Never Go Back: (Jack Reacher 18)

by Child, Lee

  He padded barefoot across the sticky carpet and opened the door. A gloved hand that had been ready to tap again was pulled back quickly. The hand was attached to an arm, which was attached to a body, which was in a Class A army uniform, with JAG Corps insignia all over it. A lawyer.

  A woman lawyer.

  According to the plate on the right side of her tunic her name was Sullivan. She was wearing the uniform like a business suit. She had a briefcase in her non-tapping hand. She didn’t say anything. She wasn’t particularly short, but her eye line was level with Reacher’s shirtless chest, where there was an old .38 bullet wound, which seemed to preoccupy her.

  Reacher said, ‘Yes?’

  Her car was behind her, a dark-green domestic sedan. The sky was still black.

  She said, ‘Major Reacher?’

  She was in her mid-thirties, Reacher guessed, a major herself, with short dark hair and eyes that were neither warm nor cold. He said, ‘How can I help you?’

  ‘It’s supposed to be the other way around.’

  ‘You’ve been assigned to represent me?’

  ‘For my sins.’

  ‘For the recall appeal or the Juan Rodriguez thing or the Candice Dayton thing?’

  ‘Forget the recall appeal. You’ll get five minutes in front of a panel about a month from now, but you won’t win. That never happens.’

  ‘So Rodriguez or Dayton?’

  ‘Rodriguez,’ Sullivan said. ‘We need to get right to it.’ But she didn’t move. Her gaze traced its way downward, to his waist, where there was another scar, by that point more than a quarter century old, a big ugly white starfish overlaid by crude stitches, cut through by a knife wound, which was much more recent, but still old.

  ‘I know,’ he said. ‘Aesthetically I’m a mess. But come in anyway.’

  She said, ‘No, I think I’ll wait in the car. We’ll talk over breakfast.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘There’s a diner two blocks away.’

  ‘You paying?’

  ‘For myself. Not for you.’

  ‘Two blocks away? You could have brought coffee.’

  ‘Could have, but didn’t.’

  ‘Some big help you’re going to be. Give me eleven minutes.’

  ‘Eleven?’

  ‘That’s how long it takes me to get ready in the morning.’

  ‘Most people would say ten.’

  ‘Then either they’re faster than me or imprecise.’ He closed the door on her and padded back to the bed and took his pants off again. They looked OK. Laying them out under the mattress was as close as he ever got to ironing. He walked on to the bathroom and set the shower running. He cleaned his teeth and climbed under the weak lukewarm stream and used what was left of the soap and shampoo. He dried himself with damp towels and dressed and stepped out to the lot. Eleven minutes, dead on. He was a creature of habit.

  Major Sullivan had turned her car around. It was a Ford, the same model as the silver item that had driven him across Missouri many days before. He opened the passenger door and climbed in. Sullivan sat up straight and put the car in gear and eased out of the lot, slow and cautious. Her uniform skirt was at her knee. She was wearing dark nylons and plain black lace-up shoes.

  Reacher asked, ‘What’s your name?’

  Sullivan said, ‘You can read, I presume.’

  ‘First name, I mean.’

  ‘Does it matter? You’re going to call me Major Sullivan.’ She said it in a way that was neither friendly nor unfriendly. Nor unexpected. A personal relationship was not on the agenda. Army defence lawyers were diligent, intelligent and professional, but they were on nobody’s side but the army’s.

  The diner was indeed two blocks away, but the blocks were long. A left, and then a right, and then a ragged strip mall, on the shoulder of another three-lane road. The mall featured a hardware store, and a no-name pharmacy, and a picture-framing shop, and a gun store, and a walk-in dentist. The diner stood alone at the end of the strip, in its own lot. It was a white stucco affair with the kind of inside decor that made Reacher bet the owner was Greek and there would be a million items on the menu. Which made it a restaurant, in his opinion, not a diner. Diners were lean, mean, stripped-down places, as ruthless as combat rifles.

  They took a booth in a side wing, and a waitress brought coffee before being asked, which raised Reacher’s opinion of the place a little. The menu was a multi-page laminated thing almost as big as the tabletop. Reacher saw pancakes and eggs on page two, and investigated no further.

