Nothing to Lose

dreams, the telephone call two years before, the chaplain’s visit to her door, the X-rays, the filthy hospitals, the unstoppable hiss of the respirator.

    Afterward they walked up and down the block together, aimlessly, just to be moving. The sky was gray with low cloud and the air smelled like rain was on the way. Vaughan wiped her face on Reacher’s shirt tail and ran her fingers through her hair. She blinked her eyes clear and swallowed and took deep breaths. They ended up outside the police station again and Reacher saw her gaze trace the line of twenty aluminum letters fixed to the brick. Hope Police Department. She said, “Why didn’t Raphael Ramirez make it?”
    Reacher said, “Because Ramirez was different.”

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    Reacher said, “One phone call from your desk will explain it. We might as well go ahead and make it. Since we’re right here anyway. Maria has waited long enough.”
    Vaughan said, “One call to who?”
    “The MPs west of Despair. You were briefed about them, they’ll have been briefed about you. Therefore they’ll cooperate.”
    “What do I ask them?”
    “Ask them to fax Ramirez’s summary file. They’ll say, Who? You’ll tell them, Bullshit, you know Maria was just there, so you know they know who he is. And tell them we know Maria was there for twenty-one hours, which is enough time for them to have gotten all the paperwork in the world.”
    “What are we going to find?”
    “My guess is Ramirez was in prison two weeks ago.”

    The Hope Police Department’s fax machine was a boxy old product standing alone on a rolling cart. It had been square and graceless to start with, and now it was grubby and worn. But it worked. Eleven minutes after Vaughan finished her call it sparked up and started whirring and sucked a blank page out of the feeder tray and fed it back out with writing on it.
    Not much writing. It was a bare-bones summary. Very little result for twenty-one hours of bureaucratic pestering. But that was explained by the fact that it had been the army doing the asking and the Marines doing the answering. Inter-service cooperation wasn’t usually very cooperative.
    Raphael Ramirez had been a private in the Marine Corps. At the age of eighteen he had been deployed to Iraq. At the age of nineteen he had served a second deployment. At the age of twenty he had gone AWOL ahead of a third deployment. He had gone on the run but had been arrested five days later in Los Angeles and locked up awaiting court martial back at Pendleton.
    Date of arrest, three weeks previously.
    Reacher said, “Let’s go find Maria.”

    They found her in her motel room. Her bed had a dent where she had been sitting, staying warm, saving energy, passing time, enduring. She answered the door tentatively, as if she was certain that all news would be bad. There was nothing in Reacher’s face to change her mind. He and Vaughan led her outside and sat her in the plastic lawn chair under her bathroom window. Reacher took room nine’s chair and Vaughan took room seven’s. They dragged them over and positioned them and made a tight little triangle on the concrete apron.
    Reacher said, “Raphael was a Marine.”
    Maria nodded. Said nothing.
    Reacher said, “He had been to Iraq twice. He didn’t want to go back a third time. So nearly four weeks ago he went on the run. He headed up to LA. Maybe he had friends there. Did he call you?”
    Maria said nothing.
    Vaughan said, “You’re not in trouble, Maria. Nobody’s going to get you for anything.”
    Maria said, “He called most days.”
    Reacher asked, “How was he?”
    “Scared. Scared to death. Scared of being AWOL, scared of going back.”
    “What happened in Iraq?”
    “To him? Not much, really. But he saw things. He said the people we were supposed to be helping were killing us, and we were killing the people we were supposed to be helping. Everybody was killing everybody else. In bad ways. It was driving him crazy.”
    “So he ran. And he called most days.”
    Maria nodded.
    Reacher said, “But then he didn’t call, for two or three days. Is that right?”
    “He lost his cell phone. He was moving a lot. To stay safe. Then he got a new phone.”
    “How did he sound on the new phone?”
    “Still scared. Very worried. Even worse.”
    “Then what?”
    “He called to say he had found some people. Or some people had found him. They were going to get him to Canada. Through a place called Despair, in Colorado. He said I should come here,