Nothing to Lose

attendants?”
    “They change at six, too.”
    “They’ll have paperwork in there.”
    The guard said, “I can’t.”
    “Can’t what?”
    “Can’t let you through. Law enforcement personnel only. Or paramedics with a fresh one.”
    Reacher said, “I am law enforcement. I’m with the Despair PD. We need to check something.”
    “I’d need to see some credentials.”
    “They don’t give us much in the way of credentials. I’m only a deputy.”
    “I’d have to see something.”
    Reacher nodded and took the big guy’s pewter star out of his shirt pocket. Held it face out, with the pin between his thumb and forefinger. The guard looked at it carefully. Township of Despair, Police Deputy.
    “All they give us,” Reacher said.
    “Good enough for me,” the guy said, and hit the button. A motor spun up and a gear engaged and drove the gate along a greased track. As soon as it was three feet open Reacher stepped through and headed across a yard through a pool of yellow sulfur light to a personnel door labeled Receiving. He went straight in and found a standby room like a million others he had seen. Desk, computer, clipboards, drifts of paper, bulletin boards, low wood-and-tweed armchairs. Everything was reasonably new but already battered. There were heaters going but the air was cold. There was an internal door, closed, but Reacher could smell sharp cold chemicals through it. Two of the low armchairs were occupied by two guys. They were white, young, and lean. They looked equally equipped for either manual or clerical labor. They looked bored and a little irreverent, which is exactly what Reacher expected from people working night shifts around a cold store full of stiffs. They glanced up at him, a little put out by the intrusion into their sealed world, a little happy about the break in their routine.
    “Help you?” one of them said.
    Reacher held up his pewter star again and said, “I need to check something about the guy we brought in yesterday.”
    The attendant who had spoken squinted at the star. “Despair?”
    Reacher nodded and said, “Male DOA, young, not huge.”
    One guy heaved himself out of his chair and dumped himself down in front of the desk and tapped the keyboard to wake the computer screen. The other guy swiveled in his seat and grabbed a clipboard and licked his thumb and leafed through sheets of paper. They both reached the same conclusion at the same time. They glanced at each other and the one who had spoken before said, “We didn’t get anything from Despair yesterday.”
    “You sure about that?”
    “Did you bring him in yourself?”
    “No.”
    “You sure he was DOA? Maybe he went to the ICU.”
    “He was DOA. No doubt about it.”
    “Well, we don’t have him.”
    “No possibility of a mistake?”
    “Couldn’t happen.”
    “Your paperwork is always a hundred percent?”
    “Has to be. Start of the shift, we eyeball the toe tags and match them against the list. Procedure. Because people get sensitive about shit like dead relatives going missing.”
    “Understandable, I guess.”
    “So tonight we’ve got five on the list and five in the freezer. Two female, three male. Not a one of them young. And not a one of them from Despair.”
    “Anywhere else they could have taken him?”
    “Not in this county. And no other county would have accepted him.” The guy tapped some more keys. “As of this exact minute the last Despair stiff we had was over a year ago. Accident at their metal plant. Adult male all chewed up, as I recall, by a machine. Not pretty. He was so spread out we had to put him in two drawers.”
    Reacher nodded and the guy spun his chair and put himself back-to against the desk with his feet straight out and his elbows propped behind him.
    “Sorry,” he said.
    Reacher nodded again and stepped back outside to the pool of sulfur light. The door sucked shut behind him, on a spring closer. To assume makes an ass out of you and me. Ass, u, me. The classroom jerks at Rucker had added: You absolutely have to verify. Reacher walked back across the concrete and waited for the gate to grind open a yard and stepped through and climbed into Vaughan’s truck.
    He had verified.
    Absolutely.

36
    Reacher drove a mile and stopped at Halfway’s all-night coffee shop and ate a cheeseburger and drank three mugs of coffee. The burger was rare and damp and the coffee was about as good as the Hope diner’s. The mug was a little worse, but acceptable. He read a