Lee Child - [Jack Reacher 01-16]

by Jack Reacher Series (epub)

  And there were plenty of women, too. More than I would have believed possible. I had no idea where they had all come from. Miles around, probably. Some were paired off with soldiers, others were in larger mixed groups, and some were in groups of their own. I could see about a hundred guys in total, and maybe eighty women, and I guessed there might be similar numbers inside. The men were from Bravo Company, I assumed, still on leave and anxious to make up for lost time. They were exactly what I would have expected to see. Good guys, well trained, by day performing at a hundred percent of their considerable capacities, by night full of energy, full of goodwill, and full of high spirits. They were all in their unofficial off-duty uniform of jeans, jackets, and T-shirts. Here or there a guy would look a little pinched and wary compared to the others, which most likely meant he was on the promotion track, and clearly some guys needed the spotlight more than others, but overall they were precisely what a good infantry unit looks like when it comes out to play. There was plenty of buzz going on, and plenty of noise, but I sensed no frustration or hostility. There was nothing negative in the air. They didn’t blame the town for their recent incarceration. They were just glad to get back to it.

  But even so I was sure local law enforcement would be holding its breath. In particular I was sure Elizabeth Deveraux would still be on duty. And I was definitely sure where I would find her. She needed a central location, and a chair and a table and a window, and something to do as time ticked away. Where else would she be?

  I eased my way through the thin crowd and stepped left of Brannan’s bar and into the alley. I skirted Janice Chapman’s pile of sand and followed the dog-leg and came out onto Main Street between the hardware store and the pharmacy. Then I turned right and walked up to the diner.

  * * *

  The diner was almost completely full that night. It was practically heaving, compared to how I had seen it before. Like Times Square. There were twenty-six customers. Nineteen of them were Rangers, sixteen of them in four groups of four at four separate tables, big guys sitting tight together, shoulder to shoulder. They were talking loud, and calling back and forth to each other. They were keeping the waitress busy. She was running in and out of the kitchen, and she probably had been all day long, dealing with the pent-up demand for something other than army chow. But she looked happy. The gates were finally open. The river of dollars was flowing again. She was getting her tips.

  The other three Rangers were dining with their girlfriends, face to face at tables for two, leaning in, heads together. All three men looked happy, and so did all three women. And why not? What could be finer than a romantic dinner at the best restaurant in town?

  The old couple from the hotel were in there too, at their usual table for four, almost hidden by the groups of Rangers all around them. The old lady had her book, and the old guy had his paper. They were staying later than normal, and I guessed they were the only service workers in town not at that very moment camped out behind their cash registers. But none of the guys from Kelham needed a bed for the night, and Toussaint’s offered no other facilities. Not even coffee. So it made sense for the owners to wait out the noise and the disruption somewhere safe and familiar, rather than listen to it all out their back windows.

  Then deeper into the room and right of the aisle and alone at the rearmost table for two was Major Duncan Munro. He was in BDUs and his head was bent over a meal. On the spot, just in case, even though his involvement in Kelham’s affairs had been terminated hours before, presumably. He was a good MP. Professional to the end. I guessed he was on his way back to Germany, and was waiting for transport.

  And Elizabeth Deveraux was there, of course. She was on her own at a table closer to the window than I had seen her choose before. On the spot, vigilant, just in case, paying attention, not willing to let the mayhem filter out from behind Main Street onto Main Street itself. Because of the voters. She was in uniform, and her hair was up in its ponytail. She looked tired, but still spectacular. I watched her for a beat, and then she looked up and saw me and smiled happily and kicked a chair out for me.

  I paused another beat, thinking hard, and then I stepped over and sat down opposite her.

  Chapter

  72

  Deveraux didn’t speak at first. She just looked me over, top to bottom, head to toe, maybe checking me for damage, maybe adjusting to the sight of me in uniform. I was still in the BDUs I had put on that afternoon, after getting back from D.C. A whole new look.

  I said, “Busy day?”

  She said, “Real busy since ten o’clock this morning. They opened the gates and out they came. Like a flood.”

  “Any trouble?”

  “None of them would pass a field sobriety test on their way home, but apart from that everything’s cool. I’ve got Butler and Pellegrino out and about, just to show the flag. Just in case.”

  “I saw them,” I said.

  “So how did it go up there?”

  “Inconclusive,” I said. “Very bad timing on my part, I’m afraid. Just one of those freak things. The guy I went to see died in an accident. So I got nothing done.”

  “I figured,” she said. “I was getting regular updates from Frances Neagley, until things got busy here. From eight until ten this morning you were drinking coffee and reading the newspaper. But something must have happened during those hours. My guess would be around nine o’clock. Mail call, maybe. But whatever, somebody must have reached a conclusion about something, because an hour later it all let loose. It was back to business as usual here.”

  I nodded.

  “I agree,” I said. “I think new information was released this morning. Something definitive, I guess.”

  “Do you know what it was?”

  I said, “By the way, thank you for worrying. I was very touched.”

  “Neagley was just as worried as I was,” she said. “Once I told her what you were doing, that is. She didn’t need much persuading.”

