by Lee Child
“A week or so.”
“Are you staying long?”
“Looks like it. You?”
“I’m not sure,” Reacher said.
The girl stood up and shook out her towel. She was a slender thing, small but long-legged. She had nail polish on her toes. They walked off the sand together and into the long concrete street. It was deserted up ahead. Reacher asked, “Where’s your house?”
Helen said, “On the left, near the top.”
“Mine’s on the right. We’re practically neighbors.” Reacher walked her all the way, but her mom was home by then, so he wasn’t asked in. Helen smiled sweetly and said thanks and Reacher crossed the street to his own place, where he found hot still air and nobody home. So he just sat on the stoop and whiled away the time. Two hours later the three Marine NCOs came home on their motorbikes, followed by two more, then two more in cars. Thirty minutes after that a regular American school bus rolled in from the ballgame, and a crowd of neighborhood kids spilled out and went inside their homes with nothing more than hard stares in Reacher’s direction. Reacher stared back just as hard, but he didn’t move. Partly because he hadn’t seen his target. Which was strange. He looked all around, once, twice, and by the time the diesel smoke cleared he was certain: the fat smelly kid with the boil had not been on the bus.
11
Eventually Joe came home, silent and preoccupied and uncommunicative. He didn’t say where he had been. He didn’t say anything. He just headed for the kitchen, washed his hands, checked the new phone for dial tone, and then went to take a shower, which was unusual for Joe at that time of day. Next in, surprisingly, was their father, also silent and preoccupied and uncommunicative. He got a glass of water, checked the phone for dial tone, and holed up in the living room. Last in was their mother, struggling under the weight of packages and a bouquet of flowers the women’s welcoming committee had produced at lunch. Reacher took the packages from her and carried them to the kitchen. She saw the new phone on the countertop and brightened a little. She never felt good until she had checked in with her dad and made sure he had her latest contact information. France was seven hours behind Japan, which made it mid-morning there, which was a good time for a chat, so she dialed the long number and listened to it ring.
She got the housekeeper, of course, and a minute later the hot little house on Okinawa was in an uproar.
12
Stan Reacher got straight on the new phone to his company clerk, who leaned on a guy, who leaned on another guy, like dominoes, and within thirty minutes Josie had a seat on the last civilian flight of the evening to Tokyo, and within forty she had an onward connection to Paris.
Reacher asked, “Do you want company?”
His mother said, “Of course I would like it. And I know your grandpa Moutier would love to see you again. But I could be there a couple of weeks. More, perhaps. And you have a test to take, and then school to start.”
“They’ll understand. I don’t mind missing a couple of weeks. And I could take the test when I get back. Or maybe they’ll forget all about it.”
His father said, “Your mother means we can’t afford it, son. Plane tickets are expensive.”
And so were taxicabs, but two hours later they took one to the airport. An old Japanese guy showed up in a big boxy Datsun, and Stan got in the front, and Josie and the boys crowded together in the back. Josie had a small bag. Joe was clean from the shower, but his hair was no longer combed. It was back to its usual tousled mess. Reacher was still salty and sandy from the beach. No one said much of anything. Reacher remembered his grandfather pretty well. He had met him three times. He had a closet full of artificial limbs. Apparently the heirs of deceased veterans were still officially obliged to return the prostheses to the manufacturer, for adjustment and eventual reissue. Part of the deal, from back in the day. Grandpa Moutier said every year or so another one would show up at his door. Sometimes two or three a year. Some of them were made from table legs.
They got out at the airport. It was dark and the air was going cold. Josie hugged Stan, and kissed him, and she hugged Joe, and kissed him, and she hugged Reacher, and kissed him, and then she pulled him aside and whispered a long urgent sentence in his ear. Then she went on alone to the check-in line.
Stan and the boys went up a long outside staircase to the observation deck. There was a JAL 707 waiting on the tarmac, spotlit and whining and ringed with attendant vehicles. It had stairs rolled up to its forward door, and its engines were turning slowly. Beyond the runway was a nighttime view of the whole southern half of the island. Their long concrete street lay indistinguishable in the distance, miles away to the south and the west. There were ten thousand small fires burning in the neighborhood. Backyard bonfires, each one flickering bright at its base and sending thin plumes of smoke high in the air.
“Trash night,” Stan said. Reacher nodded. Every island he had ever been on had a garbage problem. Regulated once-a-week burning was the usual solution, for everything, including leftover food. Traditional, in every culture. The word bonfire came from bone fire. General knowledge. He had seen a small wire incinerator behind the hot little house.
“We missed it for this week,” Stan said. “I wish we’d known.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Joe said. “We don’t really have any trash yet.”
They waited, all three of them, leaning forward, elbows on a rail, and then Josie came out below them, one of about thirty passengers. She walked across the tarmac and turned at the bottom of the stairs and waved. Then she climbed up and into the plane, and she was lost to sight.
