by Louise Penny
“It was a credible way to beat surveillance.”
“What about me as the second secret ingredient?”
“That’s credible too.”
“It would have been a miracle of coordination. Wouldn’t it? Exactly the right place at exactly the right time.”
“You could have been waiting there for hours.”
“But was I? What do your witnesses say?”
Aaron didn’t reply.
Reacher said, “Check the timing on the tape. You and me talking. Picture the sequence. Delaney got a hard-on for me because of something he heard.”
Aaron nodded. “Your lawyer already passed that on. The homeless patsy. Didn’t convince me then, doesn’t convince me now.”
“Beyond a reasonable doubt?” Reacher asked.
“I’m a detective. Reasonable doubt is for the jury.”
“You happy for an innocent man to go to prison?”
“Guilt and innocence is for the jury.”
“Suppose I get acquitted? You happy to see your case go down in flames?”
“Not my case. It’s a state matter.”
Reacher said, “Listen to the tape again. Time it out.”
“I can’t,” Aaron said. “There is no tape.”
“You told me there was.”
“We’re the county police. We can’t record a state interview. Not our jurisdiction. So the recording was discontinued.”
“It was before that. When you and I were talking.”
“That part got screwed up. The previous stuff got erased when the recording was stopped.”
“It got?”
“Accidents happen.”
“Who pressed the stop button?”
Aaron didn’t answer.
“Who was it?” Reacher said.
“Delaney,” Aaron said. “When he took over from me. He apologized. He said he wasn’t familiar with our equipment.”
“You believed him?”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
Reacher said nothing.
“Accidents happen,” Aaron said again.
“You sure it was an accident? You sure they weren’t making a silk purse out of a pig’s ear? You sure they weren’t covering their tracks?”
Aaron said nothing.
Reacher said, “You never saw such a thing happen?”
“What do you want me to say? He’s a fellow cop.”
“So am I.”
“You were, once upon a time. Now you’re just a guy passing by.”
“One day you will be too. You want all these years to count for nothing?”
Aaron didn’t answer.
Reacher said, “Right back at the beginning you told me juries don’t always like police testimony. Why would that be? Are those juries always wrong?”
No response.
Reacher said, “Can’t you remember what we said on the tape?”
“Even if I could, it would be my word against the state. And it ain’t exactly a smoking gun, is it?”
Reacher said nothing. Aaron gazed through the bars a minute more, and then he left again.
Reacher lay on his back on the narrow bed with one elbow jammed against the wall and his head resting on his cupped hand. Check the timing on the tape, he had said. He ran through what he remembered of his first conversation with Aaron. In the green bunkerlike room. The witness statement. The preamble. Name, date of birth, Social Security number. Then his address. No fixed abode, and so on and so forth. He pictured Delaney listening in. A tinny loudspeaker in another room. In other words you’re homeless, Aaron had said. Delaney had heard him say it. Loud and clear. How long did he take to spot his opportunity and come barging in?
Too long, Reacher thought.
There had been the bravura bullshit about PTSD and the 110th, and some lengthy dickering from Aaron about whether his testimony would be helpful or hurtful, and then the testimony itself, careful, composed, coherent, detailed, clear, and slow. Then the private chat afterward. After Bush had left the room. The speculation, and the semantic analysis backing it up. You said thank you very much for helping us out with that. And so on. All that stuff. Altogether seven minutes, maybe. Or eight, or nine.
Or ten.
Too much time.
Delaney had reacted to something else.
Something he heard later.
