Lee Child - [Jack Reacher 01-16]

by Jack Reacher Series (epub)

  “It’s a topic, I guess.”

  “Why does everybody ask me that?”

  She shrugged. “People are curious.”

  “Why? Why shouldn’t I leave the Army?”

  “Because I think you enjoyed it. Like I enjoy the FBI.”

  “A lot of it was very irritating.”

  She nodded. “Sure. The Bureau’s very irritating too. Like a husband, I guess. Good points and bad points, but they’re my points, you know what I mean? You don’t get a divorce because of a little irritation.”

  “They downsized me out of there,” he said.

  “No, they didn’t. We read your record. They downsized numbers, but they didn’t target you. You volunteered to go.”

  He was quiet for a mile or two. Then he nodded.

  “I got scared,” he said.

  She glanced at him. “Of what?”

  “I liked it the way it was. I didn’t want it to change.”

  “Into what?”

  “Something smaller, I guess. It was a huge, huge thing. You’ve got no idea. It stretched all around the world. They were going to make it smaller. I’d have gotten promotion, so I would have been higher up in a smaller organization.”

  “What’s wrong with that? Big fish in a small pond, right?”

  “I didn’t want to be a big fish,” he said. “I liked being a small fish.”

  “You weren’t a small fish,” she said. “A major isn’t small.”

  He nodded. “OK, I liked being a medium-sized fish. It was comfortable. Kind of anonymous.”

  She shook her head. “That’s not enough reason to quit.”

  He looked up at the stars. They were stationary in the sky, a billion miles above him.

  “A big fish in a small pond has no place to swim,” he said. “I’d have been in one place, years at a time. Some big desk someplace, then five years on, another bigger desk some other place. Guy like me, no political skills, no social graces, I’d have made full colonel and no farther. I’d have served out my time stuck there. Could have been fifteen or twenty years.”

  “But?”

  “But I wanted to keep moving. All my life, I’ve been moving, literally. I was scared to stop. I didn’t know what being stuck somewhere would feel like, but my guess was I’d hate it.”

  “And?”

  He shrugged. “And now I am stuck someplace.”

  “And?” she said again.

  He shrugged again and said nothing. It was warm in the car. Warm, and comfortable.

  “Say the words, Reacher,” she said. “Get it out. You’re stuck someplace, and?”

  “And nothing.”

  “Bullshit, nothing. And?”

  He took a deep breath. “And I’m having a problem with it.”

  The car went quiet. She nodded, like she understood. “Jodie doesn’t want to keep moving around, I guess.”

  “Well, would you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He nodded. “Problem is, she does know. She and I grew up the same, always moving, base to base to base, all around the world, a month here, six months there. So she lives the life she lives because she went out there and created it for herself, because it’s exactly what she wants. She knows it’s exactly what she wants because she knows exactly what the alternative is.”

  “She could move around a little. She’s a lawyer. She could change jobs, time to time.”

  He shook his head. “Doesn’t work that way. It’s about career. She’ll make partner sometime real soon, the way she’s going, and then she’ll probably work at the same firm her whole life. And anyway, I’m not talking about a couple of years here, three years there, buy a house, sell a house. I’m talking about if I wake up in Oregon tomorrow and I feel like going to Oklahoma or Texas or somewhere, I just go. With no idea about where I’m going the next day.”

  “A wanderer.”

  “It’s important to me.”

  “How important, though?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know, exactly.”

  “How are you going to find out?”

  “Problem is, I am finding out.”

  “So what are you going to do?”

  He was quiet for another mile.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “You might get used to it.”

  “I might,” he said. “But I might not. It feels awful deep in my blood. Like right now, middle of the night, heading down the road someplace I’ve never been, I feel real good. I just can’t explain how good I feel.”

  She smiled. “Maybe it’s the company.”

  He smiled back. “Maybe it is.”

  “So will you tell me something else?”

  “Like what?”

