The Hard Way

CHAPTER 77

CLEAN-UP TOOK THE rest of the night and most of the next day. Even though they were all bone-weary, by common consensus they didn’t try to sleep. Except for Jade. Kate put her to bed and sat with her while she slept. The child had fainted early and had missed most of what had gone on and seemed not to have understood the rest. Except for the fact that her ex-stepfather had been cast as a bad man. But she had been told that already and so it came as nothing more than confirmation of a view she was already comfortable with. So she slept, with no apparent ill-effects. Reacher figured that if any arrived in the days to come she would work them out with crayons on butcher paper.

Kate herself looked like she had been to hell and back. And like many people she was thriving on it. Going down there had felt really bad, and therefore coming back up again felt disproportionately better than really good. She had stared down at Lane’s body for a long moment. Seen that half his head was missing. Understood for sure that there was going to be no Hollywood moment where he reared up again, back to life. He was gone, utterly, completely, and definitively. And she had seen it happen. That kind of certainty helps a person. She walked away from the corpse with a spring in her step.

Taylor’s right tricep was all torn up. Reacher cut his shirt away with the kitchen knife from his shoe and field-dressed the wound as best he could with a first-aid kit in the upstairs bathroom. But Taylor was going to need attention. That was clear. He volunteered to delay it by a couple of days. The wound was not necessarily recognizable as a gunshot and it was unlikely anyone in the neighborhood had heard anything, but it seemed smart to distance an ER visit from mayhem in the night.

Jackson was OK apart from cut eyebrows and some facial bruising and a split lip and a couple of loose teeth. Nothing worse than he had experienced half a dozen times before, he said, after bar fights wherever 1st Para had been posted and where the local boys always seemed to have something to prove.

Pauling was fine. Reacher had cut her ropes and she had torn the tape off her mouth herself and then kissed him hard. She seemed to have had total confidence that he would show up and work something out. He wasn’t sure if she was telling the truth or flattering him. Either way he didn’t mention exactly how close he had come to walking away on a phantom pursuit. Didn’t mention how lucky it was that a stray peripheral glance at the driveway’s surface had fired some random synapse in his brain.

He searched the Toyota and found Lane’s leather duffel. The one he had seen before, in the Park Lane Hilton. The eight hundred thousand dollars. It was all there. Untouched. He gave it to Pauling for safe keeping. Then he sat on the floor, leaning back on the post that Kate had been tied to, six feet away from Gregory’s corpse. He was calm. Just another night of business as usual in his long and spectacularly violent life. He was used to it, literally. And the remorse gene was missing from his DNA. Entirely. It just wasn’t there. Where some men might have retrospectively agonized over justification, he spent his energy figuring out where best to hide the bodies.

They hid them in a ten-acre field near the northwest corner of the farm. Fallow land, hidden by trees, unplowed for a year. Jackson finished fixing the backhoe and then fired it up and drove off with headlights blazing. Started work immediately on a massive pit that needed to be thirty feet long, nine feet wide, and nine feet deep. A ninety-yard excavation, because they had decided to bury the cars as well.

Reacher asked Pauling, “Did you check the box for extra insurance?”

She nodded.

He said, “Call them tomorrow. Tell them it was stolen.”

Taylor was walking wounded so he was excused from heavy work. Instead he scoured the whole area for every piece of physical evidence he could find. He came up with all that anyone could think of, including all twenty-seven shell casings from Perez’s MP5. Pauling scrubbed his blood off the upstairs hallway floor and replaced the shattered bathroom tile. Reacher piled the bodies inside the Toyota Land Cruiser.

The sun had been up for hours before the pit was finished. Jackson had left a neat graded slope at one end and Reacher drove the Toyota down it and smashed it hard against the earth wall at the other end. Jackson drove the backhoe to the house and used the front bucket to jack the Mini up and shove it backward. He maneuvered it all the way to the pit and rolled it down the grade and jammed it hard against the Toyota’s rear bumper. Taylor showed up with all the other items and threw them in the hole. Then Jackson started to fill it. Reacher just sat and watched. The sky was pale blue and the sun was watery. There were thin high clouds and a mild breeze that felt warm. He knew that in the flat land all around him Stone Age people had been buried in long mounds called barrows, and then Bronze Age people, and Iron Age people, and Celts, and Romans, and Saxons, and Angles, and Viking invaders in longships, and Normans, and then the English themselves for a thousand years. He guessed the land could take four more dead. He watched Jackson work until the dirt hid the top of the cars, and then he walked away, slowly, back to the house.

Exactly twelve months later to the hour the ten-acre field was neatly plowed and dusted pale green with a brand-new winter crop. Tony and Susan Jackson and Graham and Kate Taylor were working the field next to it. The sun was shining. Back at the house the nine-year-old cousins and best friends Melody Jackson and Jade Taylor were watching Jade’s baby brother, a healthy five-month-old boy named Jack.

Three thousand miles west of Grange Farm it was five hours earlier and Lauren Pauling was alone in her Barrow Street apartment, drinking coffee and reading the New York Times. She had missed a piece inside the main section that reported the deaths of three newly arrived private military contractors in Iraq. Their names were Burke, Groom, and Kowalski, and they had died two days previously when a land mine exploded under their vehicle outside of Baghdad. But she caught a piece in the Metro Section in which it was reported that the cooperative board at the Dakota Building had foreclosed on an apartment after twelve consecutive months of unpaid monthly maintenance. On entering the apartment they had found more than nine million dollars in a locked closet.

Six thousand miles west of Grange Farm it was eight hours earlier and Patti Joseph was fast asleep in a waterfront condominium in Seattle, Washington. She was ten months into a new job as a magazine copy-editor. Her perseverance and her relentless eye for detail made her good at it. She was seeing a local journalist from time to time. She was happy.

Far from Seattle, far from New York City, far from Bishops Pargeter, down in Birmingham, Alabama, Dee Marie Graziano was up early, in a hospital gymnasium, watching her brother grasp his new metal canes and walk across the floor.

Nobody knew where Jack Reacher was. He had left Grange Farm two hours after the backhoe had shut down, and there had been no news of him since.