REACHER STORY BY LEE CHILD
all the data was negative. The guy had no phone, no car, no boat, no trailer, no credit history, no home, and no insurance. No nothing. There were some military records, from way back.
He had been an army cop, mostly in the Criminal Investigation Division, an officer, decorated multiple times, which at first gave me a warm fellow feeling, and then it worried me.
Thirteen years’ honourable service, and now he was homeless, getting shot in the side, wearing clothes so toxic the hospital had to incinerate them. Not what a new detective wants to hear, on her first day on the job.
It was dark when I got back to the hospital, but up on the fifth floor I found the big guy awake. I knew his name, so I introduced myself, to balance things up. To be polite. I told him I had a report to write. I told him it was required.
I asked him what had happened. He said, “I don’t remember.” Which was plausible. Physical trauma can induce retrograde amnesia. But I didn’t believe it. I got the feeling he was giving me a rote answer. I began to see why his file was so thin. A person has to work hard to stay under the radar.
Which was OK with me, to be honest. I got my promotion because I’m a good interrogator. And I like a challenge. An old boyfriend said I should have it on my gravestone: Everyone talks.
I said, “Help me out here.” He looked back at me with clear blue eyes. Whatever painkiller cocktail they were using wasn’t doing him any harm in the cognition department. His gaze was unworried and friendly, but also bleak and dangerous, wise and primitive, warm and predatory.
I got the feeling he knew a hundred ways to help me, and a hundred ways to kill me.
I said, “I’m new on the job. Today is my first day. I’m going to get my butt kicked if I don’t deliver.”
“Which would be a shame,” he said. “Because it’s a very cute butt.”
“How did it start?” I asked again. He sighed and took a breath and said it started like things usually start.
Which was to say they usually don’t start at all. He said most places he went were peaceful and quiet. He said most places, nothing happens.
I asked him what he meant. He said big cities, small towns, he went about his business and nobody knew.
He said he ate his meals, and slept, and showered and changed, and saw what he saw. Sometimes he got lucky with an hour’s conversation.
Sometimes he got lucky with a night’s companionship. But mostly nothing happened. He said he had a quiet life. He said he could go months between days worth forgetting. But if it was going to happen, it was going to start with people.
Usually with people in bars or diners or restaurants. Places where food and drink is consumed, and where a certain kind of community is expected, and where sipping and chewing make people unembarrassed about not talking. Because no one ever says anything. They look instead. It was all about the looking. The looking away, to be precise.
There can be a guy people are looking away from. Maybe alone at the bar, or alone in a diner booth or at a restaurant table. People are partly shunning him, but mostly they’re scared of him. Some kind of a bully. Unpopular, and he knows it.
He knows people go quiet around him, and he knows they look away, and he loves it. He loves the power. ■■ Extracted from No Middle Name: The Complete Collected Jack Reacher Stories, published in paperback by Bantam, priced £8.99. Copyright © Lee Child 2017. The latest Jack Reacher novel, Blue Moon, is out in paperback on April 2, published by Bantam at £8.99.