  “Why are we wrong about this guy’s motive?”

  He shook his head. “Wait until we see what we find in Portland.”

  “What are we going to find in Portland?”

  “My guess is a carton full of paint cans, with absolutely no clue as to where they came from or who sent them there.”

  “So?”

  “So then we put two and two together and make four. The way you guys have got it, you ain’t making four. You’re making some big inexplicable number that’s a long, long way from four.”

  REACHER RACKED HIS seat back a little more and dozed through most of Harper’s final hour at the wheel. The second-to-last leg of the trip took them up the northern flank of Mount Hood on Route 35. The Buick changed down to third gear to cope with the gradient, and the jerk from the transmission woke him again. He watched through the windshield as the road looped around behind the peak. Then Harper found Route 26 and swung west for the final approach, down the mountainside, toward the city of Portland.

  The nighttime view was spectacular. There was broken cloud high in the sky, and a bright moon, and starlight. There was snow piled in the gullies. The world was like a jagged sculpture in gray steel, glowing below them.

  “I can see the attraction of wandering,” Harper said. “Sight like this.”

  Reacher nodded. “It’s a big, big planet.”

  They passed through a sleeping town called Rhododendron and saw a sign pointing ahead to Rita Scimeca’s village, five miles farther down the slope. When they got there, it was nearly three in the morning. There was a gas station and a general store on the through road. Both of them were closed up tight. There was a cross street running north into the lower slope of the mountain. Harper nosed up it. The cross street had cross streets of its own. Scimeca’s was the third of them. It ran east up the slope.

  Her house was easy to spot. It was the only one on the street with lights in the windows. And the only one with a Bureau sedan parked outside. Harper stopped behind the sedan and turned off her lights and the motor died with a little shudder and silence enveloped them. The rear window of the Bureau car was misted with breath and there was a single head silhouetted in it. The head moved and the sedan door opened and a young man in a dark suit stepped out. Reacher and Harper stretched and unclipped their belts and opened their doors. Slid out and stood in the chill air with their breath clouding around them.

  “She’s in there, safe and sound,” the local guy said to them. “I was told to wait out here for you.”

  Harper nodded. “And then what?”

  “Then I stay out here,” the guy said. “You do all the talking. I’m security detail until the local cops take over, eight in the morning.”

  “The cops going to cover twenty-four hours a day?” Reacher asked.

  The guy shook his head, miserably.

  “Twelve,” he said. “I do the nights.”

  Reacher nodded. Good enough, he thought. The house was a big square clapboard structure, built side-on to the street so the front faced the view to the west. There was a generous front porch with gingerbread railings. The slope of the street made room for a garage under the house at the front. The garage door faced sideways, under the end of the porch. There was a short driveway. Then the land sloped upward, so that
the rest of the basement would be dug into the hillside. The lot was small, surrounded with tall hurricane fencing marching up the rise. The yard was cultivated, with flowers everywhere, the color taken out of them by the silver moonlight.

  “She awake?” Harper asked.

  The local guy nodded. "She’s in there waiting for you.”

  17

  A WALKWAY CAME off the driveway on the left and looped through the dark around some rockery plantings to a set of wide wooden steps in the center of the front porch. Harper skipped up them but Reacher’s weight made them creak in the night silence and before the echo of the sound came back from the hills the front door was open and Rita Scimeca was standing there watching them. She had one hand on the inside doorknob and a blank look on her face.

  “Hello, Reacher,” she said.

  “Scimeca,” he said back. “How are you?”

  She used her free hand to push her hair off her brow.

  “Reasonable,” she said. “Considering it’s three o’clock in the morning and the FBI has only just gotten around to telling me I’m on some kind of hit list with ten of my sisters, four of whom are already dead.”

  “Your tax dollars at work,” Reacher said.

  “So why the hell are you hanging with them?”

  He shrugged. “Circumstances didn’t leave me a whole lot of choice.”

