Lee Child - A Wanted Man

She took out the wallet and flipped it open and walked towards the sheriff. She judged him to be about twenty years older than she was. He was very solid but not tall, like three-quarters of a football player. Not bad for an old guy. He was wearing a winter jacket over his uniform shirt. No gloves, even though the night was cold. They shook hands and stood quiet for a second, facing the concrete bunker, as if wondering where to start.

‘First question,’ Sorenson said. ‘What is this place?’

Goodman said, ‘It’s an old pumping station. It brought water up from the aquifer.’

‘Abandoned now?’

Goodman nodded. ‘The water table fell. We had to dig a deeper hole. The new pump is about a mile from here.’

‘Is the dead guy still in there?’

Goodman nodded again. ‘We waited for you.’

‘Who has been in there so far?’

‘Just me and the doctor.’

‘There’s a lot of blood.’

‘Yes,’ Goodman said. ‘There is.’

‘Did you step in it?’

‘We had to. We had to make sure the guy was dead.’

‘What did you touch?’

‘Just his wrist and his neck, looking for a pulse.’

Sorenson squatted down and opened up her pear-shaped shoulder bag. She took out plastic booties, to cover her shoes, and latex gloves, to cover her hands, and a camera. She put one foot in the sticky puddle and opened the bunker’s door. One hinge squealed, and one hinge moaned. The two sounds together made a kind of banshee wail. She put the other foot in the puddle.

‘There’s a light inside,’ Goodman said.

She found the switch. It operated a caged bulb on the ceiling. Old cage, old bulb. Maybe two hundred watts. Clear glass. It gave a bright, harsh, shadowless light. She saw the stumps of two fat old pipes coming up through the floor, maybe ten feet apart. Both pipes were about a foot wide, and both of them had once been painted smooth institutional green, but they were now chipped and scaly with rust. Both of them were open at the top, and both of them terminated with wide flanges, where bolted joints had once been made. A municipal system, long disassembled. Sorenson guessed for many years ground water had come up through one pipe and had been boosted onward through the other, horizontal and underground, to a water tower somewhere close by. But then one day the pumps had started sucking on dry rock honeycombs, and it had been time for a new hole. Irrigation, population, and indoor plumbing. Sorenson had read her briefing papers. Two and a half trillion gallons of ground water a year, more than anywhere except Texas and California.

She moved on.

Apart from the water pipes there was old grit on the floor, and a heavy-duty electrical panel on one wall, several generations old, and a faded diagram on another wall, showing the nature and purpose of the hydraulic equipment that had once connected one green stump to the other. And that was it, in terms of permanent infrastructure.

The non-permanent infrastructure was the dead guy, and his blood. He was on his back, with his elbows and knees bent like a cartoon sketch of a man dancing an old-fashioned number. His face was covered in blood, and his midsection was covered in blood, and he was lying in a lake of blood. He was maybe forty years old, although it was hard to judge. He was wearing a green winter coat, cotton canvas padded and insulated with something, not old, but not new either. The coat was not zipped or buttoned. It was open, over a grey sweater and a cream checked shirt. Both sweater and shirt looked worn and dirty. Both sweater and shirt had been tugged out of the guy’s waistband, and then they had been pulled up past his ribcage.

He had two knife wounds. The first was a lateral slash across his forehead an inch above his eyes. The second was a ragged stab wound in the right side of his midsection, about level with his navel. Most of the blood had come from the second wound. It had welled out. The guy’s navel looked like a thimble full of drying paint.

Sorenson said, ‘How do you see it, sheriff?’

From outside the door Goodman said, ‘They nicked him in the forehead to blind him. A sheet of blood came down in his eyes. That’s an old knife-fighting trick. Which is why I thought of them as professionals. And from that point on it was easy. They pulled up his shirt and stuck the knife up under his ribs. And jerked it around. But not quite enough. It took him a few minutes to die.’

Sorenson nodded to herself. Hence all the blood. The guy’s heart had kept on pumping, valiantly but fruitlessly.

She asked, ‘Do you know who he is?’

‘Never saw him before.’

‘Why did they pull up his shirt?’

‘Because they’re professionals. They didn’t want the blade to snag.’

‘I agree,’ Sorenson said. ‘It must have been a long knife, don’t you think? To get up into his thorax from there?’

‘Eight or nine inches, maybe.’

‘Did the eyewitness see a knife?’

‘He didn’t say so. But you can ask him yourself. He’s waiting in the deputy’s car. Keeping warm.’

Sorenson asked, ‘Why didn’t they use a gun? A silenced.22 would be more typical, if this is a professional hit.’

‘Still loud, in an enclosed space.’

‘Pretty far from anywhere.’

‘Then I don’t know why they didn’t,’ Goodman said.

Sorenson used her camera and took photographs, zooming out wide for context, zooming in tight for details. She asked, ‘Do you mind if I disturb the body? I want to check for ID.’

Goodman said, ‘It’s your case.’

‘Is it?’

‘The perps are out of the state by now.’

‘They are if they went east.’

‘And if they went west, it’s only a matter of time. They got through the roadblocks, apparently.’

Sorenson said nothing.

‘They switched to another car,’ Goodman said.

‘Or cars,’ Sorenson said. ‘They might have split up and travelled separately.’

Goodman thought about the empty spaces either side of the parked Mazda. Thought about his final APB: any two men in any kind of vehicle . He said, ‘I didn’t consider that possibility. I guess I screwed up.’

Sorenson didn’t reassure him. She just picked her way around the blood and squatted down in the driest patch she could find. She put her left hand out behind her for balance and used her right hand on the corpse. She pressed and patted and searched. There was nothing in the shirt pocket. Nothing in the coat, inside or out. Her gloved fingers turned red with rubbery smears. She tried the pants pockets. Nothing there.

She called, ‘Sheriff? You’re going to have to help me here.’

Goodman picked his way inside, on tiptoe, using long sideways steps, like he was on a ledge a thousand feet up. Sorenson said, ‘Put your finger in his belt loop. Roll him over. I need to check his back pockets.’

Goodman squatted opposite her, arm’s length from the body, and hooked a finger in a belt loop. He turned his face away and hauled. The dead guy came up on his hip. Blood squelched and dripped, but slowly, because it was drying and mixing with the grit on the floor to make a paste. Sorenson’s gloved hand darted in like a pickpocket, and she poked and prodded and patted.

Nothing there.

‘No ID,’ she said. ‘So as of right now, we have ourselves an unidentified victim. Ain’t life grand?’

Goodman let the guy roll back, flat on the floor.

JACK REACHER WAS no kind of a legal scholar, but like all working cops he had learned something about the law, mostly its practical, real-world applications, and its tricks and its dodges.

And he had learned the areas where the law was silent.

As in: there was no law that said people who pick up hitchhikers have to tell the truth.