Lee Child - Nothing to Lose

She said, “You knew about this yesterday.”

He said, “Since the day before.”

“How?”

“The same way I figured the patients in David’s hospital were military. They were all young men.”

“You waited until that truck was over the border before you told me.”

“Yes, I did.”

“Why?”

“I didn’t want you to have it stopped.”

“Why not?”

“I wanted Rogers to get away.”

Vaughan stopped walking. “For God’s sake, you were a military cop.”

Reacher nodded. “Thirteen years.”

“You hunted guys like Rogers.”

“Yes, I did.”

“And now you’ve gone over to the dark side?”

Reacher said nothing.

Vaughan said, “Did you know Rogers?”

“Never heard of him. But I knew ten thousand just like him.”

Vaughan started walking again. Reacher kept pace. She stopped fifty yards short of the motel. Outside the police station. The brick façade looked cold in the gray light. The neat aluminum letters looked colder.

“They had a duty,” Vaughan said. “You had a duty. David did his duty. They should do theirs, and you should do yours.”

Reacher said nothing.

“Soldiers should go where they’re told,” she said. “They should follow orders. They don’t get to choose. And you swore an oath. You should obey it. They’re traitors to their country. They’re cowards. And you are, too. I can’t believe I slept with you. You’re nothing. You’re disgusting. You make my skin crawl.”

Reacher said, “Duty is a house of cards.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“I went where they told me. I followed orders. I did everything they asked, and I watched ten thousand guys do the same. And we were happy to, deep down. I mean, we bitched and pissed and moaned, like soldiers always do. But we bought the deal. Because duty is a transaction, Vaughan. It’s a two-way street. We owe them, they owe us. And what they owe us is a solemn promise to risk our lives and limbs if and only if there’s a damn good reason. Most of the time they’re wrong anyway, but we like to feel some kind of good faith somewhere. At least a little bit. And that’s all gone now. Now it’s all about political vanity and electioneering. That’s all. And guys know that. You can try, but you can’t bullshit a soldier. They blew it, not us. They pulled out the big card at the bottom of the house and the whole thing fell down. And guys like Anderson and Rogers are over there watching their friends getting killed and maimed and they’re thinking, Why? Why should we do this shit?”

“And you think going AWOL is the answer?”

“I think the answer is for civilians to get off their fat asses and vote the bums out. They should exercise control. That’s their duty. That’s the next-biggest card at the bottom of the house. But that’s gone, too. So don’t talk to me about AWOL. Why should the grunts on the ground be the only ones who don’t go AWOL? What kind of a two-way street is that?”

“You served thirteen years and you support deserters?”

“I understand their decision. Precisely because I served those thirteen years. I had the good times. I wish they could have had them, too. I loved the army. And I hate what happened to it. I feel the same as I would if I had a sister and she married a creep. Should she keep her marriage vows? To a point, sure, but no further.”

“If you were in now, would you have deserted?”

Reacher shook his head. “I don’t think I would have been brave enough.”

“It takes courage?”

“For most guys, more than you would think.”

“People don’t want to hear that their loved ones died for no good reason.”

“I know. But that doesn’t change the truth.”

“I hate you.”

“No, you don’t,” Reacher said. “You hate the politicians, and the commanders, and the voters, and the Pentagon.” Then he said, “And you hate that David didn’t go AWOL after his first tour.”

Vaughan turned and faced the street. Held still. Closed her eyes. She stood like that for a long time, pale, a small tremble in her lower lip. Then she spoke. Just a whisper. She said, “I asked him to. I begged him. I said we could start again anywhere he wanted, anywhere in the world. I said we could change our names, anything. But he wouldn’t agree. Stupid, stupid man.”

Then she cried, right there on the street, outside her place of work. Her knees buckled and she staggered a step and Reacher caught her and held her tight. Her tears soaked his shirt. Her body trembled. She wrapped her arms around him. She crushed her face into his chest. She wailed and cried for her shattered life, her broken dreams, the telephone call two years before, the chaplain’s visit to her door, the X-rays, the filthy hospitals, the unstoppable hiss of the respirator.

Afterward they walked up and down the block together, aimlessly, just to be moving. The sky was gray with low cloud and the air smelled like rain was on the way. Vaughan wiped her face on Reacher’s shirt tail and ran her fingers through her hair. She blinked her eyes clear and swallowed and took deep breaths. They ended up outside the police station again and Reacher saw her gaze trace the line of twenty aluminum letters fixed to the brick. Hope Police Department. She said, “Why didn’t Raphael Ramirez make it?”

Reacher said, “Because Ramirez was different.”

Reacher said, “One phone call from your desk will explain it. We might as well go ahead and make it. Since we’re right here anyway. Maria has waited long enough.”

Vaughan said, “One call to who?”

“The MPs west of Despair. You were briefed about them, they’ll have been briefed about you. Therefore they’ll cooperate.”

“What do I ask them?”

“Ask them to fax Ramirez’s summary file. They’ll say, Who? You’ll tell them, Bullshit, you know Maria was just there, so you know they know who he is. And tell them we know Maria was there for twenty-one hours, which is enough time for them to have gotten all the paperwork in the world.”

“What are we going to find?”

“My guess is Ramirez was in prison two weeks ago.”

The Hope Police Department’s fax machine was a boxy old product standing alone on a rolling cart. It had been square and graceless to start with, and now it was grubby and worn. But it worked. Eleven minutes after Vaughan finished her call it sparked up and started whirring and sucked a blank page out of the feeder tray and fed it back out with writing on it.

Not much writing. It was a bare-bones summary. Very little result for twenty-one hours of bureaucratic pestering. But that was explained by the fact that it had been the army doing the asking and the Marines doing the answering. Inter-service cooperation wasn’t usually very cooperative.

Raphael Ramirez had been a private in the Marine Corps. At the age of eighteen he had been deployed to Iraq. At the age of nineteen he had served a second deployment. At the age of twenty he had gone AWOL ahead of a third deployment. He had gone on the run but had been arrested five days later in Los Angeles and locked up awaiting court martial back at Pendleton.

Date of arrest, three weeks previously.

Reacher said, “Let’s go find Maria.”

They found her in her motel room. Her bed had a dent where she had been sitting, staying warm, saving energy, passing time, enduring. She answered the door tentatively, as if she was certain that all news would be bad. There was nothing in Reacher’s face to change her mind. He and Vaughan led her outside and sat her in the plastic lawn chair under her bathroom window. Reacher took room nine’s chair and Vaughan took room seven’s. They dragged them over and positioned them and made a tight little triangle on the concrete apron.