“Why?” he said. “Who the hell’s after you?”
“Nobody,” I said. “It’s just a bit of fun. I like anonymity. I feel like I’m beating the system. And right now, I’m truly pissed at the system.”
I saw him fall back to thinking. He thought a long time. I could see him deflate as he struggled with the problems that wouldn’t go away. I could see his panic come and go like a tide.
“So give me your advice about Finlay,” he said. “When he asks me about the confession, I’ll say I was stressed-out because of some business situation. I’ll say there was some kind of rivalry, threats against my family. I’ll say I don’t know anything about the dead guy or anything about the phone number. I’ll deny everything. Then I’ll just try to settle everything down. What do you think?”
I thought it sounded like a pretty thin plan.
“Tell me one thing,” I said. “Without giving me any more details, do you perform a useful function for them? Or are you just some kind of onlooker?”
He pulled on his fingers and thought for a moment.
“Yes, I perform a useful function for them,” he said. “Crucial, even.”
“And if you weren’t there to do it?” I asked him. “Would they have to recruit someone else?”
“Yes, they would,” he said. “And it would be moderately difficult to do that, given the parameters of the function.”
He was rating his chances of staying alive like he would rate a credit application up at his office.
“OK,” I said. “Your plan is as good as you’re going to get. Go for it.”
I didn’t see what else he could do. He was a small cog in some kind of a big operation. But a crucial cog. And nobody wrecks a big operation for no reason. So his future was actually clear-cut. If they ever figured it was him who had brought in the outside investigator, then he was definitely dead. But if they never found that out, then he was definitely safe. Simple as that. I figured he had a good enough chance, because of one very persuasive fact.
He had confessed because he had thought prison was some kind of a safe sanctuary where they couldn’t get him. That had been part of his thinking behind it. It was bad thinking. He’d been wrong. He wasn’t safe from attack, quite the reverse. They could have got him if they had wanted to. But the other side of that particular coin was that he hadn’t been attacked. As it happened, I had been. Not Hubble. So I figured there was some kind of a proof there that he was OK. They weren’t out to get him, because if they had wanted to kill him, they could have killed him by now, and they would have killed him by now. But they hadn’t. Even though they were apparently very uptight right now because of some kind of a temporary risk. So it seemed like proof. I began to think he would be OK.
“Yes, Hubble,” I said again. “Go for it, it’s the best you can do.”
The cell stayed locked all day. The floor was silent. We lay on our beds and drifted through the rest of the afternoon. No more talking. We were all talked out. I was bored and wished I had brought that newspaper with me from the Margrave station house. I could have read it all over again. All about the president cutting crime prevention so he could get re-elected. Saving a buck on the Coast Guard today so he could spend ten bucks on prisons like this one tomorrow.
At about seven the old orderly came by with dinner. We ate. He came back and picked up the tray. We drifted through the empty evening. At ten the power banged off and we were in darkness. Nightfall. I kept my shoes on and slept lightly. Just in case Spivey had any more plans for me.
AT SEVEN IN THE MORNING THE LIGHTS CAME BACK ON. Sunday. I woke up tired, but I forced myself to get up. Forced myself to do a bit of stretching to ease off my sore body. Hubble was awake, but silent. He was vaguely watching me exercise. Still drifting. Breakfast arrived before eight. The same old guy dragging the meal cart. I ate the breakfast and drank the coffee. As I finished up the flask, the gate lock clunked and sprang the door. I pushed it open and stepped out and bumped into a guard aiming to come in.
“It’s your lucky day,” the guard said. “You’re getting out.”
“I am?” I said.
“You both are,” he said. “Reacher and Hubble, released by order of the Margrave PD. Be ready in five minutes, OK?”
I stepped back into the cell. Hubble had hauled himself up onto his elbows. He hadn’t eaten his breakfast. He looked more worried than ever.
“I’m scared,” he said.
“You’ll be OK,” I said.
“Will I?” he said. “Once I’m out of here, they can get to me.”
