Nothing to Lose (23 page)

47

From the plant to the Hope town line was fifteen miles by road, but Reacher made it into a twenty-mile excursion by looping around to the north, through the scrub. He figured that the townsfolk would have reorganized fairly fast, and there was no obvious way of winning the consequent twin confrontations at both ends of Main Street. So he avoided them altogether. He hammered the deputy’s old truck across the rough ground and navigated by the glow of the fire to his right. It looked to be going strong. In his experience brick buildings always burned well. The contents went first, and then the floors and the ceilings, and then the roof, with the outer walls holding up and forming a tall chimney to enhance the air flow. And when the walls finally went, the collapse blasted sparks and embers all over the place, to start new fires. Sometimes a whole city block could be taken out by one cigarette and one book of matches.

He skirted the town on a radius he judged to be about four miles and then he shadowed the road back east a hundred yards out in the dirt. When the clock in his head hit midnight he figured he was less than a mile short of the line. He veered right and bounced up onto the tarred pebbles and finished the trip like a normal driver. He thumped over the line and Hope’s thick blacktop made the ride go suddenly quiet.

Vaughan was waiting a hundred yards ahead.

She was parked on the left shoulder with her lights off. He slowed and held his arm out his window in a reassuring wave. She put her arm out her own window, hand extended, fingers spread, an answering gesture. Or a traffic signal. He coasted and feathered the brakes and the steering and came to a stop with his fingertips touching hers. To him the contact felt one-third like a mission-accomplished high-five, one-third like an expression of relief to be out of the lions’ den again, and one-third just plain good. He didn’t know what it felt like to her. She gave no indication. But she left her hand there a second longer than she needed to.

“Whose truck?” she asked.

“The senior deputy’s,” Reacher said. “His name is Underwood. He’s very sick.”

“With what?”

“He said I did it to him.”

“Did you?”

“I gave a sick man a couple of contusions, which I don’t feel great about. But I didn’t give him diarrhea or blisters or sores and I didn’t make his hair fall out.”

“So is it TCE?”

“Thurman said not.”

“You believe him?”

“Not necessarily.”

Vaughan held up a plastic bottle of water.

Reacher said, “I’m not thirsty.”

“Good,” Vaughan said. “This is a sample. Tap water, from my kitchen. I called a friend of a friend of David’s. He knows a guy who works at the state lab in Colorado Springs. He told me to take this in for testing. And to find out how much TCE Thurman actually uses.”

“The tank holds five thousand gallons.”

“But how often does it get used up and refilled?”

“I don’t know.”

“How can we find out?”

“There’s a purchasing office, probably full of paperwork.”

“Can we get in there?”

“Maybe.”

Vaughan said, “Go dump that truck back over the line. I’ll drive you to town. We’ll take a doughnut break.”

So Reacher steered the truck backward into the sand and left it there, keys in. Way behind him he could see a faint red glow on the horizon. Despair was still on fire. He didn’t say anything about it. He just walked forward and crossed the line again and climbed in next to Vaughan.

“You smell of cigarettes,” she said.

“I found one,” he said. “I smoked a half-inch, for old times’ sake.”

“They give you cancer, too.”

“I heard that. You believe it?”

“Yes,” she said. “I do, absolutely.”

She took off east, at a moderate speed, one hand on the wheel and the other in her lap. He asked her, “How’s your day going?”

“A gum wrapper blew across the street in front of me. Right there in my headlights. Violation of the anti-littering ordinance. That’s about as exciting as it gets in Hope.”

“Did you call Denver? About Maria?”

She nodded.

“The old man picked her up,” she said. “By the hardware store. He confirmed her name. He knew a lot about her. They talked for half an hour.”

“Half an hour? How? It’s less than a twenty-minute drive.”

“He didn’t let her out in Despair. She wanted to go to the MP base.”

They got to the diner at twenty minutes past midnight. The college-girl waitress was on duty. She smiled when she saw them walk in together, as if some kind of a long-delayed but pleasant inevitability had finally taken place. She looked to be about twenty years old, but she was grinning away like a smug old matchmaker from an ancient village. Reacher felt like there was a secret he wasn’t privy to. He wasn’t sure that Vaughan understood it either.

They sat opposite each other in the back booth. They didn’t order doughnuts. Reacher ordered coffee and Vaughan ordered juice, a blend of three exotic fruits, none of which Reacher had ever encountered before.

“You’re very healthy,” he said.

“I try.”

“Is your husband in the hospital? With cancer, from smoking?”

She shook her head.

“No,” she said. “He isn’t.”

