“Are you Jack Reacher?” he asked across the table.
Not Chicago or Boston. New York, for sure. The voice sounded exactly like a guy Reacher had known, spent the first twenty years of his life never more than a hundred yards from Fulton Street.
“Jack Reacher?” the old guy asked again.
Up close, he had small, wise eyes under an overhanging brow. Reacher drank and glanced across at him through the clear water in his bottle.
“Are you Jack Reacher?” the old guy asked for the third time.
Reacher set his bottle on the table and shook his head.
“No,” he lied.
The old guy's shoulders slumped a fraction in disappointment. He shot his cuff and checked his watch. Moved his bulk forward on the chair like he was about to get up, but then he sat back, like suddenly there was time to spare.
“Five after four,” he said.
Reacher nodded. The guy waved his empty beer bottle at the bartender who ducked around with a fresh one.
“Heat,” he said. “Gets to me.”
Reacher nodded again and sipped his water.
“You know a Jack Reacher around here?” the guy asked.
Reacher shrugged.
“You got a description?” he asked back.
The guy was into a long pull on the second bottle. He wiped his lips with the back of his hand and used the gesture to hide a second discreet belch.
“Not really,” he said. “Big guy, is all I know. That's why I asked you.”
Reacher nodded.
“There are lots of big guys here,” he said. “Lots of big guys everywhere.”
“But you don't know the name?”
“Should I?” Reacher asked. “And who wants to know?”
The guy grinned and nodded, like an apology for a lapse in manners.
“Costello,” he said. “Pleased to meet you.”
Reacher nodded back, and raised his bottle a fraction in response.
“Skip tracer?” he asked.
“Private detective,” Costello said.
“Looking for a guy called Reacher?” Reacher asked. “What's he done?”
Costello shrugged. “Nothing, far as I know. I just got asked to find him.”
“And you figure he's down here?”
“Last week he was,” Costello said. “He's got a bank account in Virginia and he's been wiring money to it.”
“From down here in Key West?”
Costello nodded.
“Every week,” he said. “For three months.”
“So?”
“So he's working down here,” Costello said. “Has been, for three months. You'd think somebody would know him.”
“But nobody does,” Reacher said.
Costello shook his head “I asked all up and down Duval, which seems to be where the action is in this town. Nearest I got was a titty bar upstairs someplace, girl in there said there was a big guy been here exactly three months, drinks water every day at four o'clock in here.”
He lapsed into silence, looking hard at Reacher, like he was issuing a direct challenge. Reacher sipped water and shrugged back at him.
“Coincidence,” he said.
Costello nodded.
“I guess,” he said quietly.
He raised the beer bottle to his lips and drank, keeping his wise old eyes focused tight on Reacher's face.
“Big transient population here,” Reacher said to him. “People drift in and out, all the time.”
“I guess,” Costello said again.
“But I'll keep my ears open,” Reacher said.
Costello nodded.
“I'd appreciate it,” he said, ambiguously.
“Who wants him?” Reacher asked.
“My client,” Costello said. “Lady called Mrs. Jacob.”
Reacher sipped water. The name meant nothing to him. Jacob? Never heard of such a person.
“OK, if I see him around, I'll tell him, but don't hold your breath. I don't see too many people.”
“You working?”
Reacher nodded.
“I dig swimming pools,” he said.
Costello pondered, like he knew what swimming pools were, but like he had never considered how they got there.
“Backhoe operator?”
Reacher smiled and shook his head.
“Not down here,” he said. “We dig them by hand.”
“By hand?” Costello repeated. “What, like with shovels?”
“The lots are too small for machinery,” Reacher said. “Streets are too narrow, trees are too low. Get off Duval, and you'll see for yourself.”
Costello nodded again. Suddenly looked very satisfied.
