by Lee Child
Between the glamour stuff and the boring stuff was a service corral made of four counters boxed together. There were registers and computers and thick paper manuals. Behind one of the computers was a tall boy somewhere in his early twenties. Not someone Reacher had seen before. Not one of the five from the sports bar. Just a guy. He looked to be in charge. He was wearing red coveralls. A uniform, Reacher guessed, partly practical and partly suggestive of the kind of thing an Indy 500 pit mechanic might wear. Like a symbol. Like an implied promise of fast hands-on help with all kinds of matters automotive. The guy was a manager, Reacher guessed. Not the franchise owner. Not if he drove a four-cylinder Chevy to work. His name was embroidered on the left of his chest: Gary. Up close he looked sullen and unhelpful.
“I need to speak with Sandy,” Reacher said to him. “The redhead.”
“She’s in back right now,” the guy called Gary said.
“Shall I go through or do you want to go get her for me?”
“What’s this about?”
“Personal.”
“She’s here to work.”
“It’s a legal matter.”
“You’re not a cop.”
“I’m working with a lawyer.”
“I need to see some ID.”
“No, Gary, you don’t. You need to go get Sandy.”
“I can’t. I’m short-staffed today.”
“You could call her on the phone. Or page her.”
The guy called Gary just stood still. Did nothing. Reacher shrugged and bypassed the corral of counters and headed for a door in back marked No Admittance. It would be an office or a lunchroom, he guessed. Not a stockroom. A place like that, stock was unloaded directly onto the shelves. No hidden inventory. Reacher knew how modern retail worked. He read the papers people left behind on buses and in diner booths.
It was an office, small, maybe ten-by-ten, dominated by a large white laminate desk with oily handprints on it. Sandy was sitting behind it, wearing red coveralls. Hers looked a whole lot better than Gary’s. They were cinched in tight around her waist with a belt. The zipper was open about eight inches. Her name was embroidered on the left, displayed a lot more prominently than Gary’s was. Reacher figured that if he owned the franchise he would have Sandy working the counter and Gary in the office, no question.
“We meet again,” he said.
Sandy said nothing. Just looked up at him. She was working with invoices. There was a stack of them on her left, and a stack of them on her right. One of them was in her hand, frozen in midair on its journey from one stack to the other. She looked smaller than Reacher remembered, quieter, less energetic, duller. Deflated.
“We need to talk,” he said. “Don’t we?”
“I’m very sorry for what happened,” she said.
“Don’t apologize. I wasn’t offended. I just want to know how it went down.”
“I don’t know how.”
“You do, Sandy. You were there.”
She said nothing. Just placed the invoice on top of the stack to her right and used her fingers to line it up exactly.
“Who set it up?” Reacher asked.
“I don’t know.”
“You must know who told you about it.”
“Jeb,” she said.
“Jeb?”
“Jeb Oliver,” she said. “He works here. We hang out sometimes.”
“Is he here today?”
“No, he didn’t show.”
Reacher nodded. The guy called Gary had said: I’m short-staffed today.
“Did you see him again last night? Afterward?”
“No, I just ran for it.”
“Where does he live?”
“I don’t know. With his mother somewhere. I don’t know him that well.”
“What did he tell you?”
“That I could help with something he had to do.”
“Did it sound like fun?”
“Anything sounds like fun on a Monday night in this town. Watching a barn plank warp sounds like fun.”
“How much did he pay you?”
Sandy didn’t answer.
“A thing like that, nobody does it for free,” Reacher said.
“Hundred dollars,” she said.
“What about the other four guys?”
“Same for them.”
“Who were they?”
“His buddies.”
“Who came up with the plan? The brothers thing?”
“It was Jeb’s idea. You were supposed to start pawing me. Only you didn’t.”
“You improvised very well.”
She smiled a little, like it had been a small unscripted success in a life that held very few of them.
“How did you know where to find me?” Reacher asked.
“We were cruising in Jeb’s truck. Around and around. Kind of standing by. Then he got word on his cell.”
“Who called him?”
“I don’t know.”
“Would his buddies know?”
“I don’t think so. Jeb likes to know things that nobody else knows.”
“You want to lend me your car?”
“My car?”
“I need to go find Jeb.”
“I don’t know where he lives.”
“You can leave that part to me. But I need wheels.”
“I don’t know.”
“I’m old enough to drive,” Reacher said. “I’m old enough to do lots of things. And I’m pretty good at some of them.”
She half-smiled again, because he was using her own line from the night before. She looked away, and then she looked back at him, shy, but curious.
“Was I any good?” she asked. “You know, last night, with the act?”
“You were great,” he said. “I was preoccupied, or I would have given up on the football in a heartbeat.”
“How long would you need my car for?”
“How big is this town?”
“Not very.”
“Not very long, then.”
“Is this a big deal?”
“You got a hundred bucks. So did four other guys. That’s five hundred right there. My guess is Jeb kept another five for himself. So someone paid a thousand bucks to put me in the hospital. That’s a moderately big deal. For me, anyway.”
