Lee Child - [Jack Reacher 01-16]

by Jack Reacher Series (epub)

  ‘All I’ll say is right now we need to know who’s coming and going.’

  Peterson said nothing more, and a minute later dinner arrived. Plates piled high, mashed potatoes, plenty of gravy. The coffee was an hour old, and it had suffered in terms of taste but gained in terms of strength.

  Peterson asked, ‘What exactly did you do in the MPs?’

  Reacher said, ‘Whatever they told me to.’

  ‘Serious crimes?’

  ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘Homicides?’

  ‘Everything from attempted to multiple.’

  ‘How much medical training did you get?’

  ‘Worried about the food here?’

  ‘I like to know things too.’

  ‘I didn’t get much medical training, really. I was trying to make the old folks feel better, that’s all.’

  ‘They spoke well of you.’

  ‘Don’t trust them. They don’t know me.’

  Peterson didn’t reply.

  Reacher asked, ‘Where was the dead guy found? Where the police car was blocking the side street?’

  ‘No. That was different. The dead guy was somewhere else.’

  ‘He wasn’t killed there.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘No blood in the snow. Hit someone hard enough in the head to kill them, the scalp splits. It’s inevitable. And scalps bleed like crazy. There should have been a pool of blood a yard across.’

  Peterson ate in silence for a minute. Then he asked: ‘Where do you live?’

  Which was a difficult question. Not for Reacher himself. There was a simple answer. He lived nowhere, and always had. He had been born the son of a serving military officer, in a Berlin infirmary, and since the day he had been carried out of it swaddled in blankets he had been dragged all over the world, through an endless blur of military bases and cheap off-post accommodations, and then he had joined up himself and lived the same way on his own account. Four years at West Point was his longest period of residential stability, and he had enjoyed neither West Point nor stability. Now that he was out of the service, he continued the transience. It was all he knew and it was a habit he couldn’t break.

  Not that he had ever really tried.

  He said, ‘I’m a nomad.’

  Peterson said, ‘Nomads have animals. They move around to find pasture. That’s the definition.’

  ‘OK, I’m a nomad without the animals part.’

  ‘You’re a bum.’

  ‘Possibly.’

  ‘You got no bags.’

  ‘You got a problem with that?’

  ‘It’s weird behaviour. Cops don’t like weird behaviour.’

  ‘Why is it weirder to move around than spend every day in the same place?’

  Peterson was quiet for a spell and then he said, ‘Everyone has possessions.’

  ‘I’ve got no use for them. Travel light, travel far.’

  Peterson didn’t answer.

  Reacher said, ‘Whatever, I’m no concern of yours. I never heard of Bolton before. If the bus driver hadn’t twitched I’d have been at Mount Rushmore tonight.’

  Peterson nodded, reluctantly.

  ‘Can’t argue with that,’ he said.

  Five minutes to ten in the evening.

  Fifty-four hours to go.

  Seventeen hundred miles to the south, inside the walled compound a hundred miles from Mexico City, Plato was eating too, a rib eye steak flown in all the way from Argentina. Nearly eleven in the evening local time. A late dinner. Plato was dressed in chinos and a white button-down shirt and black leather penny loafer shoes, all from the Brooks Brothers’ boys’ collection. The shoes and the clothes fit very well, but he looked odd in them. They were made for fat white middle-class American children, and Plato was old and brown and squat and had a shaved bullet head. But it was important to him to be able to buy clothes that fit right out of the box. Made-to-measure was obviously out of the question. Tailors would wield the tape and go quiet and then call out small numbers with studied and artificial neutrality. Alteration of off-the-rack items was just as bad. Visits from nervous local seamstresses and the furtive disposal of lengths of surplus fabric upset him mightily.

  He put down his knife and his fork and dabbed his lips with a large white napkin. He picked up his cell phone and hit the green button twice, to return the last call he had received. When it was answered he said, ‘We don’t need to wait. Send the guy in and hit the witness.’

  The man in the city villa asked, ‘When?’

  ‘As soon as would be prudent.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘And hit the lawyer, too. To break the chain.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘And make sure those idiots know they owe me big.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘And tell them they better not bother me with this kind of shit ever again.’

