Never Go Back

THIRTY-TWO

The café was a rural greasy spoon as perfect as anything Reacher had ever seen. It had a black guy in a white undershirt next to a lard-slick griddle three feet deep and six feet wide. It had battered pine tables and mismatched chairs. It smelled of old grease and fresh coffee. It had two ancient white men in seed caps, one of them sitting way to the left of the door, the other way to the right. Maybe they didn’t get along. Maybe they were victims of a feud three hundred years old.

Turner chose a table in the middle of the room, and they rattled the chairs out over the board floor, and they sat down. There were no menus. No chalkboards with handwritten lists of daily specials. It wasn’t that kind of a place. Ordering was clearly telepathic between the cook and his regular customers. For new customers, it was going to be a matter of asking out loud, plain and simple. Which the cook confirmed, by raising his chin and rotating his head a little, so that his right ear was presented to the room.

‘Omelette,’ Turner said. ‘Mushrooms, spring onions and cheddar cheese.’

No reaction from the cook.

None at all.

Turner said it again, a little louder.

Still no reaction. No movement. Just total stillness, and a raised chin, and an averted gaze, and a dignified and implacable silence, like a veteran salesman insulted by a counter-offer. Turner looked at Reacher and whispered, ‘What’s with this place?’

‘You’re a detective,’ Reacher said. ‘You see any sign of an omelette pan up there?’

‘No, I guess not. All I see is a griddle.’

‘So probably the best way to get some enthusiasm out of this guy would be to order something griddle-related.’

Turner paused a beat.

Then she said, ‘Two eggs over easy on a fried biscuit with bacon on the side.’

The cook said, ‘Yes, ma’am.’

‘Same for me,’ Reacher said. ‘And coffee.’

‘Yes, sir.’ And immediately the guy turned away and got to work with a wedge of new lard and a blade, planing the metal surface, smoothing it, three feet out and three feet back, and six feet side to side. Which made him a griddle man at heart. In Reacher’s experience such guys were either griddle men or owners, but never really both. A griddle man’s first instinct was to tend the metal, working it until it was glassy down at a molecular level, so slick it would make Teflon feel like sandpaper. Whereas an owner’s first instinct would have been to bring the coffee. Because the first cup of coffee seals the deal. A customer isn’t committed until he has consumed something. He can still get up and walk away, if he’s dissatisfied with the wait, or if he remembers an urgent appointment. But not if he’s already started in on his first cup of coffee. Because then he would have to throw some money down, and who really knows what a cup of diner coffee costs? Fifty cents? A dollar? Two dollars?

‘OK, we’ve ordered,’ Turner said. ‘So what do you have to tell me?’

‘Let’s wait for the coffee,’ Reacher said. ‘I don’t want to be interrupted.’

‘Then I have a couple of things,’ she said. ‘I want to know more about this guy Morgan, for instance. I want to know who’s got his hands on my unit.’

‘My unit too,’ Reacher said. ‘I always assumed I’d be its worstever commander, but I guess I’m not. Your guys in Afghanistan missed two consecutive radio checks, and he did nothing about it.’

‘Do we know where he’s from?’

‘No idea.’

‘Is he one of them?’

‘Hard to say. Obviously the unit needed a temporary commander. That’s not proof of guilt in itself.’

‘And how would recalling you to service fit their game plan? Surely they would want to get rid of you, not keep you close at hand.’

‘I think it was all supposed to make me run. Which I could have. I could have gone permanently AWOL. They made a big point of saying no one would come after me. No skip tracers. Like a one-two punch, with the Big Dog affidavit. A charge I can’t beat, and a mandate to stick around to face it. I think most guys in my situation would have headed for the hills at that point. I think that was their expectation, strategically. But it didn’t work.’

‘Because when a monster comes up out of the slime, you have to fight it.’

‘Or it could have been a JAG order, simple as that. There might have been a sidebar on the file, saying that if I didn’t cooperate, then I had to be nailed down. Because of some kind of political sensitivity, in the Secretary’s office. Certainly it wasn’t Morgan’s own decision. A light colonel doesn’t decide shit like that. It had to come from a higher level.’

‘From very senior staff officers.’

‘Agreed, but which ones, exactly?’

Turner didn’t answer that. The griddle man brought the coffee, finally. Two large pottery mugs, and a little pink plastic basket full of creamer pots and sugar packets, and two spoons pressed out of metal so thin they felt weightless. Reacher took a mug and sniffed the steam and tried a sip. The mug’s rim was cold and thick, but the coffee was adequate. Hot, and not too weak.

