by Diane Capri
“Save it, Agent Otto. I’ve got the guy’s card right here in front of me. L. Mark Newton, Esquire. From Washington D.C. He had a Federal Marshal with him, for God’s sake. You sent them down here to pick up Sylvia. In the middle of the night when I wasn’t here to stop them. You know it. I know it. And I want her back. Whatever it is you want with her, you can get in the damn line behind me.”
“We don’t have her.”
“Save it,” Roscoe said again. “Just get her back here, or I’ll make you sorry. Are we clear?”
“Look, we don’t have her. But we’re on our way. See you before noon.”
The call died.
Gaspar said, “There’s one truly major flaw in that story.”
“Which is?”
“L. Mark Newton died last year,” he said.
"I know. I was at the funeral."
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Halfway to the departure gate Kim felt the boss’s cell phone vibrate in her front trouser pocket. She shifted her bags around to free one hand and tried to fish the phone out without slowing her stride. She couldn’t do it. The phone buzzed on. It felt alive, wriggling against her abdomen. She’d have to stop. But she couldn’t. The jet way door at their gate was already closed. She saw the plane through the plate glass window, still parked outside. But passengers could not be boarded after the doors were closed. Technically, the plane was gone. They’d missed the flight.
“We have to board,” Kim told the gate agent, breathless.
“I’m sorry, that’s not possible,” the gate agent said without looking up. She was working the final documents to get the plane in the air.
Kim felt the cell phone buzz on. She’d never failed to answer the boss. She never planned to. She kept her voice calm. She said, “I need you to open the door.” She put her hand in her pocket. To get the cell phone. But the gate agent misinterpreted. Her left hand darted under the counter. She hit the panic button.
Kim gave up on the cell phone and kept both hands in plain sight. She stood stock still. Where the hell was Gaspar?
He showed up three paces behind two TSA personnel. They had guns drawn. Kim kept her hands in view and said, “FBI,” as calmly as possible. She reached slowly across her body with her left hand and opened her jacket to reveal her badge, clipped to her waistband.
Gaspar came up behind her and flashed his badge, too.
“What’s the problem?” he said.
Kim held her breath while the agents looked them both over. In the corner of her eye she saw the plane begin to move.
“You’re too late,” one of the TSA guys said.
“Let’s pretend we’re not,” Kim replied.
The phone was still buzzing.
Time stood still.
Then the first agent said, “OK, hurry.”
Agent two opened the departure door wide enough to slip through. Kim ran. Gaspar followed. The door sucked shut behind them. The boss’s phone bounced against Kim’s hip as she ran. She turned the final corner and saw the jet way separating from the plane’s open door. She stopped at the widening gap. Cold November air blew into the tunnel. The flight attendant was on the phone in the cabin. To the gate agent, presumably. She called out to the jet way engineer. The jet way stopped moving. The plane stopped moving.
Four feet of empty space.
Maybe five.
The stewardess said, “You can make it. I’ve done it lots of times.”
Kim lifted her computer bag off the travel bag and telescoped its handle down. She grabbed one heavy bag in each hand, swung both, and tossed them over the void. The stewardess set them out of the way. Kim breathed in, breathed out, rocked back and forth like a varsity high jumper, and leapt across the empty black hole into the plane. The stewardess caught her by the arm and then they both moved out of the way to let Gaspar follow.
Gaspar had a problem.
He was right-handed. Therefore he would want to push off from his right leg. But his right leg was the one with the limp. And even if he could push off with his left, would his right leg be sturdy enough to stick his landing?
“Can’t we go back?” Kim asked.
“You don’t want to know what would happen if we did that,” the stewardess said.
So Kim braced her foot at the raised edge of the bulkhead doorframe. She grasped the molded handle on the inside frame with her left hand and leaned her body outside, into the frosty abyss, jutting her right arm toward him as far as she could reach.
“Now, Gaspar,” she called.
“On my way,” he called back.