  Halfway through the pot roast Reacher asked, ‘So why was that street blocked off?’

  Peterson said, ‘Maybe there was a power line down.’

  ‘I hope not. Because that would be a strange sense of priorities. You leave twenty seniors freezing on the highway for an hour to guard a power line on a side street?’

  ‘Maybe there was a fender bender.’

  ‘Same answer.’

  ‘Does it matter? You were already on your way into town by that point.’

  ‘That car had been there two hours or more. Its tracks were full of snow. But you told us no one was available.’

  ‘Which was true. That officer wasn’t available. He was doing a job.’

  ‘What job?’

  ‘None of your business.’

  ‘How big is your department?’

  ‘Big enough.’

  ‘And they were all busy?’

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘How many of them were busy sitting around doing nothing in parked cars?’

  ‘You got concerns, I suggest you move here and start paying taxes and then talk to the mayor or Chief Holland.’

  ‘I could have caught a chill.’

  ‘But you didn’t.’

  ‘Too early to say.’

  They went back to eating. Until Peterson’s cell phone rang. He answered and listened and hung up and pushed his plate to one side.

  ‘Got to go,’ he said. ‘You wait here.’

  ‘I can’t,’ Reacher said. ‘This place is closing up. It’s ten o’clock. The waitress wants us out of here. She wants to go home.’

  Peterson said nothing.

  Reacher said, ‘I can’t walk. I don’t know where I’m supposed to go and it’s too cold to walk anyway.’

  Peterson said nothing.

  Reacher said, ‘I’ll stay in the car. Just ignore me.’

  ‘OK,’ Peterson said, but he didn’t look happy about it. Reacher left a twenty dollar bill on the table. The waitress smiled at him. Which she should, Reacher thought. Two pot roasts and a cup of coffee at South Dakota prices, he was leaving her a sixty per cent tip. Or maybe it was all tip, if Bolton was one of those towns where cops ate for free.

  The Crown Vic was still faintly warm inside. Peterson hit the gas and the chains bit down and the car pushed through the snow on the ground. There was no other traffic except for snow-ploughs taking advantage of the lull in the fall. Reacher had a problem with snowploughs. Not the machines themselves, but the compound word. A plough turned earth over and left it in place. Snowploughs didn’t do that with snow. Snowploughs were more properly bulldozers. But whatever, Peterson overtook them all, didn’t pause at corners, didn’t yield, didn’t wait for green lights.

  Reacher asked, ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘Western suburbs.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Intruders.’

  ‘In a house?’

  ‘On the street. It’s a Neighbourhood Watch thing.’ No further explanation. Peterson just drove, hunched forward over the wheel, tense and anxious. Reacher sprawled in the seat beside him, wondering what kind of intruders could get a p
olice department’s deputy chief to respond so urgently to a busybody’s call.

  Seventeen hundred miles south the man in the walled Mexico City villa dialled long distance to the United States. His final task of the day. Eleven o’clock local time, ten o’clock Central Time in the big country to the north. The call was answered and the man in the villa relayed Plato’s instructions, slowly and precisely. No room for misunderstanding. No room for error. He waited for confirmation and then he hung up. He didn’t call Plato back. No point. Plato didn’t understand the concept of confirmation. For Plato, obedience followed command the same way night followed day. It was inevitable. The only way it wouldn’t happen was if the world had stopped spinning on its axis.

  SIX

  PETERSON HAD HIS DASHBOARD RADIO TURNED UP HIGH AND Reacher picked out four separate voices from four separate cars. All of them were prowling the western suburbs and none of them had seen the reported intruders. Peterson aimed his own car down the streets they hadn’t checked yet. He turned right, turned left, nosed into dead ends, backed out again, moved on. There was a moon low in the sky and Reacher saw neat suburban developments, small houses in straight rows, warm lights behind windows, all the sidewalks and driveways and yards rendered blue and flat and uniform by the thick blanket of snow. Roofs were piled high with white. Some streets had been visited by the ploughs and had high banks of snow in the gutters. Some were still covered with an undisturbed fresh layer, deep but not as deep as the yards and the driveways. Clearly this current fall was the second or the third in a week or so. Roads were covered and cleared, covered and cleared, in an endless winter rhythm.

