Never Go Back

SEVEN

Getting out of the Joint Base was only marginally quicker than getting in. Each of the three guard shacks checked ID and conducted a trunk search, to make sure Reacher was who he said he was, and hadn’t stolen anything. Then after clearing the last of the barriers he threaded his way along the same route the local bus had taken. But he stopped early, and pulled in at the kerb. There were plenty of highway ramps all around. There was I-395, spearing south and west. There was the George Washington Memorial Parkway, heading north and west. There was I-66, heading due west. There was I-395 going east, if he wanted it. All of them quiet and flowing fast. There was a big country out there. There was I-95, all the way up and down the eastern seaboard, and the West Coast, five days away, and the vast interior, empty and lonely.

They couldn’t find you before. They won’t find you now.

A new discharge, this time without honour.

She doesn’t want to see you.

Reacher moved off the kerb and drove back to the motel.

The two guys with the T-shirts were gone. Evidently they had gotten up and staggered off somewhere. Reacher left their car on the kerb two hundred yards away. He left the key in the ignition and the doors unlocked. Either it would be stolen by a couple of punks, or the two guys would come back to get it. He really didn’t care which.

He walked the last of the distance and let himself into his dismal room. He had been right. The shower was weak and strangled, and the towels were thin, and the soap was small, and the shampoo was cheap. But he cleaned up as well as he could, and then he went to bed. The mattress felt like a sack stuffed with balled-up plastic, and the sheets felt damp with disuse. But he fell asleep just fine. He set the alarm in his head for seven, and he breathed in, and he breathed out, and that was it.

Romeo dialled Juliet again and said, ‘He just tried to make contact with Turner over at Dyer. And failed, of course.’

Juliet said, ‘Our boys must have missed him at the motel.’

‘Nothing to worry about.’

‘I hope not.’

‘Goodnight.’

‘Yes, you too.’

Reacher didn’t make it to seven o’clock. He was woken at six, by a brisk tap at the door. It sounded businesslike. Not threatening. Tap, tap, tappity tap. Six o’clock in the morning, and someone was already cheerful. He slid out of bed and hauled his pants out from under the mattress and put them on. The air in the room was sharp with cold. He could see his breath. The heater had been off all night.

He padded barefoot across the sticky carpet and opened the door. A gloved hand that had been ready to tap again was pulled back quickly. The hand was attached to an arm, which was attached to a body, which was in a Class A army uniform, with JAG Corps insignia all over it. A lawyer.

A woman lawyer.

According to the plate on the right side of her tunic her name was Sullivan. She was wearing the uniform like a business suit. She had a briefcase in her non-tapping hand. She didn’t say anything. She wasn’t particularly short, but her eye line was level with Reacher’s shirtless chest, where there was an old .38 bullet wound, which seemed to preoccupy her.

Reacher said, ‘Yes?’

Her car was behind her, a dark-green domestic sedan. The sky was still black.

She said, ‘Major Reacher?’

She was in her mid-thirties, Reacher guessed, a major herself, with short dark hair and eyes that were neither warm nor cold. He said, ‘How can I help you?’

‘It’s supposed to be the other way around.’

‘You’ve been assigned to represent me?’

‘For my sins.’

‘For the recall appeal or the Juan Rodriguez thing or the Candice Dayton thing?’

‘Forget the recall appeal. You’ll get five minutes in front of a panel about a month from now, but you won’t win. That never happens.’

‘So Rodriguez or Dayton?’

‘Rodriguez,’ Sullivan said. ‘We need to get right to it.’ But she didn’t move. Her gaze traced its way downward, to his waist, where there was another scar, by that point more than a quarter century old, a big ugly white starfish overlaid by crude stitches, cut through by a knife wound, which was much more recent, but still old.

‘I know,’ he said. ‘Aesthetically I’m a mess. But come in anyway.’

She said, ‘No, I think I’ll wait in the car. We’ll talk over breakfast.’

‘Where?’

‘There’s a diner two blocks away.’

‘You paying?’

‘For myself. Not for you.’

‘Two blocks away? You could have brought coffee.’

‘Could have, but didn’t.’

‘Some big help you’re going to be. Give me eleven minutes.’

‘Eleven?’

‘That’s how long it takes me to get ready in the morning.’

‘Most people would say ten.’

