‘I like everything to match,’ he said.
‘Why?’
‘Someone told me I should.’
Total damage was seventy-seven dollars in cash, which was well within target. Three days’ wear, minimum, maybe four maximum, somewhere between about twenty and twenty-five bucks a day. Cheaper than living somewhere, and easier than washing and ironing and folding and packing. That was for damn sure.
Sorenson asked, ‘Where do you get your money?’
Reacher said, ‘Here and there.’
‘Where and where?’
‘Savings, some of it.’
‘And the rest?’
‘I work sometimes.’
‘Doing what?’
‘Casual labour. Whatever needs doing.’
‘How often?’
‘Now and then.’
‘Which can’t pay much.’
‘I get the rest from alternative sources.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘Spoils of war, usually.’
‘What war?’
Reacher said, ‘I steal from bad guys.’
‘And you’re admitting this to me?’
‘I’m following your example. Federal agencies seize property all the time, right? You find coke in some guy’s glove box, it’s goodbye BMW. Same with houses and boats.’
‘That’s different. That stuff reduces our expenditures. It spares the taxpayer.’
‘Likewise,’ Reacher said. ‘I’d be on food stamps otherwise.’
He chose the Red Roof Inn for his shower. A franchise operation, with the owner on duty at the desk, and like all such guys happy to put a little extracurricular cash in his back pocket. As expected he settled for a pair of tens, one for him and one for whichever maid was first up for favours. Reacher carried his gas station purchases into the room in one bag, and his new outfit in four others. Sorenson came in with him and checked around. She didn’t say anything, but he saw she wasn’t happy with the bathroom window. It wasn’t big, but it was big enough. It was a ground floor room, with a paved alley out back.
‘Stay here, if you want,’ Reacher said. ‘I’ll leave the shower curtain open. To keep your mind at rest.’
She smiled, but she didn’t reply. Not directly. Instead she said, ‘How long will this take?’
‘Twenty-two minutes for the shower,’ he said. ‘Then three to get dry, and three to get dressed. Plus five for unforeseen eventualities. Call it thirty-three minutes total.’
‘That’s very exact.’
‘Precision is a virtue.’
She left and he started peeling off his old clothes. They were in pretty bad shape. He had been wearing them for days, since Bolton, South Dakota. In places they were crusted with mud, and in other places they were spotted with blood, some of it his own, and some of it not. He balled the wrecked garments up tight and stuffed them all in the bathroom trash. Then he cleaned his teeth very thoroughly and set the shower running.
He washed his hair and soaped himself up from head to foot and scrubbed and rinsed. Eight minutes. Then he got out of the shower and used a washcloth and a sink of hot water and the mirror above it to attend to his face. He soaked off the hardened smears of blood and sponged the open lacerations carefully. He rubbed a slick of soap on his upper lip and sniffed as hard as he could until he started sneezing uncontrollably. Clots of blood came out, as big as garden peas.
Then he got back in the shower and washed himself from head to foot all over again. He towelled off and dressed and combed his hair with his fingers. He put his old passport and his ATM card in one pocket and his toothbrush in another. He put the short fat guy’s motel key in his jacket. He ate aspirins and drank water from the tap. Then he found his antiseptic cream and his Band-Aids and he opened the window to let the steam out and clear the mirror.
Julia Sorenson was in the back alley, watching the window.
She was on the phone. She wasn’t enjoying the call. She was arguing, but politely. With her boss, Reacher guessed. Hence the restraint. He couldn’t hear what was being said on either end of the conversation, but he figured the guy was finally taking her off the board, and she was pitching to stay on. She seemed to be making all kinds of good points. Her free hand was chopping the air, pushing objections aside, moving persuasive reasons front and centre. She was using the physical gestures to put animation in her voice. The telephone was a poor means of communication, in Reacher’s opinion. It had no room for body language and nuance.
He looked back in the mirror and used toilet paper to dry his cuts. Then he squeezed thin worms of cream into them from the tube of antiseptic. He wiped the excess and dried the intact areas of skin. He put a Band-Aid over the biggest cut. Another over the second biggest. He dumped the trash on top of his old clothes and closed the bathroom window and headed for the bedroom. He took a look in the mirror next to the closet. The new clothes were pretty good. His hair looked OK. His face was a mess. No oil painting, that was for sure. But then, it never had been, and it was certainly a lot better than an hour ago. A whole lot better. Almost halfway human.