13
Stan and the boys watched the takeoff, watched the jet bank and climb, watched its tiny lights disappear, waited until its shattering noise was gone, and then they clattered down the long staircase three abreast. They walked home, which was Stan’s usual habit when Josie wasn’t involved and the distance was less than eight miles. Two hours’ quick march. Nothing at all, to a Marine, and cheaper than the bus. He was a child of the Depression, not that his family’s flinty New England parsimony would have been markedly different even in a time of plenty. Waste not, want not, make do and mend, don’t make an exhibition of yourself. His own father had stopped buying new clothes at the age of forty, feeling that what he owned by that point would outlast him, and to gamble otherwise would be reckless extravagance.
The bonfires were almost out when they arrived at their street. Layers of smoke hung in the air, and there was the smell of ash and scorched meat, even inside the hot little house. They went straight to bed under thin sheets, and ten minutes later all was silent.
14
Reacher slept badly, first dreaming about his grandfather, the ferocious old Frenchman somehow limbless and equipped with four table legs, moving and rearing like a piece of mobile furniture. Then he was woken in the early hours by something stealthy in the backyard, a cat or a rodent or some other kind of scavenger, and then again much later when the new phone rang twice. Too soon for his mother to have arrived in Paris, too late for a report of a fatal accident en route to Tokyo. Something else, obviously, so he ignored it both times. Joe got up at that point, so Reacher took advantage of the solitude and rolled over and slept on, until after nine o’clock, which was late for him.
He found his father and his brother in the kitchen, both of them silent and strained to a degree he found excessive. No question that grandpa Moutier was a nice old guy, but any ninety-year-old was by definition limited in the life expectancy department. No big surprise. The guy had to croak sometime. No one lives forever. And he had already beaten the odds. The guy was already about twenty years old when the Wright brothers flew, for God’s sake.
Reacher made his own coffee, because he liked it stronger than the rest of his family. He made toast, poured cereal, ate and drank, and still no one had spoken to him. Eventually he asked, “What’s up?”
His father’s gaze dipped and swiveled and traversed like an artillery piece, and came to rest on a
point on the tabletop, about a foot in front of Reacher’s plate. He said, “The phone this morning.”
“Not Mom, right?”
“No, not that.”
“Then what?”
“We’re in trouble.”
“What, all of us?”
“Me and Joe.”
Reacher asked, “Why? What happened?” But at that point the doorbell rang, so there was no answer. Neither Joe or his father looked like moving, so Reacher got up and headed for the hallway. It was the same delivery guy as the day before. He went through the same ritual. He unpacked a box and retained it and handed Reacher a heavy spool of electric cable. There must have been a hundred yards of it. The spool was the size of a car tire. The cable was for domestic wiring, like Romex, heavy and stiff, sheathed in gray plastic. The spool had a wire cutter attached to it by a short chain.
Reacher left it on the hallway floor and headed back to the kitchen. He asked, “Why do we need electric cable?”
“We don’t,” his father said. “I ordered boots.”
“Well, you didn’t get them. You got a spool of wire.”
His father blew a sigh of frustration. “Then someone made a mistake, didn’t they?”
Joe said nothing, which was very unusual. Normally in that kind of a situation he would immediately launch a series of speculative analyses, asking about the nature and format of the order codes, pointing out that numbers can be easily transposed, thinking out loud about how QWERTY keyboards put alphabetically remote letters side by side, and therefore how clumsy typists are always a quarter-inch away from an inadvertent jump from, say, footwear to hardware. He had that kind of a brain. Everything needed an explanation. But he said nothing. He just sat there, completely mute.
“What’s up?” Reacher asked again, in the silence.
“Nothing for you to worry about,” his father said.
“It will be unless you two lighten up. Which I guess you’re not going to anytime soon, judging by the look of you.”
“I lost a code book,” his father said.
“A code book for what?”
“For an operation I might have to lead.”
“China?”
“How did you know that?”
“Where else is left?”
“It’s theoretical right now,” his father said. “Just an option. But there are plans, of course. And it will be very embarrassing if they leak. We’re supposed to be getting along with China now.”
“Is there enough in the code book to make sense to anyone?”
“Easily. Real names plus code equivalents for two separate cities, plus squads and divisions. A smart analyst could piece together where we’re going, what we’re going to do, and how many of us are coming.”
“How big of a book is it?”
“It’s a regular three-ring binder.”
“Who had it last?” Reacher asked.
“Some planner,” his father said. “But it’s my responsibility.”
“When did you know it was lost?”
“Last night. The call this morning was a negative result for the search I ordered.”
“Not good,” Reacher said. “But why is Joe involved?”
“He isn’t. That’s a separate issue. That was the other call this morning. Another three-ring binder, unbelievably. The test answers are missing. Up at the school. And Joe went there yesterday.”
“I didn’t even see the answer book,” Joe said. “I certainly didn’t take it away with me.”
Reacher asked, “So what exactly did you do up there?”
“Nothing, in the end. I got as far as the principal’s office and I told the secretary I wanted to talk to the guy about the test. Then I thought better of it and left.”
“Where was the answer book?”
“On the principal’s desk, apparently. But I never got that far.”
“You were gone a long time.”
“I took a walk.”
“Around the school?”
“Partly. And other places.”