‘Then either they’re faster than me or imprecise.’ He closed the door on her and padded back to the bed and took his pants off again. They looked OK. Laying them out under the mattress was as close as he ever got to ironing. He walked on to the bathroom and set the shower running. He cleaned his teeth and climbed under the weak lukewarm stream and used what was left of the soap and shampoo. He dried himself with damp towels and dressed and stepped out to the lot. Eleven minutes, dead on. He was a creature of habit.

Major Sullivan had turned her car around. It was a Ford, the same model as the silver item that had driven him across Missouri many days before. He opened the passenger door and climbed in. Sullivan sat up straight and put the car in gear and eased out of the lot, slow and cautious. Her uniform skirt was at her knee. She was wearing dark nylons and plain black lace-up shoes.

Reacher asked, ‘What’s your name?’

Sullivan said, ‘You can read, I presume.’

‘First name, I mean.’

‘Does it matter? You’re going to call me Major Sullivan.’ She said it in a way that was neither friendly nor unfriendly. Nor unexpected. A personal relationship was not on the agenda. Army defence lawyers were diligent, intelligent and professional, but they were on nobody’s side but the army’s.

The diner was indeed two blocks away, but the blocks were long. A left, and then a right, and then a ragged strip mall, on the shoulder of another three-lane road. The mall featured a hardware store, and a no-name pharmacy, and a picture-framing shop, and a gun store, and a walk-in dentist. The diner stood alone at the end of the strip, in its own lot. It was a white stucco affair with the kind of inside decor that made Reacher bet the owner was Greek and there would be a million items on the menu. Which made it a restaurant, in his opinion, not a diner. Diners were lean, mean, stripped-down places, as ruthless as combat rifles.

They took a booth in a side wing, and a waitress brought coffee before being asked, which raised Reacher’s opinion of the place a little. The menu was a multi-page laminated thing almost as big as the tabletop. Reacher saw pancakes and eggs on page two, and investigated no further.

Sullivan said, ‘I’m recommending a plea bargain. They’ll ask for five years and we’ll offer one and settle on two. You can do that. Two years won’t kill you.’

Reacher said, ‘Who was Candice Dayton?’

‘Not my case. Someone else will talk to you about that.’

‘And who was Juan Rodriguez exactly?’

‘Someone you hit in the head who died from his injuries.’

‘I don’t remember him.’

‘That’s not the best thing to say in a case like this. It makes it sound like you hit so many people in the head that you can’t distinguish one from the other. It might prompt further inquiries. Someone might be tempted to draw up a list. And from what I hear it might be a very long list. The 110th was pretty much a rogue operation back then.’

‘And what is it now?’

‘A little better, perhaps. But far from outstanding.’

‘That’s your opinion?’

‘That’s my experience.’

‘Do you know anything about Susan Turner’s situation?’

‘I know her lawyer.’

‘And?’

‘She took a bribe.’

‘Do we know that for sure?’

‘There’s enough electronic data to float a battleship. She opened a bank account in the Cayman Islands at ten o’clock in the morning the day before yesterday, and at eleven o’clock a hundred thousand dollars showed up in it, and then she was arrested at twelve o’clock, more or less red-handed. Seems fairly open and shut to me. And fairly typical of the 110th.’

‘Sounds like you don’t love my old unit, overall. Which might be a problem. Because I’m entitled to a competent defence. Sixth Amendment, and so on. Do you think you’re the right person for the job?’

‘I’m what they’re giving you, so get used to it.’

‘I should see the evidence against me, at least. Don’t you think? Isn’t there something in the Sixth Amendment about that too?’

‘You didn’t do much paperwork sixteen years ago.’

‘We did some.’

‘I know,’ Sullivan said. ‘I’ve seen what there is of it. Among other things you did daily summaries. I have one that shows you heading out for an interview with Mr Rodriguez. Then I have a document from a county hospital ER showing his admission later the same day, for a head injury, among other things.’

‘And that’s it? Where’s the connection? He could have fallen down the stairs after I left. He could have been hit by a truck.’

‘The ER doctors thought he had been.’

‘That’s a weak case,’ Reacher said. ‘In fact it’s not really a case at all. I don’t remember anything about it.’

‘Yet you remember some stairs that Mr Rodriguez might have fallen down after your interview.’

‘Speculation,’ Reacher said. ‘Hypothesis. Figure of speech. Same as the truck. They’ve got nothing.’

‘They have an affidavit,’ Sullivan said. ‘Sworn out by Mr Rodriguez himself, some time later. He names you as his attacker.’