  “In the end it was safe enough,” I said. “It got a little tense around the Pentagon. That was the worst of it. I hung around there for quite a time. I came in through the cemetery. Behind Henderson Hall. You know that place?”

  “Of course I do. I was there a hundred times. They have a great PX. It feels like Saks Fifth Avenue.”

  “I got talking with a guy there. About you and a one-star called James Dyer. This guy said Dyer knew you.”

  “Dyer?” she said. “Really? I knew him, but I doubt if he knew me. If he did, then I’m flattered. He was a real big deal. Who was the guy you were talking to?”

  “His name was Paul Evers.”

  “Paul?” she said. “You’re kidding. We worked together for years. In fact we even dated once. One of my mistakes, I’m afraid. But how amazing that you bumped into him. It’s a small world, right?”

  “Why was he a mistake? He seemed OK to me.”

  “He was fine. He was a really nice guy. But we didn’t really click.”

  “So you dumped him?”

  “More or less. But it felt close to mutual. We both knew it wasn’t going to work. It was just a question of who was going to speak first. He wasn’t upset, anyway.”

  “When was this?”

  She paused to calculate.

  “Five years ago,” she said. “Feels like yesterday. Doesn’t time fly?”

  “Then he said something about a woman called Alice Bouton. His next girlfriend after you, apparently.”

  “I don’t think I knew her. I don’t recall the name. Did Paul seem happy?”

  “He mentioned something about car trouble.”

  Deveraux smiled.

  “Girls and cars,” she said. “Is that all guys ever talk about?”

  I said, “Reopening Kelham means they’re sure the problem is on your side of the fence, you know. They wouldn’t have done it otherwise. It’s a Mississippi matter now. That will be the official line, from this point forward. It’s not one of us. It’s one of you. You got any thoughts on that?”

>   “I think the army should share its information,” she said. “If it’s good enough for them, it would be good enough for me too.”

  “The army is moving on,” I said. “The army won’t be sharing anything.”

  She paused a beat.

  “Munro told me he got new orders,” she said. “I suppose you have, too.”

  I nodded. “I came back to tie up a loose end. That’s all, really.”

  “And then you’ll be moving on. To the next thing. That’s what I’m thinking about right now. I’ll think about Janice Chapman tomorrow.”

  “And Rosemary McClatchy, and Shawna Lindsay.”

  “And Bruce Lindsay, and his mother. I’ll do my best for all of them.”

  I said nothing.

  She asked, “Are you tired?”

  I said, “Not very.”

  “I have to go help Butler and Pellegrino. They’ve been working since dawn. And anyway, I want to be on the road when the last of the stragglers start to head home. They’re always the toughest guys, and the drunkest.”

  “Will you be back by midnight?”

  She shook her head.

  “Probably not,” she said. “We’ll have to manage without the train tonight.”

  I said nothing in reply to that, and she smiled once more, a little sadly, and then she got up and left.

  The waitress finally got to me five minutes later and I ordered coffee. And pie, as an afterthought. She treated me a little differently than before. A little more formally. She worked near a base, and she knew what the black oak leaves on my collar meant. I asked her how her day had gone. She said it had gone very well, thank you.

  “No trouble at all?” I asked.

  “None,” she said.

  “Even from that guy in back? The other major? I heard he could be a handful.”

  She turned and looked at Munro. She said, “I’m sure he’s a perfect gentleman.”

  “Would you ask him to join me? Get him some pie, too.”

  She detoured via his table, and she delivered my invitation, which involved a lot of elaborate pointing, as if I was inconspicuous and hard to find in the crowd. Munro looked over quizzically, and then he shrugged and got up. Each of the four Ranger tables fell silent as he passed, one after the other. Munro was not popular with those guys. He had had them sitting on their thumbs for four solid days.

  He sat down in Deveraux’s chair and I asked him, “How much have they told you?”

  “Bare minimum,” he said. “Classified, need to know, eyes only, the whole nine yards.”

  “No names?”

  “No,” he said. “But I’m assuming that Sheriff Deveraux must have given them solid information that clears our guys. I mean, what else could have happened? But she hasn’t arrested anybody. I’ve been watching her all day.”

  “What has she been doing?”

  “Crowd control,” he said. “Watching for signs of friction. But it’s all good. No one is mad at her or the town. It’s me they’re gunning for.”

  “When are you leaving?”

  “First light,” he said. “I get a ride to Birmingham, Alabama, and then a bus to Atlanta, Georgia, and then I fly Delta back to Germany.”

  “Did you know Reed Riley never left the base?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “What do you make of that?”

  “It puzzles me a little.”

  “In what way?”

  “Timing,” he said. “At first I thought it was a decoy move, like politics as usual, but then I got real. They wouldn’t burn a hundred gallons of Jet A on a decoy move, senator’s son or not. So he was still scheduled to leave when the Blackhawk departed Benning, but by the time it arrived at Kelham, the orders had changed. Which means some big piece of decisive information came in literally while the chopper was in the air. Which was two days ago, on Sunday, right after lunch. But they didn’t act on it in any other way until this morning, which is Tuesday.”

  “Why wouldn’t they?”

