Make Me

“OK,” Reacher said. He found a ten and a five in his pocket, and paid for the phone. His change came in coins, expertly reckoned and deftly dispensed. They stopped on the sidewalk outside the store and wrestled the package open. Wasn’t easy. In the end Reacher gave up on finesse and tore it in half down the middle. He put the charger in his pocket and passed the phone itself to Chang. She looked it over, and figured it out, and turned it on. It came up with a welcome screen, small, blurred, and black and white. It showed its own number. Area code 501, plus seven more digits. It showed a battery icon, at about fifty percent capacity. Charged at the factory, but not all the way. The icon was like a tiny flashlight battery, tipped over on its side, solid at one end and hollow at the other. Reacher said, “Try McCann again. Maybe this time he’ll answer. Maybe his phone will recognize a kindred spirit.”

There was no speaker option. Not for thirteen bucks. Chang dialed, and they stood together cheek to cheek, listening, her right ear, his left, and they heard McCann’s phone ring. And ring. Endlessly. The same as before. No answer, and no voice mail.

Like a faithful spaniel, not understanding.

Chang ended the call.

She said, “Now what? We search an area bigger than Milwaukee?”

“I was dramatizing for effect. Milwaukee is bigger than thirty-six blocks. It’s a pretty nice place.”

Then he stopped.

She said, “What?”

He said, “Nothing.”

He had been about to say we should go there sometime.

She said, “OK, we have to search an area smaller than Milwaukee, but not by much.”

“A couple of blocks might do it. If we point ourselves in the right direction. This is a man who looks terrible because he doesn’t take care of himself. Probably doesn’t eat right, maybe doesn’t sleep right. Probably won’t go to the doctor, so he doesn’t get prescriptions to fill. And he certainly isn’t trawling the aisles comparison shopping for vitamin pills. Pharmacies are not on his radar. He doesn’t have a favorite. He’s indifferent to them all. Therefore he had no particular reason to buy his phone from this particular pharmacy. So why did he? Because he walks past it twice a day, to and from the library. How else would he even notice? They had one phone in the window, all covered with dust. So I think we can conclude he walks home in this direction. Out the library door, turn left, past the pharmacy, and onward.”

“To where?”

“I think this is a pretty nice neighborhood. I think the real estate here is solid. But apparently McCann is ashamed of where he lives. What does that mean? You see anything around here you’d be ashamed to live in?”

“I’m not McCann.”

“Exactly. It’s all relative. The old guy in the volunteer room looks like a retired CEO or something, and I’m sure he’s local, and I’m sure he lives in a house. Pretty much impossible to have a shirt like that without living in a house. The two things go together. Practically a requirement. Probably some kind of a nice brownstone on a quiet leafy street. Therefore if it’s relative, McCann doesn’t live in a house. But not in an apartment, either. Apartments are perfectly legitimate alternatives to houses. Better in some ways. Certainly nothing to be ashamed about. So McCann lives in something less than a house, but not an apartment.”

“A broken-up house,” Chang said. “A not-very-nice brownstone, on a not-very-leafy street, all divided up into separate rooms. Probably not still cooking on electric hotplates, but close. Which is hard for one guy to admit to another guy, especially when the other guy has a brownstone all to himself. Maybe the exact same brownstone. Same builder, same plan. But his street didn’t fall on hard times. Which is way too pointed for testosterone to bear.”

“That’s how I see it,” Reacher said. “Roughly. Maybe not the hormonal stuff. But two or three blocks in this direction, we’re going to find a couple of streets of tumbledown row houses, each with about a dozen bells on the door, and those kind of bells usually have labels next to them, sometimes with names on, and with a bit of luck we’ll find one of those names is McCann.”