“Then you probably won't know this Reacher guy,” he said. “According to Mrs. Jacob, he was an Army officer. So I checked, and she was right. He was a major. Medals and all. Military police bigshot, is what they said. Guy like that, you won't find him digging swimming pools with a damn shovel.”
Reacher took a long pull on his water, to hide his expression.
“So what would you find him doing?”
“Down here?” Costello said. “I'm not sure. Hotel security? Running some kind of a business? Maybe he's got a cruiser, charters it out.”
“Why would he be down here at all?”
Costello nodded, like he was agreeing with an opinion.
“Right,” he said. “Hell of a place. But he's here, that's for certain. He left the Army two years ago, put his money in the nearest bank to the Pentagon and disappeared. Bank account shows money wiring out all over the damn place, then for three months money wiring back in from here. So he drifted for a spell, then he settled down here, making some dough. I'll find him.”
Reacher nodded.
“You still want me to ask around?”
Costello shook his head. Already planning his next move.
“Don't you worry about it,” he said.
He eased his bulk up out of the chair and pulled a crumpled roll from his pants pocket. Dropped a five on the table and moved away.
“Nice meeting you,” he called, without looking back.
He walked out through the missing wall into the glare of the afternoon. Reacher drained the last of his water and watched him go. Ten after four in the afternoon.
Â
AN HOUR LATER Reacher was drifting down Duval Street, thinking about new banking arrangements, choosing a place to eat an early dinner, and wondering why he had lied to Costello. His first conclusion was that he would cash up and use a roll of bills in his pants pocket. His second conclusion was that he would follow his Belgian friend's advice and eat a big steak and ice cream with another two bottles of water. His third conclusion was that he had lied because there had been no reason not to.
There was no reason why a private investigator from New York should have been looking for him. He had never lived in New York. Or any big northern city. He had never really lived anywhere. That was the defining feature of his life. It made him what he was. He had been born the son of a serving Marine Corps officer, and he had been dragged all over the world from the very day his mother carried him out of the maternity ward of a Berlin infirmary. He had lived nowhere except in an endless blur of different military bases, most of them in distant and inhospitable parts of the globe. Then he had joined the Army himself, military police investigator, and lived and served in those same bases all over again until the peace dividend had closed his unit down and cut him loose. Then he had come home to the United States and drifted around like a cheap tourist until he had washed up on the extreme tip of the nation with his savings running out. He had taken a couple of days' work digging holes in the ground, and the couple of days had stretched into a couple of weeks, and the weeks had stretched into months, and he was still there.
He had no living relatives anywhere capable of leaving him a fortune in a will. He owed no money. He had never stolen anything, never cheated anybody. Never fathered any children. He was on as few pieces of paper as it was possible for a human being to get. He was just about invisible. And he had never known anybody called Jacob, either Mrs. or Mr. Never. He was sure of that. So whatever Costello wanted, he wasn't interested in it. Certainly not interested enough to come out from under and get involved with anything.
Because being invisible had become a habit. In the front part of his brain, he knew it was some kind of a complex, alienated response to his situation. Two years ago, everything had turned upside down. He had gone from being a big fish in a small pond to being nobody. From being a senior and valued member of a highly structured community to being just one of 270 million anonymous civilians. From being necessary and wanted to being one person too many. From being where someone told him to be every minute of every day to being confronted with three million square miles and maybe forty more years and no map and no schedule. The front part of his brain told him his response was understandable, but defensive, the response of a man who liked solitude but was worried by loneliness. It told him it was an extremist response, and he should take care with it.
But the lizard part of his brain buried behind the frontal lobes told him he liked it. He liked the anonymity. He liked his secrecy. It felt warm and comfortable and reassuring. He guarded it. He was friendly and gregarious on the surface, without ever saying much about himself. He liked to pay cash and travel by road. He was never on any passenger manifests or credit card carbons. He told nobody his name. In Key West, he had checked into a cheap motel under the name Harry S. Truman. Scanning back through the register, he had seen he wasn't unique. Most of the forty-one presidents had stayed there, even ones nobody had heard of, like John Tyler and Franklin Pierce. He had found names did not mean much in the Keys. People just waved and smiled and said hello. They all assumed everybody had something to be private about. He was comfortable there. Too comfortable to be in any hurry to leave.