Their drinks arrived and they sipped them in silence for a moment and then Reacher asked, “Did the old guy know why Maria wanted to go to the MPs?”

“She didn’t tell him. But it’s a weird destination, isn’t it?”

“Very,” Reacher said. “It’s an active-service forward operating base. Visitors wouldn’t be permitted. Not even if she knew one of the grunts. Not even if one of the grunts was her brother or her sister.”

“Combat MPs use women grunts?”

“Plenty.”

“So maybe she’s one of them. Maybe she was reporting back on duty, after furlough.”

“Then why would she have booked two more nights in the motel and left all her stuff there?”

“I don’t know. Maybe she was just checking something.”

“She’s too small for a combat MP.”

“They have a minimum size?”

“The army always has had, overall. These days, I’m not sure what it is. But even if she squeezed in, they’d put her somewhere else, covertly.”

“You sure?”

“No question. Plus she was too quiet and timid. She wasn’t military.”

“So what did she want from the MPs? And why isn’t she back yet?”

“Did the old guy actually see her get in?”

“Sure,” Vaughan said. “He waited, like an old-fashioned gentleman.”

“Therefore a better question would be, if they let her in, what did they want from her?”

Vaughan said, “Something to do with espionage.”

Reacher shook his head. “I was wrong about that. They’re not worried about espionage. They’d have the plant buttoned up, east and west, probably with a presence inside, or at least on the gates.”

“So why are they there?”

“They’re guarding the truck route. Which means they’re worried about theft, of something that would need a truck to haul away. Something heavy, too heavy for a regular car.”

“Something too heavy for a small plane, then.”

Reacher nodded. “But that plane is involved somehow. This morning I was barging around and therefore they had to shut down the secret operation for a spell, and tonight the plane didn’t fly. I didn’t hear it, and I found it later, right there in its hangar.”

“You think it only flies when they’ve been working on the military stuff?”

“I know for sure it didn’t when they hadn’t been, so maybe the obverse is true, too.”

“Carrying something? In or out?”

“Maybe both. Like trading.”

“Secrets?”

“Maybe.”

“People? Like Lucy Anderson’s husband?”

Reacher drained his mug. Shook his head. “I can’t make that work. There’s a logic problem with it. Almost mathematical.”

“Try me,” Vaughan said. “I did four years of college.”

“How long have you got?”

“I’d love to catch whoever dropped the gum wrapper. But I could put that on the back burner, if you like.”

Reacher smiled. “There are three things going on over there. The military contract, plus something else, plus something else again.”

“OK,” Vaughan said. She moved the saltshaker, the pepper shaker, and the sugar shaker to the center of the table. “Three things.”

Reacher moved the saltshaker to one side, immediately. “The military contract is what it is. Nothing controversial. Nothing to worry about, except the possibility that someone might steal something heavy. And that’s the MPs’ problem. They’re straddling the road, they’ve got six Humvees, they’ve got thirty miles of empty space for a running battle, they can stop any truck they need to. No special vigilance required from the townspeople. No reason for the townspeople to get excited at all.”

“But?”

Reacher cupped his hands and put his left around the pepper shaker and his right around the sugar shaker. “But the townspeople
are
excited about something.
All
of them. They
are
vigilant. Today they all turned out in defense of something.”

“What something?”

“I have no clue.” He held up the sugar shaker, in his right hand. “But it’s the bigger of the two unknowns. Because everyone is involved in it. Let’s call it the right hand, as in the right hand doesn’t know what the left is doing.”

“What’s the left hand?”

Reacher held up the pepper shaker, in his left hand. “It’s smaller. It involves a subset of the population. A small, special subgroup. Everyone knows about the sugar, most
don’t
know about the pepper, a few know about both the sugar
and
the pepper.”

“And we don’t know about either.”

“But we will.”

“How does this relate to Lucy Anderson’s husband not being taken out by plane?”

Reacher held up the sugar shaker. A large glass item, in his right hand. “Thurman flies the plane. Thurman is the town boss. Thurman directs the larger unknown. It couldn’t happen any other way. And if the Anderson guy had been a part of it, everyone would have been aware. Including the town cops and Judge Gardner. Thurman would have made sure of that. Therefore Lucy Anderson would not have been arrested, and she would not have been thrown out as a vagrant.”

“So Thurman’s doing something, and everyone is helping, but a few are also working on something else behind his back?”

Reacher nodded. “And that something the few are working on behind his back involves these young guys.”

“And the young guys either get through or they don’t, depending on who they bump into first, the many right-hand people or the few left-hand people.”

