I found it after the third concertina fold. It was listed at twelve thirty-two. Thirty-two minutes after 1989 became 1990. That was right about when I would have expected it. It was a call that lasted nearly fifteen minutes. That was about right too, in terms of duration. It was a solid prospect. I scanned ahead. Checked the next twenty or thirty minutes. There was nothing else there that looked half as good. I went back and put my finger under the number I liked. It was my best bet. Or my only hope.
“Got a pen?” I said.
Summer gave me one from her pocket.
“Got quarters?” I said.
She showed me fifty cents. I wrote the best-bet number on the army memo paper right underneath the D.C. number for the Jefferson Hotel. Passed it to her.
“Call it,” I said. “Find out who answers. You’ll have to go back across the street to the diner. The motel phone is busted.”
She was gone about eight minutes. I spent the time cleaning my teeth. I had a theory: If you can’t get time to sleep, a shower is a good substitute. If you can’t get time to shower, cleaning your teeth is the next best thing.
I left my toothbrush in a glass in the bathroom and Summer came through the door. She brought cold and misty air in with her.
“It was a golf resort outside of Raleigh,” she said.
“Good enough for me,” I said.
“Brubaker,” she said. “That’s where Brubaker was. On vacation.”
“Probably dancing,” I said. “Don’t you think? At half past midnight on New Year’s Eve? The desk clerk probably had to drag him out of the ballroom to the phone. That’s why the call lasted a quarter of an hour. Most of it was waiting time.”
“Who called him?”
There were codes on the printout indicating the location of the originating phone. They meant nothing to me. They were just numbers and letters. But my sergeant had supplied a key for me. On the sheet after the last concertina fold was a list of the codes and the locations they stood for. She had been right. She was better than the day guy. But then, she was an E-5 sergeant and he was an E-4 corporal, and sergeants made the U.S. Army worth serving in.
I checked the code against the key.
“Someone on a pay phone in the Delta barracks,” I said.
“So a Delta guy called his CO,” Summer said. “How does that help us?”
“The timing is suggestive,” I said. “Must have been an urgent matter, right?”
“Who was it?”
“One step at a time,” I said.
“Don’t shut me out.”
“I’m not.”
“You are. You’re walling up.”
I said nothing.
“Your mom died, and you’re hurting, and you’re closing in on yourself. But you shouldn’t. You can’t do this alone, Reacher. You can’t live your whole life alone.”
I shook my head.
“It’s not that,” I said. “It’s that I’m only guessing here. I’m holding my breath all the time. One long shot after another. And I don’t want to fall flat on my face. Not right in front of you. You wouldn’t respect me anymore.”
She said nothing.
“I know,” I said. “You already don’t respect me because you saw me naked.”
She paused. Then she smiled.
“But you need to get used to that,” I said. “Because it’s going to happen again. Right now, in fact. We’re taking the rest of the day off.”
The bed was awful. The mattress dipped in the middle and the sheets were damp. Maybe worse than damp. A place like that, if the room hadn’t been rented since Kramer died, I was pretty sure the bed wouldn’t have been changed either. Kramer had never actually gotten into it, but he had died right on top of it. He had probably leaked all kinds of bodily fluids. Summer didn’t seem to mind. But she hadn’t seen him there, all gray and white and inert.
But then I figured,
Afterward, we slept like babies. The heater finally put some temperature into the room. The sheets warmed up. The traffic sounds on the highway were soothing. Like white noise. We were safe. Nobody would think of looking for us there. Kramer had chosen well. It was a hideaway. We rolled down into the mattress dip together and held each other tight. I ended up thinking it was the best bed I had ever been in.
We woke up much later, very hungry. It was after six o’clock in the evening. Already dark outside the window. The January days were spooling by one after the other, and we weren’t paying much attention to them. We showered and dressed and headed across the street to eat. I took the army phone directory with me.
We went for the most calories for the fewest dollars but still ended up blowing more than eight bucks between us. I got my own back with the coffee. The diner had a bottomless cup policy and I exploited it ruthlessly. Then I camped out near the register and used the phone on the wall. Checked the number in the army book and called Sanchez down at Jackson.
“I hear you’re in the shit,” he said.
“Temporarily,” I said. “You heard anything more about Brubaker?”
“Like what?”
“Like, did they find his car yet?”
“Yes, they did. And it was a long way from Columbia.”
“Let me guess,” I said. “Somewhere more than an hour due north of Fort Bird, and maybe east and a little south of Raleigh. How about Smithfield, North Carolina?”
“How the hell did you know that?”
“Just a feeling,” I said. “Had to be close to where I-95 meets U.S. 70. Right on a main drag. Do they think that’s where he was killed?”
“No question about it. Killed right there in his car. Someone shot him from the backseat. The windshield was blown out in front of the driver’s position and what was left of the glass was all covered in blood and brains. And there were spatters on the steering wheel that hadn’t been smudged. Therefore nobody drove the car after he died. Therefore that’s where he was killed. Right there in his car. Smithfield, North Carolina.”
“Did they find shell cases?”
“No shell cases. No significant trace evidence either, apart from the kind of normal shit they would expect to find.”
“Have they got a narrative theory?”
“It was an industrial unit parking lot. Big place, like a local landmark, with a big lot, busy in the daytime but deserted at night. They think it was a two-car rendezvous. Brubaker gets there first, the second car pulls up alongside, at least two guys get out of it, they get into Brubaker’s car, one in the front and one in the back, they sit a spell, maybe they talk a little, then the guy in the back pulls a gun and shoots. Which by the way is how they figure Brubaker’s watch got busted. They figure he had his left wrist up on the top of the wheel, the way guys do when they’re sitting in their cars. But whatever, he goes down and they drag him out and they put him in the trunk of the other car and they drive him down to Columbia and they leave him there.”
“With dope and money in his pocket.”
“They don’t know where that came from yet.”
