by Jude Hardin
Diana wondered how anyone ever got to the other side of the tracks. Surely they didn’t just sit around and wait for the freight to be loaded, or unloaded, or whatever happened to be causing the delay.
She walked a little closer to the long cylindrical red and white anomaly. She looked to her right, saw a vehicle overpass and a pedestrian catwalk about half a mile north.
And then she felt a raindrop on the back of her neck.
No point in walking all the way over to the catwalk and risk getting soaked, she thought. Not when there was an obvious and easy and somewhat safe way to avoid it. She would just climb between the red and white tanker car and the boxcar behind it. Somewhat safe because it was possible that the train would start moving the instant she stepped up onto the coupling.
Possible, but not likely.
The train had been in the same spot for at least forty-five minutes. There was no indication that it had moved, not even an inch. So the possibility that it would shift at just the right instant to pose a threat was infinitesimal enough to be practically nonexistent. Like winning the lottery and being struck by lightning at exactly the same moment. It could happen, but it probably never would.
Diana didn’t hesitate. She decided to go at it like she went at everything else, aggressively and with a sense of purpose. She walked up to the tracks and stepped onto the coupling and pulled herself over in one swift motion.
Now she was on the other side of the train.
Now she was on the west side of Cordial.
And it wasn’t a pretty sight.
3
The west side of Cordial was nothing like the east side. Gone were the pretty bungalows and the tree-lined streets and the shiny bicycles, replaced by crumbling strips of blacktop and boarded windows and plumes of gray smoke rising in the distance.
The grocery store on the corner was nothing more than a dismal little shack, wood frame with a rusted steel roof and a sagging porch. Two grimy gasoline pumps fronted the facade, probably from a decade before Diana was born. She walked toward the store, heard a hissing sound and a high squeal, looked back expecting to see the wheels inching along the tracks as the train started north.
But the wheels still weren’t turning, and the train still wasn’t going anywhere.
The train hadn’t moved, but it was suddenly clear why the big long tanker car looked the way it did. There was an advertisement painted on the side Diana was looking at now. Wakeman’s Old Fashioned Peppermint Tea. Which explained the glossy red and white stripes on the other side.
Diana had never heard of the product, but she figured it must be popular somewhere if an entire tanker had been filled with it. She continued toward the grocery, pulling her jacket up over her head, walking a little faster because the rain had started falling a little harder. By the time she got to the pumps, puddles had started to form in the low spots along the store’s gravel driveway. Thunder rumbled in the distance. Diana hurried, skidding up onto the covered porch just a few seconds before the rain started coming down in sheets.
There were two rocking chairs on the porch and a couple of old tires and a big galvanized steel washtub. Someone had tacked some antique metal signs onto the board-and-batten siding—long forgotten brands of cigarettes and candies and medicines. Diana ran her finger across one of the bullet holes in an advertisement for canned gravy.
She opened the door and walked inside the store. The place smelled like someone had been cooking some kind of meat. There were two checkout lanes to the right of the entrance, both unattended.
“Hello,” Diana said.
Nobody answered.
Diana unzipped the pocket on the right side of her jacket, slid her hand in and wrapped her fingers around the grips of her nine millimeter semi-automatic pistol. She clicked the safety off and walked around and checked all the aisles, but she didn’t see anyone.
The glass doors of a walk-in cooler lined the back wall of the store, and Diana figured the clerk might be on the other side of the display shelves stocking beverages. She walked back there, opened one of the doors, said hello again.
“Be right with you,” a male voice said.
“Okay. Thanks.”
Diana clicked the safety back on, pulled her hand out and zipped the pocket back up. She decided to grab a cold bottle of spring water while she was back there, and then she noticed that one of the shelves had been loaded with Wakeman’s Old Fashioned Peppermint Tea, and she decided to grab a cold bottle of that instead. She opened the glass door and pulled one out, walked to the front of the store and stood at the counter and waited. A minute or so later, the man who’d been working in the cooler came hurrying up the cereal aisle. He stepped around to the other side of the checkout lane and jammed a key into the cash register. He wore a striped shirt and a stained apron and a black ball cap that looked brand new. Tall and thin, mid-forties, could have used a shave.
“Will that be all?” he said.
“Do you have any umbrellas?”
So much for the world record, Diana thought. She hadn’t planned on having to walk around so much.
“I don’t have any umbrellas,” the man said. “But I have some disposable rain ponchos. They’re over there by the motor oil and stuff.”
Diana walked over to the rack of automotive supplies, saw the ponchos stacked up behind the wiper blades. She picked one up and unbuttoned the flap on the clear plastic envelope it was packaged in. The poncho was bright orange and extremely low in quality, but Diana supposed it would keep her dry down Maple Street and back. She pulled it out of the package and unfolded it and slipped it over her head, and then she carried the empty plastic envelope to the register.
“Got any paperclips?” she said.
The man leaned against the counter and sighed.
“Aisle Four,” he said.
“I don’t need a whole box. I just need two.”
“Two paperclips.”
“Right.”
