The Affair: A Reacher Novel

in the streets.”
    The waitress came by. She brought no menus. Deveraux had been eating there three times a day for two years. She knew the menu. She asked for the cheeseburger. So did I, with coffee to drink. The waitress made a note and went away.
    I said, “You had the cheeseburger yesterday.”
    Deveraux said, “I have it every day.”
    “Really?”
    She nodded. “Every day I do the same things and eat the same things.”
    “How do you stay thin?”
    “Mental energy,” she said. “I worry a lot.”
    “About what?”
    “Right now about a guy from Oxford, Mississippi. That’s the guy who got shot in the thigh. The doctor brought his personal effects to my office. There was a wallet and a notebook. The guy was a journalist.”
    “Big paper?”
    “No, freelance. Struggling, probably. His last press pass was two years old. But Oxford has a couple of alternative papers. He was probably trying to sell something to one of them.”
    “There’s a school in Oxford, right?”
    Deveraux nodded again.
    “Ole Miss,” she said. “About as radical as this state gets.”
    “Why did the guy come here?”
    “I would have loved the chance to ask him. He might have had something I could use.”
    The waitress came back with my coffee and a glass of water for Deveraux. Behind my back I heard the old guy from the hotel grunt and turn a page in his paper.
    I said, “My CO still denies there are boots on the ground outside the fence.”
    Deveraux asked, “How does that make you feel?”
    “I don’t know. If he’s lying to me, it will be the first time ever.”
    “Maybe someone’s lying to him.”
    “Such cynicism in one so young.”
    “But don’t you think?”
    “More than likely.”
    “So how does
that
make you feel?”
    “What are you, a psychiatrist now?”
    She smiled. “Just interested. Because I’ve been there. Does it make you angry?”
    “I never get angry. I’m a very placid type of a guy.”
    “You looked angry twenty minutes ago. With the McKinney family.”
    “That was just a technical problem. Space and time. I didn’t want to be late for dinner. I wasn’t angry, really. Well, not at first. I got a bit frustrated later. You know, mentally. I mean, when there were four of them, I gave them the chance to come back in numbers. And what did they do? They added two more guys. That’s all. They showed up with a total of six. What is
that
about? It’s deliberate disrespect.”
    Deveraux said, “I think most people would consider six against one to be fairly respectful.”
    “But I warned them. I told them they’d need more. I was trying to be fair. But they wouldn’t listen. It was like talking to the Pentagon.”
    “How’s that going, by the way?”
    “Not good. They’re as bad as the McKinney family.”
    “Are you worried?”
    “Some people are.”
    “They should be. The army is going to change.”
    “The Marines too, then.”
    She smiled. “A little, maybe. But not much. The army is the big target. And the easy target. Because the army is boring. The Marines aren’t.”
    “You think?”
    “Come on,” she said. “We’re glamorous. We have a great dress uniform. We do great close-order drill. We do great funerals. You know why we do all that? Because Marines are very good at PR. And we get good advice. Our consultants are better than yours, basically. That’s what I’m saying. That’s what it comes down to. So you’ll lose a lot, and we’ll lose a little.”
    “You have consultants?” I said.
    “And lobbyists,” she said. “Don’t you?”
    “I don’t think so,” I said. I thought about my old pal Stan Lowrey, and his want ads. The waitress brought our meals. Just like the night before. Two big cheeseburgers, two big tangles of fries. I had had the same thing for lunch. I hadn’t remembered that. But I was hungry. So I ate. And I watched Deveraux eat. Which was some kind of a threshold. It has to mean something, if you can stand to watch another person eat.
    She chewed and swallowed and said, “Anyway, what else did your CO tell you?”
    “That he’s having you checked out.”
    She stopped eating. “Why would he?”
    “To give me something to use against you.”
    She smiled. “There’s not much there, I’m afraid. I was a good little jarhead. But don’t you see? They’re proving my case for me. The more desperate they get, the more I know for sure it’s some Kelham guy’s ass on the line.”
    She started eating again.
    I said, “My CO was also