  She gazed at him, deciding. It was cold on the porch. The night dew was beading on the painted boards. There was a thin low fog in the air. Behind Scimeca’s shoulder the lights inside her house burned warm and yellow. She looked at him a moment longer.

  “Circumstances?” she repeated.

  He nodded. “Didn’t leave me a whole lot of choice.”

  She nodded back. “Well, whatever, it’s kind of good to see you, I guess.”

  “Good to see you, too.”

  She was a tall woman. Shorter than Harper, but then most women were. She was muscular, not the compact way Alison Lamarr had been, but the lean, marathon-runner kind of way. She was dressed in clean jeans and a shapeless sweater. Substantial shoes on her feet. She had medium-length brown hair, worn in long bangs above bright brown eyes. She had heavy frown lines all around her mouth. It was nearly four years since he had last seen her, and she looked the whole four years older.

  "This is Special Agent Lisa Harper,” he said.

  Scimeca nodded once, warily. Reacher watched her eyes. A male agent, she’d have thrown him off the porch.

  “Hi,” Harper said.

  “Well, come on in, I guess,” Scimeca said.

  She still had hold of the doorknob. She was standing on the threshold, leaning forward, unwilling to step out. Harper stepped in and Reacher filed after her. The door closed behind them. They were in the hallway of a decent little house, newly painted, nicely furnished. Very clean, obsessively tidy. It looked like a home. Warm and cozy. A personal space. There were wool rugs on the floor. Polished antique furniture in gleaming mahogany. Paintings on the walls. Vases of flowers everywhere.

  “Chrysanthemums,” Scimeca said. “I grow them myself. You like them?”

  Reacher nodded.

  “I like them,” he said. “Although I couldn’t spell them.”

  “Gardening’s my new hobby,” Scimeca said. “I’ve gotten into it in a big way.”

  Then she pointed toward a front parlor.

  “And music,” she said. “Come see.”

  The room had quiet wallpaper and a polished wood floor. There was a grand piano in the back corner. Shiny black lacquer. A German name inlaid in brass. A big stool was placed in front of it, handsome buttoned leather in black. The lid of the piano was up, and there was music on the stand above the keyboard, a dense mass of black notes on heavy cream paper.

  “Want to hear something?” she asked.

  “Sure,” Reacher said.

  She slid between the keyboard and the stool and sat down. Laid her hands on the keys and paused for a second and then a mournful minor-key chord filled the room. It was a warm sound, and low, and she modulated it into the start of a funeral march.

  “Got anything more cheerful?” Reacher asked.

  “I don’t feel cheerful,” she said.

  But she changed it anyway, into the start of the Moonlight Sonata.

  “Beethoven,” she said.

  The silvery arpeggios filled the air. She had her foot on the damper and the sound was dulled and quiet. Reacher gazed out of the window at the plantings, gray in the moonlight. There was an ocean ninety miles to the west, vast and silent.

  “That’s better,” he said.

  She played it through to the end of the first movement, apparently from memory, because the music open on the stand was labeled Chopin. She kept her hands on the keys until the last chord died away to silence.

  “Nice,” Reacher said. “So, you’re doing OK?”

  She turned away from the keyboard and looked him in the eye. “You mean have I recovered from being gang-raped by three guys I was supposed to trust with my life?”

  Reacher nodded. “Something like that, I guess.”

  “I thought I’d recovered,” she said. “As well as I ever expected to. But now I hear some maniac is fixing to kill me for complaining about it. That’s taken the edge off it a little bit, you know?”

  “We’ll get him,” Harper said, in the silence.

  Scimeca just looked at her.

  “So can we see the new washing machine in the basement?” Reacher asked.

  “It’s not a washing machine, though, is it?” Scimeca asked. “Not that anybody tells me anything.”

  “It’s probably paint,” Reacher said. “In cans. Camouflage green, Army issue.”

  “What for?”

  “The guy kills you, dumps you in your bathtub and pours it over you.”

