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Reacher ducked his own head toward the open section of window and said, “I need to check some details on the guy Despair brought in yesterday morning.”
The guard said, “The attendants are inside.”
Reacher nodded as if he had received new and valuable information and waited for the guy to hit the button that would slide the gate.
The guy didn’t move.
Reacher asked, “Were you here yesterday morning?”
The guard said, “Everything after midnight is morning.”
“This would have been daylight hours.”
The guard said, “Not me, then. I get off at six.”
Reacher said, “So can you let me through? To ask the attendants?”
“They change at six, too.”
“They’ll have paperwork in there.”
The guard said, “I can’t.”
“Can’t what?”
“Can’t let you through. Law enforcement perso
Reacher said, “I am law enforcement. I’m with the Despair PD. We need to check something.”
“I’d need to see some credentials.”
“They don’t give us much in the way of credentials. I’m only a deputy.”
“I’d have to see something.”
Reacher nodded and took the big guy’s pewter star out of his shirt pocket. Held it face out, with the pin between his thumb and forefinger. The guard looked at it carefully.Township of Despair, Police Deputy.
“All they give us,” Reacher said.
“Good enough for me,” the guy said, and hit the button. A motor spun up and a gear engaged and drove the gate along a greased track. As soon as it was three feet open Reacher stepped through and headed across a yard through a pool of yellow sulfur light to a perso
“Help you?” one of them said.
Reacher held up his pewter star again and said, “I need to check something about the guy we brought in yesterday.”
The attendant who had spoken squinted at the star. “Despair?”
Reacher nodded and said, “Male DOA, young, not huge.”
One guy heaved himself out of his chair and dumped himself down in front of the desk and tapped the keyboard to wake the computer screen. The other guy swiveled in his seat and grabbed a clipboard and licked his thumb and leafed through sheets of paper. They both reached the same conclusion at the same time. They glanced at each other and the one who had spoken before said, “We didn’t get anything from Despair yesterday.”
“You sure about that?”
“Did you bring him in yourself?”
“No.”
“You sure he was DOA? Maybe he went to the ICU.”
“He was DOA. No doubt about it.”
“Well, we don’t have him.”
“No possibility of a mistake?”
“Couldn’t happen.”
“Your paperwork is always a hundred percent?”
“Has to be. Start of the shift, we eyeball the toe tags and match them against the list. Procedure. Because people get sensitive about shit like dead relatives going missing.”
“Understandable, I guess.”
“So tonight we’ve got five on the list and five in the freezer. Two female, three male. Not a one of them young. And not a one of them from Despair.”
“Anywhere else they could have taken him?”
“Not in this county. And no other county would have accepted him.” The guy tapped some more keys. “As of this exact minute the last Despair stiff we had was over a year ago. Accident at their metal plant. Adult male all chewed up, as I recall, by a machine. Not pretty. He was so spread out we had to put him in two drawers.”
Reacher nodded and the guy spun his chair and put himself back-to against the desk with his feet straight out and his elbows propped behind him.
“Sorry,” he said.
Reacher nodded again and stepped back outside to the pool of sulfur light. The door sucked shut behind him, on a spring closer.To assume makes an ass out of you and me. Ass, u, me. The classroom jerks at Rucker had added:You absolutely have to verify. Reacher walked back across the concrete and waited for the gate to grind open a yard and stepped through and climbed into Vaughan’s truck.
He had verified.
Absolutely.
36
Reacher drove a mile and stopped at Halfway’s all-night coffee shop and ate a cheeseburger and drank three mugs of coffee. The burger was rare and damp and the coffee was about as good as the Hope diner’s. The mug was a little worse, but acceptable. He read a ragged copy of the previous morning’s newspaper all the way through and then jammed himself into the corner of his booth and dozed upright for an hour. He left the place at five in the morning, when the first of the breakfast customers came in and disturbed him with bright chatter and the smell of recent showers. He filled Vaughan’s truck at the all-night gas station and then drove back out of town, heading east on the same rough road he had come in on, the mountains far behind him and the dawn waiting to happen up ahead.
He kept the speedometer needle fixed on forty and passed the MP post again fifty-two minutes later. The place was still quiet. Two guys were in the guard shack, one facing north and one facing south. Their nightlight was still burning. He figured reveille would be at six-thirty and chow at seven. The night watch would eat di
The start of the workday.
The arena lights were already on and the place was lit up bright and blue, like day. The parking lot was filling up fast. Headlights were streaming west out of town, dipping, turning, raking the rough ground, stopping, clicking off. Reacher parked neatly between a sagging Chrysler sedan and a battered Ford pick-up. He slid out and locked up and put the keys in his pocket and joined a converging crowd of men shuffling their way toward the perso
The perso
The line shuffled slowly forward, a yard, two, three.
The guy in front of Reacher stepped through the gate.
Reacher stepped through the gate.
Immediately inside there were more metal walls, head-high, like cattle chutes, dividing the crowd left and right. The right-hand chute led to a holding pen where Reacher guessed the part-time workers would wait for the call. It was already a quarter full with men standing quiet and patient. The guys going left didn’t look at them.