“I wish I hadn’t gotten involved now.”
“It turned out OK.”
“Am I in trouble?”
“Maybe,” Reacher said. “But maybe not. We could deal. You could lend me your car and I could forget all about you.”
“Promise?”
“No harm, no foul,” Reacher said.
She ducked down and lifted her purse off the floor. Rooted through and came out with a set of keys.
“It’s a Toyota,” she said.
“I know,” Reacher said. “End of the row, next to Gary’s Chevy.”
“How did you know that?”
“Intuition,” he said.
He took the keys and closed the door on her and headed back to the corral of counters. Gary was ringing some guy up for some unidentifiable purchase. Reacher waited in line behind him. Got to the register inside about two minutes.
“I need Jeb Oliver’s address,” he said.
“Why?” Gary said.
“A legal matter.”
“I want to see some ID.”
“You had a criminal conspiracy running out of your store. If I were you, the less I knew about it, the better.”
“I want to see something.”
“What about the inside of an ambulance? That’s the next thing you’re going to see, Gary, unless you give me Jeb Oliver’s address.”
The guy paused a moment. Glanced beyond Reacher’s shoulder at the line forming behind him. Apparently decided that he didn’t want to start a fight he knew he couldn’t win, with a whole bunch of people watching. So he opened a drawer and took out a file and copied an address onto a slip of paper torn off the top of a memo pad provided by an oil filter manufacturer.
“North of here,” he said. “About five miles.”
“Thank you,” Reacher said, and took the slip of paper.
The redhead’s Toyota started on the first turn of the key. Reacher let the engine idle and racked the seat back and adjusted the mirror. Clipped his belt and propped the slip of paper against the instrument panel. It meant he couldn’t see the tachometer, but he wasn’t very interested in whatever information that dial might supply. All he cared about was how much gas was in the tank, and there looked to be more than enough for five miles out and five miles back.
Jeb Oliver’s address was nothing more than a house number on a rural route. Easier to find than a road with a name, like Elm Street, or Maple Avenue. In Reacher’s experience some towns had more roads named after trees than trees themselves.
He moved out of the parking lot and drove north to the highway cloverleaf. There was the usual forest of signs. He saw the route number he wanted. It was going to be a dogleg, right and then left. East, and then north. The little SUV hummed along OK. It was tall for its width, which made it feel tippy on the turns. But it didn’t fall over. It had a small engine that kept itself working hard. The interior smelled of perfume.
The west-east part of the dogleg was some kind of a major county road. But after the turn north the blacktop narrowed and the shoulders grew ragged. There was agriculture going on to the left and the right. Some kind of a winter crop was planted in giant circles. Radial irrigation booms turned slowly. The corners where the booms didn’t reach were unplanted and stony. Superimposing circles on squares wasted more than twenty-one percent of every acre, but Reacher figured that might be an efficient trade-off in places where land was plentiful and irrigation hardware wasn’t.
He drove four more miles through the fields and passed a half-dozen tracks with mailboxes at the end of them. The mailboxes were painted with numbers and the tracks led away west and east to small swaybacked farm dwellings maybe two hundred yards off the road. He watched the numbers and slowed before he got to the Oliver place. It had a mailbox like all the others, up on a post made out of two figure-eight concrete blocks stacked end on end. The number was daubed in white on a weathered plywood rectangle wired to the concrete. The track was narrow with two muddy ruts flanking a weedy center hump. There were sharp tire tracks in the mud. New treads, wide, aggressive, from a big truck. Not the kind of tires you bought at the $99-for-four place.
Reacher turned the Toyota in and bumped down the track. At the end of it he could see a clapboard farmhouse with a barn behind it and a clean red pickup truck next to it. The truck was turned nose-out and it had a massive chrome radiator grille. A Dodge Ram, Reacher figured. He parked in front of it and got out. The house and the barn were about a hundred years old and the truck was about a month old. It had the big Hemi motor, and the crew cab, and four-wheel drive, and huge tires. It was probably worth more than the house, which was badly maintained and one winter away from serious trouble. The barn was no better. But it had new iron clasps on the doors, with a bicycle U-lock through them.
There was no sound except for a distant rainfall hiss as the irrigation booms turned slowly in the fields. No activity anywhere. No traffic on the road. No dogs barking. The air was still and full of the sharp smell of fertilizer and earth. Reacher walked to the front door and knocked twice with the flat of his hand. No response. He tried again. No response. He walked around to the back of the house and found a woman sitting on a porch glider. She was a lean and leathery person, wearing a faded print dress and holding a pint bottle of something golden in color. She was probably fifty, but she could have passed for seventy, or forty if she took a bath and got a good night’s sleep. She had one foot tucked up underneath her and was using the other to scoot the glider slowly back and forth. She wasn’t wearing shoes.
“What do you want?” she said.
“Jeb,” Reacher said.