I shook my head.
“It would have been easier for them to get you in here,” I said. “Believe me, if they were looking to kill you, you’d be dead by now. You’re in the clear, Hubble.”
He nodded to himself and sat up. I picked up my coat and we stood together outside the cell, waiting. The guard was back within five minutes. He walked us along a corridor and through two sets of locked gates. Put us in a back elevator. Stepped in and used his key to send it down. Stepped out again as the doors began to close.
“So long,” he said. “Don’t come back.”
The elevator took us down to a lobby and then we stepped outside into a hot concrete yard. The prison door sucked shut and clicked behind us. I stood face up to the sun and breathed in the outside air. I must have looked like some guy in a corny old movie who gets released from a year in solitary.
There were two cars parked in the yard. One was a big dark sedan, an English Bentley, maybe twenty years old, but it looked brand-new. There was a blond woman in it, who I guessed was Hubble’s wife, because he was on his way over to her like she was the sweetest sight he ever saw. The other car had Officer Roscoe in it.
She got out and walked straight over to me. Looked wonderful. Out of uniform. Dressed in jeans and a soft cotton shirt. Leather jacket. Calm intelligent face. Soft dark hair. Huge eyes. I’d thought she was nice on Friday. I’d been right.
“Hello, Roscoe,” I said.
“Hello, Reacher,” she said, and smiled.
Her voice was wonderful. Her smile was great. I watched it for as long as it lasted, which was a good long time. Ahead of us, the Hubbles drove off in the Bentley, waving. I waved back and wondered how things would turn out for them. Probably I would never know, unless they got unlucky and I happened to read about it in a newspaper somewhere.
Roscoe and I got into her car. Not really hers, she explained, just a department unmarked she was using. A brand-new Chevrolet something, big, smooth and quiet. She’d kept the motor running and the air on and inside it was cool. We wafted out of the concrete yard and shunted through the wire vehicle cages. Outside the last cage Roscoe spun the wheel and we blasted away down the road. The nose of the car rose up and the back end squatted down on the soft suspension. I didn’t look back. I just sat there, feeling good. Getting out of prison is one of life’s good feelings. So is not knowing what tomorrow holds. So is cruising silently down a sunny road with a pretty woman at the wheel.
“SO WHAT HAPPENED?” I SAID AFTER A MILE. “TELL ME.”
She told me a pretty straightforward story. They’d started work on my alibi late Friday evening. She and Finlay. A dark squad room. A couple of desk lights on. Pads of paper. Cups of coffee. Telephone books. The two of them cradling phones and chewing pencils. Low voices. Patient enquiries. A scene I’d been in myself a thousand times.
They’d called Tampa and Atlanta and by midnight they’d gotten hold of a passenger from my bus and the ticket clerk at the Tampa depot. Both of them remembered me. Then they got the bus driver as well. He confirmed he’d stopped at the Margrave cloverleaf to let me out, eight o’clock Friday morning. By midnight my alibi was looking rock solid, just like I’d said it would be.
Saturday morning, a long fax was in from the Pentagon about my service record. Thirteen years of my life, reduced to a few curling fax pages. It felt like somebody else’s life now, but it backed my story. Finlay had been impressed by it. Then my p
rints came back from the FBI database. They’d been matched by the tireless computer at two thirty in the morning. U.S. Army, printed on induction, thirteen years ago. My alibi was solid, and my background checked out.
“Finlay was satisfied,” Roscoe told me. “You are who you say you are, and midnight Thursday you were over four hundred miles away. That was nailed down. He called the medical examiner again just in case he had a new opinion on the time of death, but no, midnight was still about right.”
I shook my head. Finlay was one very cautious guy.
“What about the dead guy?” I said. “Did you run his prints again?”
She concentrated on passing a farm truck. The first vehicle we’d seen in a quarter hour. Then she looked across and nodded.
“Finlay told me you wanted me to,” she said. “But why?”
“They came back too quickly for a negative result,” I said.
“Too quickly?” she said.