  Reacher asked, ‘How many intruders?’

  Peterson said, ‘Two reported.’

  ‘In a vehicle?’

  ‘On foot.’

  ‘Doing what?’

  ‘Just walking around.’

  ‘So stick to the ploughed streets. Nobody walks around in six inches of snow for the fun of it.’

  Peterson slowed for a second and thought about it. Then he turned without a word and picked up a ploughed trail and retraced it. The plough had zigzagged through main drags and cross streets. The snow had been sheared thin and low and white. The excess was piled high to the sides, still soft and clean.

  They found the intruders four minutes later.

  There were two of them, shoulder to shoulder in a close standoff with a third man. The third man was Chief Holland. His car was parked twenty feet away. It was an unmarked Crown Vic. Either navy blue or black. It was hard to say, in the moonlight. Police specification, with antennas on the trunk lid and concealed emergency lights peeping up out of the rear parcel shelf. The driver’s door was open and the engine was running. Twin puddles of black vapour had condensed and pooled in the thin snow beneath the twin exhausts. Holland had gotten out and stepped ahead and confronted the two guys head on. That was clear.

  The two guys were tall and heavyset and unkempt. White males, in black Frye boots, black jeans, black denim shirts, black leather vests, fingerless black gloves, black leather bandannas. Each had an unzipped black parka thrown over everything else. They looked exactly like the dead guy in the crime scene photographs.

  Peterson braked and stopped and stood off and idled thirty feet back. His headlights illuminated the scene. The standoff looked like it wasn’t going well for Holland. He looked nervous. The two guys didn’t. They had Holland crowded back with a snow bank behind him. They were in his space, leaning forward. Holland looked beaten. Helpless.

  Reacher saw why.

  The holster on Holland’s belt was unsnapped and empty, but there was no gun in his hand. He was glancing down and to his left.

  He had dropped his pistol in the snow bank.

  Or had it knocked from his hand.

  Either way, not good.

  Reacher asked, ‘Who are they?’

  Peterson said, ‘Undesirables.’

  ‘So undesirable that the chief of police joins the hunt?’

  ‘You see what I see.’

  ‘What do you want to do?’

  ‘It’s tricky. They’re probably armed.’

  ‘So are you.’

  ‘I can’t make Chief Holland look like an idiot.’

  Reacher said, ‘Not his fault. Cold hands.’

  ‘He just got out of his car.’

  ‘Not recently. That car has been idling in place for ten minutes. Look at the puddles under the exhaust pipes.’

  Peterson didn’t reply. And didn’t move.

  Reacher asked again, ‘Who are they?’

  ‘What’s it to you?’

  ‘Just curious. They’re scaring you.’

  ‘You think?’

  ‘If they weren’t they’d be cuffed in the back of this car by now.’

  ‘They’re bikers.’

  ‘I don’t see any bikes.’

  ‘It’s winter,’ Peterson said. ‘They use pick-up trucks in winter.’

  ‘That’s illegal now?’

  ‘They’re tweakers.’

  ‘What are tweakers?’

  ‘Crystal meth users.’

  ‘Amphetamines?’

  ‘Methylated amphetamine. Smoked. Or to be technically accurate, vaporized and inhaled. Off of glass pipes or busted light bulbs or aluminum foil spoons. You heat it up and sniff away. Makes you erratic and unpredictable.’

  ‘People are always erratic and unpredictable.’

  ‘Not like these guys.’

  ‘You know them?’

  ‘Not specifically. But generically.’

  ‘They live in town?’

  ‘Five miles west. There are a lot of them. Kind of camping out. Generally they keep themselves to themselves, but people don’t like them.’

  Reacher said, ‘The dead guy was one of them.’

  Peterson said, ‘Apparently.’

  ‘So maybe they’re looking for their buddy.’

  ‘Or for justice.’ Peterson watched and waited. Thirty feet ahead the body language ballet continued as before. Chief Holland was shivering. With cold, or fear.

  Or both.

  Reacher said, ‘You better do something.’

