We entered the diner. The server got up from the booth and started to leave, but I stopped her. Turning to Reacher I asked, "Have you ordered yet?"
"Just coffee so far." His voice was deep. It wasn't loud, but it carried, if that makes any sense.
I turned back to the girl. "It's Angie, right?" She nodded. "Can you bring us three breakfasts. The usual? And a pot of coffee?"
"I don't know your usual."
I smiled at her. "Trust your instinct."
I shed my sheepskin jacket and dropped it in the booth behind me, then slid into the booth where Angie had been sitting across from Reacher. Vic took half a seat on one of the stools at the counter directly opposite the end of our table. She rested her left boot on the stool's footrest, and let her right boot stay on the floor. Her left elbow went onto the counter, and her right palm rested on her right thigh, inches from her holstered Glock.
Reacher noticed the triangulation and accepted it for what it was with what might've been an ever so slight amusement that only showed in his eyes. Vic's cell phone rang. She pulled it out without looking at it or taking her eyes off Reacher and leaned over to slide it along the table where it stopped in front of me. "It's for you," she said.
I picked it up and checked the screen, then accepted the call.
"Hey Punk."
'Dad, what are you doing?"
"Having breakfast. What are you doing?"
"I know where you are and who you're with. Do you have any idea what kind of trouble you're going to be in?" She sounded pretty upset.
"I do. And I know this puts pressure on you, but I'm asking anyway. I'd appreciate it if you could keep them off my back for a while."
"Daddy, I—"
"Cady." Using her name got her attention like nothing else. "This is important." I paused a moment. I wanted to say this right. "Reacher and I are going to talk about old times. We could use your help."
She didn't respond to that, but I heard her breathing, so I knew she was there.
"Thanks, Punk." I disconnected.
I put the phone on the table and sat back in my seat, looking across at Reacher the same way he was looking back at me. Studying. Examining. Trying to see what wasn't on the surface.
Because what was on the surface was rough, very rough. Williamson had been right; we could be bookends, size wise, but that's as far as the resemblance went. It was easy to see why he had been intimidated. If you took Superman, made him bigger, blond with a grown-out military cut and three day beard, put him in street clothes and nicked and scuffed him up a bit, assuming that was possible, you'd have something close to Reacher. He had yet to say a word, but there was an air about him that demanded attention. He was looking at me with a concentration I'd only seen a very few times. And it wasn't simply his direct gaze that got my attention. I got the feeling he was absorbing everything around him in a way that defied description, as if all of his five senses and a few others were cataloging every sight, every sound, every smell, interpreting all of them and ordering them in his mind for an appropriate level of instant response come what may. No way to surprise him. All of this while looking relaxed, but in charge somehow.
That was it. Somehow it felt like Vic and I were the ones who had come here to be debriefed.
The best tool I have as an investigator is listening. People are uncomfortable with silence. The discomfort comes from uncertainties on their part; uncertainty in what I may know about them, uncertainty about legalities and penalties, uncertainty about saying the wrong thing. The uncertainties push them into filling that silence with excuses, with explanations, with alibies, and anything they say can and will be used against them in a court of law.
Reacher knew all of that. He was reflecting it back at me, knowing I would understand that listening was a tool he was also well versed in using. It was there in his eyes. In spite of what I'd been told by Williamson and Neagley and others, I found myself having to reassess what I thought I knew about him. It reminded me of my chess matches with Lucian. He was always a half dozen moves ahead of me, no matter how long I pondered my choices.
Two more dark sedans appeared in the parking lot. One stopped at the back of the Riviera, blocking it in. The other continued on to park next to the first car. Nobody exited either vehicle.
Reacher studied them through the glass. "You carry some influence," he finally said.
"Do I? What makes you say that?"
