Never Go Back

FIFTY-EIGHT

Sullivan said, ‘Someone really went to bat for you. You must have been very well respected, major. It wasn’t a class action thing. There was no new policy regarding ambulance chasers. This was all about you. Someone wanted to clear your name.’

‘Who?’

‘The hard work was done by a captain from the 135th MP, name of Granger.’

‘Man or woman?’

‘A man, based on the West Coast. Don Granger.’

‘Never heard of him.’

‘All his notes were copied to an MP two-star, name of Garber.’

‘Leon Garber,’ Reacher said. ‘He was my rabbi, more or less. I owe him a lot. Even more than I thought, clearly.’

‘I guess so. He must have driven the whole thing. And you must have been his blue-eyed boy, because this was one hell of a full court press. But you owe Granger, too. He worked his butt off for you, and he saw something everyone else missed.’

‘What was the story?’

‘You guys generate a lot of complaints. Your branch’s standard operating procedure is play dumb and hope they go away, which they often do, but if they don’t, then they’re defended, with historically mixed results. That’s how it went for many years. Then the ones that went away started to cause a problem, ironically. You all had old unproven allegations on file. Most of them were obvious bullshit, quite rightly ignored, but some were marginal. And promotions boards saw them. And they started wondering about smoke without fire, and people weren’t getting ahead, and it became an issue. And the Big Dog’s complaint was worse than most. I guess General Garber felt it was too toxic to ignore, even if it might have gone away by itself. He didn’t want to leave it sitting there on the record. It was way too smoky.’

‘He could have asked me about it direct.’

‘Granger asked him why he didn’t.’

‘And what was the answer?’

‘Garber thought you might have done it. But he didn’t want to hear it direct.’

‘Really?’

‘He thought you might have gotten upset at the thought of SAWs on the streets of Los Angeles.’

‘That was the LAPD’s problem, not mine. All I wanted was a name.’

‘Which you got, and he didn’t really see how else you could have gotten it.’

‘He didn’t talk to me afterwards, either.’

‘He was afraid you’d stop by and put a bullet in the lawyer’s head.’

‘I might have.’

‘Then Garber was a wise man. His strategy was immaculate. He put Granger on it, and the first thing Granger didn’t like was the Big Dog, and the second thing he didn’t like was the lawyer. But there were no cracks anywhere, and he knew you had been with the guy moments before he was beaten, and the affidavit was what it was, so he was stuck. He came up with the same thing you did, which was some other dude did it, or dudes, maybe a delegation sent over by a disgruntled customer, which in that context meant a gang, either Latino like Rodriguez or black, but he didn’t make any progress on his own. So next he went to the LAPD, but the cops had nothing to offer, either. Which Granger didn’t necessarily regard as definitive, because at the relevant time the cops had been up to their eyes in racial sensitivity issues, like the LAPD often was back then, and they were nervous about discussing gangs with a stranger, in case the stranger was really a journalist who believed gang issues were code words for racial insensitivity. So Granger went back to the gang idea on his own, and he checked the record for who had been armed and dangerous at the time, as a kind of starting point, and he found no one had been armed and dangerous at the time. There was a seventy-two-hour period without a single gang crime reported anywhere. So initially Granger concluded gangs were on the wane in LA, and he better look elsewhere, but he had no luck, and Garber was ready to pull him out. Then Granger saw what he was missing.’

From her pillow Turner said, ‘The seventy-two-hour hiatus was because the LAPD trashed all the gang crime reports. Probably on the advice of their PR people. Not because nothing was happening.’

‘Correct, major,’ Sullivan said. ‘But the patrolmen’s notebooks still had all the details. Granger got some lieutenant backed up in a corner, and the true story came out, which was bizarre. About twenty minutes after Reacher left, five black guys from El Segundo showed up and started beating the Big Dog in his own front yard. A neighbour called it in, and the LAPD showed up, and they witnessed about a minute of the beating, and then they got themselves in gear and arrested the guys from El Segundo, and it was the patrolmen themselves who took the Big Dog to the hospital. But there had been a degree of excessive force in the arrests, and a number of serious injuries, so the report was reviewed, and then word came down to bury anything that wasn’t totally kosher, and the precinct captains erred on the side of caution, and they buried everything. Or maybe it wasn’t caution. Maybe there was nothing kosher.’

