Reacher stopped ten feet away and watched. He wondered which she would pull first, her ID or her Glock. He guessed ID, but would have preferred the Glock. But she pulled neither. She just sat there, taking it. She was a very patient person. Or perhaps there would be paperwork involved. Reacher didn't know the ins and outs of Bureau protocol.
Then one of the guys seemed to sense Reacher's presence and he went quiet and his head turned and his eyes locked on. His pal followed suit. They were large men, both of them bulky with the kind of flesh that wasn't quite muscle and wasn't quite flab. They had small dull eyes and unshaven faces, and bad teeth and stringy hair. They were what a doctor friend of Reacher's used to write up as PPP. A diagnosis, a message, a secret insider medical code, one professional to another, for ease of reference.
It meant piss-poor protoplasm.
Decision time, boys, Reacher thought. Either break eye contact and walk away, or don't.
They didn't. They kept on staring. Not just fascination with the nose. A challenge. Some kind of a brainless hormonal imperative. Reacher felt his own kick in. Involuntary, but inevitable. Adrenalin, seasoned with an extra component, something dark and warm and primitive, something ancient and prehistoric and predatory, something that took out all the jitters and left all the power and all the calm confidence and all the absolute certainty of victory. Not like bringing a gun to a knife fight. Like bringing a plutonium bomb.
The two guys stared. Reacher stared back. Then the guy on the left said, 'What are you looking at?'
Which was a challenge all by itself, with a predictable dynamic. For some unknown reason most people backed down at that point. Most people squirmed, and got defensive, and got apologetic. Not Reacher. His instinct was to double down, not back down.
He said, 'I'm looking at a piece of shit.'
No response.
Reacher said, 'But a piece of shit with a choice. Option one, get back in your truck and get breakfast fifty miles down the road. Option two, get in an ambulance and get breakfast through a plastic tube.'
No response.
'It's a limited time offer,' Reacher said. 'So be quick, or I'll choose for you. And to be absolutely honest, right now I'm leaning towards the ambulance and the feeding tube.'
Their mouths moved and their eyes flicked from side to side. They stayed where they were. Just for a couple of seconds, just enough to save face. Then they picked option one, like Reacher knew they would. They turned and shuffled away, slowly enough to look unconcerned and a little defiant, but they kept on going. They made steady progress. They pushed out the door and disappeared into the lot. They didn't look back. Reacher breathed out and sat down again.
Sorenson said, 'I don't need you to look after me.'
Reacher said, 'I know. And I wasn't. They were talking to me by that point. I was looking after myself.'
'What would you have done if they hadn't left?'
'Moot point. Guys like that always leave.'
'You sound disappointed.'
'I'm perpetually disappointed. It's a disappointing world. As in, why were you just sitting there and taking it?'
'Paperwork,' she said. 'Arresting people is such a pain in the ass.'
She took out her phone and lit it up. She checked it for bars and battery. She shut it down again.
'Expecting a call?' Reacher asked.
'You know I am,' she said. 'I'm waiting to be taken off this case.'
'Maybe that isn't going to happen.'
'It should have happened two hours ago.'
'So what's your best guess?'
But she didn't get a chance to answer that question, because right then, right on cue, her phone started ringing.
FORTY-TWO
THE PHONE HOPPED and buzzed. The ring tone was thin and reedy. A plain electronic sound. Sorenson answered the call and listened. Reacher could see in her face it was not the call she was expecting. She wasn't being taken off the board. Not yet. She was being given information about the case instead. Not bad news, necessarily, judging by her expression, but not good news either. Interesting news, probably. Perplexing news, possibly.
She clicked off and looked across the wet laminate table and said, 'Our medical examiners finally got around to moving the dead guy out of the old pumping station.'
Reacher said, 'And?'
'A hitherto unnoticed condition became readily apparent.'
'Which is?'
'Just before they stabbed him to death, they broke his arm.'
Sorenson told Reacher her Bureau MEs had hoisted the dead guy on to a wheeled gurney for the short trip out to the meat wagon. No body bag, which was normal for that kind of situation, where a corpse was lying in a lake of drying blood. No point getting the bag sticky both inside and out. They had planned to zip the guy up in the truck.
But on the way to the truck the gurney had hit a bump and the dead guy's right arm had flopped off the side, with the elbow turned the wrong way out. They had used a portable X-ray machine right there on the sidewalk, and determined that the joint was shattered. It was inconceivable the injury could have happened at any prior time, because the pain would have been unbearable. No one could walk around with a shattered elbow. Not even for a minute. Certainly no one could drive all the way from Denver. And the injury wasn't post mortem either. There was a little bleeding visible through the skin. And some very slight swelling. But not much. Blood pressure had continued after the break, but not for long.
'Defensive injury,' Reacher said. 'In a way. At one remove, as it were. He pulled a weapon. A gun, or possibly a knife of his own. In self-defence. They disarmed him with a degree of violence. I assume he was right-handed.'
'Most people are,' Sorenson said. 'And then they cut him, and stabbed him, and then he bled out moments later.'
'Did the eyewitness hear a scream?'
'He didn't say so.'
'Busted elbows hurt bad. He must have heard something. A yelp, at least. Pretty loud, probably.'
'Well, we can't ask him now.'
'No weapons found at the scene? His or theirs?'
Sorenson shook her head. 'They probably tossed them all down the open pipe.'
'You still think he was just a trade attache? Far from home with a knife or a gun in his pocket?'
Sorenson shook her head again.
'Something I haven't told you,' she said. 'The CIA has been sniffing around all night long. They called within minutes. Even before Bureau counterterrorism got there. Well before the State Department guy got there.'
'What did they want?'
'Updates and information.'
'There you go,' Reacher said. 'The dead guy was one of their own.'
'So why am I still on the case? This thing should have gone nuclear by now.' She checked her phone again. It had bars and battery, but it was stubbornly silent.
They hit the outlet mall next. Cheap stuff, in a cheap and dismal building. About a third of the units sold men's clothing. Reacher recognized some of the brands. He wasn't impressed by the discount pricing. In his opinion the steep reductions merely brought the values close to where they should have been all along.
As always his choices were limited by the availability or otherwise of the right big-and-tall sizes. But he managed to find generic blue jeans at one store, and a three-layer upper body ensemble at another: T-shirt, dress shirt, and cotton sweater, all shades of blue. Plus blue socks and white underwear at a third store, and a short blue warm-up jacket at a fourth. He figured he would keep the boots he already had. Just a few days more. They were OK.
'You like blue?' Sorenson asked him.
'I like everything to match,' he said.
'Why?'
'Someone told me I should.'
Total damage was seventy-seven dollars in cash, which was well within target. Three days' wear, minimum, maybe four maximum, somewhere between about twenty and twenty-five bucks a day. Cheaper than living somewhere, and easier than washing and ironing and folding and packing. That was for damn sure.