Lee Child - Running Blind

THEY DROVE OUT of the tunnel and streamed west with the traffic. Route 3 angled slightly north toward the Turnpike. It was a shiny night in New Jersey, damp asphalt everywhere, sodium lights with evening fog haloes strung like necklaces. There were lit billboards and neon signs left and right. Establishments of every nature behind lumpy blacktop yards.

The roadhouse they were looking for was in the back of a leftover lot where three roads met. It was labeled with a beer company’s neon sign which said Mac-Stiophan’s , which as far as Reacher understood Gaelic meant Stevenson’s . It was a low building with a flat roof. Its walls were faced with brown boards and there was a green neon shamrock in every window. Its parking lot was badly lit and three-quarters empty. Reacher put the Maxima at a casual angle across two spaces near the door. Slid out and looked around. The air was cold. He turned a full circle in the dark, scanning the lot against the lights from the street.

"No Cadillac DeVille,” he said. "He’s not here yet.”

Harper looked at the door, cautiously.

“We’re a little early,” she said. “I guess we’ll wait.”

“You can wait out here,” he said. “If you prefer.”

She shook her head.

“I’ve been in worse places,” she said.

It was hard for Reacher to imagine where and when. The outer door led to a six-by-six lobby with a cigarette machine and a sisal mat worn smooth and greasy with use. The inner door led to a low dark space full of the stink of beer fumes and smoke. There was no ventilation running. The green shamrocks in the windows shone inward as well as outward and gave the place a pale ghostly glare. The walls were dark boards, dulled and sticky with fifty years of cigarettes. The bar was a long wooden structure with halved barrels stuck to the front. There were tall barstools with red vinyl seats and lower versions of the same thing scattered around the room near tables built of lacquered barrels with plywood circles nailed to their tops. The plywood was rubbed smooth and dirty from thousands of wrists and hands.

There was a bartender behind the bar and eight customers in the body of the room. All of them had glasses of beer set on the plywood in front of them. All of them were men. All of them were staring at the new-comers. None of them was a soldier. They were all wrong for the military. Some were too old, some were too soft, some had long dirty hair. Just ordinary workingmen. Or maybe unemployed. But they were all hostile. They were silent, like they had just stopped talking in the middle of low muttered sentences. They were staring, like they were trying to intimidate.

Reacher swept his gaze over all of them, pausing on each face, long enough to let them know he wasn’t impressed, and short enough to stop them thinking he was in any way interested. Then he stepped to the bar and rolled a stool out for Harper.

“What’s on draft?” he asked the bartender.

The guy was wearing an unwashed dress shirt with no collar. Pleats all the way down the front. He had a dish towel squared over his shoulder. He was maybe fifty, gray-faced, paunchy. He didn’t answer.

“What have you got?” Reacher asked again.

No reply.

“Hey, are you deaf?” Harper called to the guy.

She was half on and half off the stool, one foot on the floor, the other on the rung. Her jacket was draped open and she was twisting around from the waist. Her hair was loose down her back.

“Let’s make a deal,” she said. “You give us beer, we give you money, take it from there. Maybe you could turn it into a business, you know, call it running a saloon.”

The guy turned to her.

“Haven’t seen you in here before,” he said.

Harper smiled. “No, we’re new customers. That’s what it’s all about, expanding your customer base, right? Do it well enough, and you’ll be the barroom king of the Garden State, no time at all.”

“What do you want?” the guy said.

“Two beers,” Reacher said.

“Apart from that?”

“Well, we’re already enjoying the ambiance and the friendly welcome.”

"People like you don’t come in a place like mine without wanting something.”

“We’re waiting for Bob,” Harper said.

“Bob who?”

“Bob with real short hair and an old Cadillac DeVille, ” Reacher said. “Bob from the Army, comes in here eight o’clock every night.”

“You’re waiting for him?”

“Yes, we’re waiting for him,” Harper said.

The guy smiled. Yellow teeth, some of them missing.

“Well, you’ve got a long wait, then,” he said.

“Why?”

“Buy a drink, and I’ll tell you.”

“We’ve been trying to buy a drink for the last five minutes,” Reacher said.

“What do you want?”

“Two beers,” Reacher said. “Whatever’s on tap.”

“Bud or Bud Light.”

“One of each, OK?”

The guy took two glasses down from an overhead rack and filled them. The room was still silent. Reacher could feel eight pairs of eyes on his back. The guy placed the beers on the bar. There was an inch of soapy foam on the top of each of them. The guy peeled two cocktail napkins from a stack and dealt them out like cards. Harper pulled a wallet from her pocket and dropped a ten between the glasses.

“Keep the change,” she said. “So why have we got a long wait for Bob?”

The guy smiled again and slid the ten backward. Folded it into his hand and put his hand in his pocket.

“Because Bob’s in jail, far as I know,” he said.

“What for?”

“Some Army thing,” the guy said. “I don’t know the details, and I don’t want to know the details. That’s how you do business in this part of the Garden State, miss, begging your damn pardon, your fancy ideas notwithstanding. ”

“What happened?” Reacher asked.

“Military policemen came in and grabbed him up right here, right in this room.”

“When?” Reacher asked.

“Took six of them to get him. They smashed a table. I just got a check from the Army. All the way from Washington, D.C. The Pentagon. In the mail.”

“When was this?” Reacher asked.

“When the check came? Couple days ago.”

“No, when did they arrest him?”

“I’m not sure,” the guy said. “They were still playing baseball, I remember that. Regular season, too. Couple months ago, I guess.”

THEY LEFT THE beer untouched on the bar and headed back to the parking lot. Unlocked the Nissan and slid inside.

“Couple months is no good,” Harper said. “Puts him right outside the picture.”

“He was never in the picture,” Reacher said. “But we’ll go talk to him anyway.”

“How can we do that? He’s in the Army system somewhere.”

He looked at her. “Harper, I was a military policeman for thirteen years. If I can’t find him, who can?”

“He could be anywhere.”

“No, he couldn’t. If this dump is his local bar, it means he was posted somewhere near here. Low-grade guy like that, a regional MP office will be handling him. Two-month time span, he’s not court-martialed yet, so he’s in a holding pattern at a regional MP HQ, which for this region is Fort Armstrong outside of Trenton, which is less than two hours away.”

“You sure?”

He shrugged. "Unless things have changed a hell of a lot in three years.”

“Some way you can check?” she asked.

“I don’t need to check.”

“We don’t want to waste time here,” she said.

He said nothing back and she smiled and opened her bag. Came out with a folded cellular phone the size of a cigarette packet.

“Use my mobile,” she said.

EVERYBODY USES MOBILES. They use them all the time, just constantly. It’s a phenomenon of the modern age. Everybody’s talk, talk, talking, all the time, little black telephones pressed up to their faces. Where does all that conversation come from? What happened to all that conversation before mobiles were invented? Was it all bottled up? Burning ulcers in people’s guts? Or did it just develop spontaneously because technology made it possible?