  Sullivan said, ‘I’m recommending a plea bargain. They’ll ask for five years and we’ll offer one and settle on two. You can do that. Two years won’t kill you.’

  Reacher said, ‘Who was Candice Dayton?’

  ‘Not my case. Someone else will talk to you about that.’

  ‘And who was Juan Rodriguez exactly?’

  ‘Someone you hit in the head who died from his injuries.’

  ‘I don’t remember him.’

  ‘That’s not the best thing to say in a case like this. It makes it sound like you hit so many people in the head that you can’t distinguish one from the other. It might prompt further inquiries. Someone might be tempted to draw up a list. And from what I hear it might be a very long list. The 110th was pretty much a rogue operation back then.’

  ‘And what is it now?’

  ‘A little better, perhaps. But far from outstanding.’

  ‘That’s your opinion?’

  ‘That’s my experience.’

  ‘Do you know anything about Susan Turner’s situation?’

  ‘I know her lawyer.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘She took a bribe.’

  ‘Do we know that for sure?’

  ‘There’s enough electronic data to float a battleship. She opened a bank account in the Cayman Islands at ten o’clock in the morning the day before yesterday, and at eleven o’clock a hundred thousand dollars showed up in it, and then she was arrested at twelve o’clock, more or less red-handed. Seems fairly open and shut to me. And fairly typical of the 110th.’

  ‘Sounds like you don’t love my old unit, overall. Which might be a problem. Because I’m entitled to a competent defence. Sixth Amendment, and so on. Do you think you’re the right person for the job?’

  ‘I’m what they’re giving you, so get used to it.’

  ‘I should see the evidence against me, at least. Don’t you think? Isn’t there something in the Sixth Amendment about that too?’

  ‘You didn’t do much paperwork sixteen years ago.’

  ‘We did some.’

  ‘I know,’ Sullivan said. ‘I’ve seen what there is of it. Among other things you did daily summaries. I have one that shows you heading out for an interview with Mr Rodriguez. Then I have a document from a county hospital ER showing his admission later the same day, for a head injury, among other things.’

  ‘And that’s it? Where’s the connection? He could have fallen down the stairs after I left. He could have been hit by a truck.’

  ‘The ER doctors thought he had been.’

  ‘That’s a weak case,’ Reacher said. ‘In fact it’s not really a case at all. I don’t remember anything about it.’

  ‘Yet you remember some stairs that Mr Rodriguez might have fallen down after your interview.’

  ‘Speculation,’ Reacher said. ‘Hypothesis. Figure of speech. Same as the truck. They’ve got nothing.’

  ‘They have an affidavit,’ Sullivan said. ‘Sworn out by Mr Rodriguez himself, some time later. He names you as his attacker.’

  EIGHT

  SULLIVAN HAULED HER briefcase up on the booth’s vinyl bench. She took out a thick file and laid it on the table. She said, ‘Happy reading.’

  Which it wasn’t, of course. It was a long and sordid record of a long and sordid investigation into a long and sordid crime. The root cause was Operation Desert Shield, all the way back in late 1990, which was the build-up phase before Operation Desert Storm, which was
the Gulf War the first time around, after Saddam Hussein of Iraq invaded his neighbour, the independent state of Kuwait. Half a million men and women from the free world had gathered over six long months, getting ready to kick Saddam’s ass, which in the end had taken all of one hundred hours. Then the half-million men and women had gone home again.

  The material wind-down had been the problem. Armies need a lot of stuff. Six months to build it up, six months to break it down. And the build-up had received a lot more in the way of care and attention than the wind-down. The wind-down had been piecemeal and messy. Dozens of nationalities had been involved. Long story short, lots of stuff had gone missing. Which was embarrassing. But the books had to be balanced. So some of the missing stuff was written off as destroyed, and some as damaged, and some as merely lost, and the books were closed.

  Until certain items started showing up on the streets of America’s cities.

  Sullivan asked, ‘You remember it yet?’