He put the mug back down on the table and linked his hands around it, as if he was protecting it, and he looked at Turner, right in the eye, and he said, ‘So.’

She said, ‘One more thing. And it’s going to be tough to say. So I’m sorry.’

‘What is it?’

‘I shouldn’t have asked about one room or two.’

‘I didn’t mind.’

‘But I did. I’m not sure I’m ready for one room yet. I feel like I owe you. For what you’ve done for me today. I don’t think that’s a good state of mind to be in, under those circumstances. The one-room type of circumstances, I mean.’

‘You don’t owe me anything. I had purely selfish motivations. I wanted to take you out to dinner. Which I’m right now in the middle of doing, I guess. In a way. Perhaps not as planned. But whatever, I got what I wanted. Anything else is collateral damage. So you don’t owe me shit.’

Turner said, ‘I feel unsettled.’

‘You just got arrested and broke out of jail. And now you’re running for your life and stealing cars and money.’

‘No, it’s because of you.’

‘Why?’

‘You make me feel uncomfortable.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Not your fault,’ she said. ‘It’s just the way you are.’

‘And what way is that?’

‘I don’t want to hurt your feelings.’

‘You can’t,’ Reacher said. ‘I’m a military cop. And a man. I have no feelings.’

‘That’s what I mean.’

‘I was kidding.’

‘No, you weren’t. Not entirely.’

She paused a long moment.

Then she said, ‘You’re like something feral.’

Reacher said nothing in reply to that. Feral, from the Latin adjective ferus, wild, via bestia fera, wild animal. Generally held to mean having escaped from domestication, and having devolved back to a natural state.

Turner said, ‘It’s like you’ve been sanded down to nothing but yes and no, and you and them, and black and white, and live or die. It makes me wonder, what does that to a person?’

‘Life,’ Reacher said. ‘Mine, anyway.’

‘You’re like a predator. Cold, and hard. Like this whole thing. You have it all mapped out. The four guys in the car, and their bosses. You’re swimming towards them, right now, and there’s going to be blood in the water. Yours or theirs, but there’s going to be blood.’

‘Right now I hope I’m swimming away from them. And I don’t even know who they are or where they are.’

‘But you will. You’re thinking about it all the time. I can see you doing it. You’re worrying away at it, trying to catch the scent.’

‘What else should I do? Buy us bus tickets straight to Leavenworth?’

‘Is that the only alternative?’

‘What do you think?’

She took her first sip of coffee, slow and contemplative. She said, ‘I agree with you. And that’s the problem, right there. That’s what’s making me uncomfortable. I’m just like you. Except not yet. And that’s the point. Looking at you is like looking into the future. You’re what I’m going to be one day. When I’m all sanded down too.’

‘So I’m too similar? Most women say no because I’m too different.’

‘You scare me. Or the prospect of becoming you scares me. I’m not sure I’m ready for that. I’m not sure I ever will be.’

‘Doesn’t have to happen. This is a bump in the road. You’ll still have a career.’

‘If we win.’

‘We will.’

‘So best case, I step off the path to stay on it. Worst case, I’m off it for ever.’

‘No, worst case is you’re dead or locked up. Worst case is the wrong guys win.’

‘It’s always win or lose with you, isn’t it?’

‘Is there a third option?’

‘Does it burn you up to lose?’

‘Of course.’

‘It’s a kind of paralysing arrogance. Normal people don’t get all burned up if they lose.’

‘Maybe they should,’ Reacher said. ‘But you’re not really like me. You’re not looking at yourself when you look at me. That’s why I came all this way. You’re a better version. That’s what I sensed on the phone. You’re doing it the way it should be done.’

‘Doing what?’

‘Everything. Your job. Your life. Being a person.’

‘Doesn’t feel that way. Not right now. And don’t think of me like a better version. If I can’t look at you and see what’s going to be, you can’t look at me and see what should have been.’

Then the griddle man came back, this time with plates full of eggs and bacon and fried biscuits, all of which looked good, and all of which looked perfectly cooked. The eggs had clean, crisp edges. Clearly the guy cared for his metal well. After he was gone again Turner said, ‘This is all assuming you have a definite preference, that is, one way or the other, about the number of rooms.’

Reacher said, ‘Honest answer?’

‘Of course.’

‘I do have a definite preference.’

‘For?’

‘I have to tell you my thing first.’

‘Which is?’

‘The other item designed to make me run.’

‘Which was?’

‘A paternity suit,’ Reacher said. ‘Apparently I have a daughter in Los Angeles. By a woman I can’t remember.’