The Affair_ A Reacher Novel - Lee Child [19]
There’s a risk of bad feeling between the town and the base, Garber had said. People are always tribal, when it comes right down to it. Maybe these guys had known Janice May Chapman. Maybe they couldn’t understand why she had dated soldiers, and not them. Maybe they had never looked in a mirror.
I said nothing. But I didn’t walk on. I didn’t want the truck loose behind me. Not in a lonely spot, not on a dark country road. I just stood there, looking directly at the two guys, at their faces, first one, then the other, with nothing much in my own face except frankness and skepticism and a little amusement. It’s a look that usually works. It usually provokes something, out of a certain type of person.
It provoked the passenger first.
He wound his window down and reared up through it, almost all the way out to his waist, twisting and leaning so he could face me directly across the hood of the truck. He held on to the pillar with one hand and moved the other through a fast violent arc, like he was cracking a whip or throwing something at me. He said, “We’re talking to you, asshole.”
I said nothing.
He said, “Is there a reason I don’t get out of this truck and kick your butt?”
I said, “Two hundred and six reasons.”
He said, “What?”
“That’s how many bones you got in your body. I could break them all before you put a glove on me.”
Which got his buddy going. His instinct was to stick up for his friend and face down a challenge. He leaned further out his own window and said, “You think?”
I said, “Often all day long. It’s a good habit to have.” Which shut the guy up, while he tried to piece together what I meant. He went back over our conversation in his head. His lips were moving.
I said, “Let’s all go about our legitimate business and leave each other alone. Where are you guys staying?”
Now I was asking the questions, and they weren’t answering.
I said, “It looked to me like you were about to turn into Main Street. Is that your way home?”
No answer.
I said, “What, you’re homeless?”
The driver said, “We got a place.”
“Where?”
“A mile past Main Street.”
“So go there. Watch TV, drink beer. Don’t worry about me.”
“Are you from Kelham?”
“No,” I said. “I’m not from Kelham.”
The two guys went quiet and kind of deflated themselves, like parade balloons, back through their windows, back into the cab, back into their seats. I heard the truck’s transmission engage, and then it took off backward, fast, and then it slewed and lurched through a 180 turn, with dust coming up and tire squeal, and then it drove away and braked hard and turned into Main Street. Then it was lost to sight behind the dark bulk of the Sheriff’s Department. I breathed out and started walking again. No damage done. The best fights are the ones you don’t have, a wise man once said to me. It was not advice I always followed, but on that occasion I was pleased to walk away with clean hands, both literally and figuratively.
Then I saw another car coming toward me. It did the same thing the truck had done. It went to turn, and then it paused and straightened and headed in my direction. It was a cop car. I could tell by the shape and the size, and I could make out the silhouette of a light bar on the roof. At first I thought it was Pellegrino out on patrol, but when the car got closer it killed its lights and I saw a woman behind the wheel, and Mississippi suddenly got a lot more interesting.
Chapter
11
The car came over into the wrong lane and stopped alongside me. It was an old Chevy Caprice police cruiser painted up in the Carter County Sheriff’s Department colors. The woman behind the wheel had an unruly mass of dark hair, somewhere between wavy and curly, tied back in an approximate ponytail. Her face was pale and flawless. She was low in the seat, which meant either she was short or the seat was caved in by long years of use. I decided the seat must be caved in, because her arms looked long and the set of her shoulders didn’t suggest a short person. I pegged her at somewhere in her middle thirties, old enough to show