by Lee Child
machine was a big steel thing with Cuisinart embossed on it in large letters. It looked reliable. She spooned coffee into a gold basket and hit a switch. She said, “Last night the deputies from Despair headed home after an hour.”
“They found me in the bar,” Reacher said. “They flushed me west with the phone call and then came after me. It was a trap.”
“And you fell for it.”
“ Theyfell for it. I knew what they were doing.”
“How?”
“Because twenty years ago I used to stay up for seventy-two hours at a time dealing with worse folks than you’ll ever find in Despair.”
“What happened to the deputies?”
“They joined their full-time buddies in the infirmary.”
“All four of them?”
“All six of them. They added some on-site moral support.”
“You’re a one-man crime wave.”
“No, I’m Alice in Wonderland.”
Now Vaughan nodded.
“I know,” she said. “Why aren’t they doing anything about it? You’ve committed assault and battery on eight individuals, six of them peace officers, and you’ve wrecked two police cars. And yet you’re still walking around.”
“That’s the point,” Reacher said. “I’m still walking around, but in Hope, not in Despair. That’s weirdness number one. All they ever want to do is keep people out of there. They’re not interested in the law or justice or punishment.”
“What’s weirdness number two?”
“They came at me six against one and I walked away with two bruises and sore knuckles from pounding on them. They’re all weak and sick. One of them even had to call it quits so he could find time to throw up.”
“So what’s that about?”
“The clerk at my motel figures they’re breaking environmental laws. Maybe there’s all kinds of poisons and pollution out there.”
“Is that what they’re hiding?”
“Possibly,” Reacher said. “But it’s kind of odd that the victims would help to hide the problem.”
“People worry about their jobs,” Vaughan said. “Especially in a company town, because they don’t have any alternatives.” She opened a cabinet and took out a mug. It was white, perfectly cylindrical, four inches high, and two and a half inches wide. It was made of fine bone china as thin as paper. She filled it from the pot and immediately from the aroma Reacher knew it was going to be a great one. She glanced at the living room but carried the mug to the kitchen table instead, and placed it down in front of one of the three chairs. Reacher glanced at the boxes and the lone armchair in the living room and said, “Just moved in?”
“A year and a half ago,” Vaughan said. “I guess I’m a little slow unpacking.”
“From where?”
“Third Street. We had a little cottage with an upstairs, but we decided we wanted a ranch.”
“We?”
“David and I.”
Reacher asked, “So where is he?”
“He’s not here right now.”
“Should I be sorry about that?”
“A little.”
“What does he do?”
“Not so much anymore.” She sat in one of the chairs without the mug in front of it and tugged the hem of her T-shirt down. Her hair was drying and going wavy again. She was naked under the shirt, and confident about it. Reacher was sure of that. She was looking straight at him, like she knew he knew.
He sat down opposite her.
She asked, “What else?”
“My motel clerk figures the plant makes way too much money.”
“That’s common knowledge. Thurman owns the bank, and bank auditors gossip. He’s a very rich man.”
“My motel clerk figures he’s smuggling dope or something with his little airplane.”
“Do you think he is?”
“I don’t know.”
“That’s your conclusion?”
“Not entirely.”
“So what else?”
“A quarter of the plant is screened off. There’s a secret area. I think he’s got a contract to recycle military scrap. Hence the wealth. A Pentagon contract is the fastest way on earth to get rich these days. And hence the MP unit down the road. Thurman is breaking up classified stuff back there, and people would be interested in it. Armor thickness, materials, construction techniques, circuit boards, all that kind of stuff.”
“So that’s all? Legitimate government business?”
“No,” Reacher said. “That’s not all.”
40
Reacher took the first sip of his coffee. It was perfect. Hot, strong, smooth, and a great mug. He looked across the table at Vaughan and said, “Thank you very much.”
She said, “What else is going on there?”
“I don’t know. But there’s a hell of a vigilante effort going on about something. After the PD ended up depopulated I went to see the local judge about getting sworn in as a deputy.”
“You weren’t serious.”
“Of course not. But I pretended I was. I wanted to see the reaction. The guy panicked. He went crazy. He said he’d deputize the whole population first. They’re totally serious about keeping strangers out.”
“Because of the military stuff.”
“No,” Reacher said. “That’s the MPs’ job. Any hint of espionage, Thurman’s people would get on the radio and the MPs would lock and load and about a minute later the whole town would be swarming with Humvees. The townspeople wouldn’t be involved.”
“So what’s going on?”
“At least two other things.”
“Why two?”
“Because their responses are completely incoherent. Which means there are at least two other factions in play, separate and probably unaware of each other. Like this morning, Thurman had me checked out. He saw that my paper trail went cold ten years ago, and therefore I was no obvious danger to him, and then he ran your plate and saw that I was in some way associated with a cop from the next town, and therefore in some way untouchable, so he played nice and gave me a guided tour. But meanwhile without all that information someone else was busy busting your windows. And nobody busts a cop’s windows for the fun of it. Therefore the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing.”
“Thurman gave you a tour?”
“He said he’d show me everything.”
“And did he?”
“No. He stayed away from the secret area. He said it was just a junkyard.”
“Are you sure it isn’t?”
“I saw activity in there earlier. Smoke and sparks. Plus it’s carefully screened off. Who does that, for a junkyard?”
“What are the two other factions?”
“I have no idea. But these young guys are involved somehow. Lucy Anderson’s husband and the dead guy. And Lucy Anderson’s husband is another example of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing. They sheltered him and moved him on but threw his wife out of town like a pariah. How much sense does that make?”
“He moved on?”
“I saw him at the rooming house at three o’clock and he was gone by seven. No trace of him, and nobody would admit he had ever been there.”