  “Why?”

  Reacher shrugged. “Good question. There’s a whole bunch of pointy heads working on that right now.”

  Scimeca nodded and turned to Harper. “You a pointy head?”

  “No, ma’am, I’m just an agent,” Harper said.

  “You ever been raped?”

  Harper shook her head. “No, ma’am, I haven’t.”

  Scimeca nodded again.

  “Well, don’t be,” she said. “That’s my advice.”

  There was silence.

  “It changes your life,” Scimeca said. “It changed mine, that’s for damn sure. Gardening and music, that’s all I’ve got now.”

  “Good hobbies,” Harper said.

  “Stay-at-home hobbies,” Scimeca said back. “I’m either in this room or within sight of my front door. I don’t get out much and I don’t like meeting people. So take my advice, don’t let it happen to you.”

  Harper nodded. “I’ll try not to.”

  “Basement,” Scimeca said.

  She led the way out of the parlor to a door tucked under the stairs. It was an old door, made up of pine planks painted many times. There was a narrow staircase behind it, leading down toward cold air smelling faintly of gasoline and tire rubber.

  “We have to go through the garage,” Scimeca said.

  There was a new car filling the space, a long low Chrysler sedan, painted gold. They walked single file along its flank and Scimeca opened a door in the garage wall. The musty smell of a basement bloomed out at them. Scimeca pulled a cord and a hot yellow light came on.

  “There you are,” she said.

  The basement was warm from a furnace. It was a large square space with wide storage racks built on every wall. Fiberglass insulation showed between the ceiling joists. There were heating pipes snaking up through the floorboards. There was a carton standing alone in the middle of the floor. It was at an angle to the walls, untidy against the neat shelving surrounding it. It was the same carton. Same size, same brown board, same black printing, same picture, same manufacturer’s name. It was taped shut with shiny brown tape and it looked brand-new.

  “Got a knife?” Reacher asked.

  Scimeca nod
ded toward a work area. There was pegboard screwed to the wall, and it was filled with tools hanging in neat rows. Reacher took a linoleum knife off a peg, carefully, because in his experience the peg usually came out with the tool. But not this one. He saw that each peg was secured to the board with a neat little plastic device.

  He came back to the box and slit the tape. Reversed the knife and used the handle to ease the flaps upward. He saw five metal circles, glowing yellow. Five paint can lids, reflecting the overhead light. He poked the knife handle under one of the wire hoops and lifted one of the cans up to eye level. Rotated it in the light. It was a plain metal can, unadorned except for a small white label printed with a long number and the words Camo/Green.

  “We’ve seen a few of those in our time,” Scimeca said. “Right, Reacher?”

  He nodded. “A few.”

  He lowered the can back into the box. Pushed the flaps down and walked over and hung the knife back where it had been. Glanced across at Scimeca.

  “When did this come?” he asked.

  “I don’t remember,” she said.

  “Roughly?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe a couple months ago.”

  “A couple of months?” Harper said.

  Scimeca nodded. “I guess. I don’t really remember.”

  “You didn’t order it, right?” Reacher said.

  Scimeca shook her head. “I already have one. It’s over there.”

  She pointed. There was a laundry area in the corner. Washer, dryer, sink. A vacuumed rug in the angle of the corner. White plastic baskets and detergent bottles lined up precisely on a countertop.

  “Thing like this, you’d remember,” Reacher said. “Wouldn’t you?”

  “I assumed it’s for my roommate, I guess,” she said.

  “You have a roommate?”

  “Had. She moved out, couple of weeks ago.”

  “And you figured this is hers?”

  “Made sense to me,” Scimeca said. “She’s setting up housekeeping on her own, she needs a washing machine, right?”

  “But you didn’t ask her?”

  “Why should I? I figured it’s not for me, who else could it be for?”

  “So why did she leave it here?”

  “Because it’s heavy. Maybe she’s getting help to move it. It’s only been a couple of weeks.”