TWENTY-SEVEN

REACHER BLEW STRAIGHT PAST THE BILLBOARD AND THEN SLOWED and checked ahead. In his experience most places reserved the main drag for profit-and-loss businesses. Municipal enterprises like cops and county offices would be a block or two over. Maybe more. Something to do with tax revenues. A town couldn’t charge as much for a lot on a back street.

He slowed a little more and passed the first building. It was on the left. It was an aluminium coach diner, as advertised on the billboard, as mentioned by Dorothy the housekeeper. It was the place where the county cops got their morning coffee and doughnuts. And their afternoon snacks, apparently. There was a black-and-white Dodge police cruiser parked outside. Plus two working pick-up trucks, both of them farm vehicles, both of them dented and dirty. Next up in terms of infrastructure was a gas station across the street, Texaco, with three service bays attached. Then came a long sequence of miscellaneous enterprises, on the left and the right, a hardware store, a liquor store, a bank, tyre bays, a John Deere dealership, a grocery, a pharmacy. The street was broad and muddy and had diagonal parking on both sides.

Reacher drove all the way through town. At the end of it was a genuine crossroads, signposted left to an ethanol plant and right to a hospital and straight ahead to I-80, another sixty miles farther on. He U-turned shoulder-to-shoulder and came back again, north on the main drag. There were three side streets on the right, and three on the left. They all had names that sounded like people. Maybe original Nebraska settlers, or famous football players, or coaches, or champion corn growers. He made the first right, on a street named McNally, and saw the Marriott hotel up ahead. It was four o’clock in the afternoon, which was awkward. The old files would be in the police station or a county storeroom, and either way the file clerks would be quitting at five. He had one hour. That was all. Access alone might take thirty minutes to arrange, and there was probably plenty of paper, which would take much more than the other thirty to read. He was going to have to wait for the morning.

Or, maybe not.

Worth a try.

He rolled ahead and took a look at the hotel on the way. He wasn’t sure what the difference was between a regular Marriott and a Courtyard Marriott. Maybe one was high-rise and the other was low-rise. This was a low-rise, just two storeys, H-shaped, a lobby flanked by two modest wings of bedrooms. There was a parking lot out front with marked spaces for about twenty cars, only two of them occupied. Same again at the rear of the building. Twenty spaces, only two of them occupied. Plenty of vacancies. Wintertime, in the middle of nowhere.

He made a left and came back north again, parallel to the main drag, three blocks over. He saw the second restaurant. It was a rib shack. It boasted a dry rub recipe direct from Kansas. He turned left again just beyond it and came back to the main street and pulled in at the diner. The cop car was still there. Still parked. The diner wasn’t busy. Reacher could see in through the windows. Two cops, three civilians, a waitress, and a cook behind a hatch.

Reacher locked the Cadillac and walked in. The cops were face to face in a booth, each of them wide and bulky, each of them taking up most of a two-person bench. One of them was about Reacher’s age, and one of them was younger. They had grey uniforms, with badges and insignia, and nameplates. The older cop was called Hoag. Reacher walked past him and stopped and pantomimed a big double take and said, ‘You’re Hoag, right? I don’t believe it.’

The cop said, ‘Excuse me?’

‘I remember you from Desert Storm. Don’t I? The Gulf, in 1991? Am I right?’

The cop said, ‘I’m sorry, my friend, but you’ll have to help me out here. There’s been a lot of water over the dam since 1991.’

Reacher offered his hand. He said, ‘Reacher, 110th MP.’

The cop wiped his hand on his pants and shook. He said, ‘I’m not sure I was ever in contact with you guys.’

‘Really? I could have sworn. Saudi, maybe? Just before? During Desert Shield?’

‘I was in Germany just before.’

‘I don’t think it was Germany. But I remember the name. And the face, kind of. Did you have a brother in the Gulf? Or a cousin or something?’

‘A cousin, sure.’

‘Looks just like you?’

‘Back then, I guess. A little.’

‘There you go. Nice guy, right?’

‘Nice enough.’

‘And a fine soldier, as I recall.’

‘He came home with a Bronze Star.’

‘I knew it. VII Corps, right?’

‘Second Armored Cavalry.’

‘Third Squadron?’

‘That’s the one.’

‘I knew it,’ Reacher said again. An old, old process, exploited by fortune tellers everywhere. Steer a guy through an endless series of yes-no, right-wrong questions, and in no time at all a convincing illusion of intimacy built itself up. A simple psychological trick, sharpened by listening carefully to answers, feeling the way, and playing the odds. Most people who wore name tags every day forgot they had them on, at least initially. And a lot of heartland cops were ex-military. Way more than the average. And even if they weren’t, most of them had big families. Lots of brothers and cousins. Virtually certain that at least one of them would have been in the army. And Desert Storm had been the main engagement for that whole generation, and VII Corps had been by far its largest component, and a Bronze Star winner from the Second Armored Cavalry was almost certainly from the Third Squadron, which had been the tip of the spear. An algorithm. Playing the odds. No-brainers all the way.

