Lee Child - A Wanted Man

‘Stay here, if you want,’ Reacher said. ‘I’ll leave the shower curtain open. To keep your mind at rest.’

She smiled, but she didn’t reply. Not directly. Instead she said, ‘How long will this take?’

‘Twenty-two minutes for the shower,’ he said. ‘Then three to get dry, and three to get dressed. Plus five for unforeseen eventualities. Call it thirty-three minutes total.’

‘That’s very exact.’

‘Precision is a virtue.’

She left and he started peeling off his old clothes. They were in pretty bad shape. He had been wearing them for days, since Bolton, South Dakota. In places they were crusted with mud, and in other places they were spotted with blood, some of it his own, and some of it not. He balled the wrecked garments up tight and stuffed them all in the bathroom trash. Then he cleaned his teeth very thoroughly and set the shower running.

He washed his hair and soaped himself up from head to foot and scrubbed and rinsed. Eight minutes. Then he got out of the shower and used a washcloth and a sink of hot water and the mirror above it to attend to his face. He soaked off the hardened smears of blood and sponged the open lacerations carefully. He rubbed a slick of soap on his upper lip and sniffed as hard as he could until he started sneezing uncontrollably. Clots of blood came out, as big as garden peas.

Then he got back in the shower and washed himself from head to foot all over again. He towelled off and dressed and combed his hair with his fingers. He put his old passport and his ATM card in one pocket and his toothbrush in another. He put the short fat guy’s motel key in his jacket. He ate aspirins and drank water from the tap. Then he found his antiseptic cream and his Band-Aids and he opened the window to let the steam out and clear the mirror.

Julia Sorenson was in the back alley, watching the window.

She was on the phone. She wasn’t enjoying the call. She was arguing, but politely. With her boss, Reacher guessed. Hence the restraint. He couldn’t hear what was being said on either end of the conversation, but he figured the guy was finally taking her off the board, and she was pitching to stay on. She seemed to be making all kinds of good points. Her free hand was chopping the air, pushing objections aside, moving persuasive reasons front and centre. She was using the physical gestures to put animation in her voice. The telephone was a poor means of communication, in Reacher’s opinion. It had no room for body language and nuance.

He looked back in the mirror and used toilet paper to dry his cuts. Then he squeezed thin worms of cream into them from the tube of antiseptic. He wiped the excess and dried the intact areas of skin. He put a Band-Aid over the biggest cut. Another over the second biggest. He dumped the trash on top of his old clothes and closed the bathroom window and headed for the bedroom. He took a look in the mirror next to the closet. The new clothes were pretty good. His hair looked OK. His face was a mess. No oil painting, that was for sure. But then, it never had been, and it was certainly a lot better than an hour ago. A whole lot better. Almost halfway human.

He stepped out to the lot. Sorenson’s cruiser was right outside the door. She was leaning on the front fender. Reacher guessed she had left the alley when he closed the bathroom window. At that point she had hustled around to the front, double quick. Not to greet him. To make sure he didn’t run.

She said, ‘You clean up pretty well.’

Something in her face. Something in her voice. Not hurt. Not anger. Not necessarily even disappointment. More like confusion.

Reacher said, ‘What?’

‘I got a call.’

‘I saw.’

‘My SAC.’

‘I guessed. Did he take you off the case?’

She shook her head no, then changed it to a yes. She said, ‘I mean, I’m off the case, yes. But not because he took me off, no.’

‘Then why?’

‘Because there is no case. Not any more.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘It means that as of twenty minutes ago there is no active investigation. Which is logical, really, because as far as the Federal Bureau of Investigation is concerned nothing happened in Nebraska last night. Absolutely nothing at all.’

SORENSON SAID, ‘THEY took it the other way. They didn’t take it nuclear. They made it a black hole instead. They’re erasing it from history. A CIA demand, presumably. Or State. Something squirrelly. Some kind of national security bullshit.’ Then her phone rang again before Reacher could reply. She checked the incoming number and asked, ‘Where is the 405 area code?’

‘Southwestern Oklahoma,’ Reacher said. ‘Lawton, probably. It’s the army.’

She answered and listened for a spell and thanked whoever she was talking to. She clicked off and said, ‘Mother Sill confirms she had a Peter James King on active duty in 1991. He was a fister. Which I’m sure isn’t what I think it is.’

‘Fire support team,’ Reacher said. ‘Not just a dagby after all. I sold him short. Probably a forward observer. Smart guys, most of them. The 13F MOS. Which means he manoeuvred with the lowly infantry or the humble armoured divisions, rather than the kings of battle themselves. Did they confirm a brother named Alan?’

‘No. Didn’t deny one, either. But they’ll need paperwork.’

‘What happened to Peter?’

‘He quit as a gunnery sergeant in 1997.’

‘Same year as me. Where is he now?’

‘Mother Sill doesn’t know for sure. Last she heard he was working with a security company in Denver, Colorado. Which happens to be exactly where the dead guy flew into.’

‘Coincidence,’ Reacher said. ‘Alan King said they don’t talk.’

‘Did you believe him?’

‘He told the truth about Peter’s name and service, apparently. Why wouldn’t he be telling the truth about not talking to him too?’

‘How many people live in Denver?’

‘About six hundred thousand,’ Reacher said. ‘Between two and a half and three million in the metro area, depending on how you measure it. Too small and too big to match King’s million and a half.’

‘How do you know stuff like that? Area codes and populations?’

‘I like information. I like facts. Denver was named after James W. Denver, who was governor of the Kansas Territory at the time. It was a kiss-ass move by a land speculator called Larimer. He hoped the governor would move a county seat there and make him rich. What he didn’t know was that the governor had already resigned. Mails were slow in those days. And then the new place became part of Colorado anyway, not Kansas. Area code is 303.’

‘Get in the car,’ Sorenson said.

‘Want me to drive the rest of the way?’

‘No, I don’t. I can’t arrive with you at the wheel. It’s bad enough having you in the front.’

‘I’m not going to ride in the back.’

Sorenson didn’t reply to that. They climbed aboard, into their accustomed positions. Sorenson backed out of the motel lot and threaded her way back to the highway. She took the ramp and accelerated. There were rain clouds in the east. The weather was chasing them all the way. Sorenson fumbled her phone up into its cradle, where it beeped once to acknowledge it was charging, and then immediately it started to ring again, no longer thin and reedy, but loud and powerful through the sound system. Sorenson accepted the call and Reacher heard a man’s voice say he was en route for the location south and east of Des Moines, Iowa, as instructed.

Sorenson clicked off and said, ‘My forensics team, heading for Delfuenso.’

Reacher said, ‘Who is what we should be talking about here. How can the Bureau shut down a case where an innocent bystander died?’