James Penney's New Identity/Guy Walks Into a Bar

by Lee Child

  “What did you do?” he asked.

  “Do?” Penney repeated.

  “You’re running,” Reacher said. “Heading out of town, walking in the rain, head down, no bag, don’t know what your name is. I’ve seen a lot of people running, and you’re one of them.”

  “You going to turn me in?”

  “I’m a military cop,” Reacher said. “You done anything to hurt the Army?”

  “The Army?” Penney said. “No, I was a good soldier.”

  “So why would I turn you in?”

  Penney looked blank.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “What did you do to the civilians?” Reacher asked.

  “You’re going to turn me in,” Penney said, helplessly.

  Reacher shrugged at the wheel.

  “Well, that depends,” he said. “What did you do?”

  Penney said nothing. Reacher turned his head and looked straight at him. A powerful silent stare, hypnotic intensity in his eyes, held for a hundred yards of road.

  “What did you do?” he asked again.

  Penney couldn’t look away. He took a breath.

  “I burned my house,” he said. “Near Mojave. I worked seventeen years and got canned yesterday and I got all upset because they were going to take my car away so I burned my house. They’re calling it deliberate arson.”

  “Near Mojave?” Reacher said. “They would. They don’t like fires down there.”

  Penney nodded. “I should have thought harder. But I was real mad. Seventeen years, and suddenly I’m shit on their shoe. And my car got stolen anyway, first night I’m away.”

  “There are roadblocks all around here,” Reacher said. “I came through one south of the city.”

  “You think they’re for me?” Penney asked.

  “Could be,” Reacher said. “They don’t like fires down there.”

  “You going to turn me in?”

  Reacher looked at him again, hard and silent.

  “Is that all you did?”

  Penney nodded. “Yes, sir, that’s all I did.”

  There was silence for a beat. Just the sound of the wet pavement under the tires.

  “Well, I don’t have a problem with it,” Reacher said. “A guy does a jungle tour, works seventeen years and gets canned, I guess he’s entitled to get a little mad.”

  “So what should I do?”

  “You got attachments?”

  “Divorced, no kids.”

  “So start over, someplace else.”

  “They’ll find me,” Penney said.

  “You’re already thinking about changing your name,” Reacher said.

  Penney nodded.

  “I junked all my ID,” he said. “Buried it in the woods.”

  “So build a new identity. Get new paper. That’s all anybody cares about. Pieces of paper.”

  “Like how?”

  Reacher was quiet another beat, thinking hard.

  “Easy enough,” he said. “Classic way is find some cemetery, find a kid who died as a child, get a copy of the birth certificate, start from there. Get a social security number, a passport, credit cards, and you’re a new person.”

  Penney shrugged. “I can’t do all that. Too difficult. And I don’t have time. According to you, there’s a roadblock up ahead. How am I going to do all of that stuff before we get there?”

  “There are other ways,” Reacher said.

  “Forgeries?”

  Reacher shook his head. “No good. Sooner or later, forgeries don’t work.”

  “So how?”

  “Find some guy who’s already created false ID for himself, and take it away from him.”

  Penney shook his head. “You’re crazy. How am I going to do that?”

  “Maybe you don’t need to do that. Maybe I already did it for you.”

  “You got false ID?”

  “Not me,” Reacher said. “Guy I was looking for.”

  “What guy?”

  Reacher drove one-handed and pulled a sheaf of official paper from his inside jacket pocket.

  “Arrest warrant,” he said. “Army liaison officer at a weapons plant outside of Fresno, looks to be peddling blueprints. Turns out to have three separate sets of bogus ID, all perfect, all completely backed up with everything from elementary school records onward. Which makes it likely they’re Soviet, which means they can’t be beat. I’m on my way back from talking to him right now. He was running, too, already on his second set of papers. I took them. They’re clean. They’re in the trunk of this car, in a wallet, in a jacket.”

  Traffic was slowing ahead. There was red glare visible through the streaming windshield. Flashing blue lights. Yellow flashlight beams waving, side to side.