  Peterson did nothing.

  Reacher said, ‘Interesting strategy. You’re going to wait until they freeze to death.’

  Peterson said nothing.

  Reacher said, ‘Only problem is, Holland will freeze first.’

  Peterson said nothing.

  ‘I’ll come with you, if you like.’

  ‘You’re a civilian.’

  ‘Only technically.’

  ‘You’re not properly dressed. It’s cold out.’

  ‘How long can it take?’

  ‘You’re unarmed.’

  ‘Against guys like that, I don’t need to be armed.’

  ‘Crystal meth is not a joke. No inhibitions.’

  ‘That just makes us even.’

  ‘Users don’t feel pain.’

  ‘They don’t need to feel pain. All they need to feel is conscious or unconscious.’

  Peterson said nothing.

  Reacher said, ‘You go left and I’ll go right. I’ll turn them around and you get in behind them.’

  Thirty feet ahead Holland said something and the two guys crowded forward and Holland backed off and tripped and sat down heavily in the snow bank. Now he was more than an arm’s length from where his gun must have fallen.

  Half past ten in the evening.

  Reacher said, ‘This won’t wait.’

  Peterson nodded. Opened his door.

  ‘Don’t touch them,’ he said. ‘Don’t start anything. Right now they’re innocent parties.’

  ‘With Holland down on his ass?’

  ‘Innocent until proven guilty. That’s the law. I mean it. Don’t touch them.’ Peterson climbed out of the car. Stood for a second behind his open door and then stepped around it and started forward. Reacher matched him, pace for pace.

  The two guys saw them coming.

  Reacher went right and Peterson w
ent left. The car had been a comfortable seventy degrees. The evening air was sixty degrees colder. Maybe more. Reacher zipped his jacket all the way and shoved his hands deep in his pockets and hunched his shoulders so that his collar rode up on his neck. Even so he was shivering after five paces. It was beyond cold. The air felt deeply refrigerated. The two guys ahead stepped back, away from Holland. They gave him room. Holland struggled to his feet. Peterson stepped alongside him. His gun was still holstered. Reacher tracked around over the thin white glaze and stopped six feet behind the two guys. Holland stepped forward and dug around in the snow bank and retrieved his weapon. He brushed it clean and checked the muzzle for slush and stuck it back in his holster.

  Everyone stood still.

  The shaved snow on the street was part bright white powder and part ice crystals. They shone and glittered in the moonlight. Peterson and Holland were staring straight at the two guys and even though he was behind them Reacher was pretty sure the two guys were staring right back. He was shivering hard and his teeth were starting to chatter and his breath was fogging in front of him.

  Nobody spoke.

  The guy on Reacher’s right was more than six feet tall and close to four feet wide. Some of the bulk was goose-feather insulation in the black winter parka, but most of it was flesh and bone. The guy on Reacher’s left was a little smaller in both directions, and more active. He was restless, moving from foot to foot, twisting at the waist, rolling his shoulders. Cold, for sure, but not actively shivering. Reacher guessed the twitching was all about chemistry, not temperature.

  Nobody spoke.

  Reacher said, ‘Guys, either you need to move right along, or one of you needs to loan me a coat.’

  The two men turned around, slowly. The big guy on the right had a white slab of a face buried deep in a beard. The beard was rimed with frost. Like a polar explorer, or a mountaineer. The smaller guy on the left had two days of stubble and jumpy eyes. His mouth was opening and closing like a goldfish pecking at the surface. Thin mobile lips, bad teeth.

  The big guy on the right asked, ‘Who are you?’

  Reacher said, ‘Go home. It’s too cold for foolishness on the street.’

  No reply.

  Behind the two guys Peterson and Holland did nothing. Their guns were holstered and their holsters were snapped shut. Reacher planned his next moves. Always better to be prepared. He anticipated no major difficulty. He would have preferred the bigger guy to be on his left, because that would have maximized the impact from a right-handed blow by allowing a marginally longer swing, and he always liked to put the larger of a pair down first. But he was prepared to be flexible. Maybe the jittery guy should go down first. The bigger guy was likely to be slower, and maybe less committed, without the chemical assistance.