  “I don’t know. I see no reason for a delay. It feels to me like they were evaluating the new data for a couple of days. Which is usually wise. Except in this instance it makes no sense at all. If the new data was strong enough to make a snap decision to keep Riley on the post Sunday afternoon, why wasn’t it strong enough to open the gates Sunday afternoon? It doesn’t add up. It’s as if they were ready to act privately on Sunday, but they weren’t ready to act publicly until this morning. In which case, what changed? What was the difference between Sunday and today?”

  “Beats me,” I said. Which was disingenuous. Because there was really only one answer to that question. The only material difference between Sunday afternoon and Tuesday morning was that I had been in Carter Crossing on Sunday afternoon, and I had been eight hundred miles away on Tuesday morning.

  And no one had expected me to come back again.

  What that meant, I had no idea.

  Chapter

  73

  The waitress was overworked and slow, so I left Munro to receive the pies alone and I headed back to the dog-leg alley. I came out between Brannan’s bar and the loan office and saw that a few cars had left and the crowd on the open ground had thinned considerably, much more so than the few absent cars could explain, so I figured people were inside at that point, drinking away their last precious minutes of freedom before heading home for the night.

  I found most of them inside Brannan’s bar itself. The place was packed. It was seriously overcrowded. I wasn’t sure if Carter County had a fire marshal, but if it did, the guy would have been having a panic attack. There must have been a hundred Rangers and fifty women in there, back to back, chest to chest, holding their drinks up neck-high to avoid the crush. There was a roar of sound, a loud generalized amalgam of talk and laughter, and behind it all I could hear the cash drawer slamming in and out of the register. The river of dollars was back in full flow.

  I spent five minutes fighting my way to the bar, on a random route left and right through the crowd, checking faces as I went, some up close, some from afar, but I didn’t see Reed Riley. The Brannan brothers were hard at work, dealing beer in bottles, taking money, making change, dumping wet dollar bills into their tip jar, passing and repassing each other in their cramped space with moves like dancers. One of them saw me and did the busy-barman thing with his chin and his eyes and the angle of his head, and then he recognized me from our earlier conversation, and then he remembered I was an MP, and then he leaned in fast like he was prepared to give me a couple of seconds. I couldn’t remember if he was Jonathan or Hunter.

  I asked him, “Have you seen that guy Reed? The guy we were talking about before?”

  He said, “He was in here two hours ago. By now he’ll be wherever the shots are cheapest.”

  “Which is where?”

  “Can’t say for sure. Not here, anyway.”

  Then he ducked away to continue his marathon and I fought my way back to the door.

  I got back to the diner sixteen minutes after I left it and found that the pies had been delivered in my absence and that Munro was halfway through eating his. I picked up my fork and he apologized for not waiting. He said, “I thought you were gone.”

  I said, “I often take a walk between courses. It’s a Mississippi thing, apparently. Always good to blend in with the local population.”

  He said nothing in reply to that. He just looked a little bemused.

  I asked, “What are you doing in Germany?”

  “Generally?”

  “No, specifically. As in, when you get there first thing in the morning the day after tomorrow, what’s on your desk?”

  “Not very much.”

  “Nothing urgent?”

  “Why?”

  “Three women were killed here,” I said. “And the perp is running around free as a bird.”

  “We have no jurisdiction.”

  “Remember that picture in Emmeline McClatchy’s parlor? Martin Luther King? He said all that needs to happen
for evil to prevail is that good men do nothing.”

  “I’m a military cop, not a good man.”

  “He also said the day we see the truth and cease to speak is the day we begin to die.”

  “That stuff is way above my pay grade.”

  “He also said that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “I want you to stay here,” I said. “One more day.”

  Then I finished my pie and went looking for Elizabeth Deveraux again.

  It was eleven thirty-one when I left the diner for the second time. I turned right and walked up to the Sheriff’s Department. It was locked up and dark. No vehicles in the lot. I kept on going and turned the corner onto the Kelham road. There was a stream of traffic coming out from behind Main Street. One car after another. Some were full of women and turning left. Most were full of Rangers and turning right, at least three and sometimes four guys in each car. Bravo Company, going home. Maybe they had a midnight curfew. I glanced down to the acre of beaten dirt and saw every single car except my Buick in motion. Some were just starting up and backing out. Others were maneuvering for position, getting in line, getting ready to join the convoy.

  I kept on walking, on the left-hand shoulder, keeping my distance from the traffic heading for Kelham. A lot of beer had been consumed, and the designated driver concept was not big in 1997. Not in the army, anyway. Dust was coming up off the road, and bright headlight beams were cutting through it, and motors were roaring. Two hundred yards ahead of me cars were thumping over the railroad track and then accelerating away into the darkness.

  Deveraux was right there, sitting in her car on the far side of the crossing. She was facing me. She was parked with her wheels on the shoulder of the road. I walked toward her, with Bravo Company overtaking me all the way, maybe ninety of them in thirty cars in the minute it took me to reach the railroad. By the time I got there the stream was already thinning behind me. The last of the stragglers were passing me by, five and ten and twenty seconds between each one. They were driving fast, chasing after their more punctual friends.