61 Hours

let you see the photographs?’
    ‘He tried hard not to. But your cleaning staff did a good job on his window.’
    ‘You saw them all?’
    ‘I couldn’t tell if the guy was dead or unconscious.’
    ‘So you suckered me with that jab about Korea.’
    ‘I like to know things. I’m hungry for knowledge.’
    A waitress came by, a tired woman in her forties wearing sneakers under a uniform that featured a knotted necktie over a khaki shirt. Peterson ordered pot roast. Reacher followed his lead, and asked for coffee to drink.
    Peterson asked, ‘How long were you in the army?’
    ‘Thirteen years.’
    ‘And you were an MP?’
    Reacher nodded.
    ‘With medical training?’
    ‘You’ve been talking to the bus passengers.’
    ‘And the driver.’
    ‘You’ve been checking me out.’
    ‘Of course I have. Like crazy. What else do you think I was doing?’
    ‘And you want me in your house tonight.’
    ‘You got a better place to go?’
    ‘Where you can keep an eye on me.’
    ‘If you say so.’
    ‘Why?’
    ‘There are reasons.’
    ‘Want to tell me what they are?’
    ‘Just because you’re hungry for knowledge?’
    ‘I guess.’
    ‘All I’ll say is right now we need to know who’s coming and going.’
    Peterson said nothing more, and a minute later dinner arrived. Plates piled high, mashed potatoes, plenty of gravy. The coffee was an hour old, and it had suffered in terms of taste but gained in terms of strength.
    Peterson asked, ‘What exactly did you do in the MPs?’
    Reacher said, ‘Whatever they told me to.’
    ‘Serious crimes?’
    ‘Sometimes.’
    ‘Homicides?’
    ‘Everything from attempted to multiple.’
    ‘How much medical training did you get?’
    ‘Worried about the food here?’
    ‘I like to know things too.’
    ‘I didn’t get much medical training, really. I was trying to make the old folks feel better, that’s all.’
    ‘They spoke well of you.’
    ‘Don’t trust them. They don’t know me.’
    Peterson didn’t reply.
    Reacher asked, ‘Where was the dead guy found? Where the police car was blocking the side street?’
    ‘No. That was different. The dead guy was somewhere else.’
    ‘He wasn’t killed there.’
    ‘How do you know?’
    ‘No blood in the snow. Hit someone hard enough in the head to kill them, the scalp splits. It’s inevitable. And scalps bleed like crazy. There should have been a pool of blood a yard across.’
    Peterson ate in silence for a minute. Then he asked: ‘Where do you live?’
    Which was a difficult question. Not for Reacher himself. There was a simple answer. He lived nowhere, and always had. He had been born the son of a serving military officer, in a Berlin infirmary, and since the day he had been carried out of it swaddled in blankets he had been dragged all over the world, through an endless blur of military bases and cheap off-post accommodations, and then he had joined up himself and lived the same way on his own account. Four years at West Point was his longest period of residential stability, and he had enjoyed neither West Point nor stability. Now that he was out of the service, he continued the transience. It was all he knew and it was a habit he couldn’t break.
    Not that he had ever really tried.
    He said, ‘I’m a nomad.’
    Peterson said, ‘Nomads have animals. They move around to find pasture. That’s the definition.’
    ‘OK, I’m a nomad without the animals part.’
    ‘You’re a bum.’
    ‘Possibly.’
    ‘You got no bags.’
    ‘You got a problem with that?’
    ‘It’s weird behaviour. Cops don’t like weird behaviour.’
    ‘Why is it weirder to move around than spend every day in the same place?’
    Peterson was quiet for a spell and then he said, ‘Everyone has possessions.’
    ‘I’ve got no use for them. Travel light, travel far.’
    Peterson didn’t answer.
    Reacher said, ‘Whatever, I’m no concern of yours. I never heard of Bolton before. If the bus driver hadn’t twitched I’d have been at Mount Rushmore tonight.’
    Peterson nodded, reluctantly.
    ‘Can’t argue with that,’ he said.
    Five minutes to ten in the evening.
    Fifty-four hours to go.
    Seventeen hundred miles to the south, inside the walled compound a hundred miles from Mexico City, Plato was eating too, a rib eye steak flown in all the way from Argentina. Nearly eleven in the evening local time. A late dinner. Plato was dressed in chinos and a white button-down shirt and black leather penny loafer shoes, all from the Brooks