“Exactly. And there’s a new one now. Name of Rogers, just arrested, but I didn’t see him.”

“Rogers? I’ve heard that name before.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know.”

“Wherever, he was one of the unlucky ones.”

“The odds will always be against them.”

“Exactly.”

“Which was Ramirez’s problem.”

“No, Ramirez didn’t bump into anyone,” Reacher said. “I checked the records. He was neither arrested nor helped.”

“Why? What made him different?”

“Great question,” Reacher said.

“What’s the answer?”

“I don’t know.”

48

The clock in Reacher’s head hit one in the morning and the clock on the diner’s wall followed it a minute later. Vaughan looked at her watch and said, “I better get back in the saddle.”

Reacher said, “OK.”

“Go get some sleep.”

“OK.”

“Will you come with me to Colorado Springs? To the lab, with the water sample?”

“When?”

“Tomorrow, today, whatever it is now.”

“I don’t know anything about water.”

“That’s why we’re going to the lab.”

“What time?”

“Leave at ten?”

“That’s early for you.”

“I don’t sleep anyway. And this is the end of my pattern. I’m off duty for four nights now. Ten on, four off. And we should leave early because it’s a long ride, there and back.”

“Still trying to keep me out of trouble? Even on your downtime?”

“I’ve given up on keeping you out of trouble.”

“Then why?”

Vaughan said, “Because I’d like your company. That’s all.”

She put four bucks on the table for her juice. She put the salt and the pepper and the sugar back where they belonged. Then she slid out of the booth and walked away and pushed through the door and headed for her car.

Reacher showered and was in bed by two o’clock in the morning. He slept dreamlessly and woke up at eight. He showered again and walked the length of the town to the hardware store. He spent five minutes looking at ladders on the sidewalk, and then he went inside and found the racks of pants and shirts and chose a new one of each. This time he went for darker colors and a different brand. Prewashed, and therefore softer. Less durable in the long term, but he wasn’t interested in the long term.

He changed in his motel room and left his old stuff folded on the floor next to the trash can. Maybe the maid had a needy male relative his size. Maybe she would know how to launder things so they came out at least marginally flexible. He stepped out of his room and saw that Maria’s bathroom light was on. He walked to the office. The clerk was on her stool. Behind her shoulder, the hook for Maria’s room had no key on it. The clerk saw him looking and said, “She came back this morning.”

He asked, “What time?”

“Very early. About six.”

“Did you see how she got here?”

The woman looked both ways and lowered her voice and said, “In an armored car. With a soldier.”

“An armored car?”

“Like you see on the news.”

Reacher said, “A Humvee.”

The woman nodded. “Like a jeep. But with a roof. The soldier didn’t stay. Which I’m glad about. I’m no prude, but I couldn’t permit a thing like that. Not here.”

“Don’t worry,” Reacher said. “She already has a boyfriend.”

Or had,
he thought.

The woman said, “She’s too young to be fooling around with soldiers.”

“Is there an age limit?”

“There ought to be.”

Reacher paid his bill and walked back down the row, doing the math. According to the old man’s telephone testimony, he had let Maria out at the MP base around eight-thirty the previous morning. She had arrived back in a Humvee at six. The Humvee wouldn’t have detoured around the Interstates. It would have come straight through Despair, which was a thirty-minute drive, max. Therefore she had been held for twenty-one hours. Therefore her problem was outside of the FOB’s local jurisdiction. She had been locked in a room and her story had been passed up the chain of command. Phone tag, voice mails, secure telexes. Maybe a conference call. Eventually, a decision taken elsewhere, release, the offer of a ride home.

Sympathy, but no help.

No help about what?

He stopped outside her door and listened. The shower wasn’t running. He waited one minute in case she was toweling off and a second minute in case she was dressing. Then he knocked. A third minute later she opened the door. Her hair was slick with water. The weight gave it an extra inch of length. She was dressed in jeans and a blue T-shirt. No shoes. Her feet were tiny, like a child’s. Her toes were straight. She had been raised by conscientious parents, who had cared about appropriate footwear.

“You OK?” he asked her, which was a dumb question. She didn’t look OK. She looked small and tired and lost and bewildered.

She didn’t answer.

He said, “You went to the MP base, asking about Raphael.”

She nodded.

He said, “You thought they could help you, but they didn’t.”

She nodded.

He said, “They told you it was Despair PD business.”

She didn’t answer.

He said, “Maybe I could help you. Or maybe the Hope PD could. You want to tell me what it’s all about?”

She said nothing.

He said, “I can’t help you unless I understand the problem.”

She shook her head.

