Never Go Back

THIRTY-THREE

Reacher talked, and Turner ate. He told her the things he had been told. Red Cloud, between Seoul and the DMZ, and Candice Dayton, and her diary, and her home in LA, and her homelessness in LA, and her daughter, and her car, and her visit with a lawyer.

Turner asked, ‘What’s the kid’s name?’

‘Samantha,’ Reacher said. ‘Sam for short, presumably.’

‘How old is she?’

‘Fourteen. Nearly fifteen.’

‘How do you feel?’

‘Bad. If she’s mine, I should have been there for her.’

‘You really don’t remember her mother?’

‘No, I really don’t.’

‘Is that normal for you?’

‘You mean, exactly how feral am I?’

‘I suppose.’

‘I don’t think I forget people. I hope I don’t. Especially women I sleep with. But if I did, I would be unaware of it, by definition. You can’t be aware of forgetting.’

‘Is this why we’re going to Los Angeles?’

‘I have to know,’ Reacher said.

‘But it’s suicide. They’ll all be waiting for you there. It’s the one place they can be sure you’ll go.’

‘I have to know,’ Reacher said again.

Turner said nothing.

Reacher said, ‘Anyway, that’s the story. That’s what I had to tell you. In the interests of full disclosure. In case it had a bearing. On the rooms issue, for instance.’

Turner didn’t answer.

They finished up, and they got their check, which was for a total represented by a scrawled figure circled beneath three scribbled lines. How much was a cup of diner coffee? No one knew, because no one ever found out. Maybe it was free. Maybe it had to be, because the composite total was modest. Reacher had thirteen dollars and thirty-two cents in his pocket, which was Sullivan’s surviving eighty cents plus the change he had gotten in the gas station hut, and he left all of it on the table, thereby including a handsome tip. A guy who worked a hot griddle all night deserved no less.

The car was where they had left it, unmolested, not surrounded by searchlights and SWAT teams. Far to their left the state police barracks looked quiet. The cruisers out front had not moved. The warm lights were still showing in the windows.

‘Stay or go?’ Turner asked.

‘Stay,’ Reacher said. ‘This place is as good as any. As weird as that sounds, with the troopers right here. It’s not going to get better than this. Not until it’s over.’

‘Not until we win, you mean.’

‘Same thing.’

They eased themselves into the Corvette’s low seats, and Turner fired it up and drove back to the motel. She stopped outside the office.

‘I’ll wait here,’ she said. ‘You go do it.’

‘OK,’ he said.

He took a fistful of twenties from one of Billy Bob’s bricks.

‘Two rooms,’ she said.

The night clerk was asleep in his chair, but it didn’t take much to wake him up. The sound of the door did half the job, and a polite tap from Reacher’s knuckles on the counter did the rest. The guy was young. Maybe it was a family business. Maybe this was a son or a nephew.

‘Got two rooms?’ Reacher asked him.

The guy made a big show of checking on a computer screen, like many such guys do, which Reacher thought was dumb. They weren’t the worldwide heads of global operations for giant hotel corporations. They were in motels with rooms they could count on their fingers and toes. If they lost track, then surely all they had to do was turn around and check the keys hanging on the hooks behind them.

The guy looked up from the screen and said, ‘Yes, sir, I can do that.’

‘How much?’

‘Thirty dollars per room per night. With a voucher included, for breakfast at the café across the street.’

‘Deal,’ Reacher said, and he swapped three of Billy Bob’s twenties for two of the young guy’s keys. Rooms eleven and twelve. Adjacent. A kindness, on the young guy’s part. Easier for the maid in the morning. Less distance to push her heavy cart.

‘Thank you,’ Reacher said.

He went out to the car, and Turner drove around to the rear of the compound, where she found a patch of lumpy winter grass behind the last of the buildings. She eased the car up on to it, and they raised the top, and they locked it up for the night, and they left it there, not visible from the street.

They walked back together and found their rooms, which were on the second floor, up an exterior flight of concrete stairs. Reacher gave Turner the key to eleven, and kept twelve for himself. She said, ‘What time tomorrow?’

‘Noon,’ he said. ‘And I’ll drive some, if you like.’

‘We’ll see. Sleep well.’

‘You too.’

He waited until she was safely inside before he opened his door. The room behind it was a concrete box with a popcorn ceiling and vinyl wallpaper. Better than the place a mile from Rock Creek, but only by degrees. The heater was quieter, but far from silent. The carpet was cleaner, but not by much. As was the bedspread. The shower looked reasonable, and the towels were thin but not transparent. The soap and the shampoo were dressed up with a brand name that sounded like a firm of old Boston lawyers. The furniture was made of pale wood, and the television set was a small off-brand flat-screen, about the size of a carry-on suitcase. There was no telephone. No minibar refrigerator, no free bottle of water, no chocolate on the pillow.

He turned on the television and found CNN and watched the ticker at the bottom of the screen, all the way through a full cycle. There was no mention of two fugitives fleeing an army facility in Virginia. So he headed for the bathroom and started the shower and stood under it, aimlessly, long after the soap he had used was rinsed away. Fragments of the conversation over the scarred café table came back to him, unstoppably. You’re like something feral, she had said. You’re like a predator. Cold, and hard.

But in the end the line that stuck was from earlier in the exchange. Turner had asked about Morgan, and he had told her, Your guys in Afghanistan missed two consecutive radio checks, and he did nothing about it. He went over and over it, sounding the words in his head, moving his lips, saying it out loud, breaking it down, sputtering each phrase into the beating water, examining each separate clause in detail.

Your guys in Afghanistan.

Missed two consecutive radio checks.

And he did nothing about it.

He shut off the water and got out of the tub and grabbed a towel. Then, still damp, he put his pants back on, and one of his T-shirts, and he stepped out to the upstairs walkway. He padded barefoot through the cold night air, to room eleven’s door.

He knocked.