61 Hours

meandering pattern he stopped and raised his eyes. Janet Salter stared back at him. She was diagonally opposite him. A straight line. A vector. Left of the stair post, in through the library door, across its width, to her chair. A small comma had formed below the bullet hole in her forehead. Not really blood. Just ooze. Leakage.
    Each time he looked at her for as long as he could bear, and then he dropped his gaze again, back to the rug.
    I don’t like getting beaten
, he had said.
Better for all concerned that it just doesn’t happen
.
    Protect and serve
.
    Never off duty
.
    Empty words.
    He was a fraud and a fake and a failure.
    He always had been.
    He sat in the chair. No one came. The house hummed on around him. It didn’t know. It made its noises, oblivious. Water moved in the pipes, a sash rattled in a frame, the busted back door creaked back and forth as it moved in the wind. Outside the foliage hissed and the whole frozen planet shuddered and groaned.
    He picked up the phone.
    He dialled the number he remembered.
    You have reached the Bureau of Labor Statistics. If you know your party’s extension, you may dial it at any time
.
    He dialled 110.
    A click. A purr. ‘Yes?’
    Reacher said, ‘Susan, please.’
    ‘Who?’
    ‘Amanda.’
    A click. A purr.
    Susan said, ‘Reacher?’
    He didn’t answer.
    ‘Reacher? You OK?’
    He said nothing.
    She said, ‘Talk to me. Or hang up.’
    He asked her, ‘Have you ever been hungry?’
    ‘Hungry? Of course. Sometimes.’
    ‘I was once hungry for six straight months. In the Gulf. Desert Shield and Desert Storm. When we had to go throw Saddam out of Kuwait. We got there right at the beginning. We stayed there right to the end. We were hungry the whole time. There was nothing to eat. My unit, I mean. And some of the other rear echelon people. Which we thought was OK. We sucked it up. A big deal like that, there had to be snafus. Supply chains are always a problem. Better that whatever there was went to the guys doing the fighting. So no one made a big fuss. But it was no kind of fun. I got thin. It was miserable. Then we went home and I ate like a pig and I forgot all about it.’
    ‘And then?’
    ‘And then years later we were on that Russian train. They had American rations. I was bored at the time. We got back and I made it a little project to find out what had been going on. Like a hobby. One thing led to another and I traced it all back. Turned out a logistics guy had been selling our food for ten years. You know, a bit here, a bit there, all over the world. Africa, Russia, India, China, anyone who would pay for crap like that. He was pretty careful. No one noticed, the way the stockpiles were. But the Gulf caught him out. Suddenly there was a huge demand, and the stockpiles just weren’t there any more. He was shipping it to us on paper, but we were starving in the desert.’
    ‘The general?’
    ‘Recent promotion. He was a colonel most of the time. Not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but he was reasonably cautious. His tracks were well covered. But I wouldn’t let it go. It was him against me. It was personal. My people had been hungry because of him. I was in his bank accounts and everything. You know what he spent the money on?’
    ‘What?’
    ‘Not much. He saved most of it. For his retirement. But he bought a 1980 Corvette. He thought it was a classic. Like a collector’s item. But the 1980 Corvette was the worst Corvette ever made. It was a piece of shit. They junked the three-fifty and put in a three-oh-five, for emissions. It was making a hundred eighty horsepower. I could run faster than a 1980 Corvette. Something just went off in my head. I mean, starving for some kind of a criminal mastermind would be one thing. Doing it for a complete idiot was something else. A complete, tasteless, clueless, sordid, pathetic little idiot.’
    ‘So you hauled him in?’
    ‘I built that case like it was Ethel Rosenberg. I was out of my mind. I checked it forward and backward and forward again. I could have taken it to the Supreme Court. I brought him in. I told him I was upset. He was in a Class A uniform. He had all kinds of busywork medals. He laughed at me. A kind of patronizing sneer. Like he was better than me. I thought, you bought a 1980 Corvette, asshole. Not me. So who’s better? Then I hit him. I popped him in the gut to fold him over and then I banged his head on my desk.’
    ‘What happened?’
    ‘I broke his skull. He was in a coma