Running Blind

remember? Petrosian’s boy? And what goes for skulls goes for necks, right? So it wasn’t an accident. It was deliberate homicide.”

There was silence.

“OK,” Reacher said. “What’s the deal?”

“You’re going to jail,” Deerfield said. “There’s no deal.”

“Bullshit, there’s no deal,” Reacher said. “There’s always a deal.”

Silence again. It lasted minutes. Then Blake shrugged.

“Well, you want to cooperate, we could compromise, ” he said. “We could call Lamarr a suicide, grieving about her father, tormented she couldn’t save her sister.”

“And you could keep your big mouth shut,” Deerfield said. “You could tell nobody nothing, except what we want them told.”

Silence again.

“Why should I?” Reacher said.

“Because you’re a smart guy,” Deerfield said. “Don’t forget, there’s absolutely nothing on Lamarr. You know that. She was way too smart. Sure, you could dig around a couple of years, if you had a million dollars for lawyer bills. You could come up with a little meaningless circumstantial stuff, but what’s a jury going to do with that? A big man hates a small woman? He’s a bum, she’s a federal agent? He breaks her neck, and then he blames her for it? Some fantastic story about hypnosis? Forget about it.”

“So face it, OK?” Blake said. “You’re ours, now.”

There was silence. Then Reacher shook his head.

“No,” he said. “I think I’ll pass on that.”

“Then you go to jail.”

“Just one question, first,” Reacher said.

“Which is?”

“Did I kill Lorraine Stanley?”

Blake shook his head. “No, you didn’t.”

“How do you know?”

“You know how we know. We had you tailed, all that week.”

“And you gave a copy of the surveillance report to my lawyer, right?”

“Right.”

“OK,” Reacher said.

“OK what, smart guy?”

“OK nuts to you, is what,” Reacher said.

“You want to expand on that?”

Reacher shook his head. “You figure it out.”

The room went quiet.

“What?” Blake said.

Reacher smiled at him. “Think about strategy. Maybe you can lock me up for Lamarr, but you can’t ever claim I’m also the guy who killed the women, because my lawyer has got your own report proving that I’m not. So what are you going to do then?”

“What does that matter to you?” Blake said. “You’re locked up anyway.”

“Think about the future,” Reacher said. “You’ve told the world it’s not me, and you’re swearing blind it’s not Lamarr, so you’ve got to be seen to keep on looking, right? You can’t ever stop, not without people wondering why. Think about the negative headlines. Elite FBI unit gets nowhere, tenth year of search. You’d just have to swallow them. And you’d have to keep the guards in place, you’d have to work around the clock, more and more manpower, more and more effort, more and more budget, year after year, searching for the guy. Are you going to do that?”

Silence in the room.

“No, you’re not going to do that,” Reacher said. “And not doing that is the same thing as admitting you know the truth. Lamarr is dead, the search has stopped, it wasn’t me, therefore Lamarr was the killer. So it’s all or nothing now, for you guys. It’s make-your-mind-up time. If you don’t admit it was Lamarr, then you use up all your resources for the rest of history, pretending to look for a guy you know for sure doesn’t exist. And if you do admit it was Lamarr, then you can’t lock me up for killing her, because in the circumstances it was absolutely justifiable.”

Silence again.

“So, nuts to you,” Reacher said.

There was silence. Reacher smiled.

“So now what?” he asked.

They were quiet for a long moment. Then they recovered.

“We’re the Bureau,” Deerfield said. “We can make your life very difficult.”

Reacher shook his head.

“My life’s already very difficult,” he said. “Nothing you guys can do to make it any harder. But you can stop with the threats, anyway. Because I’ll keep your secret.”

“You will?”

Reacher nodded. “I’ll have to, won’t I? Because if I don’t, it’ll all just come back on Rita Scimeca. She’s the only living witness. She’ll get pestered to death, prosecutors, police, newspapers, television. All the sordid details, how she was raped, how she was naked in the tub with the paint. It’ll hurt her. And I don’t want that to happen.”

Silence again.

“So, your secret is safe with me,” Reacher said.

Blake stared at the tabletop. Then he nodded.

“OK,” he said. “I’ll buy that.”

“But we’ll be watching you,” Deerfield said. “Always. Never forget that.”

Reacher smiled again.

“Well, don’t let me catch you at it,” he said. “Because you should remember what happened to Petrosian. You guys never forget that, OK?”

IT FINISHED LIKE that as a tie, as a wary stalemate. Nothing more was said. Reacher stood up and threaded his way around the table and out of the room. He found an elevator and made it down to street level. Nobody came after him. There were double doors, scarred oak and wired glass. He pushed them open and stepped out into the chill of some dark deserted Portland street in the middle of the night. Stood on the edge of the sidewalk, looking at nothing in particular.

“Hey, Reacher,” Harper called.

She was behind him in the shadow of a pillar flanking the entrance. He turned and saw the gleam of her hair and a stripe of white where her shirt showed at the front of her jacket.

“Hey yourself,” he said. “You OK?”

She stepped across to him.

“I will be,” she said. “I’m going to ask for a transfer. Maybe over here. I like it.”

“Will they let you?”

She nodded. “Sure they will. They’re not going to rock any boats as long as the budget hearings are on. This is going to be the quietest thing that ever happened. ”

“It never happened at all,” he said. “That’s how we left it, upstairs.”

“So you’re OK with them?”

“As OK as I ever was.”

“I’d have stood up for you,” she said. “Whatever it took.”

He nodded. “I know you would. There should be more like you.”

“Take this,” she said.

She held out a slip of flimsy paper. It was a travel voucher, issued by the desk back at Quantico.

“It’ll get you to New York,” she said.

“What about you?” he asked.

“I’ll say I lost it. They’ll wire me another one.”