Reacher said, ‘So I’m in an affidavit for a beating, but the LAPD actually saw someone else doing it?’

‘Granger got photocopies of their notebooks. They’re all in our archives.’

‘That’s some ballsy lawyer the Big Dog found.’

‘Worse than you think. Plan A was jump on the bandwagon and sue the LAPD itself. Why not? Everyone else was. Granger was snooping the lawyer’s office one night, on Ventura Boulevard, and he found a draft affidavit identical to yours, except it had the LAPD all over it, instead of you. But ironically that couldn’t fly, because the LAPD could prove for a fact it hadn’t been in the neighbourhood that day, because all its records were doctored, so as soon as that little wrinkle sunk in, the lawyer switched to Plan B, which was the army. Which is of course fraudulent and criminal, but the reasoning was very solid. Ever afterwards the LAPD could never admit they trashed crime reports for political convenience, so the lawyer was guaranteed absolute silence from that direction. And the Big Dog wanted a big payday, and the guys from El Segundo had no traceable assets, so Uncle Sam was the next best thing.’

‘How did Granger wrap it up?’

‘He had to thread the needle, because he didn’t want to embarrass the LAPD in public. But he knew a JAG guy who knew a guy in the Bar Association, and between them they put some professional hurt on the lawyer. Granger made him write out another affidavit, swearing the first one was fraudulent, which he personally witnessed, and which, by the way, is still in the archive one slot away from where the phony one was. And then Granger split the lawyer’s lip.’

‘He put that in the archive too?’

‘Apparently he was defending himself against an unprovoked attack.’

‘That can happen. How is Colonel Moorcroft doing?’

‘He’s out of danger, but not good.’

‘Give him my best, if you get the chance. And thanks for your efforts tonight.’

Sullivan said, ‘I owe you an apology, major.’

Reacher said, ‘No, you don’t.’

‘Thank you. But you still owe me thirty dollars.’

Reacher pictured Turner in his mind, in Berryville, Virginia, after the hardware store, in her new pants, with his shirt ballooning around her, its tail touching the backs of her knees. He said, ‘They were the best thirty dollars I ever had.’

They celebrated the best way they knew how, and then it was too late to go back to sleep, so they got up and showered, and Turner said, ‘How does it feel?’

‘No different,’ Reacher said.

‘Why not?’

‘I knew I didn’t do it, so it contributed no new information, and it brought no relief, because I wasn’t upset to begin with, because I don’t care what people think.’

‘Even me?’

‘You knew I didn’t do it. Like I knew you didn’t take a hundred grand.’

‘I’m glad she apologized. It was very courteous of you to say she didn’t need to.’

‘It wasn’t courtesy,’ Reacher said. ‘It was a statement of fact. She really didn’t need to apologize. Because her initial prejudice was correct. And I shouldn’t have said I didn’t do it, because I almost did. I was a minute away from making every word of that affidavit true. Not because of SAWs on the streets of Los Angeles. I wasn’t worried about them. It takes a lot of strength and training to use one right. And maintenance. The squad machine gun goes to your best guy, not your worst, and are there guys like that on the streets of Los Angeles? I didn’t think so. I figured the SAWs would fire once and end up as boat anchors. Nothing to get upset about there. It was the other stuff that upset me. Claymore mines, and hand grenades. No expertise required. But lots of collateral damage, in an urban situation. Innocent passers-by, and children. And that sneering tub of lard was making a fortune, and spending it all on dope and hookers and twenty Big Macs a day.’

Turner said, ‘Let’s go get breakfast. And let’s not come back here. Authenticity is losing its charm.’

They put their toothbrushes in their pockets, and they put on their coats, and they headed out to the lot. The street lights were still brighter than the sky. The car was where they had left it, five rooms away.

There was something written on it.

It was written in the grime on the front passenger’s window. Someone had used a broad fingertip and traced three words, a total of thirteen letters, all of them block capitals, neatly, with the punctuation all present and correct: WHERE’S THE GIRL?