The man squatted down behind the counter and started ferreting through a drawer or a bin or something, making a lot of noise as he did so, obviously annoyed by Diana’s request.
“I could only find one,” he said, standing and tossing the paperclip onto the counter.
“That’s fine. I’ll take that and the poncho and the drink.”
The man seemed puzzled about something.
“Did you walk here?” he said, gesturing toward the cheap sheet of plastic draped over Diana’s upper body.
“I walked to the diner from the police station,” Diana said. “I didn’t know I was going to be crossing the tracks. I should have just brought my car.”
“None of my business, of course, but this isn’t exactly a great neighborhood for a woman to be—”
“I can take care of myself,” Diana said.
“I’m sure you can.”
The man rang up the items. He threw in the paperclip for free. Diana paid and thanked him and exited the store. Thinking the rain might let up in a few minutes, she sat in one of the rocking chairs and twisted the cap off her bottle of Wakeman’s Old Fashioned Peppermint Tea. Not bad, she thought. She wondered why she had never heard of it before. She thought that maybe it was something new from one of the big soft drink companies, but when she examined the label, she saw that the production and distribution facilities were right there in Cordial.
WakemanBev, Inc.
She read the ingredients and took another sip and screwed the cap back on. The rain was still steady, but it wasn’t coming down quite as hard as it had been earlier. Diana got up from the chair and walked across the parking lot and headed down Maple Street, staying on the sidewalk, noticing the weeds in the yards and the rotting wood and the chipping paint and the rusted car parts.
Rae Derlin’s house was actually one of the nicer ones on the block. The grass needed to be mowed, but there were some flowers planted around the tree out front, and it probably hadn’t been more than a year since someone had slapped a fresh coat of paint on the wood sidin
g. Diana ducked under the yellow CRIME SCENE DO NOT CROSS tape, climbed the stairs to the porch and stepped up to the front door. She set her drink down, straightened out the paperclip and started bending the wire back and forth until it broke into two pieces, and then she proceeded to pick the lock.
It took her less than a minute to get inside the house.
In the living room there was a couch and a recliner and a set of bookshelves and a coffee table. Television mounted over the mantle, framed prints of foreign film posters on the walls. It was a nice tidy place except for the blood splatters. Diana started looking around. She looked in the living room and in the kitchen and in the bedrooms, opening drawers and flipping through books and lifting mattresses, but as it turned out the only item of true interest was in the bathroom, right there on top of the vanity, right there in plain sight.
It was a folding toothbrush.
4
Chief Kearning took a sip from his coffee mug.
“You think Jack Reacher is the only person who ever owned a folding toothbrush?” he said.
“Of course not,” Diana said. “But the guy I talked to at the diner—”
“What was his name?”
“Timothy Granniff. He said that the victim had a driver’s license with the name Jack Reacher on it.”
“Did he actually see the license?”
“That’s the impression I got.”
“I’ll talk to him,” Kearning said. “But even if that’s true, even if the victim had taken on Reacher’s identity for some reason, it doesn’t mean that Ms. Derlin didn’t kill him. It just means that maybe she didn’t know his real name. Then again, maybe she did know his real name. Maybe they were running some kind of scam together.”
Or maybe Rae Derlin really was innocent, Diana thought.
“Can I talk to her now?” she said.
“I’ll get the corrections officer to bring her back up to the interview room. You can go on in there and wait if you want to. It’s right down the hall. Third door to your right.”
“Great. Also, I know this is going to sound strange, but there was a guy at the diner who kept staring at me.”
“Staring at you?”
“Yeah. Right after I told the waitress I was with SIU. Late twenties or early thirties, dark hair, drives a white pickup truck.”
Diana told Chief Kearning the tag number. He wrote it down.
“I think I know who you’re talking about,” he said. “Ryan Casibler. Works over at Wakeman’s. Which doesn’t exactly put him in an elite group around here, by the way. Half the town works over there. What did he say?”
“He didn’t say anything. He just stared at me for a while, and then he left the restaurant.”
“I guess I could put him on my list of people to talk to.”
“I think you should. There was something really creepy about him.”
Diana walked down to the interview room and sat at the table. Her shoes and socks were wet from walking in the rain. She was wondering if she might have time to go outside and grab her suitcase out of the car when her cell phone started vibrating. She pulled it out of her pocket and unlocked the display.
It was The Director.
“Got anything?” he said.
“It wasn’t Jack Reacher. That’s all I know for sure right now.”
“So you’re on your way back to the airport?”
“No. I’m still in Cordial.”
“Why?”
“I think the victim was impersonating Reacher. The clothes he was wearing looked like they might have come from a sporting goods outlet, and there was a folding toothbrush in the bathroom where he’d been staying. Also, I talked to a guy a while ago who said the victim had been carrying a driver’s license with the name Jack Reacher on it, although that hasn’t been confirmed yet.”
“Reacher doesn’t even have a driver’s license,” The Director said.
“You and I know that, but most people wouldn’t. Anyway, I was thinking it might be useful to find out why this imposter came to such a grisly end. It’s possible that we’re not the only ones monitoring Reacher’s actions. If another agency is watching him, our paths will probably cross at some point. Better to know who they are beforehand.”