In one fluid motion, as if they’d choreographed the move and practiced for decades, he backed off ten feet, and transferred his heavier bag to his left hand, and slung his computer bag over his back, and came in at a run. He got his bags swinging for momentum, he got his feet in place, and he pushed off with his right leg.
His right leg didn’t hold.
No elegant arcing trajectory.
The weight of his bags jerked him onward while gravity pulled him down. Kim lunged and grabbed his left forearm in her right hand and she pulled with all her 97 pounds of body weight and hauled him in. His left foot landed inside the bulkhead frame. He sprawled on the galley floor. She thought he might have said, “Thanks,” with something very vulnerable in his voice. Something she didn’t want to be there. Not now. Not ever. For her sake, as well as his.
But whatever, they were on the plane.
Not that being on another plane was a good thing, Kim felt.
Gaspar struggled to his feet, breathing hard, and he said, “Thanks,” again.
Kim said, “From now on, we’ll answer to Karl and Helen.”
“What?”
“You know the Flying Wallendas are Germans, right?”
She got the grin she’d hoped for. He said, “Yeah, Gertrude. I know.”
She felt better, as if equilibrium had been restored. She watched the flight attendant secure the hatch. If the hatch failed, the plane would crash. She couldn’t move until the hatch was securely closed.
Her cell phone was still ringing.
She watched the attendant lock the door lever and test it. Then she moved.
Seat 1A was open.
She hated 1A.
Too much open space around 1A.
From 1A, she could see the galley and the door to the flight deck. She could hear the flight attendants talking among themselves or on the phone with the cockpit crew.
In 1A she’d be the first to know when something went wrong.
No.
She glanced back. “You take 1A,” she told Gaspar, before she hurried back to 3D.
She shoved her computer bag under the seat in front of her and left her larger bag in the aisle for the attendant to heave into the overhead. She belted herself in as tightly as possible and grabbed both armrests and closed her eyes and prayed.
The cell phone had stopped ringing.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Atlanta, Georgia
November 2
7:45 a.m.
Gaspar picked a full sized sedan at the rental counter in Atlanta. A black Crown Vic. The kind of car Kim hated because it was too big, and too low to the ground. She’d have to pull the seat all the way up to reach the pedals. Even then, she couldn’t see the road beyond the long front hood. Not that she needed to worry. Gaspar wouldn’t let her drive anyway.
“Much better,” he said. “This is the kind of car G-men ought to drive, Tila Tequila.”
“Absolutely. Unless the airbag deploys and suffocates me, the most serious problem is a seatbelt that scrapes my neck and cuts my head off.”
He looked over at her scowling face and laughed. “Should I go back for a booster seat?”
She bent at the waist and scooted forward to reach her travel bag in the foot-well, and rooted around to find what she needed.
“Seriously?” Gaspar asked. “Do you want me to get a different vehicle? I’m glad to do it, but now’s the time to say so.”
/> “Not necessary.” She pulled the seatbelt slack, and anchored the small alligator clamp from her bag onto the belt webbing immediately below the retractor. She settled into the seat and checked her adjustments. The shoulder harness now snugged across her body instead of her throat. She left the clamp’s wings up to be sure it would fly off in a collision and allow the retractor to do its job.
“German engineering at its finest,” he said.
“Precisely,” she said. She tested the harness again, flattened her hand, chopped her forearm from the elbow straight ahead, and said, “Engage.”
They stopped at a drive-through for coffee and greasy egg wraps, and then they joined the interstate traffic heading south. Sixty-six miles to the Margrave exit, according to the first road sign Kim noticed. The coffee was bad and the food was worse, but they were both hungry.
Gaspar chewed his eggs a while and flushed them down with the coffee before he asked, “Tell me again what Roscoe said about Sylvia Black.”
“She said a U.S. Marshall and a lawyer showed up at the jail around midnight with a federal court order. The desk guy released Sylvia into their custody. Now, they can’t find Sylvia, the lawyer’s office doesn’t answer the phone, and the Marshall’s office said no order ever existed.”
