Nothing to Lose

35

The MPs were all asleep, except for two on sentry duty inside the guard shack. Reacher saw them as he drove past, bulky figures in the gloom, dressed in desert camos and vests, MP brassards, no helmets. They had an orange nightlight burning near the floor, to preserve their night vision. They were standing back to back, one watching the southern approach, one the northern. Reacher slowed and waved, and then hit the gas again and kept on going.

Thirty miles later the solid truck road swung sharply to the right and speared north through the darkness toward the distant Interstate. But the old route it must have been built over meandered on straight ahead, unsignposted and apparently aimless. Reacher followed it. He bumped down off the flat coarse blacktop onto a surface as bad as Despair’s own road. Lumpy, uneven, cheaply top-dressed with gravel on tar. He followed it between two ruined farms and entered an empty spectral world with nothing on his left and nothing on his right and nothing ahead of him except the wandering gray ribbon of road and the silver moonlit mountains remote in the distance. Nothing happened for four more miles. He seemed to make no progress at all through the landscape. Then he passed a lone roadside sign that said:Halfway County Route 37. A mile later he saw a glow in the air. He came up a long rise and the road peaked and fell away into the middle distance and suddenly laid out right in front of him was a neat checkerboard of lit streets and pale buildings. Another mile later he passed a sign that said:Halfway Township. He slowed and checked his mirrors and pulled to the shoulder and stopped.

The town in front of him was aptly named. Another trick of topography put the moonlit Rockies closer again. The hardy souls who had struggled onward from Despair had been rewarded for forty miles of actual travel with an apparent hundred miles of progress. But by then they would have been wise enough and bitter enough not to get carried away with enthusiasm, so they had given their next resting place the suitably cautious name of Halfway, perhaps secretly hoping that their unassuming modesty would be further rewarded by finding out that they were in fact more than halfway there.Which they weren’t, Reacher thought. Forty miles was forty miles, optical illusions notwithstanding. They were only a fifth of the way there. But the wagons had rolled out of Despair with only the optimists aboard, and the town of Halfway reflected their founding spirit. The place looked crisp and bright and livelier in the dead of night than Despair had in the middle of the day. It had been rebuilt, perhaps several times. There was nothing ancient visible. The structures Reacher could make out seemed to be seventies’ stucco and eighties’ glass, not nineteenth-century brick. In the age of fast transportation there was no real reason why one nearby town rather than another should be chosen for investment and development, except for inherited traits of vibrancy and vigor. Despair had suffered and Halfway had prospered, and the optimists had won, like they sometimes deserved to.

Reacher coasted down the rise into town. It was a quarter past three in the morning. Plenty of places were lit up but not many were actually open. A gas station and a coffee shop was about all, at first sight. But the town and the county shared the same name, which in Reacher’s experience implied that certain services would be available around the clock. County police, for instance. They would have a station somewhere, manned all night. There would be a hospital, too, with a 24-7 emergency room. And to serve the gray area in between, where perhaps the county police were interested and the emergency room had failed, there would be a morgue. And it would be open for business night and day. A county town with a cluster of dependent municipalities all around it had to provide essential services. There was no morgue in Hope or Despair.Not even a meat locker, Vaughan had said, and presumably other local towns were in the same situation. And shit happened, and ambulances had to go somewhere. Dead folks couldn’t be left out in the street until the next business day. Usually.

Morgues were normally close to hospitals, and a redeveloped county seat would normally have a new hospital, and new hospitals were normally built on the outskirts of towns, where land was empty and available and cheap. Halfway had one road in from the east, and a spider web of four roads out north and west, and Reacher found the hospital a half mile out on the second exit road he tried. It was a place the size of a university campus, long, low, and deep, with buildings like elongated ski chalets. It looked calm and friendly, like sickness and death were really no big deal. It had a vast parking lot, empty except for a cluster of battered cars near a staff entrance and a lone shiny sedan in a section marked off with ferocious warning signs:MD Parking Only. Steam drifted from vents from a building in back. The laundry, Reacher guessed, where sheets and towels were being washed overnight by the drivers of the battered cars, while the guy from the shiny sedan tried to keep people alive long enough to use them in the morning.

He avoided the front entrances. He wanted dead people, not sick people, and he knew how to find them. He had visited more morgues than wards in his life, by an order of magnitude. Morgues were usually well hidden from the public. A sensitivity issue. They were often not signposted at all, or else labeled something anodyne likeSpecial Services. But they were always accessible. Meat wagons had to be able to roll in and out unobstructed.

He found Halfway’s county morgue in back, next to the hospital laundry, which he thought was a smart design. The laundry’s drifting steam would camouflage the output of the morgue’s crematorium chimney. The place was another low, wide, chalet-style building. It had a high steel fence, and a sliding gate, and a guard shack.