  “There’s the roadblock,” Reacher said.

  “So can I use this guy’s ID?” Penney asked urgently.

  “Sure you can,” Reacher said. “Hop out and get it. Bring the wallet from the jacket.”

  He slowed and stopped on the shoulder. Penney got out. Ducked away to the back of the car and lifted the trunk lid. Came back a long moment later, white in the face.

  “Got it?” Reacher asked.

  Penney nodded silently. Held up the wallet.

  “It’s all in there,” Reacher said. “I checked. Everything anybody needs.”

  Penney nodded again.

  “So put it in your pocket,” Reacher said.

  Penney slipped the wallet into his inside jacket pocket. Reacher’s right hand came up. There was a gun in it. And a pair of handcuffs in his left.

  “Now sit still,” he said, quietly.

  He leaned over and snapped the cuffs on Penney’s wrists, one-handed. Put the car back into drive and crawled forward.

  “What’s this for?” Penney asked.

  “Quiet,” Reacher said.

  They were two cars away from the checkpoint. Three highway patrolmen in rain capes were directing traffic into a corral formed by parked cruisers. Their light bars were flashing bright in the shiny dark.

  “What?” Penney said again.

  Reacher said nothing. Just stopped where the cop told him and wound his window down. The night air blew in, cold and wet. The cop bent down. Reacher handed him his military ID. The cop played his flashlight over it and handed it back.

  “Who’s your passenger?” he asked.

  “My prisoner,” Reacher said. He handed over the arrest warrant.

  “He got ID?” the cop asked.

  Reacher leaned over and slipped the wallet out from inside Penney’s jacket, two-fingered like a pickpocket. Flipped it open and passed it through the window. A second cop stood in Reacher’s headlight beams and copied the plate number onto a clipboard. Stepped around the hood and joined the first guy.

  “Captain Reacher of the military police,” the first cop said.

  The second cop wrote it down.

  “With a prisoner name of Edward Hendricks,” the first cop said.

  The second cop wrote it down.

  “Thank you, sir,” the first cop said. “You drive safe, now.”

  Reacher eased out from between the cruisers. Accelerated away into the rain. A mile later, he stopped again on the shoulder. Leaned over and unlocked Penney’s handcuffs. Put them back in his pocket. Penney rubbed his wrists.

  “I thought you were going to turn me in,” he said.

  Reacher shook his head. “Looked better for me that way. I’ve got an arrest warrant, I want a prisoner in the car for everybody to see, right?”

  Penney nodded.

  “I guess,” he said, quietly.

  Reacher handed the wallet back.

  “Keep it,” he said.

  “Really?”

  “Edward Hendricks,” Reacher said. “That’s who you are now, rest of your life. It’s clean ID, and it’ll work. Think of it like a veteran’s benefit. One soldier to another, OK?”

  Edward Hendricks looked at him and nodded and opened his door. Got out into the rain and turned up the collar o
f his leather jacket and started walking north. Reacher watched him until he was out of sight and then pulled away and took the next turn west. Turned north past a town called Eureka and stopped again where the road was lonely and ran close to the ocean. There was a wide gravel shoulder and a low barrier and a steep cliff with the Pacific high tide boiling and foaming fifty feet below it.

  He got out of the car and opened the trunk and grasped the lapels of the jacket he had told his passenger about. Took a deep breath and heaved. The corpse was heavy. He wrestled it up out of the trunk and jacked it onto his shoulder and staggered with it to the barrier. Bent his knees and dropped it over the edge. The rocky cliff caught it and it spun and the arms and the legs flailed limply. Then it hit the surf with a faint splash and it was gone.

  Guy Walks Into a Bar

  SHE WAS ABOUT nineteen. No older. Maybe younger. An insurance company would have given her sixty more years to live. I figured a more accurate projection was thirty-six hours, or thirty-six minutes if things went wrong from the get-go.