At ten o’clock in Reacher’s head there was the heavy tramp of footsteps in the corridor outside the steel door. The door opened and people came in. Six of them. Different uniforms. State police. Prisoner escorts. They had Mace and pepper spray and Tasers on their belts. Handcuffs and shackles and thin metal chains. They knew what they were doing. They made Reacher back up against the bars and stick his hands out behind him, through the meal slot. They cuffed his wrists, and held tight to the link, and squatted down and put their hands in through the bars, the same way he had poured his coffee but in reverse. They put shackles around his ankles and linked them together, and ran a chain up to his handcuffs. Then they unlocked his gate and slid it open. He shuffled out, small clinking steps, and they stopped him at the booking desk, where they retrieved his possessions from a drawer. His passport, his ATM card, his toothbrush, his seventy bucks in bills, his seventy-five cents in quarters, and his shoelaces. They put them all in a khaki envelope and sealed the flap. Then they escorted him out of the cell block, three ahead, three behind. They walked him around the dogleg corners, under the low concrete ceilings, and out to the lot. There was a gray-painted school bus with wire on the windows parked next to the wrecked SUV in the far corner. They pushed him inside and planted him on a bench seat in back. There were no other passengers. One guy drove and the other five sat close together up front.
They got to Warren just before midnight. The prison was visible from a mile away, with bright pools of arc light showing through the mist. The bus waited at the gate, idling with a heavy diesel clatter, and spotlights played over it, and the gate ground open, and the bus drove inside. It waited again for a second gate and then shut down in a brightly lit space near an iron door marked PRISONER INTAKE. Reacher was led through it and down the right-hand spur of a Y-shaped junction to the holding pen for inmates as yet unconvicted. His cuffs and chains and shackles were removed. His possessions in their khaki envelope were filed away, and he was issued with a white jumpsuit uniform and blue shower shoes. He was led to a cell more or less identical to the one he had just left. The gate was slid shut and the key was turned. His escort left, and a minute later the light clicked off and the block was plunged into noisy and restless darkness.
The lights came back on at six in the morning. Reacher heard a guard in the corridor, unlocking one gate after another. Eventually the guy showed up at Reacher’s door. He was a mean-looking man about thirty. He said, “Go get your breakfast now.”
Breakfast was in a large low room that smelled of boiled food and disinfectant. Reacher lined up with about twelve other guys. The kid in the black sweatshirt was not among them. Still in Bangor, Reacher figured, at the state DEA’s HQ. Maybe talking, maybe not. Reacher arrived at the serving station and got a spoonful of bright yellow mush that might have been scrambled eggs, served on a slice of what might have been white bread, with a melamine mug half full of what might have been coffee. Or the water left over from washing the previous night’s dishes. He sat on a bench at an empty table and ate. The inmates all around him were a mixed bunch, mostly squirrelly and furtive. The back part of Reacher’s brain ran an automatic threat assessment and found nothing much to worry about, unless tooth decay was contagious.
When breakfast was over they were all corralled out for a compulsory hour of early-morning exercise. The jail part of the installation was much smaller than the prison part, and therefore it had a correspondingly smaller yard, about the size of a basketball court, separated from the general population by a high wire fence. The fence had a gate with a bolt but no lock. The guard who had led them out took up station in front of it. Beyond him a wan spring dawn was coming up in the sky.
>
The bigger part of the yard was full of men in jumpsuits of a different color. Hundreds of them. They were milling about in groups. Some of them looked like desperate characters. One of them was a huge guy about six-seven and three hundred pounds. Like a caricature of an old Maine lumberjack. All he needed was a plaid wool shirt and a two-headed ax. He was bigger than Reacher, which was a statistical rarity. He was twenty feet away, looking in through the wire. Looking at Reacher. Reacher looked back. Eye to eye. The guy came closer. Reacher kept on looking. Dangerous etiquette, in prison. But looking away was a slippery slope. Too submissive. Better to get any kind of hierarchy issues straightened out right from the get-go. Human nature. Reacher knew how these things worked.
The guy stepped close to the fence.
He said, “What are you looking at?”
A standard gambit. Old as the hills. Reacher was supposed to get all intimidated and say, Nothing. Whereupon the guy would say, You calling me nothing? Whereupon things would go from bad to worse. Best avoided.
So Reacher said, “I’m looking at you, asshole.”
“What did you call me?”
“An asshole.”
“You’re dead.”
“Not yet,” Reacher said. “Not the last time I checked.”
