Tripwire

Two. Mine was a foot soldier, went to the Pacific. Victor kind of felt his family hadn’t done its bit. So he wanted to do it, like a duty. Sounds stuffy now, right? Duty? But we all thought like that, back then. No comparison at all with the kids of today. We were all pretty serious and old-fashioned around here, Victor maybe slightly more than the rest of us. Very serious, very earnest. But not really a whole lot out of the ordinary.”
    Reacher was three-quarters through with the bags. He stopped and rested against the pickup door. “Was he smart?”
    “Smart enough, I guess,” Steven said. “He did well in school, without exactly setting the world on fire. We had a few kids here, over the years, gone to be lawyers or doctors or whatever. One of them went to NASA, a bit younger than Victor and me. Victor was smart enough, but he had to work to get his grades, as I recall.”
    Reacher started with the bags again. He had filled the farthest shelves first, which he was glad about, because his forearms were starting to burn.
    “Was he ever in any kind of trouble?”
    Steven looked impatient. “Trouble? You haven’t been listening to me, mister. Victor was straight as an arrow, back when the worst kid would look like a complete angel today.”
    Six bags to go. Reacher wiped his palms on his pants.
    “What was he like when you last saw him? Between the two tours?”
    Steven paused to think about it. “A little older, I guess. I’d grown up a year, it seemed like he’d grown up five. But he was no different. Same guy. Still serious, still earnest. They gave him a parade when he came home, because he had a medal. He was real embarrassed about it, said the medal was nothing. Then he went away again, and he never came back.”
    “How did you feel about that?”
    Steven paused again. “Pretty bad, I guess. This was a guy I’d known all my life. I’d have preferred him to come back, of course, but I was real glad he didn’t come back in a wheelchair or something, like a lot of them did.”
    Reacher finished the work. He butted the last bag into position on the shelf with the heel of his hand and leaned on the post opposite Steven.
    “What about the mystery? About what happened to him?”
    Steven shook his head and smiled, sadly. “There’s no mystery. He was killed. This is about two old folks refusing to accept three unpleasant truths, is all.”
    “Which are?”
    “Simple,” Steven said. “Truth one is their boy died. Truth two is he died out there in some godforsaken impenetrable jungle where nobody will ever find him. Truth three is the government got dishonest around that time, and they stopped listing the MIAs as casualties, so they could keep the numbers reasonable. There were what? Maybe ten boys on Vic’s chopper when it went down? That’s ten names they kept off the nightly news. It was a policy, and it’s too late for them to admit to anything now.”
    “That’s your take?”
    “Sure is,” Steven said. “The war went bad, and the government went bad with it. Hard enough for my generation to accept, let me tell you. You younger guys are probably more at home with it, but you better believe the old folk like the Hobies are never going to square up to it.”
    He lapsed into silence, and glanced absently back and forth between the empty pickup and the full shelves. “That’s a ton of cement you shifted. You want to come in and wash up and let me buy you a soda?”
    “I need to eat,” Reacher said. “I missed lunch.”
    Steven nodded, and then he smiled, ruefully. “Head south. There’s a diner right after the train station. That’s where we used to drink milk shakes, half past nine Saturday night, thinking we were practically Frank Sinatra.”
    THE DINER HAD obviously changed many times since daring boys with baseball cards in the wheels of their bicycles had sipped milk shakes there on Saturday nights. Now it was a seventies-style eaterie, low and square, a brick facade, green roof, with a nineties-style gloss in the form of elaborate neon signs in every window, hot pinks and blues. Reacher took the leather-bound folder with him and pulled the door and stepped into chilly air smelling of freon and burgers and the strong stuff they squirt on the tables before wiping them down. He sat at the counter and a cheerful heavy girl of twenty-something boxed him in with flatware and a napkin and handed him a menu card the size of a billboard with photographs of the food positioned next to