  She was blond and blue-eyed, but not American. American girls have a glow, a smoothness, from many generations of plenty. This girl was different. Her ancestors had known hardship and fear. That inheritance was in her face and her body and her movements. Her eyes were wary. Her body was lean. Not the kind of lean you get from a diet, but the Darwinian kind of lean you get when your grandparents had no food, and either starved or didn’t. Her movements were fragile and tense, a little alert, a little nervous, even though on the face of it she was having as good a time as a girl could get.

  She was in a New York bar, drinking beer, listening to a band, and she was in love with the guitar player. That was clear. The part of her gaze that wasn’t wary was filled with adoration, and it was all aimed in his direction. She was probably Russian. She was rich. She was alone at a table near the stage and she had a pile of ATM-fresh twenties in front of her and she was paying for each new bottle with one of them and she wasn’t asking for change. The waitresses loved her. There was a guy further back in the room, wedged on an upholstered bench, staring at her. Her bodyguard, presumably. He was a tall wide man with a shaved head and a black T-shirt under a black suit. He was a part of the reason she was drinking beer in a city bar at the age of nineteen or less. It wasn’t the kind of glossy place that had a policy about underage rich girls, either for or against. It was a scruffy dive on Bleecker Street, staffed by skinny kids trying to make tuition money, and I guessed they had looked at her and her minder and taken a snap decision against trouble and in favor of tips.

  I watched her for a minute, and then I looked away. My name is Jack Reacher, and once I was a military cop, with heavy emphasis on the past tense. I have been out nearly as long as I was in. But old habits die hard. I had stepped into the bar the same way I always step anywhere, which is carefully. One thirty in the morning. I had ridden the A train to West 4th and walked south on Sixth Avenue and made the left on Bleecker and checked the sidewalks. I wanted music, but not the kind that drives large numbers of patrons outside to smoke. The smallest knot of people was next to a place with half a flight of stairs leading up to its door. There was a shiny black Mercedes sedan parked on the curb, with a driver behind the wheel. The music coming out of the place was filtered and dulled by the walls but I could hear an agile bass line and some snappy drumming. So I walked up the stairs and paid a five-dollar cover and shouldered my way inside.

  Two exits. One the door I had just come through, the other indicated at the end of a long dark restroom corridor way in back. The room was narrow and about ninety feet deep. A bar on the left at the front, then some upholstered horseshoe benches, then a cluster of freestanding tables on what on other nights might have been a dancefloor. Then the stage, with the band on it.

  The band looked like it had been put together by accident after a misfiling incident at a talent agency. The bass player was a stout old black guy in a suit with a vest. He was plucking away at an upright bass fiddle. The drummer could have been his uncle. He was a big old guy sprawled comfortably behind a small simple kit. The singer was also a harmonica player and was older than the bass player and younger than the drummer and bigger than either one. Maybe sixty, built for comfort, not for speed.

  The guitarist was completely different. He was young and white and small. Maybe twenty, maybe five feet six, maybe a hundred and thirty pounds. He had a fancy blue guitar wired to a crisp new amplifier and together the instrument and the electronics made sharp sounds full of space and echoes. The amp must have been turned up to eleven. The sound was incredibly loud. It was like the air in the room was locked solid. It had no more capacity for volume.

  But the music was good. The three black guys were old pros, and the white kid knew all the notes, and when and how and in what order to play them. He was wearing a red T-shirt and black pants and white tennis shoes. He had a very serious expression on his face. He looked foreign. Maybe Russian too.

  I spent the first half of the first song checking the room, counting people, scanning faces, parsing body language. Old habits die hard. There were two guys across a table with their hands underneath it. One selling, one buying, obviously, the deal done by feel and confirmed with furtive glances. The bar staff was scamming the owner by selling store-bought beer out of an ice chest. Two out of three domestic bottles were legit, from the refrigerator cabinets, and then the third came from their own cooler. I got one of them. A wet label and a big margin. I carried the bottle to a corner seat and sat down with my back to the wall. It was at that point I saw the girl alone at her table, and her bodyguard on his bench. I guessed the Mercedes outside was theirs. I guessed daddy was a B-grade oligarch, millions but not billions, indulging his daughter with four years at NYU and an ATM card that never stopped working.