“You told me there was a pyramid system, right?” I said. “The top ten, then the top hundred, then the top thousand, all the way down, right?”
She nodded again.
“So take me as an example,” I said. “I’m in the database, but I’m pretty low down the pyramid. You just said it took fourteen hours to get down to me, right?”
“Right,” she said. “I sent your prints in about twelve thirty at lunchtime and they were matched at two thirty in the morning.”
“OK,” I said. “Fourteen hours. So if it takes fourteen hours to reach nearly to the bottom of the pyramid, it’s got to take more than fourteen hours to get all the way down to the bottom. That’s logical, right?”
“Right,” she said.
“But what happened with this dead guy?” I said. “The body was found at eight o’clock, so the prints went in when? Eight thirty, earliest. But Baker was already telling me there was no match on file when they were talking to me at two thirty. I remember the time, because I was looking at the clock. That’s only six hours. If it took fourteen hours to find out that I’m in there, how could it take just six hours to say the dead guy’s not in there?”
“God,” she said. “You’re right. Baker must have screwed up. Finlay took the prints and Baker sent them. He must have screwed up the scan. You got to be careful, or it doesn’t transmit clearly. If the scan’s not clear, the database tries to decipher it, then it comes back as unreadable. Baker must have thought that meant a null result. The codes are similar. Anyway, I sent them again, first thing. We’ll know soon enough.”
We drove on east and Roscoe told me she’d pushed Finlay to get me out of Warburton right away yesterday afternoon. Finlay had grunted and agreed, but there was a problem. They’d had to wait until today, because yesterday afternoon Warburton had been just about shut down. They had told Finlay there had been some trouble in a bathroom. One convict was dead, one had lost an eye, and a full-scale riot had started, black and white gangs at war.
I just sat there next to Roscoe and watched the horizon reeling in. I’d killed one guy and blinded another. Now I’d have to confront my feelings. But I didn’t feel much at all. Nothing, in fact. No guilt, no remorse. None at all. I felt like I’d chased two roaches around that bathroom and stomped on them. But at least a roach is a rational, reasonable, evolved sort of a creature. Those Aryans in that bathroom had been worse than vermin. I’d kicked one of them in the throat and he had suffocated on his smashed larynx. Well, tough shit. He started it, right? Attacking me was like pushing open a forbidden door. What waited on the other side was his problem. His risk. If he didn’t like it, he shouldn’t have pushed open the damn door. I shrugged and forgot about it. Looked over at Roscoe.
“Thank you,” I said. “I mean it. You worked hard to help me out.”
She waved away my thanks with a blush and a small gesture and just drove on. I was starting to like her a lot. But probably not enough to stop me getting the hell out of Georgia as soon as I could. Maybe I might just stay an hour or two and then get her to drive me to a bus depot somewhere.
“I want to take you to lunch,” I said. “Kind of a thank-you thing.”
She thought about it for a quarter mile and then smiled across at me.
“OK,” she said.
She jinked the right turn onto the county road and accelerated south toward Margrave. Drove past Eno’s shiny new place and headed down to town.
9
I GOT HER TO DUCK IN AT THE STATION HOUSE AND BRING me out the property bag with my money in it. Then we drove on and she dropped me in the center of Margrave and I arranged to meet her up at the station house in a couple of hours. I stood on the sidewalk in the fierce Sunday morning heat and waved her off. I felt a whole lot better. I was back in motion. I was going to check out the Blind Blake story, then take Roscoe to lunch, then get the hell out of Georgia and never come back.
So I spent a while wandering around looking at the town, doing the things I should have been doing on Friday afternoon. There wasn’t really much to the place. The old county road ran straight through, north to south, and for about four blocks it was labeled Main Street. Those four blocks had small stores and offices facing each other across the width of the road, separated by little service alleys which ran around to the back of the buildings. I saw a small grocery, a barbershop, an outfitter’s, a doctor’s office, a lawyer’s office and a dentist’s office. In back of the commercial buildings was parkland with white picket fences and ornamental trees. On the street, the stores and offices had awnings over wide sidewalks. There were benches set on the sidewalks, but they were empty. The whole place was deserted. Sunday morning, miles from anywhere.