At which exact moment a big commotion started up in the far corner of the big yard. Later Reacher realized it was precisely timed. Whispers and signals had been passed through the population, diagonally, man to man. There was distant shouting and yelling and fighting. Searchlights sparked up in the towers and swung in that direction. Radios crackled. Everyone rushed over. Including the guards. Including the guard at the small yard’s gate. He slipped through and ran into the crowd.
Whereupon the big guy moved the opposite way. In through the unattended gate. Into the smaller yard. Straight toward Reacher. Not a pretty sight. Black shower shoes, no socks, an orange jumpsuit stretched tight over bulging muscles.
Then it got worse.
The guy snapped his arm like a whip and a weapon appeared in his hand. From up his sleeve. A prison shiv. Clear plastic. Maybe a toothbrush handle sharpened on a stone, maybe six inches long. Like a stiletto. A third of its length was wrapped with surgical tape. For grip. Not good.
Reacher kicked off his shower shoes.
The big guy did the same.
Reacher said, “All my life I’ve had a rule. You pull a knife on me, I break your arms.”
The big guy said nothing.
Reacher said, “It’s completely inflexible, I’m afraid. I can’t make an exception just because you’re a moron.”
The big guy stepped closer.
The other men in the yard stepped back. Reacher heard the fence clink as they pressed up tight against it. He heard the distant riot still happening. Manufactured, therefore a little halfhearted. Couldn’t last forever. The searchlights would soon swing back. The guards would regroup and return. All he had to do was wait.
Not his way.
“Last chance,” he said. “Drop the weapon and get down on the ground. Or I’ll hurt you real bad.”
He used his MP voice, honed over the years to a thing of chill and dread, all floating on the unhinged psycho menace he had been as a kid, brawling in back streets all over the world. He saw a flicker of something in the big guy’s eyes. But nothing more. Wasn’t going to work. He was going to have to fight it out.
Which he was suddenly very happy about.
Because now he knew.
Ten minutes of your time. You saw what you saw.
He didn’t like knives.
He said, “Come on, fat boy. Show me what you got.”
The guy stepped in, rotating on the way, leading with the shiv. Reacher feinted to his left, and the shiv jerked in that direction, so Reacher swayed back to his right, inside the trajectory, and aimed his left hand inside out for the guy’s wrist, but mistimed it a little and caught the guy’s hand instead, which was like gripping a softball, and he pulled on it, which turned the guy more, and he slammed a triple right jab to the guy’s face, bang bang bang, a blur, all the while crushing the guy’s right hand as hard as possible, shiv and all. The guy pulled back, and the sweat on Reacher’s palm greased his exit, until Reacher had nothing but the shiv in his grip, which was okay, because it was a pick, not a blade, sharp only at the point, and it was plastic, so Reacher put the ball of his thumb where the tape ended and snapped it like turning a door handle.
So far so good. At that point, about three seconds in, Reacher saw his main problem as how the hell he was going to make good on his promise to break the guy’s arms. They were huge. They were thicker than most people’s legs. They were sheathed and knotted with slabs of muscle.
Then it got worse again.
The guy was bleeding from the nose and the mouth, but the damage seemed only to energize him. He braced and roared like the kind of guy Reacher had seen on strongman shows on afternoon cable in motel rooms. Like he was psyching himself up to pull a semi truck in a harness or lift up a rock the size of a Volkswagen. He was going to charge like a water buffalo. He was going to knock Reacher down and pummel him on the ground.
The lack of shoes didn’t help. Kicking barefoot was strictly for the health club or the Olympic Games. Rubbery shower shoes were worse than none at all. Which Reacher supposed was the point of making prisoners wear them. So kicking the guy was off the menu. Which was a sad limitation. But knees would still work, and elbows.
The guy charged, roaring, arms wide as if he wanted to catch Reacher in a bear hug. So Reacher charged too. Straight back at him. It was the only real alternative. A collision could be a wonderful thing. Depending on what hit who first. In this case the answers were Reacher’s forearm and the big guy’s upper lip. Like a wreck on the highway. Like two trucks crashing head-on. Like getting the guy to punch himself in the head.
