Never Go Back

‘We’ve got nineteen dollars. You can have one or the other.’

‘Pants, then. And I’ll trade you your jacket back for your shirt.’

‘My shirt will look like a circus tent on you.’

‘I’ve seen women wear men’s shirts. Like wraps, all chic and baggy.’

‘You’ll be cold.’

‘I was born in Montana. I’m never cold.’

The bus laboured up the hill past the 110th HQ. The old stone building. The gates were open. The sentry was in his hutch. The day guy. Morgan’s car was still in the lot. The painted door was closed. Lights were on in all the windows. Turner swivelled all the way around in her seat, to keep the place in sight as long as she could. Until the last possible moment. Then she let it go and faced front again and said, ‘I hope I get back there.’

Reacher said, ‘You will.’

‘I worked so hard to get there in the first place. It’s a great command. But you know that already.’

‘Everyone else hates us.’

‘Only if we do our job properly.’

The bus made the turn at the top of the hill, on to the next three-lane, which led to Reacher’s motel. There was rain in the air. Just a little, but enough that the bus driver had his wipers going.

Turner said, ‘Tell me again how this is all my fault. Me and Afghanistan.’

The road levelled out and the bus picked up speed. It rattled straight past Reacher’s motel. The lot was empty. No car with dented doors.

He said, ‘It’s the only logical explanation. You put a fox in someone’s henhouse, and that someone wanted to shut you down. Which was easy enough to do. Because as it happened no one else in the unit knew what it was about. Your duty captain didn’t. Neither did Sergeant Leach. Or anyone else. So you were the only one. They set you up with the Cayman Islands bank account scam, and they busted you, which cut your lines of communication. Which stayed cut, when they beat on your lawyer Moorcroft, as soon as he showed the first sign of trying to get you out of jail. Problem solved, right there. You were isolated. You couldn’t talk to anyone. So everything was hunky dory. Except the records showed you had spent hours on the phone to South Dakota with some guy. And scuttlebutt around the building said the guy had been a previous 110th CO. Your duty captain knew that for sure, because I told him, first time I called. Maybe lots of people knew. Certainly I got a lot of name recognition when I showed up yesterday. And you and I could be assumed to share some common interests. We might have talked about the front burner. Either just shooting the shit, or maybe you were even asking me for a perspective.’

‘But I didn’t mention Afghanistan to you at all.’

‘But they didn’t know that. The phone log shows duration, not content. They didn’t have a recording. So I was a theoretical loose end. Maybe I knew what you knew. Not much of a problem, because I wasn’t likely to show up. They seem to have checked me out. They claim to know how I live. But just in case, they made some plans. They had the Big Dog thing standing by, for instance.’

‘I don’t see how that would help them any. You’d have been in the system, with plenty of time to talk.’

‘I was supposed to run,’ Reacher said. ‘I was supposed to disappear and never come near the army again, the whole rest of my life. That was the plan. That was the whole point. They even showed up at the motel to make sure I understood. And the Big Dog thing was a great choice for that. The guy is dead, and there’s an affidavit. There’s no real way to fight it. Running would have been entirely rational. Sergeant Leach thought if she could find a way of warning me, I’d head for the hills.’

‘Why didn’t you run?’

‘I wanted to ask you out to dinner.’

‘No, really?’

‘Not my style. I figured it out when I was about five years old. A person either runs or he fights. It’s a binary choice, and I’m a fighter. Plus, they had something else in their back pocket.’

‘Which was?’

‘Something else designed to make me run, which didn’t, either.’

‘Which was?’

Samantha Dayton.

Sam.

Fourteen years old.

I’ll get to it.

‘I’ll tell you later,’ Reacher said. ‘It’s a complicated story.’

The bus ground onward, all low gears and loud diesel, past the strip mall Reacher knew, with the hardware store, and the pharmacy, and the picture-framing shop, and the gun store, and the dentist, and the Greek restaurant. Then it moved out into territory he hadn’t seen before. Onward, and away.

He said, ‘Look on the bright side. Your problem ain’t exactly brain surgery. Whatever rabbit you were chasing in Afghanistan is behind all this shit. So we need to work backward from him. We need to find out who his friends are, and we need to find out who did what, and when, and how, and why, and then we need to bring the hammer down.’

Turner said, ‘There’s a problem with that.’

Reacher nodded.

‘I know,’ he said. ‘It won’t be easy. Not from the outside. It’s like we’ve got one hand tied behind our back. But we’ll give it our best shot.’

‘Unfortunately that’s not the problem I’m talking about.’

‘So what is?’