Main Street ran north, straight as a die, past a few hundred yards of more parkland up to the station house and the firehouse, and a half mile farther on than that was Eno’s diner. A few miles beyond Eno’s was the turn west out to Warburton where the prison was. North of that junction there was nothing on the county road until you reached the warehouses and the highway cloverleaf, fourteen empty miles from where I stood.
On the south edge of town I could see a little village green with a bronze statue and a residential street running away to the west. I strolled down there and saw a discreet green sign which read: Beckman Drive. Hubble’s street. I couldn’t see any real distance down it because pretty much straight away it looped left and right around a wide grass square with a big white wooden church set on it. The church was ringed by cherry trees and the lawn was circled by cars with clean quiet paint parked in neat lines. I could just about make out the growl of the organ and the sound of the people singing.
The statue on the village green was of a guy called Caspar Teale who’d done something or other about a hundred years ago. More or less opposite Beckman Drive on the other side of the green was another residential street, running east, with a convenience store standing alone on the corner. And that was it. Not much of a town. Not much going on. Took me less than thirty minutes to look over everything the place had to offer.
But it was the most immaculate town I had ever seen. It was amazing. Every single building was either brand-new or recently refurbished. The roads were smooth as glass, and the sidewalks were flat and clean. No potholes, no cracks, no heave. The little offices and stores looked like they got repainted every week. The lawns and the plantings and the trees were clipped to perfection. The bronze statue of old Caspar Teale looked like somebody licked it clean every morning. The paint on the church was so bright it hurt my eyes. Flags flew everywhere, sparkling white and glowing red and blue in the sun. The whole place was so tidy it could make you nervous to walk around in case you left a dirty footprint somewhere.
THE CONVENIENCE STORE ON THE SOUTHEASTERN CORNER was selling the sort of stuff that gave it a good enough excuse to be open on a Sunday morning. Open, but not busy. There was nobody in there except the guy behind the register. But he had coffee. I sat up at the little counter and ordered a big mug and bought a Sunday newspaper.
The president was still on the fr
ont page. Now he was in California. He was explaining to defense contractors why their gravy train was grinding to a halt after fifty glorious years. The aftershock from his Pensacola announcement about the Coast Guard was still rumbling on. Their boats were returning to their harbors on Saturday night. They wouldn’t go out again without new funding. The paper’s editorial guys were all stirred up about it.
I stopped reading and glanced up when I heard the door open. A woman came in. She took a stool at the opposite end of the counter. She was older than me, maybe forty. Dark hair, very slender, expensively dressed in black. She had very pale skin. So pale, it was almost luminous. She moved with a kind of nervous tension. I could see tendons like slim ropes in her wrists. I could see some kind of an appalling strain in her face. The counter guy slid over to her and she ordered coffee in a voice so quiet I could barely hear it, even though she was pretty close by and it was a silent room.
She didn’t stay long. She got through half her coffee, watching the window all the time. Then a big black pickup truck pulled up outside and she shivered. It was a brand-new truck and obviously it had never hauled anything worth hauling. I caught a glimpse of the driver as he leaned over inside to spring the door. He was a tough-looking guy. Pretty tall. Broad shoulders and a thick neck. Black hair. Black hair all over long knotted arms. Maybe thirty years old. The pale woman slid off her stool like a ghost and stood up. Swallowed once. As she opened the shop door I heard the burble of a big motor idling. The woman got into the truck, but it didn’t move away. Just sat there at the curb. I swiveled on my stool to face the counter guy.
“Who is that?” I asked him.
The guy looked at me like I was from another planet.
“That’s Mrs. Kliner,” he said. “You don’t know the Kliners?”
“I heard about them,” I said. “I’m a stranger in town. Kliner owns the warehouses up near the highway, right?”
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