  Just two people out of eighty in the room. No big deal.

  Until I saw two other guys.

  They were a pair. Tall young white men, cheap tight leather jackets, heads shaved by blunt razors that had left nicks and scabs. More Russians, probably. Operators, no question. Connected, no doubt. Probably not the best the world has ever seen, but probably not the worst, either. They were sitting far apart from one another but their twin gazes were triangulated on the girl alone at the table. They were tense, determined, to some degree nervous. I recognized the signs. Many times I had felt the same way myself. They were about to go into action. So two B-grade oligarchs had a beef, and one was protecting his kid with drivers and bodyguards, and the other was sending guys around the world to snatch her. Then would come ransom, and extortion, and demands, and fortunes would change hands, or uranium leases, or oil rights, or coal or gas.

  Business, Moscow style.

  But not usually successful business. Kidnaps have a thousand different dynamics and go wrong a thousand different ways. Average life expectancy for a kidnap victim is thirty-six hours. Some survive, but most don’t. Some die right away, in the initial panic.

  The girl’s pile of twenties was attracting waitresses like wasps at a picnic. And she wasn’t shooing any of them away. She was taking one fresh bottle after another. And beer is beer. She was going to have to visit the restroom, soon and often. And the restroom corridor was long and dark, and it had a street exit at the end of it.

  I watched her in the gaudy reflected light, with the music shrieking and pounding all around me. The two guys watched her. Her bodyguard watched her. She watched the guitarist. He was concentrating hard, key changes and choruses, but from time to time he would lift his head and smile, mostly at the glory of being up on the stage, but twice directly at the girl. The first of those smiles was shy, and the second was a little wider.

  The girl stood up. She butted the lip of her table with her thighs and shuffled out from behind it and headed for the corridor in back. I got there first. The sound from the band howled through it. The ladies’ room was halfway down. The men’s room was all the way at the end. I leaned on the wall and watched the girl walk toward me. She was u
p on high heels and she was wearing tight pants and her steps were short and precise. Not drunk yet. She was Russian. She put a pale palm on the restroom door and pushed. She went inside.

  Less than ten seconds later the two guys stepped into the corridor. I guessed they would wait there for her. But they didn’t. They glanced at me like I was a part of the architecture and shouldered in through the ladies’ room door. One after the other. The door slammed behind them.

  The music played on.

  I went in after them. Every day brings something new. I had never been in a women’s bathroom before. Stalls on the right, sinks on the left. Bright light and the smell of perfume. The girl was standing near the back wall. The two guys were facing her. Their backs were to me. I said, “Hey,” but they didn’t hear. Too much noise. I caught them by the elbows, one in each hand. They spun around, ready to fight, but then they stopped. I am bigger than the Frigidaires they had been dreaming about back home. They stood still for a second and then pushed past me and pulled the door and headed out.

  The girl looked at me for a moment with an emotion I couldn’t read and then I left her to do what she needed to do. I went back to my seat. The two guys were already back in theirs. The bodyguard was impassive. He was watching the stage. The band was finishing up. The girl was still in the bathroom.

  The music stopped. The two guys got up and headed back toward the corridor. The room was suddenly crowded with people standing and moving. I headed over to the bodyguard and tapped him on the shoulder and pointed. He took no notice. He didn’t move at all, until the guitar player started backing away off the stage. Then he got up, the two movements perfectly synchronized, and I knew I had gotten it all wrong. Not an indulged daughter. An indulged son. Daddy had bought the guitar and the amp and hired backing musicians. The boy’s dream. Out of the bedroom, onto the stage. His driver at the curb, his bodyguard watching all the way. Not a team of two from his rival, but a team of three. An adoring groupie. The boy’s dream. A classic honeytrap. A last-minute tactical conference in the bathroom, and then action.