Reacher asked, ‘So what’s your cousin doing now?’

‘Tony? He’s back in Lincoln. He got out before the second go-round, thank God. He’s working for the railroad. Two kids, one in junior high and one in college.’

‘That’s terrific. You see him much?’

‘Now and then.’

‘Be sure to remember me to him, OK? Jack Reacher, 110th MP. One desert rat to another.’

‘So what are you doing now? He’s bound to ask.’

‘Me? Oh, the same old, same old.’

‘What, you’re still in?’

‘No, I mean I was an investigator, and I’m still an investigator. But private now. My own man, not Uncle Sam’s.’

‘Here in Nebraska?’

‘Just temporarily,’ Reacher said. Then he paused. ‘You know what? Maybe you could help me out. If you don’t mind me asking.’

‘What do you need?’

‘You guys going on duty or going off?’

‘We’re coming on. We got the night shift ahead of us.’

‘Mind if I sit down?’

The cop called Hoag scooted over, all swishing vinyl and creaking leather. Reacher perched on the part of the bench he had vacated. It was warm. He said, ‘I knew this other guy, name of McNally. Another Second Armored guy, as a matter of fact. Turns out he has a friend of a friend who has an aunt in this county. She’s a farmer. Her daughter disappeared twenty-five years ago. Eight years old, never seen again. The woman never really got over it. Your department handled it, with the FBI as the icing on the cake. McNally’s friend of a friend thinks the FBI screwed up. So McNally hired me to review the paperwork.’

‘Twenty-five years ago?’ Hoag said. ‘Before my time.’

‘Right,’ Reacher said. ‘I guess we were both in basic back then.’

‘And the kid was never seen again? That means it’s an open case. Cold, but open. Which means the paperwork should still exist. And someone should remember it.’

‘That’s exactly what McNally was hoping.’

‘And he’s looking to screw the FBI? Not us?’

‘The story is you guys did a fine job.’

‘And what did the FBI do wrong?’

‘They didn’t find the kid.’

‘What good will all this do?’

‘I don’t know,’ Reacher said. ‘You tell me. You know how it is with people. It might put some minds at rest, I guess.’

‘OK,’ Hoag said. ‘I’ll put the word out at the station house. Someone will get you in, first thing tomorrow morning.’

‘Any chance of doing something tonight? If I could get this done by midnight, it would cut McNally’s bill by one day. He doesn’t have much money.’

‘You turning down a bigger pay cheque?’

‘One veteran to another. You know how it is. Plus I’ve got business elsewhere. I need to get to Virginia as soon as I can.’

Hoag checked his watch. Twenty minutes past four. He said, ‘All that old stuff is in the basement under the county clerk’s office. You can’t be in there after five o’clock.’

‘Any way of getting it out?’

‘Oh, man, that’s asking a lot.’

‘I don’t need court exhibits. I don’t want the physical evidence, assuming there is any. I just want the paperwork.’

‘I could get my ass kicked real bad.’

‘I just want to read it. Where’s the harm in that? In and out in one night, who’s even going to know?’

‘There’s probably a lot of it. Boxes and boxes.’

‘I’ll help with the grunt work.’

‘McNally was Second Armored? Same as Tony?’

Reacher nodded. ‘But Second Squadron, not Third. Not quite in Tony’s class.’

‘Where are you staying?’

‘The Marriott. Where else?’

There was a long pause. The younger cop looked on. Hoag was well aware of his scrutiny. Reacher watched the dynamic unfold. Hoag cycled through proper civil caution to a kind of nostalgic old-school can-do soldier-to-soldier recklessness. He looked at Reacher and said, ‘OK, I know a guy. We’ll get this done. But it’s better that you’re not there. So go wait for us. We’ll deliver.’

So Reacher drove back to the Courtyard Marriott and put the Cadillac way in the rear, behind the building itself, where it couldn’t be seen from the front. Safer that way, in case Seth Duncan couldn’t be stopped from getting on the horn and spreading the word. Then he walked back and waited at the lobby desk for the clerk to finish on the phone. He seemed to be taking a couple of bookings from someone. When he was done Reacher bought a night in a ground floor room, which turned out to be way in the back of the H, very quiet and very adequate, very clean and very well equipped, all green and tan colours and brass accents and pale wood. Then forty minutes later Hoag and his partner showed up in a borrowed K-9 van loaded with eleven cardboard cartons of files. Five minutes after that, all eleven cartons were in Reacher’s room.

And five minutes after that, but sixty miles to the north, the doctor left the motel lounge. He had talked with Vincent a bit, just shooting the shit, but mostly he had drunk three triples of Jim Beam. Nine measures of bourbon, in a little more than an hour. And it was cloudy and going dark, which meant that his glance up and down the road didn’t reveal what it would have if the sun had been brighter. He climbed into the pick-up truck and started the motor and backed out from his place of concealment. He swung the wheel and crossed the lot and turned right on the two-lane.