“I can’t tell you,” she said. “I can’t tell anyone.”

The way she said the word
can’t
was definitive. Not surly or angry or moody or plaintive, but calm, considered, mature, and ultimately just plain informative. As if she had looked at a whole bunch of options, and boiled them down to the only one that was viable. As if a world of trouble was surely inevitable if she opened her mouth.

She couldn’t tell anyone.

Simple as that.

“OK,” Reacher said. “Hang in there.”

He walked away, to the diner, and had breakfast.

He guessed Vaughan planned to pick him up at the motel, so at five to ten he was sitting in the plastic lawn chair outside his door. She showed up three minutes past the hour, in a plain black Crown Vic. Dull paint, worn by time and trouble. An unmarked squad car, like a detective would drive. She stopped close to him and buzzed the window down. He said, “Did you get promoted?”

“It’s my watch commander’s ride. He took pity on me and loaned it out. Since you got my truck smashed up.”

“Did you find the litterbug?”

“No. And it’s a serial crime now. I saw the silver foil later. Technically that’s two separate offenses.”

“Maria is back. The MPs brought her home early this morning.”

“Is she saying anything?”

“Not a word.” He got out of the chair and walked around the hood and slid in beside her. The car was very plain. Lots of black plastic, lots of mouse-fur upholstery of an indeterminate color. It felt like a beat-up rental. The front was full of police gear. Radios, a laptop on a bracket, a video camera on the dash, a hard-disc recorder, a red bubble light on a curly cord. But there was no security screen between the front and the rear, and therefore the seat was going to rack all the way back. It was going to be comfortable. Plenty of legroom. The water sample was on the rear seat. Vaughan was looking good. She was in old blue jeans and a white Oxford shirt, the neck open two buttons and the sleeves rolled to her elbows.

She said, “You’ve changed.”

“In what way?”

“Your clothes, you idiot.”

“New this morning,” he said. “From the hardware store.”

“Nicer than the last lot.”

“Don’t get attached to them. They’ll be gone soon.”

“What’s the longest you ever wore a set of clothes?”

“Eight months,” Reacher said. “Desert BDUs, during Gulf War One. Never took them off. We had all kinds of supply snafus. No spares, no pajamas.”

“You were in the Gulf, the first time?”

“Beginning to end.”

“How was it?”

“Hot.”

Vaughan pulled out of the motel lot and headed north to First Street. Turned left, east, toward Kansas. Reacher said, “We’re taking the long way around?”

“I think it would be better.”

Reacher said, “Me too.”

It was an obvious cop car and the roads were empty and Vaughan averaged ninety most of the way, charging head-on toward the mountains. Reacher knew Colorado Springs a little. Fort Carson was there, which was a major army presence, but it was really more of an Air Force town. Aside from that, it was a pleasant place. Scenery was pretty, the air was clean, it was often sunny, the view of Pikes Peak was usually spectacular. The downtown area was neat and compact. The state lab was in a stone government building. It was a satellite operation, an offshoot of the main facility in Denver, the capital. Water was a big deal all over Colorado. There wasn’t much of it. Vaughan handed over her bottle and filled out a form and a guy wrapped the form around the bottle and secured it with a rubber band. Then he carried it away, ceremoniously, like that particular quart had the power to save the world, or destroy it. He came back and told Vaughan that she would be notified of the results by phone, and to please let the lab know some figures for Despair’s total TCE consumption. He explained that the state used a rough rule-of-thumb formula, whereby a certain percentage of evaporation could be assumed, and a further percentage of absorption by the ground could be relied upon, so that what really mattered was how much was running off and how deep an aquifer was. The state knew the depth of Halfway County’s aquifer to the inch, so the only variable would be the exact amount of TCE heading down toward it.

“What are the symptoms?” Vaughan asked. “If it’s there already?”

The lab guy glanced at Reacher.

“Prostate cancer,” he said. “That’s the early warning. Men go first.”

They got back in the car. Vaughan was distracted. A little vague. Reacher didn’t know what was on her mind. She was a cop and a conscientious member of her community, but clearly she was worrying about more than a distant chemical threat to her water table. He wasn’t sure why she had asked him to travel with her. They hadn’t spoken much. He wasn’t sure that his company was doing her any good at all.

She pulled out off the curb and drove a hundred yards on a tree-lined street and stopped at a light at a T-junction. Left was west and right was east. The light turned green and she didn’t move. She just sat there, gripping the wheel, looking left, looking right, as if she couldn’t choose. A guy honked behind her. She glanced in the mirror and then she glanced at Reacher.

She said, “Will you come with me to visit my husband?”