“So we got a dead lawyer, a phony Marshall, and a fake order, right?”
“Exactly.”
“I know these small town departments don’t always put the brightest bulb on the desk at night, but Brent seemed a lot savvier than that to me. He must have believed the two strangers, right? So we must be missing something.”
“I’m not sure Brent was on duty. Remember he’d worked the night before and then straight through Harry Black’s shift, too. Once Brent took Sylvia back to the station and finished her intake, Roscoe might have sent him home.”
“What kind of court order was it?”
“Roscoe was a little irrational during the phone call, remember,” she said.
Gaspar shook his head, as if to clear out the cobwebs. “Doesn’t make any sense. The desk guy’s maybe new on the job, and yet he didn’t call Roscoe first? Before letting a couple of strangers take his one and only inmate?”
Early morning sunlight bathed the countryside in pink and blue. Fall harvests were finished. Red dirt fields were wet mud saturated by yesterday’s rainstorm. “I don’t get it, either. We’ll have an opportunity to ask Roscoe shortly, I’m sure.”
They came up behind a grandpa poking along in an ancient wood-paneled truck loaded heavy with hogs. He was having trouble holding the truck in his lane. Maybe the truck was overloaded or maybe Gramps was just a bad driver. Regardless, his cargo’s stench was unavoidable.
Kim pinched her nostrils between thumb and forefinger.
Gaspar said, “No kidding,” and pulled out to pass on the left.
Gramps didn’t want to be passed, though. When Gaspar got alongside him, Gramps sped up and kept pace for half a mile or so. At the higher speed the truck’s random weaving was forcing Gaspar toward the median.
“Oh, for cripe sakes, Gramps, slow down,” Gaspar said. “You’re going to splatter that bacon all over the asphalt.”
“He can’t hear you, you know,” Kim said.
“Sorry, bad habit. Lot of crazy drivers in Miami. Griping at them is better than shooting at them.”
“Sometimes,” Kim said.
“Crazy old fool,” Gaspar said, but he returned the Crown Vic to a more reasonable cruising speed once Gramps was too far behind to catch up again. They ran along in the fast lane for a mile or so. Kim saw muddy fields and billboards advertising outlet malls, carpet discounts, and pecans farther down the road. Every now and then, an abandoned vehicle on the shoulder or in the median. Typical Interstate. Nothing more or less. Traffic cams mounted high enough to catch traffic scenes made her feel more secure, as always.
Gaspar asked, “Should we make some calls? On the court order? Easy enough to chase that down before we get to Margrave.”
“Not necessary,” Kim said. “Roscoe will have done all that by the time we get there. But she won’t find anything.”
“Because?”
“Because there’s nothing to find. There was no order. No U.S. Marshall would show up with a private lawyer in tow, or the other way around. If any part of that story was legitimate, they would have coordinated with Roscoe, at least.”
“The whole thing sounds like government work, doesn’t it? There are national security courts that issue secret orders. Inmates do get picked up from local jails these days. Crime doesn’t happen only during business hours, either.”
Kim sighed. The sun had come out and it was hurting her eyes. She didn’t know where she’d put her sunglasses. “We’re talking about Sylvia Black here. Not a terrorist or a spy.”
“Good point. But whoever she is, Sylvia did not belong in Harry Black’s house. That’s for sure.”
“She didn’t belong anywhere in Margrave. But what reason would a national security court have to move Sylvia to federal custody? She’d have to be a fugitive or in need of protection.” Kim closed her eyes against the sun’s glare.
“Witness protection?”
“Unlikely. Sylvia didn’t strike me as valuable enough to be living under witness protection. Even if she had been, a single U.S. Marshall wouldn’t show up with a private lawyer in the middle of the night and grab her after she murdered her husband.”
Traffic was backing up ahead. Gaspar lifted his foot off the accelerator and the big sedan slowed to a crawl. Kim said, “But whatever, Sylvia Black is not our case and not our problem. We’re building the Reacher file, remember?”
