The Affair_ A Reacher Novel - Lee Child [70]
“You know about that?”
“There’s a reporting mechanism in place.”
“That kid? The girl in his office?”
“I’m not at liberty to discuss the details. But I need to know why you called him.”
“He’s my brother.”
“But why now? Were you going to ask him something?”
“Yes,” I said. “I was going to ask him how he’s doing. Purely social.”
“Why now? Did something at Kelham provoke the inquiry?”
“This is none of your business.”
“Everything is my business. Help me out here, Reacher.”
I said, “Two black women were killed here before Janice May Chapman. Did you even know that? Because that’s something you should be bearing in mind, if you’re thinking about political campaigns. We ignored them and then our heads exploded when a white woman got killed.”
“How does this relate to Joe?”
“I met the second victim’s brother. Made me think about family. That’s all it was.”
“Did Joe tell you anything about money from Kosovo?”
“I didn’t get him. He was out of the office. He was in Georgia.”
“Atlanta again? Or Margrave?”
“I have no idea. Georgia is a big state.”
“OK,” Garber said. “I apologize for the intrusion.”
I asked, “Who exactly is worried about money from Kosovo?”
He said, “I’m not at liberty to discuss that.”
I hung up with Garber and breathed in and out for a spell, and then I carried my new shirt upstairs and left it on my bed. I started to think about dinner with Elizabeth Deveraux. Three hours to go, and only one more thing to do beforehand.
Chapter
40
I came out of the front of the hotel and looped back through the dog-leg alley between the pharmacy and the hardware store and came out the other end between the loan office and Brannan’s bar. Where Janice May Chapman’s body had been found. The sand pile was still there, dry and crusted and powdery and a little redistributed by the breeze. I stepped around it and checked activity on the one-sided street. Not much was going on. Some of the bars were closed, because the base was closed. No point in opening without customers. A simple economic calculation.
But Brannan’s bar was open. Defiantly optimistic, or maybe just maintaining some longstanding tradition. I went in and found nobody there except two similar guys fussing with stuff in the drinks well. They looked like brothers. Middle thirties, maybe two years apart, like Joe and me. Wise to the ways of the world, which was going to give me the advantage. Their place was like a thousand base-town bars I had seen before, a complex boxed-in machine designed to turn boredom into cash. It was a decent size. I guessed it had been a small restaurant in the past, but small restaurants make big bars. The decor was maybe a little better than most. There were travel posters on the walls, of the world’s great cities photographed at night. No local stuff, which was smart. If you’re stuck for six months in the back of beyond, you don’t want to be reminded of it at every turn.
“Got coffee?” I asked.
They said no, which didn’t surprise me very much.
I said, “My name is Jack Reacher and I’m an MP with a dinner date coming up.”
They didn’t follow.
I said, “Which means that usually I’d have time to hang around all night and weasel stuff out of you in the normal course of conversation, but I don’t have time for that on this occasion, so we’ll have to rely on a straightforward question-and-answer session, OK?”
They got the message. Base-town bar owners worry about MPs. Easiest thing in the world to put a particular establishment on a local no-go list, for a week, or a month. Or forever. They introduced themselves as Jonathan and Hunter Brannan, brothers, inheritors of a business started by their grandmother back in the railroad days. She had sold tea and fancy cakes, and she had made a nice living. Their father had switched to alcohol when the trains stopped and the army arrived. They were a nice enough pair of guys. And realistic. They ran the best bar in town, so they couldn’t deny they saw everybody from time to time.
“Janice Chapman came here,” I said. “The woman who got killed.”
They