He stepped out to the lot. Sorenson’s cruiser was right outside the door. She was leaning on the front fender. Reacher guessed she had left the alley when he closed the bathroom window. At that point she had hustled around to the front, double quick. Not to greet him. To make sure he didn’t run.
She said, ‘You clean up pretty well.’
Something in her face. Something in her voice. Not hurt. Not anger. Not necessarily even disappointment. More like confusion.
Reacher said, ‘What?’
‘I got a call.’
‘I saw.’
‘My SAC.’
‘I guessed. Did he take you off the case?’
She shook her head no, then changed it to a yes. She said, ‘I mean, I’m off the case, yes. But not because he took me off, no.’
‘Then why?’
‘Because there is no case. Not any more.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘It means that as of twenty minutes ago there is no active investigation. Which is logical, really, because as far as the Federal Bureau of Investigation is concerned nothing happened in Nebraska last night. Absolutely nothing at all.’
FORTY-THREE
SORENSON SAID, ‘THEY took it the other way. They didn’t take it nuclear. They made it a black hole instead. They’re erasing it from history. A CIA demand, presumably. Or State. Something squirrelly. Some kind of national security bullshit.’ Then her phone rang again before Reacher could reply. She checked the incoming number and asked, ‘Where is the 405 area code?’
‘Southwestern Oklahoma,’ Reacher said. ‘Lawton, probably. It’s the army.’
She answered and listened for a spell and thanked whoever she was talking to. She clicked off and said, ‘Mother Sill confirms she had a Peter James King on active duty in 1991. He was a fister. Which I’m sure isn’t what I think it is.’
‘Fire support team,’ Reacher said. ‘Not just a dagby after all. I sold him short. Probably a forward observer. Smart guys, most of them. The 13F MOS. Which means he manoeuvred with the lowly infantry or the humble armoured divisions, rather than the kings of battle themselves. Did they confirm a brother named Alan?’
‘No. Didn’t deny one, either. But they’ll need paperwork.’
‘What happened to Peter?’
‘He quit as a gunnery sergeant in 1997.’
‘Same year as me. Where is he now?’
‘Mother Sill doesn’t know for sure. Last she heard he was working with a security company in Denver, Colorado. Which happens to be exactly where the dead guy flew into.’
‘Coincidence,’ Reacher said. ‘Alan King said they don’t talk.’
‘Did you believe him?’
‘He told the truth about Peter’s name and service, apparently. Why wouldn’t he be telling the truth about not talking to him too?’
‘How many people live in Denver?’
‘About si
x hundred thousand,’ Reacher said. ‘Between two and a half and three million in the metro area, depending on how you measure it. Too small and too big to match King’s million and a half.’
‘How do you know stuff like that? Area codes and populations?’
‘I like information. I like facts. Denver was named after James W. Denver, who was governor of the Kansas Territory at the time. It was a kiss-ass move by a land speculator called Larimer. He hoped the governor would move a county seat there and make him rich. What he didn’t know was that the governor had already resigned. Mails were slow in those days. And then the new place became part of Colorado anyway, not Kansas. Area code is 303.’
‘Get in the car,’ Sorenson said.
‘Want me to drive the rest of the way?’
‘No, I don’t. I can’t arrive with you at the wheel. It’s bad enough having you in the front.’
‘I’m not going to ride in the back.’
Sorenson didn’t reply to that. They climbed aboard, into their accustomed positions. Sorenson backed out of the motel lot and threaded her way back to the highway. She took the ramp and accelerated. There were rain clouds in the east. The weather was chasing them all the way. Sorenson fumbled her phone up into its cradle, where it beeped once to acknowledge it was charging, and then immediately it started to ring again, no longer thin and reedy, but loud and powerful through the sound system. Sorenson accepted the call and Reacher heard a man’s voice say he was en route for the location south and east of Des Moines, Iowa, as instructed.
Sorenson clicked off and said, ‘My forensics team, heading for Delfuenso.’
Reacher said, ‘Who is what we should be talking about here. How can the Bureau shut down a case where an innocent bystander died?’
‘Such a thing has happened before.’
‘But facts don’t just go away.’
‘We don’t dispute Delfuenso died. Lots of people die every day.’
‘How did she die?’
‘No one knows. She drove her own car to a neighbouring state. It set on fire. Suicide, maybe. Maybe she took some pills and smoked a last cigarette. And dropped the cigarette. We’ll never know for sure, because the evidence was lost in the fire. The pill bottle, and so on.’
