The Enemy

was the guy who had called me, at five seconds past midnight.
    “I’m Rick Stockton,” he said. “Deputy Chief.”
    He was calm. He had seen heart attacks before.
    “I’m Jack Reacher. MP duty officer tonight.”
    He recognized my voice in turn. Smiled.
    “You decided to come out,” he said. “After all.”
    “You didn’t tell me the DOA was a two-star.”
    “Well, he is.”
    “I’ve never seen a dead general,” I said.
    “Not many people have,” he said, and the way he said it made me think he had been an enlisted man.
    “Army?” I asked.
    “Marine Corps,” he said. “First sergeant.”
    “My old man was a Marine,” I said. I always make that point, talking to Marines. It gives me some kind of genetic legitimacy. Stops them from thinking of me as a pure army dogface. But I keep it vague. I don’t tell them my old man had made captain. Enlisted men and officers don’t automatically see eye to eye.
    “Humvee,” Stockton said.
    He was looking at my ride.
    “You like it?” he asked.
    I nodded.
Humvee
was everyone’s best attempt at saying HMMWV, which stands for
High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle,
which about says it all. Like the army generally, what you’re told is what you get.
    “It works as advertised,” I said.
    “Kind of wide,” he said. “I wouldn’t like to drive it in a city.”
    “You’d have tanks in front of you,” I said. “They’d be clearing the way. I think that would be the basic plan.”
    The music from the bar thudded on. Stockton said nothing.
    “Let’s look at the dead guy,” I said to him.
    He led the way inside. Flicked a switch that lit up the interior hallway. Then another that lit up the whole room. I saw a standard motel layout. A yard-wide lobby with a closet on the left and a bathroom on the right. Then a twelve-by-twenty rectangle with a built-in counter the same depth as the closet, and a queen bed the same depth as the bathroom. Low ceiling. A wide window at the far end, draped, with an integrated heater-cooler unit built through the wall underneath it. Most of the things in the room were tired and shabby and colored brown. The whole place looked dim and damp and miserable.
    There was a dead man on the bed.
    He was naked, facedown. He was white, maybe pushing sixty, quite tall. He was built like a fading pro athlete. Like a coach. He still had decent muscle, but he was growing love handles the way old guys do, however fit they are. He had pale hairless legs. He had old scars. He had wiry gray hair buzzed close to his scalp and cracked weathered skin on the back of his neck. He was a type. Any hundred people could have looked at him and all hundred would have said
army officer,
for sure.
    “He was found like this?” I asked.
    “Yes,” Stockton said.
    Second question: How? A guy takes a room for the night, he expects privacy until the maid comes in the next morning, at the very least.
    “How?” I said.
    “How what?”
    “How was he found? Did he call 911?”
    “No.”
    “So how?”
    “You’ll see.”
    I paused. I didn’t see anything yet.
    “Did you roll him over?” I said.
    “Yes. Then we rolled him back.”
    “Mind if I take a look?”
    “Be my guest.”
    I stepped to the bed and slipped my left hand under the dead guy’s armpit and rolled him over. He was cold and a little stiff. Rigor was just setting in. I got him settled flat on his back and saw four things. First, his skin had a distinctive gray pallor. Second, shock and pain were frozen on his face. Third, he had grabbed his left arm with his right hand, up near the bicep. And fourth, he was wearing a condom. His blood pressure had collapsed long ago and his erection had disappeared and the condom was hanging off, mostly empty, like a translucent flap of pale skin. He had died before reaching orgasm. That was clear.
    “Heart attack,” Stockton said, behind me.
    I nodded. The gray skin was a good indicator. So was the evidence of shock and surprise and sudden pain in his upper left arm.
    “Massive,” I said.
    “But before or after penetration?” Stockton said, with a smile in his voice.
    I looked at the pillow area. The bed was still completely made. The dead guy was on top of the counterpane and the counterpane was still tight over the pillows. But there was a head-shaped dent, and there were rucks where elbows and heels had scrabbled and pushed lower down.
    “She was underneath him when it happened,” I said. “That’s for sure. She had to wrestle