The Best American Mystery Stories 2018

by Louise Penny

  One person was Detective Bush.

  The other person was the public defender, Cathy Clark.

  The two prisoner escorts turned around and left double-quick. Anxious to get going. Back later. Couldn’t keep a bus standing idle. They gave the impression they had many different jobs that day. Many bits and pieces. Maybe they did. Or maybe they liked a long lazy lunch. Maybe they knew somewhere good to go.

  Reacher was left alone with Bush and the lawyer.

  Just for a second.

  He thought, You got to be kidding me.

  He tapped Bush high on the chest, just a polite warning to the solar plexus, like a wake-up call, enough to cause a helpless buzzing in all kinds of retaliatory muscles but no real pain anywhere else. Reacher stuck his hand in Bush’s pocket and came out with car keys. He put them in his own pocket and shoved the guy in the chest, quite gently, as considerately as possible, just enough to send him staggering backward a pace or two.

  Reacher didn’t touch the lawyer at all. Just pushed past her and walked away, head up and confident, under the low ceilings, through the dogleg corridors, and out through the front door. He went straight to Bush’s car, in the D2 slot. The Crown Vic. Worn but not sagging, clean but not shiny. It started first time. It was already warmed up. The prisoner escorts were already beyond it. They were on their way to their bus. They didn’t look back.

  Reacher took off, just as the first few wait a damn minute faces started showing at doors and windows. He turned right and left and left again, on random streets, aiming at first for what passed for downtown. The first squad car was more than two whole minutes behind him. Starting out from the stationhouse itself. A disgrace. Others were worse. It was not the county police department’s finest five minutes.

  They didn’t find him.

  Reacher called on the phone, just before lunch. From a pay phone. The town still had plenty. Cell reception was poor. Reacher had quarters, from under café tables. Always a few. Enough for local calls at least. He had the number, from a business card pinned up behind the register in a five-and-dime even cheaper than the dollar stores. The card was one of many, as if together they made a defensive shield. It was from Detective Ramsey Aaron, of the county police department. With a phone number and an email address. Maybe some kind of neighborhood outreach. Modern police did all kinds of new things.

  Evidently the number on the card rang through to Aaron’s desk. He answered first ring.

  He said, “This is Aaron.”

  Reacher said, “This is Reacher.”

  “Why are you calling me?”

  “To tell you two things.”

  “But why me?”

  “Because you might listen.”

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m a long way out of town by now. You’re never going to see me again. I’m afraid your uniformed division let you down badly.”

  “You should give yourself up, man.”

  “That was the first thing,” Reacher said. “That ain’t going to happen. We need to get that straight from the get-go. Or we’ll waste a lot of energy on the back-and-forth. You’ll never find me. So don’t even try. Just give it up gracefully. Spend your time on the second thing instead.”

  “Was that you at the prison? With the parolee that got beat up?”

  “Why would a parolee be in prison?”

  “What’s the second thing?”

  “You need to find out exactly who the girl with the bag was and exactly who the kid in the sweatshirt was. Names and histories. And exactly what was in the bag.”

  “Why?”

  “Because before you tell me, I’m going to tell you. When you see I’m right, maybe you’ll start paying attention.”

  “Who are they?”

  Reacher said, “I’ll call again later.”

  He was in the diner down the block. Where his lunch and his dinner had come from. The safest place to be, amid all the panic. No one in there had ever seen him before. No cop was going to come in for a coffee break. Not right then. Out of the question. And the police station was the eye of the storm, which meant for a block all around the squad cars were either accelerating hard to get away and go search some other distant place or braking hard as they came back in again, all negative and disappointed and frustrated. In other words there was visual drama and emotion, but therefore not very much patient looking out through the car windows at the immediate neighborhood surroundings.

  The phone was on the wall of a corridor in the back of the diner, with restrooms left and right and a fire door at the end. Reacher hung up and walked back to his table. He was one of six people sitting alone in the shadows. No one paid him attention. He got the feeling strangers were not rare. At least as a concept. There were old photographs on the wall. Plus old-time artifacts hung up on display. The town had been in the lumber business. Fortunes had been made. People had been in and out constantly for a hundred years, hauling loads, selling tools, putting on all kinds of mock outrage about prices.

  Maybe some part of the town was still working. A lone sawmill here or there. Maybe some people were still coming by. Not many, but enough. Certainly no one stared in the diner. No one hid behind a newspaper and surreptitiously dialed a phone.

  Reacher waited.

  He called again, a random number of minutes after the first hour had gone by. He cupped his hand over his mouth so the background noise wouldn’t sound the same twice. He wanted them to think he was always on the move. If they thought he wasn’t, they would start to ask themselves where he was holed up, and Aaron seemed a smart enough guy to figure it out. He could step right in and pull up a chair.

  The phone was answered on the first ring.

  Aaron said, “This is Aaron.”

  Reacher said, “You need to ask yourself a transportation question. Six guys took me to Warren last night. But only two guys brought me back this morning. Six guys was a lot of overtime in one evening. Overkill, some might say, for one prisoner in a bus. Especially when budgets are an issue. So why did it happen that way?”

