Never Go Back

Reacher and Turner got in the first in line.
    ‘Arlington Cemetery,’ Reacher said. ‘Main gate.’
    He read the printed notice on the door. The fare was going to be three bucks for the flag drop, plus two dollars and sixteen cents per mile thereafter. Plus tip. They were going to be down about seven bucks, total. Which was going to leave them about twenty-three. Which was better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick, but was a long way short of what they were going to need.
    They sat low in sagging seats and the cab crashed and bounced like its wheels were square. But it made the trip OK. Around the back of the Lincoln Memorial, and out over the water on the Memorial Bridge, and back into Arlington County. To the bus stop at the cemetery gate. Right where Reacher had started out, almost exactly twenty-four hours previously.
    Which was a weird kind of progress.
    The bus stop at the cemetery gate had a small crowd waiting, all small dark Hispanic men, all labourers, all tired, and patient, and resigned. Reacher and Turner took their places among them. Turner blended in fairly well. Reacher didn’t. He was more than a head taller and twice as wide as anyone else. And much paler. He looked like a lighthouse on a dark rocky shore. Therefore the wait was tense. And long. But no cop cars rolled past, and eventually the bus came. Reacher paid the fares, and Turner sat at a window, and Reacher sat next to her on the aisle and hunched down as low as he could go. The bus moved off, slow and ponderous, on the same route Reacher had taken the day before, past the stop where he had gotten off at the bottom of the three-lane hill, and onward up the steep incline towards the 110th HQ.
    Turner said, ‘They’ll call the FBI, because they’ll assume we’re going interstate. The only question is who calls first. My money is on the Metro PD. The army will wait until morning, most likely.’
    ‘We’ll be OK,’ Reacher said. ‘The FBI won’t use roadblocks. Not here on the East Coast. In fact they probably won’t get off their asses at all. They’ll just put our IDs and our bank cards on their watch lists, which doesn’t matter anyway, because we don’t have IDs or bank cards.’
    ‘They might tell local PDs to watch their bus depots.’
    ‘We’ll keep an eye out.’
    ‘I still need clothes,’ Turner said. ‘Pants and a jacket at least.’
    ‘We’ve got nineteen dollars. You can have one or the other.’
    ‘Pants, then. And I’ll trade you your jacket back for your shirt.’
    ‘My shirt will look like a circus tent on you.’
    ‘I’ve seen women wear men’s shirts. Like wraps, all chic and baggy.’
    ‘You’ll be cold.’
    ‘I was born in Montana. I’m never cold.’
    The bus laboured up the hill past the 110th HQ. The old stone building. The gates were open. The sentry was in his hutch. The day guy. Morgan’s car was still in the lot. The painted door was closed. Lights were on in all the windows. Turner swivelled all the way around in her seat, to keep the place in sight as long as she could. Until the last possible moment. Then she let it go and faced front again and said, ‘I hope I get back there.’
    Reacher said, ‘You will.’
    ‘I worked so hard to get there in the first place. It’s a great command. But you know that already.’
    ‘Everyone else hates us.’
    ‘Only if we do our job properly.’
    The bus made the turn at the top of the hill, on to the next three-lane, which led to Reacher’s motel. There was rain in the air. Just a little, but enough that the bus driver had his wipers going.
    Turner said, ‘Tell me again how this is all my fault. Me and Afghanistan.’
    The road levelled out and the bus picked up speed. It rattled straight past Reacher’s motel. The lot was empty. No car with dented doors.
    He said, ‘It’s the only logical explanation. You put a fox in someone’s henhouse, and that someone wanted to shut you down. Which was easy enough to do. Because as it happened no one else in the unit knew what it was about. Your duty captain didn’t. Neither did Sergeant Leach. Or anyone else. So you were the only one. They set you up with the Cayman Islands bank account scam, and they busted you, which cut your lines of communication. Which stayed cut, when they beat on your lawyer Moorcroft, as soon as he showed the first sign of trying to get you out of jail. Problem solved, right there. You were isolated. You couldn’t talk to anyone. So everything was hunky dory.