The prison sirens went off.
Big picture. What did you see?
The searchlights swung back. The riot was over. The prison yard went suddenly quiet. The big guy couldn’t resist. Human nature. He wanted to look. He wanted to know. He turned his head. Just a tiny spasm. An instinct, instantly crushed.
But enough. Reacher hit him on the ear. All the time in the world. Like hitting a speed ball hanging down from a tree. And no one has muscles on his ear. All ears are pretty much equal. The smallest bones in the body are right there. Plus all kinds of mechanisms for maintaining balance. Without which you fall over.
The guy went down hard.
The searchlights hit the fence.
Reacher took the big guy’s hand. As if to help him up. But no. Then as if to shake respectfully and congratulate him warmly on a valiant defeat.
Not that either.
Reacher drove the broken shiv through the guy’s palm and left it sticking out both sides, and then he stepped away and mingled with the others by the door. A second later a searchlight beam came to rest on the guy. The sirens changed their note, to lockdown.
Reacher waited in his cell. He expected the wait to be short. He was the obvious suspect. The others from the small yard were half the big guy’s size. So the guards would come to him first. Probably. Which could be a problem. Because technically a crime had been committed. Some would say. Others would say offense was the best kind of self-defense, which was still mostly legal. Purely a question of interpretation.
It would be a delicate argument to make.
What’s the worst thing could happen?
He waited.
He heard boots in the corridor. Two guards came straight to his cell. Mace and pepper spray and Tasers on their belts. Handcuffs and shackles and thin metal chains.
One said, “Stand by to turn around on command and stick your wrists out through the meal slot.”
Reacher said, “Where are we going?”
“You’ll find out.”
“I’d appreciate sooner rather than later.”
“And I’d appreciate half a chance to use my Taser. Which one of us
is going to get what he wants today?”
Reacher said, “I guess neither would be best for both of us.”
“I agree,” the guy said. “Let’s work hard to keep it that way.”
“I still want to know.”
The guy said, “You’re going back where you came from. You have your arraignment this morning. You have half an hour with your lawyer beforehand. So put your street clothes on. You’re innocent until you’re proven guilty. You’re supposed to look the part. Or we ain’t being constitutional. Or some such thing. They say jail uniforms look like you’re already guilty. That’s where prejudice comes from, you know. The judicial system. It’s right there in the word.”
He led Reacher out of the cell, small clinking steps, and his partner crowded in from behind, and they met a team of two state prisoner escorts in an airlock lobby, halfway in and halfway out of the place, where responsibility was handed over from one team to the other, who then led Reacher onward, out to a gray prison bus, the same kind of thing he had ridden in on. He was pushed down the aisle and dumped on the rearmost bench. One of the escorts got in behind the wheel to drive, and the other sat sideways behind him with a shotgun in his lap.
They retraced the journey Reacher had made in the opposite direction less than twelve hours previously. They covered every yard of the same pavement. The two escorts talked all the way. Reacher heard some of the conversation. It depended on the engine note. Some of the words were lost. But he got plenty of gossip about the big guy found knocked down in the small yard that morning. No one was yet implicated in the incident. Because no one could understand it. The big guy was a month away from his first parole hearing. Why would he fight? And if he didn’t fight, who would fight him? Who would fight him and win and drag him back to the small yard like some kind of trophy?
They shook their heads.
Reacher said nothing.
The drive back took the same duration, just shy of two hours, the same night and day, because their speed was not limited by visibility or traffic but by a slow-revving engine and a short gearbox, good for stopping and starting in cities and towns but not so good for the open road. But eventually they pulled into the lot Reacher recognized, next to the stove-in wreck of the blue SUV, and Reacher was beckoned down the aisle and off the bus and in through the same concrete door he had come out of. Inside was a lobby, lockable both ends, where his chains and cuffs were taken off, and where he was handed over to a two-person welcoming committee.