‘That’s your boss’s script?’
‘It’s a local matter now. Sheriff Goodman will deal with it. Except he won’t, because someone will sit on him too, for sure.’
‘What about the missing eyewitness? Is he erased too?’
Sorenson shrugged at the wheel. ‘A no-account local farm worker, with a history of drinking and a rented house and no stable relationships? People like that wander off all the time. Some of them come back, and some of them don’t.’
‘That’s all in the script too?’
‘Everything will have a plausible explanation. Not too precise, not too vague.’
Reacher said, ‘If the case was closed twenty minutes ago, why are you still getting calls? Like just now, from Mother Sill, and your forensics guy?’
Sorenson paused a beat. She said, ‘Because they both had my cell number. They called me direct. They didn’t go through the field office. They haven’t gotten the memo yet.’
‘When will they?’
‘Not soon, I hope. Especially my forensics guys. I need to know how King and McQueen kept Delfuenso in the back seat. I mean, would you just sit still for that? They set the car on fire, and you just sit there and take it? Why would you? Why wouldn’t you fight?’
‘They shot her first. It’s obvious. She was already dead.’
‘That’s what I’m hoping.’
‘They may never be able to prove it.’
‘All I need is an indication. A balance of probabilities. Which I might get. My people are pretty good.’
‘Your boss will recall them, surely.’
‘He doesn’t know they’re out and about. And I’m not going to make it a point to tell him.’
‘Won’t they check in?’
‘Only with me,’ Sorenson said. ‘I’m their primary point of contact.’
She drove on, another fast mile, with Reacher quiet beside her. The sun was still out behind them. It was casting shadows. The rain clouds were still low in the sky. But they were coming. The far horizon was bright. Reacher said, ‘If there’s no case any more, then the Omaha field office doesn’t need to show anything for its night’s work. Because there was no night’s work. Because nothing happened in Nebraska.’
Sorenson didn’t answer.
Reacher said, ‘And if there’s no case any more, who needs a suspect or a material witness? No one did anything and no one saw anything. I mean, how could anyone, if nothing even happened?’
No response.
Reacher said, ‘And if there’s no active investigation any more, then there won’t be any new information for you to pass on to me.’
Sorenson said nothing.
Reacher asked, ‘So why am I still in this car?’
No answer.
Reacher asked, ‘Am I in the script too? A no-account unemployed and homeless veteran? With no stable relationships? Not even a rented house? People like me wander off all the time, right? Which would be very convenient for all concerned. Because I’m the last man alive who can call bullshit on this whole thing. I know what happened. I saw King and McQueen. I saw Delfuenso with them. I know she didn’t drive her own car to a neighbouring state. I know she didn’t take any pills. So are they going to erase me too?’
Sorenson said nothing.
Reacher asked, ‘Julia, did you discuss me with your boss while I was in the shower?’
Sorenson said, ‘Yes, I did.’
‘And what are your orders?’
‘I still have to bring you in.’
‘Why? What’s the plan?’
‘I don’t know,’ Sorenson said. ‘I have to bring you to the parking lot. That’s all I was told.’
FORTY-FOUR
REACHER SPENT A long minute revisiting a variation on an earlier problem: it was technically challenging to take out a driver from the front passenger seat, while that driver was busy doing eighty miles an hour on a public highway. More than challenging. Impossible, almost certainly, even with seat belts and air bags. Too much risk. Too many innocent parties around. People driving to work, old folks dropping in on family.
Sorenson said, ‘I’m sorry.’
Reacher said, ‘My mom always told me I shouldn’t put myself first. But I’m afraid I’m going to have to this time. How much trouble will you be in if you don’t deliver me?’
‘A lot,’ she said.
Which was not the answer he wanted to hear. He said, ‘Then I need you to swear something for me. Raise your right hand.’
She did. She took it off the wheel and brought it up near her shoulder, palm out, halfway between slow and snappy, a familiar move for a public official. Reacher swivelled in his seat and caught her wrist with his left hand, one, and then he leaned over and snaked his right hand under her jacket and took her Glock out of the holster on her hip, two. Then he sat back in his seat with the gun in the gap between his leg and the door.
Three.
Sorenson said, ‘That was sneaky.’
‘I apologize,’ Reacher said. ‘To you and my mom.’
‘It was also a crime.’
‘Probably.’
‘Are you going to shoot me?’