“Not here.”
“He’s not at work, either.”
“I know that.”
“So where is he?”
“How would I know?”
“Are you his mother?”
“Yes, I am. You think I’m hiding him here? Go ahead and check.”
Reacher said nothing. The woman stared at him and rocked the glider, back and forth, back and forth. The bottle rested easy in her lap.
“I insist,” she said. “I mean it. Search the damn house.”
“I’ll take your word for it.”
“Why should you?”
“Because if you invite me to search the house it means he’s not in it.”
“Like I said. Jeb’s not here.”
“What about the barn?”
“It’s locked from the outside. There’s only one key and he’s got it.”
Reacher said nothing.
“He went away,” the woman said. “Disappeared.”
“Disappeared?”
“Only temporarily, I hope.”
“Is that his truck?”
The woman nodded. Took a small, delicate sip from her bottle.
“So he walked?” Reacher said.
“He was picked up. By a friend.”
“When?”
“Late last night.”
“To go where?”
“I have no idea.”
“Take a guess.”
The woman shrugged, rocked, sipped.
“Far away, probably,” she said. “He has friends all over. California, maybe. Or Arizona. Or Texas. Or Mexico.”
“Was this trip planned?” Reacher asked.
The woman wiped the neck of the bottle on the hem of her dress and held it out toward him. He shook his head. Sat down on the porch step. The old wood creaked once under his weight. The glider kept on rocking, back and forth. It was almost silent. Almost, but not quite. There was a small sound from the mechanism that came once at the end of each swing, and a little creak from a porch board as it started its return. Reacher could smell mildew from the cushions, and bourbon from the bottle.
“Cards on the table, whoever the hell you are,” the woman said. “Jeb got home last night limping. With his nose busted. And I’m figuring you for the guy who bust it.”
“Why?”
“Who else would come looking for him? I’m guessing he started something he couldn’t finish.”
Reacher said nothing.
“So he ran,” the woman said. “The pussy.”
“Did he call someone last night? Or did someone call him?”
“How would I know? He makes a thousand calls a day, he takes a thousand calls a day. His cell phone is the biggest thing in his life. Next to his truck.”
“Did you see who picked him up?”
“Some guy in a car. He waited on the road. Wouldn’t come down the track. I didn’t see much. It was dark. White lights on the front, red lights on the back, but all cars have those.”
Reacher nodded. He had seen only a single set of tire marks in the mud, from the big pickup. The car that had waited on the road was probably a sedan, too low-slung to make it down the farm track.
“Did he say how long he would be gone?”
The woman just shook her head.
“Was he scared of something?”
“He was kind of beaten down. Deflated.”
Deflated. Like the redhead in the auto parts store.
“OK,” Reacher said. “Thanks.”
“You going now?”
“Yes,” Reacher said. He walked back the way he had come, listening to the glider moving, listening to the hiss of irrigation water. He backed the Toyota all the way to the road and swung the wheel and headed south.
He put the Toyota next to the Chevy and headed inside the store. Gary was still behind the register. Reacher ignored him and headed straight for the No Admittance door. The redhead was still behind the desk. She was almost through with the invoices. The stack on her right was tall, and the stack on her left had just one sheet of paper in it. She wasn’t doing anything with it. She was leaning back
in the chair, unwilling to finish, unwilling to get back out to the public. Or to Gary.
Reacher put the car keys on the desk.
“Thanks for the loan,” he said.
“Did you find him?” she asked.
“He’s gone.”
She said nothing.
“You look tired,” Reacher said.
She said nothing.
“Like you’ve got no energy. No sparkle. No enthusiasm.”
“So?”
“Last night you were full of beans.”
“I’m at work now.”
“You were at work last night, too. You were getting paid.”
“You said you were going to forget all about that.”
“I am. Have a nice life, Sandy.”
She watched him for a minute.
“You too, Jimmy Reese,” she said.
He turned around and closed the door on her again and headed out to the daylight. Started walking south, back to town.
There were four people in Helen Rodin’s office when he got there. Helen herself, and three strangers. One of them was a guy in an expensive suit. He was sitting in Helen’s chair, behind her desk. She was standing next to him, head bent, talking. Some kind of an urgent conference. The other two strangers were standing near the window, like they were waiting, like they were next in line. One was a man, one was a woman. The woman had long dark hair and glasses. The man had no hair and glasses. Both were dressed casually. Both had lapel badges with their names printed large. The woman had Mary Mason followed by a bunch of letters that had to be medical. The man had Warren Niebuhr with the same bunch of letters. Doctors, Reacher figured, probably psychiatrists. The name badges made them look like they had been dragged out of a convention hall. But they didn’t seem unhappy about it.
Helen looked up from her discussion.
“Folks, this is Jack Reacher,” she said. “My investigator dropped out and Mr. Reacher agreed to take over his role.”
News to me, Reacher thought. But he said nothing. Then Helen gestured at the guy in her chair, proudly.
