Ли Чайлд - Persuader

“I’m serious, Reacher,” she said.

I smiled up at her. “I’ll be OK. Two or three more days. I’ll find Teresa and I’ll find Quinn and then I’ll get out.”

“Only if I let you.”

I nodded.

“The two bodyguards,” I said.

She nodded in turn. “That’s why you need my end of the operation. You can forget all about the heroic stuff. With you or without you, my ass. We turn those guys loose and you’re a dead man, one phone call later.”

“Where are they now?”

“In the first motel, back in Massachusetts. Where we made the plans. The guys from the Toyota and the college car are sitting on them.”

“Hard, I hope.”

“Very.”

“That’s hours away,” I said.

“By road,” she said. “Not by telephone.”

“You want Teresa back.”

“Yes,” she said. “But I’m in charge.”

“You’re a control freak,” I said.

“I don’t want anything bad to happen to you, is all.”

“Nothing bad ever happens to me.”

She leaned down and traced her fingertips over the scars on my body. Chest, stomach, arms, shoulders, forehead. “You’ve taken a lot of damage for a guy nothing bad ever happens to.”

“I’m clumsy,” I said. “I fall over a lot.”

She stood up and walked to the bathroom, naked, graceful, completely unself-conscious.

“Hurry back,” I called.

But she didn’t hurry back. She was in the bathroom a long time and when she came out again she was wearing a robe. Her face had changed. She looked a little awkward. A little rueful.

“We shouldn’t have done that,” she said.

“Why not?”

“It was unprofessional.”

She looked straight at me. I nodded. I guessed it was a little unprofessional.

“But it was fun,” I said.

“We shouldn’t have.”

“We’re grown-ups. We live in a free country.”

“It was just taking comfort. Because we’re both stressed and uptight.”

“Nothing really wrong with that.”

“It’s going to complicate things,” she said.

I shook my head.

“Not if we don’t let it,” I said. “Doesn’t mean we have to get married or anything. We don’t owe each other anything because of it.”

“I wish we hadn’t.”

“I’m glad we did. I think if a thing feels right, you should do it.”

“That’s your philosophy?”

I looked away.

“It’s the voice of experience,” I said. “I once said no when I wanted to say yes and I lived to regret it.”

She hugged the robe tight around her.

“It did feel good,” she said.

“For me too,” I said.

“But we should forget it now. It meant what it meant, nothing more, OK?”

“OK,” I said.

“And you should think hard about going back.”

“OK,” I said again.

I lay on the bed and thought about how it felt to say no when you really wanted to say yes. On balance saying yes had been better, and I had no regrets. Duffy was quiet. It was like we were just waiting for something to happen. I took a long hot shower and dressed in the bathroom. We were done talking by then. There was nothing left to say. We both knew I was going back. I liked the fact that she didn’t really try to stop me. I liked the fact that we were both focused, practical people. I was lacing my shoes when her laptop went ping, like a muffled high-pitched bell. Like a microwave when your food is ready. No artificial voice saying You’ve got mail. I came out of the bathroom and she sat down in front of the computer and clicked a button.

“Message from my office,” she said. “Records show eleven dubious ex-cops called Duke. I put the request in yesterday. How old is he?”

“Forty, maybe,” I said.

She scrolled through her list.

“Southern guy?” she asked. “Northern?”

“Not Southern,” I said.

“Choice of three,” she said.

“Mrs. Beck said he’d been a federal agent, too.”

She scrolled some more.

“John Chapman Duke,” she said. “He’s the only one who went federal afterward. Started in Minneapolis as a patrolman and then a detective. Subject of three investigations by Internal Affairs. Inconclusive. Then he joined us.”

“DEA?” I said. “Really?”

“No, I meant the federal government,” she said. “He went to the Treasury Department.”

“To do what?”

“Doesn’t say. But he was indicted within three years. Some kind of corruption. Plus suspicion of multiple homicides, no real hard evidence. But he went to prison for four years anyway.”

“Description?”

“White, about your size. The photo makes him look uglier, though.”

“That’s him,” I said.

She scrolled some more. Read the rest of the report.

“Take care,” she said. “He sounds like a piece of work.”

“Don’t worry,” I said. I thought about kissing her good-bye at the door. But I didn’t. I figured she wouldn’t want me to. I just ran over to the Cadillac.

I was back in the coffee shop and almost at the end of my second cup when Elizabeth Beck appeared. She had nothing to show for her shopping. No purchases, no gaudy bags. I guessed she hadn’t actually been inside any stores. She had hung around for four long hours to let the government guy do whatever he needed to. I raised my hand. She ignored me and headed straight for the counter. Bought herself a tall white coffee and carried it over to my table. I had decided what I was going to tell her.

“I don’t work for the government,” I said.

“Then I’m disappointed,” she said, for the third time.

“How could I?” I said. “I killed a cop, remember.”

“Yes,” she said.

“Government people don’t do stuff like that.”

“They might,” she said. “By accident.”

“But they wouldn’t run away afterward,” I said. “They would stick around and face the music.”

She went quiet and stayed quiet for a long time. Sipped her coffee slowly.

“I’ve been there maybe eight or ten times,” she said. “Where the college is, I mean. They run events for the students’ families, now and then. And I try to be there at the start and finish of every semester. One summer I even rented a little U-Haul and helped him move his stuff home.”

“So?”

“It’s a small school,” she said. “But even so, on the first day of the semester it gets very busy. Lots of parents, lots of students, SUVs, cars, vans, traffic everywhere. The family days are even worse. And you know what?”

“What?”

“I’ve never seen a town policeman there. Not once. Certainly not a detective in plain clothes.”

I looked out the window to the internal mall sidewalk.

“Just a coincidence, I suppose,” she said. “A random Tuesday morning in April, early in the day, nothing much going on, and there’s a detective waiting right by the gate, for no very obvious reason.”

“What’s your point?” I asked.

“That you were terribly unlucky,” she said. “I mean, what were the odds?”

“I don’t work for the government,” I said.

“You took a shower,” she said. “Washed your hair.”

“Did I?”

“I can see it and smell it. Cheap soap, cheap shampoo.”

“I went to a sauna.”

“You didn’t have any money. I gave you twenty dollars. You bought at least two cups of coffee. That would leave maybe fourteen dollars.”

“It was a cheap sauna.”

“It must have been,” she said.

“I’m just a guy,” I said.

“And I’m disappointed about it.”

“You sound like you want your husband to get busted.”

“I do.”

“He’d go to prison.”

“He already lives in a prison. And he deserves to. But he’d be freer in a real prison than where he is now. And he wouldn’t be there forever.”