He gave her a level stare. “Who knew you Germans were so gullible?”
He braked to a full stop. A worker with a flag was holding traffic in the fast lane to let four trucks enter the highway. Gaspar tried to move over into the right lane because traffic was still moving there, albeit slowly. Kim checked her side mirror and saw Gramps coming up in his panel truck on the right. Gramps waved and grinned as he and his pigs passed them by. She noticed he had a dog in the passenger seat, too. Some kind of taupe colored hound with floppy ears and expressive eyes. Huge. Probably weighed as much as Kim did.
She said, “Slow and steady wins the race, I guess.”
Gaspar laughed. Gramps continued traveling below the speed limit down the road in the slow lane, while the big Crown Vic waited for the heavy trucks to get out of the way.
“You should call Roscoe and tell her we’ve been delayed,” Gaspar said.
Kim shook her head. “And give her another chance to bitch me out? No thanks. I’ll wait. Let her get it out of her system all at once.”
“Are you sure you don’t have kids? That’s the kind of logic I get from my teenagers.”
“Forget Roscoe,” she said.
"Good plan." His tone was grim.
“What did you find out about Joe Reacher’s final case?”
He said, “A lot. None of it good."
"How so?"
"It must have been about money, obviously. And lots of it, judging by the mayhem. If we count from the day Joe Reacher was killed, until six government agencies swarmed into Margrave to sort it all out, it was twelve days. In those twelve days, at least twelve people died, maybe more.”
Kim stared at him. “Twelve people?”
“Or more. Including Joe Reacher and Police Chief Morrison. And there were two big explosions, followed by raging fires. Several buildings were destroyed, including the firehouse, the police station, and those old warehouses.”
“No wonder Finlay said we didn’t have time to get the details last night.”
Gaspar gave her the raised eyebrow again. “If you say so. Still think the boss didn’t know about this?”
She didn’t answer his question because the answer was obvious. “I saw those burned warehouses on the way in yesterday. Big area to be burned out like that. But it does explain why there are no records of Jack Reacher’s arrest. They’
d have been in the burned police station, right?”
Gaspar said, “That’s what Roscoe claimed.”
“You don’t believe her?”
Gaspar took a deep breath, as if to fortify himself before he spoke. “If Roscoe and Finlay didn’t know about a crime spree like that at the time it happened, then they’re idiots.”
“Which they’re not.”
“So they knew what was happening when everything went down.” He looked at her to see if she was following his logic. “Agreed?”
Kim said, “You think that’s what this is about? Dirty cops?”
“It’s looking that way,” he said. "I don't trust her. She's in this up to her neck. That's one of the reasons she's acting so odd. Not like any cop I've ever known, or you either, I'm betting. I'm telling her nothing."
Kim considered the facts. Roscoe's behavior was off, just as Gaspar said. But dirty cops didn’t feel like the right answer, exactly. “Which makes me think that’s not why we’re here.”
“Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar,” he said.
They followed the four heavy trucks for six miles until the work area ended. Gaspar dumped his lead foot on the accelerator. Kim looked at her watch. They had lost thirty minutes. Roscoe would be thirty minutes more annoyed. Kim wasn't sure she cared.
Gaspar said, “There are only two possible answers here. Either Roscoe and Finlay participated in those killings or they covered up for the killer, who had to be Jack Reacher.”
“I know,” Kim said, too quietly.
“You know why it had to be Reacher, right?” Gaspar asked, when she'd had enough time to work it through.
“Yes.”
“Are you gonna say it out loud?”
“No.”
“Me, neither,” Gaspar said.
But the logic was as clear as spring water. The boss knew all. He knew about Roscoe and Finlay, about the murders, the explosions, the fires, about Jack and Joe Reacher. He knew everything. He’d known yesterday when he sent them to Margrave, and he’d known for years. And let it slide. Maybe even helped with the cover-up. Why would he do that? And why change course now? And why lead them here but not tell them anything? Did he have money to burn in his covert budget like that? What was he up to?