The fence was solid, and the gate was closed, and there was a guard in the shack.

Reacher parked off to one side and climbed out of the truck and stretched. The guard watched him do it. Reacher finished stretching and glanced around like he was getting his bearings and then headed straight for the shack. The guard slid back the bottom part of his window and ducked his head down, like he needed to line up his ears with the empty space to hear properly. He was a middle-aged guy, lean, probably competent but not ambitious. He was a rent-a-cop. He was wearing a dark generic uniform with a molded plastic shield like something from a toy store. It saidSecurity on it. Nothing more. It could have done double duty at an outlet mall. Maybe it did. Maybe the guy worked two jobs, to make ends meet.

Reacher ducked his own head toward the open section of window and said, “I need to check some details on the guy Despair brought in yesterday morning.”

The guard said, “The attendants are inside.”

Reacher nodded as if he had received new and valuable information and waited for the guy to hit the button that would slide the gate.

The guy didn’t move.

Reacher asked, “Were you here yesterday morning?”

The guard said, “Everything after midnight is morning.”

“This would have been daylight hours.”

The guard said, “Not me, then. I get off at six.”

Reacher said, “So can you let me through? To ask the attendants?”

“They change at six, too.”

“They’ll have paperwork in there.”

The guard said, “I can’t.”

“Can’t what?”

“Can’t let you through. Law enforcement personnel only. Or paramedics with a fresh one.”

Reacher said, “I am law enforcement. I’m with the Despair PD. We need to check something.”

“I’d need to see some credentials.”

“They don’t give us much in the way of credentials. I’m only a deputy.”

“I’d have to see something.”

Reacher nodded and took the big guy’s pewter star out of his shirt pocket. Held it face out, with the pin between his thumb and forefinger. The guard looked at it carefully.Township of Despair, Police Deputy.

“All they give us,” Reacher said.

“Good enough for me,” the guy said, and hit the button. A motor spun up and a gear engaged and drove the gate along a greased track. As soon as it was three feet open Reacher stepped through and headed across a yard through a pool of yellow sulfur light to a personnel door labeledReceiving. He went straight in and found a standby room like a million others he had seen. Desk, computer, clipboards, drifts of paper, bulletin boards, low wood-and-tweed armchairs. Everything was reasonably new but already battered. There were heaters going but the air was cold. There was an internal door, closed, but Reacher could smell sharp cold chemicals through it. Two of the low armchairs were occupied by two guys. They were white, young, and lean. They looked equally equipped for either manual or clerical labor. They looked bored and a little irreverent, which is exactly what Reacher expected from people working night shifts around a cold store full of stiffs. They glanced up at him, a little put out by the intrusion into their sealed world, a little happy about the break in their routine.

“Help you?” one of them said.

Reacher held up his pewter star again and said, “I need to check something about the guy we brought in yesterday.”

The attendant who had spoken squinted at the star. “Despair?”

Reacher nodded and said, “Male DOA, young, not huge.”

One guy heaved himself out of his chair and dumped himself down in front of the desk and tapped the keyboard to wake the computer screen. The other guy swiveled in his seat and grabbed a clipboard and licked his thumb and leafed through sheets of paper. They both reached the same conclusion at the same time. They glanced at each other and the one who had spoken before said, “We didn’t get anything from Despair yesterday.”

“You sure about that?”

“Did you bring him in yourself?”

“No.”

“You sure he was DOA? Maybe he went to the ICU.”

“He was DOA. No doubt about it.”

“Well, we don’t have him.”

“No possibility of a mistake?”

“Couldn’t happen.”

“Your paperwork is always a hundred percent?”

“Has to be. Start of the shift, we eyeball the toe tags and match them against the list. Procedure. Because people get sensitive about shit like dead relatives going missing.”

“Understandable, I guess.”

“So tonight we’ve got five on the list and five in the freezer. Two female, three male. Not a one of them young. And not a one of them from Despair.”

“Anywhere else they could have taken him?”

“Not in this county. And no other county would have accepted him.” The guy tapped some more keys. “As of this exact minute the last Despair stiff we had was over a year ago. Accident at their metal plant. Adult male all chewed up, as I recall, by a machine. Not pretty. He was so spread out we had to put him in two drawers.”

Reacher nodded and the guy spun his chair and put himself back-to against the desk with his feet straight out and his elbows propped behind him.

“Sorry,” he said.

Reacher nodded again and stepped back outside to the pool of sulfur light. The door sucked shut behind him, on a spring closer.To assume makes an ass out of you and me. Ass, u, me. The classroom jerks at Rucker had added:You absolutely have to verify. Reacher walked back across the concrete and waited for the gate to grind open a yard and stepped through and climbed into Vaughan’s truck.

He had verified.

Absolutely.