In the event the smelly kid didn’t do much of anything with his busted ribs. He just doubled over like a wounded buffalo. So Reacher crowded in and launched a low clubbing right and bust some more ribs on the other side. Easy enough. The heavy cable wrap made his hands like wrecking balls. The only problem was that people don’t always go to the hospital for busted ribs. Especially not in Marine families. They just tape them up and gut it out. And Reacher needed the guy in a hospital cot, with his whole concerned family all around him. At least for one evening. So he dragged the guy’s left arm out from its midsection clutch, clamping the guy’s wrist in his own left hand, clumsy because of the wire, and he twisted it through a 180-degree turn, so the palm was up and the soft side of the elbow was down, a
nd then he smashed his own right fist clean through the joint and the guy howled and screamed and fell to his knees and Reacher put him out of his misery with an uppercut under the jaw.
Game over.
Reacher looked left to right around the silent semicircle of spectators and said, ‘Next?’
No one moved.
Reacher said, ‘Anyone?’
No one moved.
‘OK,’ Reacher said. ‘Let’s all get it straight. From now on, it is what it is.’
And then he turned and walked back to his house.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
REACHER’S FATHER WAS waiting in the hallway, a little pale around the eyes. Reacher started unwrapping his hands, and he asked, ‘Who are you working with on this code book thing?’
His father said, ‘An Intelligence guy and two MPs.’
‘Would you call them and ask them to come over?’
‘Why?’
‘All part of the plan. Like mom told me.’
‘They should come here?’
‘Yes.’
‘When?’
‘Right now would be good.’ Reacher saw he had the word Georgia stamped backward across one of his knuckles. Must have been where the wire was manufactured. Raised lettering on the insulation. A place he had never been.
His father made the call to the base and Reacher watched the street from a window. He figured with a bit of luck the timing would be perfect. And it was, more or less. Twenty minutes later a staff car pulled up and three men in uniform got out. And immediately an ambulance turned into the street behind them and manoeuvred around their parked vehicle and headed on down to the smelly kid’s house. The medics loaded the kid on board, and his mother and what looked like a younger brother rode along as passengers. Reacher figured the kid’s father would head straight for the hospital, on his motorbike, at the end of his watch. Or earlier, depending on what the doctors said.
The Intelligence guy was a major, and the MPs were Warrant Officers. All three of them were in BDUs. All three of them were still standing in the hallway. All three of them had the same expression on their faces: why are we here?
Reacher said, ‘That kid they just took away? You need to go search his house. Which is now empty, by the way. It’s ready and waiting for you.’
The three guys looked at each other. Reacher watched their faces. Clearly none of them had any real desire to nail a good Marine like Stan Reacher. Clearly all of them wanted a happy ending. They were prepared to clutch at straws. They were prepared to go the extra mile, even if that involved taking their cues from some weird thirteen-year-old kid.
One of the MPs asked, ‘What are we looking for?’
‘You’ll know it when you see it,’ Reacher said. ‘Eleven inches long, one inch wide, grey in colour.’
The three guys stepped out into the street, and Reacher and his father sat down to wait.
CHAPTER TWENTY
IT WAS A reasonably short wait, as Reacher had privately predicted. The smelly kid had demonstrated a degree of animal cunning, but he was no kind of a criminal mastermind. That was for damn sure. The three men came back less than ten minutes later with a metal object that had been burned in a fire. It was ashy grey as a result. It was a once-bright alloy fillet eleven inches long and one inch wide, slightly curved across its shorter dimension, with three round appendages spaced along its length.
It was what is left when you burn a regular three-ring binder.
No stiff covers, no pages, no contents, just scorched metal.
Reacher asked, ‘Where did you find it?’
One of the MPs said, ‘Under a bed in the second bedroom. The boys’ room.’
No kind of a criminal mastermind.
The major from Intelligence asked, ‘Is it the code book?’
Reacher shook his head.
‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s the test answers from the school.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Positive.’
‘So why call us?’
‘This has to be handled by the Corps. Not by the school. You need to go up to the hospital and talk to the kid and his father together. You need to get a confession. Then you need to tell the school. What you do to the kid after that is your business. A warning will do it, probably. He won’t trouble us again anyway.’
‘What exactly happened here?’
‘It was my brother’s fault,’ Reacher said. ‘In a way, anyway. The kid from down the street started hazing us, and Joe stepped up and did really well. Smart mouth, fast answers, the whole nine yards. It was a great performance. Plus, Joe is huge. Gentle as a lamb, but the kid didn’t know that, obviously. So he decided to duck the physical route, in terms of revenge. He decided to go another way. He figured out that Joe was uptight about the test. Maybe he had heard us talking. But anyway, he followed Joe up to the school yesterday and stole the answers. To discredit him.’
‘Can you prove that?’
‘Circumstantially,’ Reacher said. ‘The kid didn’t go to the ballgame. He wasn’t on the bus. So he was in town all day. And Joe washed his hands and took a shower when he got back. Which is unusual for Joe, in the afternoon. He must have felt dirty. And my guess is he felt dirty because he had been smelling that kid’s stink all day, from behind him and around corners.’
‘Very circumstantial,’ the major said.
‘Ask the kid,’ Reacher said. ‘Lean on him, in front of his dad.’
‘Then what happened?’
‘The kid made up a scenario where Joe memorized the answers and then burned the book. Which would be plausible, for a guy who wanted to cheat on a test. And it was trash night, which was convenient. The plan was the kid would burn the book in his own back yard, and then sneak into ours during the night and dump the metal part in our incinerator, among our ashes, so the evidence would be right there. But we had no ashes. We missed trash night. We had to be up at the airport instead. So the kid had to abort the plan. He just snuck away again. And I heard him. Early hours of the morning. I thought it was a cat or a rat.’
‘Any trace evidence?’
‘You might find footprints out there,’ Reacher said. ‘The yard was swept at some point, but there’s always dust. Especially after trash night.’
The MPs went away and took a look at the yard, and then they came back with quizzical expressions on their faces, as if to say, the kid could be right.
The Intelligence major got a look on his own face, like I can’t believe I’m about to say this to a thirteen-year-old, and then he asked, ‘Do you know where the code book is too?’
‘No,’ Reacher said. ‘Not for sure. But I could make a pretty good guess.’
‘Where?’
‘Help my brother out with the school, and then we’ll talk.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
THE THREE MARINES came back ninety minutes later. One of the MPs said, ‘You bust that kid up pretty good, didn’t you?’
‘He’ll live,’ Reacher said.
The other MP said, ‘He confessed. It went down like you figured. How did you know?’
‘Logic,’ Reacher said. ‘I knew Joe wouldn’t have done it, so clearly someone else did. It was just a question of who. And how, and why.’
The Intelligence major said, ‘We squared things away with the school. Your brother is in the clear.’ Then the guy smiled. He said, ‘But there’s one unfortunate consequence.’
‘Which is what?’