Lee Child: James Penney's New Identity

And Penney had burned three houses down. That was the problem. But then it wasn’t a problem any more. The silence in the station house was broken by the sound of the telex machine starting up. The sheriff wandered through to the booth and tore off a foot and a half of paper. Read it and folded it and slipped it into the file he’d just started. Then he picked up the phone and called the California Highway Patrol.

“I’ll take it from here,” he told them. “This is Laney County business. Our coroner will see to the guy. I’ll go out to Soda Lake with him right away.”

The Laney County coroner was a young medic out of Stanford called Kolek. Polish name, but the guy was from a family which had been in California longer than most. Forty years, maybe. The sheriff rode east with him in his official station wagon. Kolek wasn’t upset by the late call. He didn’t object to working at night. He was young and he was new and he needed the money. But he was pretty quiet the whole way. Medical guys in general are not keen on dealing with burned bodies. The sheriff didn’t know why. He’d seen a few. A burned body was like something you left on the barbecue too long. Better than the damp maggoty things you find in the woods. A whole lot better.

“We got to bring it back?” Kolek asked.

“The car?” the sheriff said. “Or the guy?”

“The corpse,” Kolek said.

The sheriff grinned at him and nodded. “There’s an ex-wife somewhere. She might want to bury the guy. Maybe there’s a family plot.”

Kolek shrugged and turned the heater up a click. Drove through the night all the way from Mojave to Soda Lake in silence. A hundred and thirty miles without saying a word.

The junkyard was a stadium-sized space hidden behind a high wooden fence in the angle made by the road down to Baker where it left the highway. There were gleaming tow trucks lined up outside the gate. Kolek slowed and passed them and nosed into the compound. Inside the gate, a wooden hut served as the office. The light was on inside. Kolek hit his horn once and waited. A woman came out. She saw who they were and ducked back inside to hit the lights. The compound lit up like day with blue lights on poles. The woman directed them to the burned Firebird. It was draped with a sun-bleached tarp.

Kolek and the sheriff pulled the tarp off the wreck. It wasn’t bent very far out of shape. The sheriff could see that the brush growing on the mountainside had slowed its descent, all the way. It hadn’t smashed head-on into a boulder or anything. If it hadn’t caught on fire, James Penney might have survived.

Kolek pulled flashlights and his tool kit out of the station wagon. He needed the crowbar to get the driver’s door open. The hinges were seized and distorted from the heat. The sheriff put his weight on it and screeched it all the way open. Then the two men played their flashlight beams all round the charred interior.

“Seat belt is burned away,” Kolek said. “But he was wearing it. Buckle’s still done up.”

The sheriff nodded and pointed.

“Airbag deployed,” he said.

The plastic parts of the steering wheel had all burned away, but they could see the little metal hinges in the up position, where the bag had exploded outwards.

“OK,” Kolek said. “Now for the fun part.”

The sheriff held both flashlights and Kolek put on some heavy rubber gloves. He poked around for a while.

“He’s fused on pretty tight,” he said. “Best way would be to cut through the seat springs and take part of the seat with us.”

“Is the body bag big enough?”

“Probably. This isn’t a very big corpse.”

The sheriff glanced in again. Slid the flashlight beam over the body.

“Penney was a big enough guy,” he said. “Maybe better than five-ten.”

Kolek grimaced. “Fire shrinks them. The body fluids boil off.”

He walked back to the station wagon and pulled out a pair of wire cutters. Leaned back into the Firebird and started snipping through the zigzag metal springs close to where they were fused to the corpse. It took him a while. He had to lean right in, chest-to-chest with the body, to reach the far side.

“OK, give me a hand here,” he said.

The sheriff shoved his hands in under the charred legs and grabbed the springs where Kolek had cut them away from the frame. He pulled and twisted and hauled the body out, feet-first. Kolek grabbed the shoulders and they carried the rigid assembly a few feet away and laid it carefully on the ground. They stood up together and the body rolled backwards, stiff, with the bent legs pointing grotesquely upwards.

“Shit,” Kolek said. “I hate this.”

The sheriff was crouched down, playing his flashlight beam over the contorted gap that had been Penney’s mouth.

“Teeth are still there,” he said. “You should be able to make the ID.”

Kolek joined him. There was a distinctive overbite visible.

“No problem,” he agreed. “You in a hurry for it?”

The sheriff shrugged. “Can’t close the case without it.”

They struggled together to zip the body into the bag and then loaded it into the back of the wagon. They put it on its side, wedged against the bulge of the wheel arch. Then they drove back west, with the morning sun rising behind them.

That same morning sunwoke James Penney by coming in through a hole in his motel room blind and playing a bright beam across his face. He stirred and lay in the warmth of the rented bed, watching the dust motes dancing.

He was still in California, up near Yosemite, cabin twelve in a place just far enough from the Park to be cheap. He had six weeks’ pay in his billfold, which was hidden under the center of his mattress. Six weeks’ pay, less a tank and a half of gas, a cheeseburger and twenty-seven-fifty for the room. Hidden under the mattress, because twenty-seven-fifty doesn’t get you a space in a top-notch place. His door was locked, but the desk guy would have a pass key, and he wouldn’t be the first desk guy in the world to rent out his pass key by the hour to somebody looking to make a little extra money during the night.

But nothing bad had happened. The mattress was so thin he could feel the billfold right there, under his kidney. Still there, still bulging. A good feeling. He lay watching the sunbeam, struggling with mental arithmetic, spreading six weeks’ pay out over the foreseeable future. With nothing to worry about except cheap food, cheap motels and the Firebird’s gas, he figured he had no problems at all. The Firebird had a modern motor, twenty-four valves, tuned for a blend of power and economy. He could get far away and have enough money left to take his time looking around.

After that, he wasn’t so sure. There wasn’t going to be much call anywhere for a metalworker, even with seventeen years’ experience. But there would be a call for something. He was sure of that. Even if it was menial. He was a worker. He didn’t mind what he did. Maybe he’d find something outdoors, might be a refreshing thing. Might have some kind of dignity to it. Some kind of simple work, for simple honest folks, a lot different than slaving for that grinning weasel Odell.

He watched the sunbeam travel across the counterpane for a while. Then he flung the cover aside and swung himself out of bed. Used the john, rinsed his face and mouth at the sink and untangled his clothes from the pile he’d dropped them in. He’d need more clothes. He only had the things he stood up in. Everything else, he’d burned along with his house. He shrugged and re-ran his calculations to allow for some new pants and work shirts. Maybe some heavy boots, if he was going to be laboring outside. The six weeks’ pay was going to have to stretch a little thinner. He decided to drive slow, to save gas, and maybe eat less. Or maybe not less, just cheaper. He’d use truck stops, not tourist diners. More calories, less money.