“Were you in the building across the lunch hour?” Joe nodded.
“And that’s the problem,” he said. “That’s when they think I took it.”
“What’s going to happen?”
“It’s an honor violation, obviously. I could be excluded for a semester. Maybe the whole year. And then they’ll hold me back a grade, which will be two grades by then. You and I could end up in the same class.”
“You could do my homework,” Reacher said.
“This is not funny.”
“Don’t worry about it. We’ll have moved on by the end of the semester anyway.”
“Maybe not,” their father said. “Not if I’m in the brig or busted back to private and painting curbstones for the rest of my career. We all could be stuck on Okinawa forever.”
And at that point the phone rang again. Their father answered. It was their mother on the line, from Paris, France. Their father forced a bright tone into his voice, and he talked and listened, and then he hung up and relayed the news that their mother had arrived safely, and that old man Moutier wasn’t expected to live more than a couple of days, and that their mother was sad about it.
Reacher said, “I’m going to the beach.”
15
Reacher stepped out through the door and glanced toward the sea. The street was empty. No kids. He made a snap decision and detoured to the other side and knocked on Helen’s door. The girl he had met the day before. She opened up and saw who it was and crowded out next to him on the stoop and pulled the door all the way closed behind her. Like she was keeping him secret. Like she was embarrassed by him. She picked up on his feeling and shook her head.
“My dad is sleeping,” she said. “That’s all. He sat up and worked all night. And now he’s not feeling so hot. He just flaked, an hour ago.”
Reacher said, “You want to go swimming?”
She glanced down the street, saw no one was there, and said, “Sure. Give me five minutes, OK?” She crept back inside and Reacher turned and watched the street, half hoping that the kid with the boil would come out, and half hoping he wouldn’t. He didn’t. Then Helen came out again, in a bathing suit under a sundress. She had a towel. They walked down the street together, keeping pace, a foot apart, talking about where they’d lived and the places they’d seen. Helen had moved a lot, but not as much as Reacher. Her dad was a rear echelon guy, not a combat Marine, and his postings tended to be longer and more stable.
The morning water was colder than it had been the afternoon before, so they got out after ten minutes or so. Helen let Reacher use her towel, and then they lay on it together in the sun, now just inches apart. She asked him, “Have you ever kissed a girl?”
“Yes,” he said. “Twice.”
“The same girl two times or two girls once each?”
“Two girls more than once each.”
“A lot?”
“Maybe four times each.”
“Where?”
“On the mouth.”
“No, where? In the movies, or what?”
“One in the movies, one in a park.”
“With tongues?”
“Yes.”
She asked, “Are you good at it?”
He said, “I don’t know.”
“Will you show me how? I’ve never done it.”
So he leaned up on an elbow and kissed her on the mouth. Her lips were small and mobile, and her tongue was cool and wet. They kept it going for fifteen or twenty seconds, and then they broke apart.
He asked, “Did you like it?”
She said, “Kind of.”
“Was I good at it?”
“I don’t know. I don’t have anything to compare it with.”
“Well, you were better than the other two I kissed,” he said.
“Thank you,” she said, but he didn’t know what she was thanking him for. The compliment or the trial run, he wasn’t sure.
16
Reacher and Helen
walked back together, and they almost made it home. They got within twenty yards of their destination, and then the kid with the boil stepped out of his yard and took up a position in the middle of the road. He was wearing the same Corps T-shirt and the same pair of ragged pants. And he was alone, for the time being.
Reacher felt Helen go quiet beside him. She stopped walking and Reacher stopped a pace ahead of her. The big kid was six feet away. The three of them were like the corners of a thin sloping triangle. Reacher said, “Stay there, Helen. I know you could kick this guy’s ass all by yourself, but there’s no reason why both of us should be exposed to the smell.”
The big kid just smiled.
He said, “You’ve been to the beach.”
Reacher said, “And we thought Einstein was smart.”
“How many times have you been?”
“You can’t count that high.”
“Are you trying to make me mad?”
Reacher was, of course. For his age he had always been a freakishly big kid, right from birth. His mother claimed he had been the biggest baby anyone had ever seen, although she had a well-known taste for the dramatic, so Reacher tended to discount that information. But even so, big or not, he had always fought two or three classes up. Sometimes more. With the result that one on one, ninety-nine percent of the time, he had been the small kid. So he had learned to fight like a small kid. All things being equal, size usually wins. But not always, otherwise the heavyweight championship of the world would be decided on the scale, not in the ring. Sometimes, if the small guy is faster and smarter, he can get a result. And one way of being smarter is to make the other guy dumber, which you can do by inducing a rage. An opponent’s red mist is the smaller guy’s best friend. So yes, Reacher was trying to make the smelly kid mad.
But the smelly kid wasn’t falling for it. He was just standing there, taking it, tense but controlled. His feet were well placed, and his shoulders were bunched. His fists were ready to come up. Reacher took one pace forward, into the miasma of halitosis and body odor. Rule one with a guy like that: don’t let him bite you. You could get an infection. Rule two: watch his eyes. If they stayed up, he was going to swing. If they dropped down, he was going to kick.
