40
Reacher took the first sip of his coffee. It was perfect. Hot, strong, smooth, and a great mug. He looked across the table at Vaughan and said, “Thank you very much.”
She said, “What else is going on there?”
“I don’t know. But there’s a hell of a vigilante effort going on about something. After the PD ended up depopulated I went to see the local judge about getting sworn in as a deputy.”
“You weren’t serious.”
“Of course not. But I pretended I was. I wanted to see the reaction. The guy panicked. He went crazy. He said he’d deputize the whole population first. They’re totally serious about keeping strangers out.”
“Because of the military stuff.”
“No,” Reacher said. “That’s the MPs’ job. Any hint of espionage, Thurman’s people would get on the radio and the MPs would lock and load and about a minute later the whole town would be swarming with Humvees. The townspeople wouldn’t be involved.”
“So what’s going on?”
“At least two other things.”
“Why two?”
“Because their responses are completely incoherent. Which means there are at least two other factions in play, separate and probably unaware of each other. Like this morning, Thurman had me checked out. He saw that my paper trail went cold ten years ago, and therefore I was no obvious danger to him, and then he ran your plate and saw that I was in some way associated with a cop from the next town, and therefore in some way untouchable, so he played nice and gave me a guided tour. But meanwhile without all that information someone else was busy busting your windows. And nobody busts a cop’s windows for the fun of it. Therefore the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing.”
“Thurman gave you a tour?”
“He said he’d show me everything.”
“And did he?”
“No. He stayed away from the secret area. He said it was just a junkyard.”
“Are you sure it isn’t?”
“I saw activity in there earlier. Smoke and sparks. Plus it’s carefully screened off. Who does that, for a junkyard?”
“What are the two other factions?”
“I have no idea. But these young guys are involved somehow. Lucy Anderson’s husband and the dead guy. And Lucy Anderson’s husband is another example of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing. They sheltered him and moved him on but threw his wife out of town like a pariah. How much sense does that make?”
“He moved on?”
“I saw him at the rooming house at three o’clock and he was gone by seven. No trace of him, and nobody would admit he had ever been there.”
“The plane flies at seven,” Vaughan said. “Is that connected?”
“I don’t know.”
“No trace at all?”
“No physical sign, and a lot of zipped lips.”
“So what’s going on?”
“When was the last time any normal person entered Despair and stayed as long as he wanted and left of his own accord? To your certain knowledge?”
“I don’t know,” Vaughan said. “Months, certainly.”
“There was an entry in the hotel register from seven months ago.”
“That sounds about right.”
“I met the new girl last night,” Reacher said. “Sweet kid. Her name is Maria. I’m pretty sure the dead guy was her boyfriend. She showed me his picture. His name was Raphael Ramirez.”
“Did you tell her?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“She asked me if I’d seen him. Truth is, I didn’t actually see him. It was dark. And I can’t give her news like that without being completely sure.”
“So she’s still swinging in the wind.”
“I think she knows, deep down.”
“What happened to the body?”
“It didn’t go to the county morgue. I checked on that.”
“We knew that already.”
“No, we knew it didn’t go straight to the morgue. That was all. So I wondered if it had been dumped somewhere out of town and found later by someone else. But it wasn’t. Therefore it never left Despair. And the only meat wagon and the only stretcher in Despair belong to the metal plant. And the metal plant has furnaces that could vaporize a corpse in five minutes flat.”
Vaughan got up and poured herself a glass of water, from a bottle in the refrigerator. She stood with her hips against the counter and stared out the window. Her heels were on the floor but most of her weight was on her toes. Her T-shirt had one lateral wrinkle where the base of her spine met her butt. The cotton material was very slightly translucent. The light was all behind her. Her hair was dry and there was fine golden down on her neck.
She looked spectacular.
She asked, “What else did Maria say?”
Reacher said, “Nothing. I didn’t ask her anything else.”
“Why ever not?”
“No point. The wives and the girlfriends aren’t going to tell us anything. And what they do say will be misleading.”
“Why?”
“Because they’ve got a vested interest. Their husbands and their boyfriends aren’t just hiding out in Despair on their own account. They’re aiming to get help there. They’re aiming to ride some kind of an underground railroad for fugitives. Despair is a way station, in and out. The women want to keep it all secret. Lucy Anderson was OK with me until I mentioned I used to be a cop. Then she started hating me. She thought I was still a cop. She thought I was here to bust her husband.”
“What kind of fugitives?”
“I don’t know what kind. But the Anderson guy was the right kind and Raphael Ramirez was the wrong kind.”