He strolled for an hour in the noisy warmth and then ducked off Duval toward a hidden courtyard restaurant where they knew him by sight and had his favorite brand of water and would give him a steak that hung off both sides of his plate at once.
Â
THE STEAK CAME with an egg and fries and a complicated mix of some sort of warm-weather vegetables, and the ice cream came with hot chocolate sauce and nuts.
Jack Reacher returns in
Make Me
Available in hardcover from Delacorte Press
Keep reading for a special preview of the first two chapters
1
M
OVING A GUY
as big as Keever wasn't easy. It was like trying to wrestle a king-size mattress off a waterbed. So they buried him close to the house. Which made sense anyway. The harvest was still a month away, and a disturbance in a field would show up from the air. And they would use the air, for a guy like Keever. They would use search planes, and helicopters, and maybe even drones.
They started at midnight, which they thought was safe enough. They were in the middle of ten thousand acres of nothingness, and the only man-made structure their side of any horizon was the railroad track to the east, but midnight was five hours after the evening train and seven hours before the morning train. Therefore, no prying eyes. Their backhoe had four spotlights on a bar above the cab, the same way kids pimped their pick-up trucks, and together the four beams made a wide pool of halogen brightness. Therefore, visibility was not a problem either. They started the hole in the hog pen, which was a permanent disturbance all by itself. Each hog weighed two hundred pounds, and each hog had four feet. The dirt was always chewed up. Nothing to see from the air, not even with a thermal camera. The picture would white out instantly, from the steaming animals themselves, and their steaming piles and pools of waste.
Safe enough.
Hogs were rooting animals, so they made sure the hole was deep. Which was not a problem either. Their backhoe's arm was long, and it bit rhythmically, in fluent articulated seven-foot scoops, the hydraulic rams glinting in the electric light, the engine straining and roaring and pausing, the cab falling and rising, as each bucketload was dumped aside. When the hole was done they backed the machine up and turned it around and used the front bucket to push Keever into his grave, scraping him, rolling him, covering his body with dirt, until finally it fell over the lip and thumped down into the electric shadows.
Only one thing went wrong, and it happened right then.
The evening train came through five hours late. The next morning they heard on the AM station that a broken locomotive had caused a jam a hundred miles south. But they didn't know that at the time. All they heard was the mournful whistle at the distant crossing, and then all they could do was turn and stare, at the long lit cars rumbling past in the middle distance, one after the other, like a vision in a dream, seemingly forever. But eventually the train was gone, and the rails sang for a minute more, and then the tail light was swallowed by the midnight darkness, and they turned back to their task.
Twenty miles north the train slowed, and slowed, and then eased to a hissing stop, and the doors sucked open, and Jack Reacher stepped down to a concrete ramp in front of a grain elevator as big as an apartment house. To his left were four more elevators, all of them bigger than the first, and to his right was an enormous metal shed the size of an airplane hangar. There were vapor lights on poles, set at regular intervals, and they cut cones of yellow in the darkness. There was mist in the nighttime air, like a note on a calendar. The end of summer was coming. Fall was on its way.
Reacher stood still and behind him the train moved away without him, straining, grinding, settling to a slow rat-a-tat rhythm, and then accelerating, its building slipstream pulling at his clothes. He was the only passenger who had gotten out. Which was not surprising. The place was no kind of a commuter hub. It was all agricultural. What token passenger facilities it had were wedged between the last elevator and the huge shed, and were limited to a compact building, which seemed to have both a ticket window and benches for waiting. It was built in a traditional railroad style, and it looked like a child's toy, temporarily set down between two shiny oil drums.
