Never Go Back

two disappear, here and there, for fun and profit. Or a hundred tons. The 110th had been tasked to find out who and how and where and when. The unit was new, with its name to make, and it had gone at it hard. Reacher had spent hundreds of hours on it, and his team had spent many times more.

He said, ‘But I still don’t remember any Juan Rodriguez.’

Sullivan said, ‘Flip to the end of the file.’

Which Reacher did, where he found he remembered Juan Rodriguez pretty well.

Just not as Juan Rodriguez.

The 110th had gotten a solid tip about a gangbanger in South Central LA, who went by the street name of Dog, which was alleged to be a contraction of Big Dog, because the guy was supposedly sizeable in terms of both status and physique. The DEA wasn’t interested in him, because he wasn’t part of the drug wars. But the tip said like neutrals everywhere he was making a fortune selling black-market weapons to both sides at once. The tip said he was the go-to guy. The tip said he was angling to unload eleven crates of army SAWs. SAWs were not metal things with little teeth, good for cutting wood. SAWs were Squad Automatic Weapons, which were fearsome fully automatic machine guns, with fearsome capacities and fearsome capabilities.

Reacher had gone to South Central LA and walked the hot dusty streets and asked the right kinds of questions in the right kinds of places. In that environment he was unmistakably army, so he had posed as a disaffected grunt with interesting stuff for sale. Grenades, launchers, armour-piercing ammunition in vast quantities, Beretta handguns. People were naturally cautious, but ultimately the pose worked. Two days later he was face to face with the Dog, who turned out to be big indeed, mostly side to side. The guy could have weighed four hundred pounds.

The last sheet in the file was the affidavit, which was headed Evidentiary Statement of Juan Rodriguez, a.k.a. Big Dog, a.k.a. Dog. Reacher’s name was all over it, as well as a long list of injuries, including a broken skull and broken ribs and tissue damage and contusions. It was signed at the bottom, by Rodriguez himself, and witnessed, by a lawyer on Ventura Boulevard in Studio City, Los Angeles, and notarized, by someone else entirely.

Sullivan said, ‘Remember him now?’

‘He was lying in this affidavit,’ Reacher said. ‘I never laid a finger on him.’

‘Really?’

‘Why would I? I wasn’t interested in him. I wanted his source, that’s all. I wanted the guy he was buying from. I wanted a name.’

‘You weren’t worried about SAWs on the streets of LA?’

‘That was the LAPD’s problem, not mine.’

‘Did you get the name?’

‘Yes.’

‘How?’

‘I asked, he answered.’

‘Just like that?’

‘More or less.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘I was a good interrogator. I made him think I knew more than I did. He wasn’t very smart. I’m surprised he even had a brain to injure.’

‘So how do you explain the hospital report?’

‘Do I have to? A guy like that, he knows all kinds of unsavoury characters. Maybe he ripped someone off the day before. He wasn’t operating in a very civilized environment.’

‘So that’s your defence? Some other dude did it?’

‘If I’d done it he wouldn’t have made it to the hospital. He was a useless tub of lard.’

‘I can’t go to the prosecutor with some other dude did it. I can’t say the proof is you would have actually killed him, rather than merely mortally injuring him.’

‘You’ll have to.’

‘No, I won’t have to. You need to listen up, Reacher. You need to take this seriously. I can get you a deal, but you have to get out in front of it. You have to own it and show some contrition.’

‘I don’t believe this.’

‘I’m giving you my best advice.’

‘Can I get a new lawyer?’

‘No,’ Sullivan said. ‘You can’t.’

They ate the rest of their breakfasts in silence. Reacher wanted to move to another table, but he didn’t, because he thought it would look petty. They split the check and paid and went out to the car, where Sullivan said, ‘I have somewhere else to go. You can walk from here. Or take the bus.’

She got in her car and drove away. Reacher was left on his own, in the restaurant lot. The three-lane in front of him was part of the local bus route. There was a bench stop thirty yards to his left. There were two people waiting. Two men. Mexicans, both of them much thinner than the Big Dog. Honest civilians, probably, heading for yard work in the cemetery, or janitor jobs in Alexandria, or in D.C. itself.

There was another bus stop fifty yards to his right. Another bench. On the near side of the street, not the far. Heading north, not south. Heading out, not in. To McLean, and then Reston, maybe. And then to Leesburg,