  “You were an unknown quantity. Better safe than sorry.”

  “Then why didn’t I get the same six guys again this morning? They don’t know me any better now than they did last night.”

  Aaron said, “I’m sure you’re going to tell me why.”

  “Two possibilities. Not really competing. Kind of interlinked.”

  “Show me.”

  “They really, really wanted to get me there last night. It was important I went. My lawyer put in a reasonable request. They said no. They signed off on an unnecessary round trip that did nothing but waste gas and man-hours. They assigned six guys to make sure I got there safe and sound.”

  “And?”

  “They didn’t expect me to leave again this morning. So they didn’t assign escorts. So when it came to it they had to scramble an odd-job crew who already had a bunch of other stuff to do today.”

  “That doesn’t make sense. Everyone expected you to leave again this morning. For the arraignment. Standard procedure. Common knowledge.”

  “So why the scramble?

  “I don’t know.”

  “They weren’t expecting me to leave.”

  “They knew you had to.”

  “Not if I was in a coma in the hospital. Or dead in the morgue. Which normally would be a surprise event. But they knew well in advance. They didn’t arrange round-trip transportation.”

  Aaron paused a beat.

  He said, “It was you up at the prison.”

  Reacher said, “The guy didn’t even know me. We had never crossed paths before. Yet he came straight for me. While his pals staged a diversion far away. He was coming up for parole. My guess is Delaney was the guy who busted him, way back in the day. Am I right?”

  “Yes, as it happens.”

  “So they made a deal. If the big guy took care of me, under the radar, then Delaney would speak up for him at his parole board hearing. He would say he was a reformed character. Who bet
ter to know than the arresting officer? People assume some kind of a mystical connection. Parole boards love all that shit. The guy would have walked. Except he didn’t get the job done. He underestimated his opponent. Possibly he was badly briefed.”

  “You’re admitting felony assault.”

  “You’ll never find me. I could be in California tomorrow.”

  Aaron said, “Tell me who the girl was. And the boy in the sweatshirt. Show me you know what you’re talking about here.”

  “The boy and the girl were both stooges. Both blackmailed into playing a part. Probably the girl had just gotten busted. Maybe her second time. Maybe even her first. By the state DEA. By Delaney. She thinks he’s making up his mind about whether to drop it. He proposes a deal. All she has to do is carry a bag. He proposes a similar deal to the boy. A minor bust could go away. He could get back to Yale or Harvard or wherever he’s from with his record unblemished. Daddy need never know. All he has to do is run a little and grab a bag. The boy and the girl don’t know each other. They’re from different cases. Am I right so far?”

  Aaron said, “What was in the bag?”

  “I’m sure the official report says it was either meth or Oxycontin or money. One or the other. A delivery, or a payment.”

  “It was money,” Aaron said. “It was a payment.”

  “How much?”

  “Thirty thousand dollars.”

  “Except it wasn’t. Think about it. What makes me exactly the same as the boy and the girl, and what makes me completely different?”

  “I’m sure you’re going to tell me.”

  “Three people in the world could testify that bag was empty all along. The girl and the boy, because they had to carry it, so they knew it was light as a feather, and then later me, because it sailed up in the air a yard from my face, and I could see there was nothing in it. It was obvious.”

  “How are you different?”

  “He controls the boy and the girl. But he doesn’t control me. I’m a wild card running around in public saying the bag was empty. That’s what he heard. On the tape. That’s what he reacted to. He couldn’t let me say that. No one else was supposed to know the bag was empty. It could ruin everything. So he deleted the tape and then he tried to delete me.”

  “You’re arguing ahead of the facts.”

  “That’s why he asked how people get ahold of me. He found out he could put me in a potters’ field and no one would ever know.”

  “You’re speculating.”

  “There’s only one way this thing works. Delaney stole the thirty grand. He knew it was coming through. He’s DEA. He thought he could get away with it if he staged a freak accident. I mean, accidents happen, right? Like if your house sets on fire and the money is all in the sofa. It’s an operating loss. It’s a rounding error. It’s the cost of doing business for these guys. They don’t trust their mothers, but they know that shit happens eventually. One time I read in the paper where some guy lost nearly a million dollars, all eaten up by mice in his basement. So Delaney figured he could get away with it. Without getting his legs broken. All he had to do was put on a bold face and stick to his story.”

  “Wait,” Aaron said. “None of that makes sense.”

  “Unless.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “Say it out loud. See how ridiculous it sounds.”

  “None of that makes sense, because okay, Delaney might know thirty grand is coming through, but how does he get access to it? How does he dictate who carries what in a bag? And when and where and by which route?”

  “Unless,” Reacher said again.

  “This is crazy.”

  “Say it.”

  “Unless Delaney is walking on the dark side of the street.”

  “Don’t hide behind flowery language. Say it out loud.”

  “Unless Delaney is himself a link in the chain.”

  “Still kind of flowery.”

  “Unless Delaney is secretly a drug dealer as well as a DEA agent.”