“The plane flies at seven,” Vaughan said. “Is that connected?”
“I don’t know.”
“No trace at all?”
“No physical sign, and a lot of zipped lips.”
“So what’s going on?”
“When was the last time any normal person entered Despair and stayed as long as he wanted and left of his own accord? To your certain knowledge?”
“I don’t know,” Vaughan said. “Months, certainly.”
“There was an entry in the hotel register from seven months ago.”
“That sounds about right.”
“I met the new girl last night,” Reacher said. “Sweet kid. Her name is Maria. I’m pretty sure the dead guy was her boyfriend. She showed me his picture. His name was Raphael Rami
rez.”
“Did you tell her?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“She asked me if I’d seen him. Truth is, I didn’t actually see him. It was dark. And I can’t give her news like that without being completely sure.”
“So she’s still swinging in the wind.”
“I think she knows, deep down.”
“What happened to the body?”
“It didn’t go to the county morgue. I checked on that.”
“We knew that already.”
“No, we knew it didn’t go straight to the morgue. That was all. So I wondered if it had been dumped somewhere out of town and found later by someone else. But it wasn’t. Therefore it never left Despair. And the only meat wagon and the only stretcher in Despair belong to the metal plant. And the metal plant has furnaces that could vaporize a corpse in five minutes flat.”
Vaughan got up and poured herself a glass of water, from a bottle in the refrigerator. She stood with her hips against the counter and stared out the window. Her heels were on the floor but most of her weight was on her toes. Her T-shirt had one lateral wrinkle where the base of her spine met her butt. The cotton material was very slightly translucent. The light was all behind her. Her hair was dry and there was fine golden down on her neck.
She looked spectacular.
She asked, “What else did Maria say?”
Reacher said, “Nothing. I didn’t ask her anything else.”
“Why ever not?”
“No point. The wives and the girlfriends aren’t going to tell us anything. And what they do say will be misleading.”
“Why?”
“Because they’ve got a vested interest. Their husbands and their boyfriends aren’t just hiding out in Despair on their own account. They’re aiming to get help there. They’re aiming to ride some kind of an underground railroad for fugitives. Despair is a way station, in and out. The women want to keep it all secret. Lucy Anderson was OK with me until I mentioned I used to be a cop. Then she started hating me. She thought I was still a cop. She thought I was here to bust her husband.”
“What kind of fugitives?”
“I don’t know what kind. But the Anderson guy was the right kind and Raphael Ramirez was the wrong kind.”
Vaughan took Reacher’s mug from him and refilled it from the machine. Then she refilled her glass from the refrigerator and sat down and said, “May I ask you a personal question?”
Reacher said, “Feel free.”
“Why are you doing this?”
“Doing what?”
“Caring, I suppose. Caring about what’s happening in Despair. Bad stuff happens everywhere, all the time. Why does this matter to you so much?”
“I’m curious, that’s all.”
“That’s no answer.”
“I have to be somewhere, doing something.”
“That’s still no answer.”
“Maria,” Reacher said. “She’s the answer. She’s a sweet kid, and she’s hurting.”
“Her boyfriend is a fugitive from the law. You said so yourself. Maybe she deserves to be hurting. Maybe Ramirez is a dope dealer or something. Or a gang member or a murderer.”
“Ramirez looked like a harmless guy to me.”
“You can tell by looking?”
“Sometimes. Would Maria hang out with a bad guy?”
“I haven’t met her.”
“Would Lucy Anderson?”
Vaughan said nothing.
“I don’t like company towns,” Reacher said. “I don’t like feudal systems. I don’t like smug fat bosses lording it over people. And I don’t like people so broken down that they put up with it.”
“You see something you don’t like, you feel you have to tear it down?”
“Damn right I do. You got a problem with that?”
“No.”
They sat in the kitchen and drank coffee and water in silence. Vaughan took her free hand out of her lap and laid it on the table, her fingers spread and extended. They were the closest part of her to Reacher. He wondered whether it was a gesture, either conscious or subconscious. An approach, or an appeal for a connection.
No wedding band.
He’s not here right now.
He put his own free hand on the table.
She asked, “How do we know they were fugitives at all? Maybe they were undercover environmental activists, checking on the pollution. Maybe the Anderson guy fooled them and Ramirez didn’t.”
“Fooled them how?”
“I don’t know. But it worries me, if they’re using poisons over there. We share the same water table.”
“Thurman mentioned something called trichloroethylene. It’s a metal degreaser. I don’t know whether it’s dangerous or not.”
“I’m going to check it out.”
“Why would the wife of an environmental activist be scared of cops?”
“I don’t know.”
“The Anderson guy wasn’t fooling anyone. He was a guest there. They gave him a place to stay and protection. He was helped. ”
“But Lucy Anderson wasn’t. She was thrown out.”
“Like I said, the left hand doesn’t know what the right is doing.”
“And Ramirez was killed.”
“Not killed. Left to die.”
“So why help one and shun the other?”
“Why shun him at all? Why not just round him up and dump him at the line, like they did with me and Lucy?”
Vaughan sipped her water.
“Because Ramirez was different in some way,” she said. “More specifically dangerous to them.”
“Then why not just take him out immediately? Disappear him? The end result would have been the same.”
“I don’t understand it.”
“Maybe I’m wrong,” Reacher said. “Maybe they didn’t shun him or keep him out. Maybe they never even knew he was there. Maybe he was sniffing around on the periphery, staying out of sight, trying to find a way in. Desperate enough to keep trying, not good enough to succeed.”
Vaughan took her hand off the table.
“We need to know exactly who he was,” she said. “We need to talk to Maria.”
