The Affair: A Reacher Novel

didn’t want to have to hit the guy. Not with my hands. I’m no hygiene freak, but even so, with a guy like that, I would feel the need to wash up afterward, extensively, with good soap, especially if there was pie in my future. So I planned on kicking him instead. I saw the moves in my head: he opens his door, he steps out, he comes around the door toward me, and then he goes down, puking and retching and clutching his groin.
    No major difficulty.
    He said, “Do you speak English?”
    I said nothing.
    The guy in the passenger seat said, “Maybe he’s a Mexican.”
    The driver asked me, “Are you a Mexican?”
    I didn’t answer.
    The driver said, “He doesn’t look like a Mexican. He’s too big.”
    Which was true in a general sense, although I had heard of a guy from Mexico called José Calderón Torres, who had stood seven feet six and a quarter inches, which was more than a foot taller than me. And I remembered a Mexican guy called José Garces from the LA Olympics, who had cleaned-and-jerked more than four hundred and twenty pounds, which was probably what the two guys in the truck weighed both together.
    The driver asked, “Are you coming in from Kelham?”
    There’s a risk of bad feeling between the town and the base
, Garber had said. People are always tribal, when it comes right down to it. Maybe these guys had known Janice May Chapman. Maybe they couldn’t understand why she had dated soldiers, and not them. Maybe they had never looked in a mirror.
    I said nothing. But I didn’t walk on. I didn’t want the truck loose behind me. Not in a lonely spot, not on a dark country road. I just stood there, looking directly at the two guys, at their faces, first one,then the other, with nothing much in my own face except frankness and skepticism and a little amusement. It’s a look that usually works. It usually provokes something, out of a certain type of person.
    It provoked the passenger first.
    He wound his window down and reared up through it, almost all the way out to his waist, twisting and leaning so he could face me directly across the hood of the truck. He held on to the pillar with one hand and moved the other through a fast violent arc, like he was cracking a whip or throwing something at me. He said, “We’re
talking
to you, asshole.”
    I said nothing.
    He said, “Is there a reason I don’t get out of this truck and kick your butt?”
    I said, “Two hundred and six reasons.”
    He said, “What?”
    “That’s how many bones you got in your body. I could break them all before you put a glove on me.”
    Which got his buddy going. His instinct was to stick up for his friend and face down a challenge. He leaned further out his own window and said, “You think?”
    I said, “Often all day long. It’s a good habit to have.” Which shut the guy up, while he tried to piece together what I meant. He went back over our conversation in his head. His lips were moving.
    I said, “Let’s all go about our legitimate business and leave each other alone. Where are you guys staying?”
    Now I was asking the questions, and they weren’t answering.
    I said, “It looked to me like you were about to turn into Main Street. Is that your way home?”
    No answer.
    I said, “What, you’re homeless?”
    The driver said, “We got a place.”
    “Where?”
    “A mile past Main Street.”
    “So go there. Watch TV, drink beer. Don’t worry about me.”
    “Are you from Kelham?”
    “No,” I said. “I’m not from Kelham.”
    The two guys went quiet and kind of deflated themselves, like parade balloons, back through their windows, back into the cab, back into their seats. I heard the truck’s transmission engage, and then it took off backward, fast, and then it slewed and lurched through a 180 turn, with dust coming up and tire squeal, and then it drove away and braked hard and turned into Main Street. Then it was lost to sight behind the dark bulk of the Sheriff’s Department. I breathed out and started walking again. No damage done.
The best fights are the ones you don’t have
, a wise man once said to me. It was not advice I always followed, but on that occasion I was pleased to walk away with clean hands, both literally and figuratively.
    Then I saw another car coming toward me. It did the same thing the truck had done. It went to turn, and then it paused and straightened and headed in my direction. It was a cop car. I could tell by the shape and the size, and I could make out the silhouette