  “Thirty grand might be about right for the kind of franchise fee he has to pay. For the kind of dealer he is. Which is not big. But not small-time either. Probably medium-sized, with a relatively civilized clientele. The work is easy. He’s well placed to help himself out with legal problems. He makes a decent living from it. Better than his pension is going to be. It was all good. But even so, he started to get greedy. This time he wanted to keep all the money for himself. He only pretended to pass along his boss’s share. The bag was empty from the get-go. But no one would know that. The police report would list thirty grand missing. Any gossip about what eyewitnesses saw would make it sound exactly like a freak robbery. His boss might write it off as genuine. Maybe Delaney planned to do it once a year. Kind of randomly. As an extra little margin.”

  “Still makes no sense,” Aaron said. “Why would the bag be empty? He would have used a wad of cut-up newspaper.”

  “I don’t think so,” Reacher said. “Suppose the kid had blown it? Suppose he missed the tackle? Or chickened out beforehand. The girl might have gotten all the way through. The real people might have taken the bag. Newspaper would be hard to explain. It’s the kind of thing that could sour a relationship. Whereas an empty bag could be claimed as reconnaissance. A dry run, looking for surveillance. An excess of caution. The bad guys couldn’t complain about that. Maybe they even expect it. Like employee-of-the-month competitions.”

  Aaron said nothing.

  Reacher said, “I’ll call again soon,” and he hung up the phone.

  This time he moved on. He went out the back of the diner and across one exposed street corner and into an alley between what might once have been elegant furniture showrooms. He scouted out a phone on the back wall of a franchise tire shop. Maybe where you called a cab, if the shop didn’t have the right tires.

  He backed into a doorway and waited. The police station was now two blocks away. He could still hear cars driving in and out. Speed and urgency. He gave it thirty more minutes. Then he headed for the tire shop. For the phone on the wall. But before he got there a guy came out the back of the building. From where the customers waited for their cars, on mismatched chairs, with a pay machine for coffee. The guy had buzzed hair and a blue sport coat over a checked shirt, with tan chino pants below.

  The guy had a Glock in his hand.

  From his shoulder holster.

  Delaney.

  Who pointed the gun and said, “Stop walking.”

  Reacher stopped walking.

  Delaney said, “You’re not as smart as you think.”

  Reacher said nothing.

  Delaney said, “You were in the police station. You saw how basic it was. You gambled they couldn’t trace a pay-phone location in real time. So you talked as long as you wanted.”

  “Was I right?”

  “The county can’t do it. But the state can. I knew where you were. From the start. You made a mistake.”

  “That’s always a theoretical possibility.”

  “You made one mistake after another.”

  “Or did I? Because think about it for a minute. From my point of view. First I told you where I was, and then I gave you time to get here. I had to hang around for hours. But never mind. Because here you are. Finally. Maybe I’m exactly as smart as I think.”

  “You wanted me here?”

  “Face-to-face is always better.”

  “You know I’m going to shoot you.”

  “But not yet. First you need to know what I said to Aaron. Because I gambled again. I figured you would know where the phone was, but I figured you couldn’t tap in and listen. Not instantly and randomly anywhere in the state. Not without warrants and subpoenas. You don’t have that kind of power. Not yet. So you knew about the call but you didn’t hear the conversation. Now you need to know how much more damage control will be necessary. You hope none at all. Because getting rid of Aaron will be a lot harder than me. You’d rather not do it. But you need to know.”

  �
�Well?”

  Reacher said, “Let’s talk about county police technology. Just for a moment. I was safe as long as I was talking. They’re basic, but it’s not exactly the Stone Age in there. At least they can get the number after the call is over. Surely. They can find out who owns it. Maybe they even recognize it. I know they call that diner from time to time.”

  “So?”

  “So my guess is Aaron knew where I was pretty early. But he’s a smart guy. He knows why I’m yapping. He knows how long it takes to drive from Bangor. So he sits tight for an hour or two, just to see what comes out of the woodwork. Why not? What’s he got to lose? What’s the worst thing could happen? And then you show up. A crazy theory is proved right.”

  “You saying you got reinforcements here? I don’t see any.”

  “Aaron knew I was in the diner. Now he knows I’m a block or two away. It’s all about where the pay phones are. I’m sure he figured that out pretty early. My guess is he’s watching us right now. His whole squad is watching us, probably. Lots of people. It’s not just you and me, Delaney. There are lots of people here.”

  “What is this? Some kind of psy-ops bullshit?”

  “It’s what you said. It’s a gamble. Aaron is a smart guy. He could have picked me up hours ago. But he didn’t. Because he wanted to see what would happen next. He’s been watching for hours. He’s watching right now. Or maybe he isn’t. Because maybe he’s actually a dumb guy all along. Except did he look dumb to you? That’s the gamble. I have to tell you, personally, I’m betting on smart. My professional advice would be close your mouth and lie down on the ground. There are witnesses everywhere.”

  Delaney glanced left, at the back of the tire shop. Then right, at the derelict showroom. Ahead, at the narrow alley between. Doors and windows all around, and shadows.