"It's obvious. The agents in those cars are just waiting. They aren't taking up defensive positions behind their vehicles. They aren't waiting for a SWAT team, although I expect one to show up. Somebody is telling them to wait. And assuming Cady is your daughter, and she works for the FBI or Wyoming DCI or whoever, her position is probably too junior to have the weight to hold these people back on her own. She's too young. Plus, you're from another county. In fact, you're sheriff of the least populated county in the least populated state in the country, but something gives you the standing to make up for all that. Previous military service since you knew my father like your note said. Some medals besides the junk ones. Years, decades probably, on the job here in Wyoming, successful career, good at what you do. On top of that, you've been around the block a few times. You've done high profile work in a relatively low profile job. Sound about right so far?"
Angie came back with the pot of coffee I'd asked for. "I'll be right back with your breakfasts." She smiled at us, mostly Reacher, before she left. I picked up the pot as Reacher turned his mug right side up in its saucer. I filled his cup, then turned mine over and filled it as well. Vic vacated her position on the stool and peeled off her duty jacket, dropping it on mine. She squeezed onto the bench seat next to me with her own mug.
"It looks like you guys aren't going to shoot each other anytime soon, so I'm joining your party." I scooched closer to the window and poured her coffee too. To Reacher Vic said, "Yes, we know you're armed with at least one handgun, a .45 Glock."
"I could've ditched it."
"Guy like you? Uh-uh." She pulled her coffee in close. "Besides you've got it under your right thigh as we speak."
"And I have a G17 in my jacket pocket. Spoils of war." An interesting choice of words.
"As long as it stays there, we're okay," said Vic. "I would've hung on to both of them too,"
Reacher glanced back and forth between the two of us and raised his mug in a salute. "So, like I said," he nodded to me with a bristly chin, "you carry some influence. You have a reputation that precedes you." He sipped his coffee. Something in his manner changed when Vic joined us. This was a man who liked women, not in a dominating or overtly masculine way. I couldn't put a finger on it just yet. I suspected Vic felt it too and it made her feel comfortable enough to relax her guard and join us, in spite of what she said about Reacher being armed.
More cars and SUVs were arriving outside, some of them obviously government vehicles, and some state law enforcement, as well as locals. Vic frowned. "Why is this starting to feel like that last scene in Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid?"
"There aren't any guns out yet. That's a good sign."
Reacher sipped his coffee again. "You didn't come down here to talk to me, did you? You wanted to talk to Angie."
"Yep."
"Why?"
"I wanted to get a sense of how much of your father has been carried forward in you. I wasn't sure if I'd ever get a chance to actually talk to you. Talking to her felt as close as I was likely to get."
"You talked to Ron, didn't you?"
"Ron?"
"The truck driver."
I nodded. "Yep. Agent Williamson. I talked with him. He was helpful, but I needed more."
"Why 'more'?"
I shrugged. "I'm a curious man."
Angie showed up with our breakfasts. It turned out the usual was corned beef hash with melted cheese and a short stack of buckwheat pancakes. To Reacher, she said, "Let me know if you need anything else." It was almost a purr.
He smiled. "Thanks." She left and Reacher took a moment to enjoy watching her go.
"Well, you two seem to get along pretty well," Vic said.
"We're engaged."
That stopped Vic for a moment and Reacher said, "So…tell me about my father."
I took a sip of coffee and cleared my throat. "I met him in Vietnam. This was in '68, maybe summer? I'm not completely sure. The Tet offensive was over, definitely. I was stationed at Tan Son Nhut, the big air base outside of Saigon. We had Marines, Army, Navy…every branch had people deployed there."
"I'm familiar," Reacher said.
"Right, I suppose you would be. Anyway, back in the states I'd done some boxing at the University of Southern California, and throughout my time in the Corps, I continued fighting on and off—fought in some Golden Gloves type matches, was on the West Pac All Marine boxing team, that sort of thing. We had a big match coming up against a local boxing club that drew fighters from the South Vietnamese army. Tensions were high around town wherever troops spent leave time. The Vietnamese mob even had money riding on several of the bouts—I didn't find that out until later. In fact, there were four rival mob bosses and they all had stakes in the match.
