Lee Child - Personal

I knelt next to him and patted him down. No gun. No knife. I went back to the guy on his ass. No gun. No knife. Not in broad daylight, I guessed. Not in London.

Casey Nice staggered back into view. She looked very pale. She said, ‘What the hell are you doing?’

I said, ‘Talk later. We’re in public here. Get them in the van first.’

The guy in the gutter was barely breathing. I bunched the front of his raincoat in my hands and lifted him up and turned him around and got his head and shoulders into the load space, and then I shovelled the rest of him inside, and then I did the same thing with the other guy, but with his collar from behind, and the back of his belt, because he was bleeding badly all down his front, and I didn’t want to get marked or sticky. I kicked the props and closed the doors on them, and checked the handle.

Secure.

Casey Nice said, ‘Why did you do that?’

I said, ‘You didn’t want to be sidetracked.’

‘They’re cops , for God’s sake.’

‘Get in the front. We need to dump this thing somewhere.’

‘You’re crazy.’

I looked all around, and saw some cars and people, but they all seemed to be going about their normal business. No big crowd was gathering. No one was standing with a flat hand over an open mouth, or fumbling for a cell phone. We were being ignored. Almost consciously. The same the world over. People look away.

I said, ‘You told me if we get a problem, we should deal with it fast and decisively.’

I stepped back up on the sidewalk and tracked around to the driver’s door. I got in and pushed the seat back as far as it would go, which wasn’t very far, because of the wire screen. I was going to be driving with my knees up around my ears, on the left side of the road, with a stick shift and a diesel engine, none of which I was used to.

Casey Nice got in next to me. She was still pale. The key was still in the ignition. I started the motor and pressed the clutch and waggled the stick. There seemed to be a whole lot of gears in there. At least seven of them, including reverse. I took an educated guess and shoved the stick left, and up, and looked for the stalk that would work the turn signals.

Casey Nice said, ‘I meant different problems than cops.’

I said, ‘Cops are the same problem as anything else. Worse, in fact. They can take us back to the airport in handcuffs. No one else can do that.’

‘Which they will now. For sure. They’ll hunt us down with a vengeance. You just assaulted two police officers. We’re on the run, as of this minute. You just made things a thousand times harder. A million times harder. You just made things impossible.’

I clicked the turn signal and checked the door mirror. I moved off, with a lurch, because of a clumsy left foot.

I said, ‘Except they weren’t police officers.’

I changed gear, once, twice, three times, a little smoother as I went along, and I got straight and centred in the left-hand lane.

She said, ‘We saw his badge.’

‘I bet it was done on a home computer.’

‘You bet ? What does that even mean? You’re going to assault a hundred cops just in case one of them isn’t?’

I changed gear again and sped up a little, to blend in.

I said, ‘No cop on earth would call his badge a government identification document. Cops don’t work for the government. Not in their minds. They work for their department. For each other. For the whole worldwide brotherhood. For the city, just maybe, at the very best. But not the government. They hate the government. The government is their worst enemy, at every level. National, county, local, no one understands cops and everyone makes their lives more and more miserable with an endless stream of bullshit. A cop wouldn’t use the word.’

‘This is a different country.’

‘Cops are the same the world over. I know, because I was one, and I met plenty of others. Including here. This is not a different country when it comes to cops.’

‘Maybe that’s what they call their ID here.’

‘I think they call it a warrant card.’

‘Which he knew we wouldn’t understand. So he used different words.’

‘He would have said, I’m a police officer, and I’m going to put my hand in my pocket very slowly and show you ID. Or my ID. Or identification. Or credentials. Or something. But the word police would have been in there somewhere, for damn sure, and the word government would not have been, equally for damn sure.’

She said nothing for a minute, and then she bagged out her seat belt and squirmed around and knelt up for a look through the grille.

She said, ‘Reacher, one of them isn’t breathing.’

I GLANCED BACK, but I couldn’t keep my eyes off the road long enough to be sure. Maybe he was just breathing very slowly. Casey Nice said, ‘Reacher, you have to do something.’

I said, ‘What am I, a doctor?’

‘We have to find a hospital.’

‘Hospitals have the cops on speed dial.’

‘We could dump the truck at the door, and run.’

I drove on, with no real idea where I was headed, taking the easy option at every junction, going with the flow, on roads that seemed endlessly long but never straight. I guessed we were aiming basically north, away from the river. I guessed Romford was somewhere on our right. We passed all kinds of places, including every kind of no-name fast food, kebabs, fried chicken, pizza, hamburgers, and every kind of insurance bureau, and phone shops, and carpet shops. No hospitals. If the guy had stopped breathing, he had died minutes ago.

I pulled off into a lumpy blacktop rectangle boxed in on two sides by two rows of single-car garages. The space between them was empty, but for a broken and rusted bicycle. No people. No activity. I stopped the van and fumbled the shift into neutral and turned around.

And looked.

And waited.

The guy wasn’t breathing.

The other guy was staring at me. The bottom part of his face was a mask of red. The top part was pale. Now he was white. His nose was badly busted. His eyes were wide open. I said to him, ‘I’m going to come around and open up. You mess with me in any way at all, I’ll do to you what I did to him.’

He didn’t answer.

I said, ‘Do you understand?’

He said, ‘Yes.’

Little bubbles of blood formed at the corners of his mouth.

I opened the door and climbed out and walked around. Casey Nice did the same thing on her side. I turned the rear handle and opened up. The guy who was breathing was on the left, and the guy who wasn’t was on the right. I put my arm in, as a test. No reaction. So I found a wrist on the right and checked for a pulse.

Nothing there.

I leaned right in and knelt up and felt for the neck. The guy was still warm. I pulled his collar down a little and got my fingers in behind the point of his jaw. I kept them there a good long time, just in case. I looked here and there, waiting. The guy had a twice-pierced ear. And a small tattoo on his neck, just peeking out from under his collar. It looked like a leaf twisting in the wind.

He was dead.

I said, ‘We should search his pockets. We should search both of them.’

I stepped sideways, to start in on the live guy.

She said, ‘I can’t do that.’

I said, ‘Do what?’

‘Search a dead man.’

‘Why not?’

‘Too creepy.’

‘Want to swap?’

‘Could you do both?’

‘Sure,’ I said. So I did. The live guy had suspiciously little in his pockets. And what he had was a little suspicious. By the time I had finished with his pants I was sure he wasn’t a cop. He had too much cash money, for one thing. Hundreds and hundreds of British pounds, maybe even thousands, in a huge greasy roll. Cops are public servants, which doesn’t make them paupers, but they live lives of payments and budgets and credit cards bending under the strain. Added to which the guy had no communication device. Nothing at all. Nowhere. No cell phone, no radio. Which was unthinkable, for a cop during work hours.