Ли Чайлд - No Middle Name

It would be a delicate argument to make.

What’s the worst thing could happen?

He waited.

He heard boots in the corridor. Two guards came straight to his cell. Mace and pepper spray and tasers on their belts. Handcuffs and shackles and thin metal chains.

One said, ‘Stand by to turn around on command and stick your wrists out through the meal slot.’

Reacher said, ‘Where are we going?’

‘You’ll find out.’

‘I’d appreciate sooner rather than later.’

‘And I’d appreciate half a chance to use my taser. Which one of us is going to get what he wants today?’

Reacher said, ‘I guess neither would be best for both of us.’

‘I agree,’ the guy said. ‘Let’s work hard to keep it that way.’

‘I still want to know.’

The guy said, ‘You’re going back where you came from. You have your arraignment this morning. You have half an hour with your lawyer beforehand. So put your street clothes on. You’re innocent until you’re proven guilty. You’re supposed to look the part. Or we ain’t being constitutional. Or some such thing. They say jail uniforms look like you’re already guilty. That’s where prejudice comes from, you know. The judicial system. It’s right there in the word.’

He led Reacher out of the cell, small clinking steps, and his partner crowded in from behind, and they met a team of two state prisoner escorts, in an airlock lobby, halfway in and halfway out of the place, where responsibility was handed over from one team to the other, who then led Reacher onward, out to a grey prison bus, the same kind of thing he had ridden in on. He was pushed down the aisle and dumped on the rearmost bench. One of the escorts got in behind the wheel to drive, and the other sat sideways behind him with a shotgun in his lap.

They retraced the journey Reacher had made in the opposite direction less than twelve hours previously. They covered every yard of the same pavement. The two escorts talked all the way. Reacher heard some of the conversation. It depended on the engine note. Some of the words were lost. But he got plenty of gossip about the big guy found knocked down in the small yard that morning. No one was yet implicated in the incident. Because no one could understand it. The big guy was a month away from his first parole hearing. Why would he fight? And if he didn’t fight, who would fight him? Who would fight him and win and drag him back to the small yard like some kind of trophy?

They shook their heads.

Reacher said nothing.

The drive back took the same duration, just shy of two hours, the same night and day, because their speed was not limited by visibility or traffic, but by a slow-revving engine and a short gearbox, good for stopping and starting in cities and towns, but not so good for the open road. But eventually they pulled into the lot Reacher recognized, next to the stove-in wreck of the blue SUV, and Reacher was beckoned down the aisle, and off the bus, and in through the same door he had come out of. Inside was a lobby, lockable both ends, where his chains and cuffs were taken off, and he was handed over to a two-person welcoming committee.

One person was Detective Bush.

The other person was the public defender, Cathy Clark.

The two prisoner escorts turned around and left double quick. Anxious to get going. Back later. Couldn’t keep a bus standing idle. They gave the impression they had many different jobs that day. Many bits and pieces. Maybe they did. Or maybe they liked a long lazy lunch. Maybe they knew somewhere good to go.

Reacher was left alone with Bush and the lawyer.

Just for a second.

He thought, you got to be kidding me.

He tapped Bush high on the chest, just a polite warning to the solar plexus, like a wake-up call, enough to cause a helpless buzzing in all kinds of retaliatory muscles, but no real pain anywhere else. Reacher stuck his hand in Bush’s pocket and came out with car keys. He put them in his own pocket, and shoved the guy in the chest, quite gently, as considerately as possible, just enough to send him staggering backward a pace or two.

He didn’t touch the lawyer at all. Just pushed past her and walked away, head up and confident, under the low ceilings, through the dogleg corridors, and out through the front door. He went straight to Bush’s car, in the D2 slot. The Crown Vic. Worn but not sagging, clean but not shiny. It started first time. It was already warmed up. The prisoner escorts were already beyond it. They were on their way to their bus. They didn’t look back.

Reacher took off, just as the first few wait a damn minute faces started showing at doors and windows. He turned right and left and left again, on random streets, aiming at first for what passed for downtown. The first squad car was more than two whole minutes behind him. Starting out from the station house itself. A disgrace. Others were worse. It was not the county police department’s finest five minutes.

They didn’t find him.

Reacher called on the phone, just before lunch. From a pay phone. The town still had plenty. Cell reception was poor. Reacher had quarters, from under café tables. Always a few. Enough for local calls at least. He had the number, from a business card pinned up behind the register in a five-and-dime even cheaper than the dollar stores. The card was one of many, as if together they made a defensive shield. It was from Detective Ramsey Aaron, of the county police department. With a phone number and an e-mail address. Maybe some kind of neighbourhood outreach. Modern police did all kinds of new things.

Evidently the number on the card rang through to Aaron’s desk. He answered first ring.

He said, ‘This is Aaron.’

Reacher said, ‘This is Reacher.’

‘Why are you calling me?’

‘To tell you two things.’

‘But why me?’

‘Because you might listen.’

‘Where are you?’

‘I’m a long way out of town by now. You’re never going to see me again. I’m afraid your uniformed division let you down badly.’

‘You should give yourself up, man.’

‘That was the first thing,’ Reacher said. ‘That ain’t going to happen. We need to get that straight from the get-go. Or we’ll waste a lot of energy on the back and forth. You’ll never find me. So don’t even try. Just give it up gracefully. Spend your time on the second thing instead.’

‘Was that you at the prison? With the parolee that got beat up?’

‘Why would a parolee be in prison?’

‘What’s the second thing?’

‘You need to find out exactly who the girl with the bag was, and exactly who the kid in the sweatshirt was. Names and histories. And exactly what was in the bag.’

‘Why?’

‘Because before you tell me, I’m going to tell you. When you see I’m right, maybe you’ll start paying attention.’

‘Who are they?’

Reacher said, ‘I’ll call again later.’

He was in the diner down the block. Where his lunch and his dinner had come from. The safest place to be, amid all the panic. No one in there had ever seen him before. No cop was going to come in for a coffee break. Not right then. Out of the question. And the police station was the eye of the storm, which meant for a block all around the squad cars were either accelerating hard to get away and go search some other distant place, or braking hard as they came back in again, all negative and disappointed and frustrated. In other words there was visual drama and emotion, but therefore not very much patient looking out through the car windows at the immediate neighbourhood surroundings.

The phone was on the wall of a corridor in the back of the diner, with restrooms left and right, and a fire door at the end. Reacher hung up and walked back to his table. He was one of six people sitting alone in the shadows. No one paid him attention. He got the feeling strangers were not rare. At least as a concept. There were old photographs on the wall. Plus old-time artefacts hung up on display. The town had been in the lumber business. Fortunes had been made. People had been in and out constantly for a hundred years, hauling loads, selling tools, putting on all kinds of mock outrage about prices.