"So, one night I was in a bar, hadn't been there too many times, but my usual bar had lost its appeal. Long story. Anyway, it was late, and as I was leaving, a guy in a group coming in bumped into me. I think he meant it to be a hard bump, but the Vietnamese are not a sizeable people, and I don't bump too easily, especially back then.
"Of course, he took offense, said it was my fault. It was a classic set-up—you know, you've seen it a thousand times; locals picking a fight with the foreigners. I wasn't going to bite. I apologized, but he wouldn't let it go. I just walked past him and he followed me, shoving me in the back, swearing in Vietnamese and calling my ancestors all kinds of degrading things."
Reacher said nothing.
"But when we got outside, I found a ring of guys waiting on the sidewalk under the neon lights. Several rings of guys, in fact, all of them staring at me, none of them smiling, and it occurred to me that this was perhaps something more than a simple drunken altercation."
"Through just the sheer presence of numbers, I was jostled and pressed into an alley next to the bar." I paused for a bite of hash, which was probably a mistake because I had to talk around it. "I'd been almost two years in-country. I'd smelled a lot of smells. Never anything like this. Not just alcohol. Not just sweat. It was a miasma of pure hostility and menace. And some shit that got stepped in, I'm pretty sure."
"'Miasma,' Vic repeated. "Not a real sheriff-ey word."
"I wound up maybe ten yards into the shadows in this alley—boxes and cans of rotting trash lining the brick walls, garbage underfoot—surrounded by a mass of cursing, shoving Vietnamese, who now backed away from me and left me in the rough center of a ten foot ring of empty cobblestone. I'd been a little buzzed leaving the bar, but by now I had pretty much sobered up."
Reacher said nothing.
"And as if it wasn't already hot enough, someone lit fires in a couple of the trash cans. The brick walls and the faces in the crowd took on this hellish, smoky glow. A guy dressed in pieces of a South Vietnamese army uniform pushed through into the circle, and the mob started cheering and chanting a name: 'Tien! Tien!' He peeled of his shirt, put up his fists and settled into a fighter's stance.
"I realized I was only going to exit this alley in one of three ways. I could be carried out, I could fight my way out, or I could be carried out after trying to fight my way out. If anybody had been there to ask me which I thought it would be, I would've said Number Three."
Reacher said nothing. Given what I knew about his military upbringing and career, I figured he was thinking back on some of his own fights in different alleys around the world.
"So the crowd was shouting, yelling for blood, egging both of us on. We were circling, measuring each other. Tien, he was shorter than me, and I had the reach on him, but weight-wise we looked pretty even. For a Vietnamese national, he was a giant. He moved in, tried a couple of jabs, but it felt wrong, like he wasn't taking it seriously. I was wondering what his strategy was when someone behind me whacked me in the back of the head with some kind of club.
"At the same time, Tien rushed in and hit me with a straight right that laid open my cheek. I'm already dazed from the blow to the back of my head, and now I'm bleeding pretty well to boot. The circle had closed in until we barely had enough room to fight. Hands on my back kept shoving me at him. He feinted and I raised my left to block and—wham—somebody from behind hit me again. Through the stars and cobwebs, I realized I was bleeding from my left forearm where I'd blocked him. I had enough cognition left to understand he had a small blade of some sort in his fist. A sick feeling was growing in the pit of my stomach, and by this point the mood of the crowd was bordering on berserk."
I took another sip of coffee. Vic's eyes were locked on my face. "Geez, Walt, how come you never told me this story before?"
"'Men of few words are the best men.'"
"You know, it's getting pretty bad when even I can tell you're quoting Shakespeare." She glanced at Reacher. "Was that Shakespeare?"
Reacher nodded. "Henry V, one of the Histories."
She shook her head. "Motherfu—"
I stopped her with a hand on her arm, and she amazed me by not biting it off at the elbow, as I reassessed Reacher again, and his recognition of the quote. To Vic I said, "How should I know which stories you'd want to hear, and which ones would put you to sleep?"
She bumped her shoulder against mine, not gently, and took a bite of pancakes. "Ath-hole."