Vaughan took Reacher’s mug from him and refilled it from the machine. Then she refilled her glass from the refrigerator and sat down and said, “May I ask you a personal question?”
Reacher said, “Feel free.”
“Why are you doing this?”
“Doing what?”
“Caring, I suppose. Caring about what’s happening in Despair. Bad stuff happens everywhere, all the time. Why does this matter to you so much?”
“I’m curious, that’s all.”
“That’s no answer.”
“I have to be somewhere, doing something.”
“That’s still no answer.”
“Maria,” Reacher said. “She’s the answer. She’s a sweet kid, and she’s hurting.”
“Her boyfriend is a fugitive from the law. You said so yourself. Maybe she deserves to be hurting. Maybe Ramirez is a dope dealer or something. Or a gang member or a murderer.”
“Ramirez looked like a harmless guy to me.”
“You can tell by looking?”
“Sometimes. Would Maria hang out with a bad guy?”
“I haven’t met her.”
“Would Lucy Anderson?”
Vaughan said nothing.
“I don’t like company towns,” Reacher said. “I don’t like feudal systems. I don’t like smug fat bosses lording it over people. And I don’t like people so broken down that they put up with it.”
“You see something you don’t like, you feel you have to tear it down?”
“Damn right I do. You got a problem with that?”
“No.”
They sat in the kitchen and drank coffee and water in silence. Vaughan took her free hand out of her lap and laid it on the table, her fingers spread and extended. They were the closest part of her to Reacher. He wondered whether it was a gesture, either conscious or subconscious. An approach, or an appeal for a connection.
No wedding band.
He’s not here right now.
He put his own free hand on the table.
She asked, “How do we know they were fugitives at all? Maybe they were undercover environmental activists, checking on the pollution. Maybe the Anderson guy fooled them and Ramirez didn’t.”
“Fooled them how?”
“I don’t know. But it worries me, if they’re using poisons over there. We share the same water table.”
“Thurman mentioned something called trichloroethylene. It’s a metal degreaser. I don’t know whether it’s dangerous or not.”
“I’m going to check it out.”
“Why would the wife of an environmental activist be scared of cops?”
“I don’t know.”
“The Anderson guy wasn’t fooling anyone. He was a guest there. They gave him a place to stay and protection. He was
helped.
”
“But Lucy Anderson wasn’t. She was thrown out.”
“Like I said, the left hand doesn’t know what the right is doing.”
“And Ramirez was killed.”
“Not killed. Left to die.”
“So why help one and shun the other?”
“Why shun him at all? Why not just round him up and dump him at the line, like they did with me and Lucy?”
Vaughan sipped her water.
“Because Ramirez was different in some way,” she said. “More specifically dangerous to them.”
“Then why not just take him out immediately? Disappear him? The end result would have been the same.”
“I don’t understand it.”
“Maybe I’m wrong,” Reacher said. “Maybe they didn’t shun him or keep him out. Maybe they never even knew he was there. Maybe he was sniffing around on the periphery, staying out of sight, trying to find a way in. Desperate enough to keep trying, not good enough to succeed.”
Vaughan took her hand off the table.
“We need to know exactly who he was,” she said. “We need to talk to Maria.”
“She won’t tell us anything.”
“We can try. We’ll find her in the diner. Meet me there, later.”
“Later than what?”
“We both need to sleep.”
Reacher said, “May I ask you a personal question?”
“Go ahead.”
“Is your husband in prison?”
Vaughan paused a beat, and then smiled, a little surprised, a little sad.
“No,” she said. “He isn’t.”
41
Reacher walked back to the motel, alone. Lucy Anderson’s door was open. A maid’s cart was parked outside. The bed was stripped and all the towels were on the floor. The closet was empty.
I think she left town,
the waitress had said, in the diner. Reacher watched for a moment and then he moved on.
Good luck, Lucky,
he thought,
whatever the hell you’re doing and wherever the hell you’re going.
He unlocked his own door and took a long hot shower and climbed into bed. He was asleep within a minute. The coffee didn’t fight him at all.
He woke up in the middle of the afternoon with the MPs on his mind. The forward operating base. Its location. Its equipment mix. The place came at him like an analysis problem from the classrooms at Fort Rucker.
What was it for?
Why was it there?
The old County Route 37 wandered east to west through Hope, through Despair, through Halfway, and presumably onward. First he saw it laid out like a ribbon, like a line on a map, and then he pictured it in his head like a rotating three-dimensional diagram, like something on a computer screen, all green webs of origins and layers. Way back in its history it had been a wagon trail. Beaten earth, crushed rock, ruts and weeds. Then it had been minimally upgraded, when Model Ts had rolled out of Dearborn and flooded the country. Then Hope Township had upgraded ten miles of it again, for the sake of civic pride. They had done a conscientious job. Maybe foundation reinforcement had been involved. Certainly there had been grading and leveling. Maybe a little straightening. Possibly a little widening. Thick blacktop had been poured and rolled.