“You think another agency might have put a hit out on Reacher?”
“It’s possible. If so, they obviously killed the wrong man.”
“But they might not know that.”
“Right.”
“What about the suspect?”
“I’m in an interview room waiting to talk to her. She should be here shortly.”
“You know what concerns me most about all this?” The Director said.
“That we’ve lost track of the real Jack Reacher.”
“Yeah. Let me know how the interview goes.”
The Director clicked off.
The door opened and a uniformed corrections officer escorted the suspect into the room. Rae Derlin’s shoulder-length blond hair contrasted sharply against the bright orange coveralls she was wearing, and the bruises under her eyes contrasted sharply against the pale skin on her face. She was tall. Six feet, Diana guessed, and maybe about a hundred and seventy pounds. Certainly capable of handling the type of weapon that was used in the homicide.
The chains on her shackles rattled as the officer guided her to the chair across from Diana and told her to sit down.
The officer’s nametag said Goffner.
“I’ll be right outside the door if you need me,” he said.
“Thanks,” Diana said. “I think we’ll be okay.”
Goffner nodded, closed the door on his way out.
“Who are you?” Rae said.
Diana reached into her pocket and pulled out a folding leather case about the size of a man’s wallet. She opened it and set it on the table, displaying her SIU badge and military ID card.
“I’m an investigator with the United States Army,” she said. “I just wanted to ask you a few—”
“I’m not talking to anyone without my lawyer being present.”
Espionage 101, Lesson Three: it is almost always beneficial for an operative to conduct interviews and interrogations with a sense of urgency.
“We might be able to arrange for your lawyer to come back,” Diana said. “But it would take some time, and I don’t have much. I have a plane to catch.”
“That’s your problem.”
“Actually, it’s your problem, because you’ve been charged with first-degree murder, and from the evidence I’ve seen, there isn’t a lawyer on the planet who could convince a jury that you’re innocent. So my advice is to drop the attitude and take any kind of help you can get. But you don’t have to take my advice. Just tell me to leave right now and you’ll never see me again.”
There was a long pause. Rae Derlin was thinking it over.
“What makes you think you can help me?” she said.
“The man who was staying at your house was not Jack Reacher,” Diana said.
“What do you mean?”
“He was an imposter. The army wants to know his true identity. We want to know who went after him, and why.”
“I didn’t kill him,” Rae said.
“Convince me. Tell me exactly what happened the night of the murder.”
Another long pause.
“I already told the police everything I know,” Rae said.
“I understand that, but I want you to tell me now.”
“First of all, the guy might have been an imposter, like you say, but his first name really was Jack.”
“How do you know?”
“The letters were tattooed on the fingers of his right hand. J-A-C-K. Big black letters. You could see them real good when he made a fist. Which he did pretty often. So maybe his last name wasn’t Reacher, but his first name was definitely Jack.”
“Okay. That’s a start.”
“Of course the tattoo’s gone now that his hand’s gone,” Rae said. “Anyway, we were sitting on the couch
playing a game of chess when two guys came in through the front door.”
“Chess?”
“One of the ladies I work with taught me how to play a while back. I’m not very good. Anyway, these two guys just walked right into my house, casual as you please. They were wearing ski masks, so I couldn’t tell you what they looked like. Everything they had on was black. Pants, shirt, shoes, everything. They had pistols and they made us get down on the floor, and then one of them went to the closet there in the living room and grabbed my twelve-gauge pump. He went straight to it, like he knew where it was, so I think he’d been in my house before. He racked a shell into the chamber and shot Jack in the back. The other guy pulled me up off the floor and shoved me into the kitchen and started punching me in the face. He knocked me out, and I woke up on the couch with the shotgun in my lap and blue lights flashing through the curtains.”
“So the police were already there when you woke up?” Diana said.
“Yeah. I staggered outside and they started shouting at me, telling me to get down on the ground and all that. They handcuffed me and threw me into the back of a car, and here I am.”
“Those bruises on your face,” Diana said. “They’re from the guy in the mask?”
“Of course. Who else would they be from?”
“Your friend Jack could have hit you. Maybe that’s why you killed him. Or you could have hit yourself afterward.”
“I thought you wanted to help me,” Rae said.
“I’m just trying to think like a prosecutor. There’s no evidence that anyone came into your house that night. No signs of forced entry, no fingerprints other than yours and the victim’s.”
“Those guys weren’t stupid. They had gloves on. And they must have had a key. Like I said, they just walked on in.”
They could have had a key, Diana thought, or they could have had a couple of paperclips. The lock on Rae’s front door hadn’t been particularly hard to pick. Even an amateur could have gotten in without much of a problem. Maybe not with Rae and Jack right there in the living room, though. Rae and Jack probably would have heard the metallic lock parts rattling around, and at least one them probably would have gotten up to investigate. And when you look through your peephole and see two guys in ski masks, you probably don’t just stand there and wait for them to finish what they’re doing. You probably run to the closet and grab your shotgun.
