The Hard Way

men might have retrospectively agonized over justification, he spent his energy figuring out where best to hide the bodies.

----

    They hid them in a ten-acre field near the northwest corner of the farm. Fallow land, hidden by trees, unplowed for a year. Jackson finished fixing the backhoe and then fired it up and drove off with headlights blazing. Started work immediately on a massive pit that needed to be thirty feet long, nine feet wide, and nine feet deep. A ninety-yard excavation, because they had decided to bury the cars as well.
    Reacher asked Pauling, “Did you check the box for extra insurance?”
    She nodded.
    He said, “Call them tomorrow. Tell them it was stolen.”
    Taylor was walking wounded so he was excused from heavy work. Instead he scoured the whole area for every piece of physical evidence he could find. He came up with all that anyone could think of, including all twenty-seven shell casings from Perez’s MP5. Pauling scrubbed his blood off the upstairs hallway floor and replaced the shattered bathroom tile. Reacher piled the bodies inside the Toyota Land Cruiser.

----

    The sun had been up for hours before the pit was finished. Jackson had left a neat graded slope at one end and Reacher drove the Toyota down it and smashed it hard against the earth wall at the other end. Jackson drove the backhoe to the house and used the front bucket to jack the Mini up and shove it backward. He maneuvered it all the way to the pit and rolled it down the grade and jammed it hard against the Toyota’s rear bumper. Taylor showed up with all the other items and threw them in the hole. Then Jackson started to fill it. Reacher just sat and watched. The sky was pale blue and the sun was watery. There were thin high clouds and a mild breeze that felt warm. He knew that in the flat land all around him Stone Age people had been buried in long mounds called barrows, and then Bronze Age people, and Iron Age people, and Celts, and Romans, and Saxons, and Angles, and Viking invaders in longships, and Normans, and then the English themselves for a thousand years. He guessed the land could take four more dead. He watched Jackson work until the dirt hid the top of the cars, and then he walked away, slowly, back to the house.

----

    Exactly twelve months later to the hour the ten-acre field was neatly plowed and dusted pale green with a brand-new winter crop. Tony and Susan Jackson and Graham and Kate Taylor were working the field next to it. The sun was shining. Back at the house the nine-year-old cousins and best friends Melody Jackson and Jade Taylor were watching Jade’s baby brother, a healthy five-month-old boy named Jack.
    Three thousand miles west of Grange Farm it was five hours earlier and Lauren Pauling was alone in her Barrow Street apartment, drinking coffee and reading the
New York Times.
She had missed a piece inside the main section that reported the deaths of three newly arrived private military contractors in Iraq. Their names were Burke, Groom, and Kowalski, and they had died two days previously when a land mine exploded under their vehicle outside of Baghdad. But she caught a piece in the Metro Section in which it was reported that the cooperative board at the Dakota Building had foreclosed on an apartment after twelve consecutive months of unpaid monthly maintenance. On entering the apartment they had found more than nine million dollars in a locked closet.
    Six thousand miles west of Grange Farm it was eight hours earlier and Patti Joseph was fast asleep in a waterfront condominium in Seattle, Washington. She was ten months into a new job as a magazine copy-editor. Her perseverance and her relentless eye for detail made her good at it. She was seeing a local journalist from time to time. She was happy.
    Far from Seattle, far from New York City, far from Bishops Pargeter, down in Birmingham, Alabama, Dee Marie Graziano was up early, in a hospital gymnasium, watching her brother grasp his new metal canes and walk across the floor.
    Nobody knew where Jack Reacher was. He had left Grange Farm two hours after the backhoe had shut down, and there had been no news of him since.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

    LEE CHILD is the author of ten Jack Reacher thrillers, including the
New York Times
bestsellers
Persuader, The Enemy,
and
One Shot,
which has been optioned for a major motion picture by Paramount Pictures. His debut,
Killing Floor,
won both the Anthony and the Barry Awards for Best First Mystery. Foreign rights