Despair Township had done none of that. Thurman and his father and his grandfather or whoever had owned the town before had ignored the road. Maybe they had grudgingly dumped tar and pebbles on it every decade or so, but fundamentally it was still the same road it had been back when Henry Ford ruled the world. It was narrow, weak, lumpy, and meandering.
Unfit for heavy traffic.
Except west of the metal plant. There, a thirty-five-mile stretch had been co-opted and rebuilt. Probably from the ground up. Reacher pictured a yard-deep excavation, drainage, a rock foundation, a thick concrete roadbed, rebar, a four-inch asphalt layer rolled smooth and true by heavy equipment. The shoulders were straight and the camber was good. Then after thirty-five miles the new road had been driven through virgin territory to meet the Interstate, and the old Route 37 had wound onward as before, once again in its native state, narrow, weak, and lumpy.
Weak, strong, weak.
There was no military presence east of Despair or west of the fork, across the weak parts of the road.
The MP base straddled the strong part.
The truck route.
Close to Despair, but not too close.
Not sealing the town like a trap, but guarding one direction only and leaving the other wide open.
The base was equipped with six up-armored Humvees, each one an eight-ton rhinoceros, each one reasonably fast and reasonably maneuverable, each one topped with a belt-fed 7.62-caliber M60 machine gun on a free-swinging mount.
Why all that?
Reacher lay in bed and closed his eyes and heard barking voices from the Rucker classrooms:
This is what you know. What’s your conclusion?
His conclusion was that nobody was worried about espionage.
He got out of bed at four o’clock and took another long hot shower. He knew he was out of step with the Western world in terms of how often he changed his clothes, but he tried to compensate by keeping his body scrupulously clean. The motel soap was white and came in a small thin paper-wrapped morsel, and he used the whole bar. The shampoo was a thick green liquid in a small plastic bottle. He used half of it. It smelled faintly of apples. He rinsed and stood under the water for a moment more and then shut it off and heard someone knocking at his door. He wrapped a towel around his waist and padded across the room and opened up.
Vaughan.
She was in uniform. Her HPD cruiser was parked neatly behind her. She was staring in at him, openly curious. Not an unusual reaction.
Look at yourself. What do you see?
He was a spectacular meso-morph, built of nothing except large quantities of bone and sinew and muscle. But with his shirt off most people saw only his scars. He had a dozen minor nicks and cuts, plus a dimpled .38 bullet hole in the left center of his chest, and a wicked spider web of white lacerations low down on the right side of his abdomen, all criss-crossed and puckered by seventy clumsy stitches done quick and dirty in a mobile army surgical hospital. Souvenirs, in the first instance of childhood mayhem, in the second of a psychopath with a small revolver, and in the third, shrapnel from a bomb blast. Survivable, because childhood mayhem was always survivable, and because the .38 that hit him had been packed with a weak load, and because the shrapnel had been someone else’s bone, not white-hot metal. He had been a lucky man, and his luck was written all over his body.
Ugly, but fascinating.
Vaughan’s gaze traveled upward to his face.
“Bad news,” she said. “I went to the library.”
“You get bad news at libraries?”
“I looked at some books and used their computer.”
“And?”
“Trichloroethylene is called TCE for short. It’s a metal degreaser.”
“I know that.”
“It’s very dangerous. It causes cancer. Breast cancer, prostate cancer, all kinds of cancers. Plus heart disease, problems with the nervous system, strokes, liver disease, kidney disease, even diabetes. The EPA says a concentration of five parts per billion is acceptable. Some places have been measured twenty or thirty times worse than that.”
“Like where?”
“There was a case in Tennessee.”
“That’s a long way from here.”
“This is serious, Reacher.”
“People worry too much.”
“This isn’t a joke.”
He nodded.
“I know,” he said. “And Thurman uses five thousand gallons at a time.”
“And we drink the groundwater.”
“You drink bottled water.”
“Lots of people use tap.”
“The plant is twenty miles away. There’s a lot of sand. A lot of natural filtration.”
“It’s still a concern.”
Reacher nodded. “Tell me about it. I had two cups of coffee right there. One in the restaurant and one at the judge’s house.”
“You feel OK?”
“Fine. And people seem OK here.”
“So far.”
She went quiet.
He said, “What else?”
“Maria is missing. I can’t find her anywhere. The new girl.”