Nothing to Lose

66

Reacher said, “One phone call from your desk will explain it. We might as well go ahead and make it. Since we’re right here anyway. Maria has waited long enough.”

Vaughan said, “One call to who?”

“The MPs west of Despair. You were briefed about them, they’ll have been briefed about you. Therefore they’ll cooperate.”

“What do I ask them?”

“Ask them to fax Ramirez’s summary file. They’ll say, Who? You’ll tell them, Bullshit, you know Maria was just there, so you know they know who he is. And tell them we know Maria was there for twenty-one hours, which is enough time for them to have gotten all the paperwork in the world.”

“What are we going to find?”

“My guess is Ramirez was in prison two weeks ago.”

The Hope Police Department’s fax machine was a boxy old product standing alone on a rolling cart. It had been square and graceless to start with, and now it was grubby and worn. But it worked. Eleven minutes after Vaughan finished her call it sparked up and started whirring and sucked a blank page out of the feeder tray and fed it back out with writing on it.

Not much writing. It was a bare-bones summary. Very little result for twenty-one hours of bureaucratic pestering. But that was explained by the fact that it had been the army doing the asking and the Marines doing the answering. Inter-service cooperation wasn’t usually very cooperative.

Raphael Ramirez had been a private in the Marine Corps. At the age of eighteen he had been deployed to Iraq. At the age of nineteen he had served a second deployment. At the age of twenty he had gone AWOL ahead of a third deployment. He had gone on the run but had been arrested five days later in Los Angeles and locked up awaiting court martial back at Pendleton.

Date of arrest, three weeks previously.

Reacher said, “Let’s go find Maria.”

They found her in her motel room. Her bed had a dent where she had been sitting, staying warm, saving energy, passing time, enduring. She answered the door tentatively, as if she was certain that all news would be bad. There was nothing in Reacher’s face to change her mind. He and Vaughan led her outside and sat her in the plastic lawn chair under her bathroom window. Reacher took room nine’s chair and Vaughan took room seven’s. They dragged them over and positioned them and made a tight little triangle on the concrete apron.

Reacher said, “Raphael was a Marine.”

Maria nodded. Said nothing.

Reacher said, “He had been to Iraq twice. He didn’t want to go back a third time. So nearly four weeks ago he went on the run. He headed up to LA. Maybe he had friends there. Did he call you?”

Maria said nothing.

Vaughan said, “You’re not in trouble, Maria. Nobody’s going to get you for anything.”

Maria said, “He called most days.”

Reacher asked, “How was he?”

“Scared. Scared to death. Scared of being AWOL, scared of going back.”

“What happened in Iraq?”

“To him? Not much, really. But he saw things. He said the people we were supposed to be helping were killing us, and we were killing the people we were supposed to be helping. Everybody was killing everybody else. In bad ways. It was driving him crazy.”

“So he ran. And he called most days.”

Maria nodded.

Reacher said, “But then he didn’t call, for two or three days. Is that right?”

“He lost his cell phone. He was moving a lot. To stay safe. Then he got a new phone.”

“How did he sound on the new phone?”

“Still scared. Very worried. Even worse.”

“Then what?”

“He called to say he had found some people. Or some people had found him. They were going to get him to Canada. Through a place called Despair, in Colorado. He said I should come here, to Hope, and wait for his call. Then I should join him in Canada.”

“Did he call from Despair?”

“No.”

“Why did you go to the MPs?”

“To ask if they had found him and arrested him. I was worried. But they said they had never heard of him. They were army, he was Marine Corps.”

“And so you came back here to wait some more.”

Maria nodded.

Reacher said, “It wasn’t exactly like that. He was arrested in LA. The Marines caught up with him. He didn’t lose his phone. He was in jail for two or three days.”

“He didn’t tell me that.”

“He wasn’t allowed to.”

“Did he break out again?”

Reacher shook his head. “My guess is he made a deal. The Marine Corps offered him a choice. Five years in Leavenworth, or go undercover to bust the escape line that ran from California all the way to Canada. Names, addresses, descriptions, techniques, routes, all that kind of stuff. He agreed, and they drove him back to LA and turned him loose. That’s why the MPs didn’t respond. They found out what was going on and were told to stonewall you.”

“So where is Raphael now? Why doesn’t he call?”

Reacher said, “My father was a Marine. Marines have a code. Did Raphael tell you about it?”

Maria said, “Unit, corps, God, country.”

Reacher nodded. “It’s a list of their loyalties, in priority order. Raphael’s primary loyalty was to his unit. His company, in fact. Really just a handful of guys. Guys like him.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I think he agreed to the deal but couldn’t carry it through. He couldn’t betray guys just like him. I think he rode up to Despair but didn’t call in to the Marines. I think he hung around on the edge of town and stayed out of sight, because he was conflicted. He didn’t want to know who was involved, because he was afraid he might have to give them away later. He hung out for days, agonizing. He got thirsty and hungry. He started hallucinating and decided to walk over to Hope, and find you, and get out some other way.”

“So where is he?”

“He didn’t make it, Maria. He collapsed halfway. He died.”

“But where is his body?”

“The people in Despair took care of it.”

“I see.”

Then for the second time in an hour Reacher watched a woman cry. Vaughan held her and Reacher said, “He was a good man, Maria. He was just a kid who couldn’t take any more. And in the end he didn’t betray what he believed in.” He said those things over and over again, in different orders, and with different emphases, but they didn’t help.

Maria was all cried out after twenty minutes and Vaughan led her back inside. Then she joined Reacher again and they walked away together. She asked, “How did you know?”

Reacher said, “No other rational explanation.”

“Did he really do what you said? Agonized and then sacrificed himself?”

“Marines are good at self-sacrifice. On the other hand maybe he double-crossed the Corps from the get-go. Maybe he planned all along to head straight to Hope and grab Maria and disappear.”

“It doesn’t take four days to walk from Despair to Hope.”

“No,” Reacher said. “It doesn’t.”

“So he probably did the right thing.”

“I hope that was Maria’s impression.”

“Do you think he told them about the people in California?”

“I don’t know.”

“This will carry on if he didn’t.”

“You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

“It could get out of hand.”

“You could make a couple of calls. They’re in the hotel register in Despair, name and address. You could check and see who they are, and whether they’re still around, or whether they’ve disappeared into federal custody.”

“I’m sorry about what I said before.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

They walked on, and then Reacher said, “And you weren’t wrong, when you did what you did the night before last. Otherwise whoever killed David killed you too. You want to give them that? Because I don’t. I want you to have a life.”

“That sounds like the beginnings of a farewell speech.”

“Does it?”

“Why stay? The Pentagon is washing its dirty linen in private, which isn’t a crime. And we seem to have decided this other thing isn’t a crime either.”

“There’s one more thing on my mind,” Reacher said.