  ‘Yes,’ Reacher said. He remembered it very well. It was the kind of crime the 110th had been created to fight. Man-portable military weapons don’t end up on the streets by accident. They’re filched and diverted and stolen and sold. By persons unknown, but by persons in certain distinct categories. In logistics companies, mostly. Guys who have to move tens of thousands of tons a week with hazy bills of lading can always find ways of making a ton or two disappear, here and there, for fun and profit. Or a hundred tons. The 110th had been tasked to find out who and how and where and when. The unit was new, with its name to make, and it had gone at it hard. Reacher had spent hundreds of hours on it, and his team had spent many times more.

  He said, ‘But I still don’t remember any Juan Rodriguez.’

  Sullivan said, ‘Flip to the end of the file.’

  Which Reacher did, where he found he remembered Juan Rodriguez pretty well.

  Just not as Juan Rodriguez.

  The 110th had gotten a solid tip about a gangbanger in South Central LA, who went by the street name of Dog, which was alleged to be a contraction of Big Dog, because the guy was supposedly sizeable in terms of both status and physique. The DEA wasn’t interested in him, because he wasn’t part of the drug wars. But the tip said like neutrals everywhere he was making a fortune selling black-market weapons to both sides at once. The tip said he was the go-to guy. The tip said he was angling to unload eleven crates of army SAWs. SAWs were not metal things with little teeth, good for cutting wood. SAWs were Squad Automatic Weapons, which were fearsome fully automatic machine guns, with fearsome capacities and fearsome capabilities.

  Reacher had gone to South Central LA and walked the hot dusty streets and asked the right kinds of questions in the right kinds of places. In that environment he was unmistakably army, so he had posed as a disaffected grunt with interesting stuff for sale. Grenades, launchers, armour-piercing ammunition in vast quantities, Beretta handguns. People were naturally cautious, but ultimately the pose worked. Two days later he was face to face with the Dog, who turned out to be big indeed, mostly side to side. The guy could have weighed four hundred pounds.

  The last sheet in the file was the affidavit, which was headed Evidentiary Statement of Juan Rodriguez, a.k.a. Big Dog, a.k.a. Dog. Reacher’s name was all over it, as well as a long list of injuries, including a broken skull and broken ribs and tissue damage and contusions. It was signed at the bottom, by Rodriguez himself, and witnessed, by a lawyer on Ventura Boulevard in Studio City, Los Angeles, and notarized, by someone else entirely.

  Sullivan said, ‘Remember him now?’

  ‘He was lying in this affidavit,’ Reacher said. ‘I never laid a finger on him.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Why would I? I wasn’t interested in him. I wanted his source, that’s all. I wanted the guy he was buying from. I wanted a name.’

  ‘You weren’t worried about SAWs on the streets of LA?’

  ‘That was the LAPD’s problem, not mine.’

  ‘Did you get the name?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I asked, he answered.’

  ‘Just like that?’

  ‘More or less.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘I was a good interrogator. I made him think I knew more than I did. He wasn’t very smart. I’m surprised he even had a brain to injure.’

  ‘So how do you explain the hospital report?’

  ‘Do I have to? A guy like that, he knows all kinds of unsavoury characters. Maybe he ripped someone off the day before. He wasn’t operating in a very civilized environment.’

  ‘So that’s your defence? Some other dude did it?’

  ‘If I’d done it he wouldn’t have made it to the hospital. He was a useless tub of lard.’

  ‘I can’t go to the prosecutor with some other dude did it. I can’t say the proof is you would have actually killed him, rather than merely mortally injuring him.’

  ‘You’ll have to.’

  ‘No, I won’t have to. You need to listen up, Reacher. You need to take this seriously. I can get you a deal, but you have to get out in front of it. You have to own it and show some contrition.’

  ‘I don’t believe this.’

  ‘I’m giving you my best advice.’

  ‘Can I get a new lawyer?’

  ‘No,’ Sullivan said. ‘You can’t.’

  They ate the rest of their breakfasts in silence. Reacher wanted to move to another table, but he didn’t, because he thought it would look petty. They split the check and paid and went out to the car, where Sullivan said, ‘I have somewhere else to go. You can walk from here. Or take the bus.’