But on a sign board running its whole length was written the reason Reacher was there:
Mother's Rest
. Which he had seen on a map, and which he thought was a great name for a railroad stop. He figured the line must cross an ancient wagon train trail, right there, where something had happened long ago. Maybe a young pregnant woman went into labor. The jostling could not have helped. Maybe the wagon train stopped for a couple of weeks. Or a month. Maybe someone remembered the place years later. A descendant, perhaps. A family legend. Maybe there was a one-room museum.
Or perhaps there was a sadder interpretation. Maybe they had buried a woman there. Too old to make it. In which case there would be a commemorative stone.
Either way Reacher figured he might as well find out. He had no place to go, and all the time in the world to get there, so detours cost him nothing. Which is why he got out of the train. To a sense of disappointment, initially. His expectations had been way off base. He had pictured a couple of dusty houses, and a lonely one-horse corral. And the one-room museum, maybe run part-time and volunteer by an old guy from one of the houses. Or the headstone, maybe marble, behind a square wrought-iron fence.
He had not expected the immense agricultural infrastructure. He should have, he supposed. Grain, meet the railroad. It had to be loaded somewhere. Billions of bushels and millions of tons each year. He stepped left and looked through a gap between structures. The view was dark, but he could sense a rough semicircle of habitation. Houses, obviously, for the depot workers. He could see lights, which he hoped were a motel, or a diner, or both.
He walked to the exit, skirting the pools of vapor light purely out of habit, but he saw that the last lamp was unavoidable, because it was set directly above the exit gate. So he saved himself a further perimeter diversion by walking through the next-to-last pool of light, too.
At which point a woman stepped out of the shadows.
She came toward him with a distinctive burst of energy, two fast paces, eager, like she was pleased to see him. Her body language was all about relief.
Then it wasn't. Then it was all about disappointment. She stopped dead, and she said, “Oh.”
She was Asian. But not petite. Five-nine, maybe, or even five-ten. And built to match. Not a bone in sight. No kind of a willowy waif. She was about forty, Reacher guessed, with black hair worn long, jeans and a T-shirt under a short cotton coat. She had lace-up shoes on her feet.
He said, “Good evening, ma'am.”
She was looking past his shoulder.
He said, “I'm the only passenger.”
She looked him in the eye.
He said, “No one else got out of the train. So I guess your friend isn't coming.”
“My friend?” she said. A neutral kind of accent. Regular American. The kind he heard everywhere.
He said, “Why else would a person be here, except to meet the train? No point in coming otherwise. I guess normally there would be nothing to see at midnight.”
She didn't answer.
He said, “Don't tell me you've been waiting here since seven o'clock.”
“I didn't know the train was late,” she said. “There's no cell signal here. And no one from the railroad, to tell you anything. And I guess the Pony Express is out sick today.”
“He wasn't in my car. Or the next two, either.”
“Who wasn't?”
“Your friend.”
“You don't know what he looks like.”
“He's a big guy,” Reacher said. “That's why you jumped out when you saw me. You thought I was him. For a second, anyway. And there were no big guys in my car. Or the next two.”
“When is the next train?”
“Seven in the morning.”
She said, “Who are you and why have you come here?”
“I'm just a guy passing through.”
“The train passed through. Not you. You got out.”
“You know anything about this place?”
“Not a thing.”
“Have you seen a museum or a gravestone?”
“Why are you here?”
“Who's asking?”
She paused a beat, and said, “Nobody.”
Reacher said, “Is there a motel in town?”
“I'm staying there.”
“How is it?”
“It's a motel.”
“Works for me,” Reacher said. “Does it have vacancies?”
“I'd be amazed if it didn't.”
“OK, you can show me the way. Don't wait here all night. I'll be up by first light. I'll knock on your door as I leave. Hopefully your friend will be here in the morning.”
The woman said nothing. She just glanced at the silent rails one more time, and then turned around and led the way through the exit gate.