  She got in her car and drove away. Reacher was left on his own, in the restaurant lot. The three-lane in front of him was part of the local bus route. There was a bench stop thirty yards to his left. There were two people waiting. Two men. Mexicans, both of them much thinner than the Big Dog. Honest civilians, probably, heading for yard work in the cemetery, or janitor jobs in Alexandria, or in D.C. itself.

  There was another bus stop fifty yards to his right. Another bench. On the near side of the street, not the far. Heading north, not south. Heading out, not in. To McLean, and then Reston, maybe. And then to Leesburg, probably, and possibly all the way to Winchester. Where there would be more buses waiting, bigger buses, which would labour through the Appalachians, into West Virginia, and Ohio, and Indiana. And onward. And away.

  They couldn’t find you before. They won’t find you now.

  A new discharge, this time without honour.

  She doesn’t want to see you.

  Reacher waited. The air was cold. The traffic was steady. Cars and trucks. All makes, all models, all colours. Then far to his left he saw a bus. Heading north, not south. Heading out, not in. The bench was fifty yards to his right. He waited. The bus was a big van, really, converted. Local, not long distance. A municipal service, with a subsidized fare. It was snorting and snuffling its way towards him, slowly.

  He let it go. It passed him by and continued on its way, oblivious.

  He walked back to the 110th HQ. Two miles in total, thirty minutes exactly. He passed his motel. The car with the dents in the doors was gone from the kerb. Reclaimed, or stolen.

  He got to the old stone building at five minutes to eight in the morning, and he met another lawyer, who told him who Candice Dayton was, and why she was unhappy.

  NINE

  THE SENTRY REACHER had met the afternoon before was back in his hutch. The day watch. He nodded Reacher through the gate, and Reacher walked onward to the short flight of steps and the freshly painted door. The Humvee was still in the lot. As was the small red two-seater. The car with the dents in the doors was not.

  There was a new sergeant at the desk in the lobby. The night watch, presumably, finishing up. This one was male, white, and a little more reserved than Leach had been in the end. Not explicitly hostile, but quiet and slightly censorious, like a milder version of the guys in the T-shirts from the night b
efore: You brought the unit into disrepute. He said, ‘Colonel Morgan requires you to report to 207 immediately.’

  Reacher said, ‘Immediately what?’

  The guy said, ‘Immediately, sir.’

  ‘Thank you, sergeant,’ Reacher said. Room 207 was upstairs, fourth on the left, next to his own room. Or next to Susan Turner’s, or Morgan’s, now. Back in the day 207 had been Karla Dixon’s office, his number cruncher. His financial specialist. She had busted open plenty of tough things. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, crimes come down to love, hate, or money, and unlike what it says in the Bible, the greatest of these is money. Dixon had been worth her modest weight in gold, and Reacher had fond memories of room 207.

  He used the stairs and walked the corridor and passed his old office. The name plate was still on the wall: Maj. S. R. Turner, Commanding Officer. He heard Captain Weiss’s voice in his head, and Major Sullivan’s: She took a bribe. Maybe there was an innocent explanation. Maybe a distant uncle had died and left stock in a uranium mine. Maybe it was a foreign mine, hence the offshore status. Australian, perhaps. There was uranium in Australia. And gold, and coal, and iron ore. Or somewhere in Africa. He wished Karla Dixon was there. She could have taken one look at the paperwork, and seen the truth in an instant.

  He didn’t knock at 207’s door. No reason to. Apart from Morgan he was likely to be the highest rank in the building. And rank was rank, even in his peculiar circumstances. So he went straight in.

  The room was empty. And it was no longer an office. It had been converted to a conference room of some kind. There was no desk, but there was a big round table and six chairs. There was a black spider-shaped thing in the centre of the table, presumably a speakerphone for group discussions with remote parties. There was a credenza against one wall, presumably for in-meeting coffee and sandwiches. The lightshade was the same glass bowl. There was an economy bulb in it, turned on already, glowing weak and sickly.