I continued. "About then the alley was rocked—BOOM BOOM BOOM—by pistol fire. Everybody ducked out of reflex, looking around for the source. A guy, an American with an M1911 .45 raised above his head, pushed into the center of the crowd to stand with the two of us in the flickering yellow glow of the trash can fires. He was tall, dressed in civilian clothes, same as me, but definitely military, same as me.
"My father," Reacher said.
"Yep. Like the cavalry, although I didn't find out who he was right away. Have you heard this story?"
"I overheard my father telling my mother about something that happened while he was in Saigon. He wasn't big on talking about himself. It might've been this. But I never heard any real details, except one. If it comes up in your story, I'll let you know."
"I would've been interested to hear his side of things. Anyway, in the bit of silence after the gun shots, your father called out, 'The next one of you who touches either of these men will be shot. No warning.' He repeated it in Vietnamese.
"Of course they couldn't let it go without testing him. A big, rough-looking individual carrying a stout bamboo staff stepped out of the pack and managed to snarl one syllable before your father shot him through the knee, dropped him on the bricks. No warning. The round ricocheted off the pavement after going through his knee and two other guys behind him went down as well, all three of them screaming bloody murder.
"Your dad motioned with the .45. 'Get them out of here.'
"There were at least seventy or eighty men jammed into that alley, and he stood there with a maximum of four rounds left in his pistol's magazine and backed the crowd down. There was just something in his eyes and the way he stood—he was not a man to be doubted.
"'This fight will continue,' he said. 'Three minute rounds, one minute rest between.'
"I wiped blood and sweat from my face with back of my hand and nodded at Tien with my chin. 'He's got a blade or something in his fist.'
"Your dad said, 'Don't get hit anymore'—which got a smile out of Reacher—"and he lifted his free hand.
"To the crowd, he called out: 'When I drop my arm.'
"Tien and I squared off. Your dad's arm dropped.
"We both had the same thought, which was to go for a quick knockout. Instead we wound up in a clench, me holding his right fist away from me in my left hand while we each punched the other with our free hands. That went on for a few seconds, then I shoved him away and we started circling again. The noise from the mob was growing louder. I moved in on him and tried a couple of quick left jabs, and I could tell by the way he tried to block my blows that the blade was on the bottom side of his right fist, maybe something small glued to his last knuckle. He was trying to cut me with each block.
"I glanced over to see if your father had noticed. He caught my look and shrugged, as if to say, deal with it.
"Tien picked up on this exchange and took encouragement. He moved in again, but he was overconfident. I feinted with another left jab and as he blocked it, I crossed with a right that folded his nose against his right cheek with a snap everybody heard. He went down hard on his ass, but he bounced back up right away.
"BOOM! I flinched—everybody flinched. Your dad's pistol was in the air.
"'Three minutes, end of round,' he called out. He was down to three cartridges in his .45.
"There were no corners to go to, so Tien and I backed away from each other as far we were able, which basically put us about eight feet apart. By this time the noise from the mob was nearing the decibel level of a locomotive roaring through the alley. They were following the demand not to touch either of us, but they were making up the difference in shouting and chanting 'Tien! Tien!'
"Your dad leaned in close so I could hear him. 'Pretty sure the goal here is for Tien and this mob to cripple you, take you out of competition in the tournament! If you die in the process, they'll be just as happy. There's big money involved!' He nodded at Tien. 'That last punch was good but save your hands for the tournament. Bury your fists in his gut! Break his ribs! When he slows down, that's the time to punch his head in!'
"That sounds like my father."
"He stepped back and raised his free hand. 'Ready…' he glanced back and forth between us, '…fight!'
"I had a hard time following his advice. Tien met me in the center with a flurry of blows at my head, trying desperately to open a cut over either one of my eyes with his hidden blade to get me bleeding, affect my vision. I had a hell of a time blocking him.
"I finally saw an opening. Tien had just finished up back-to-back combinations and I stepped in and drove a hard right into his stomach just above his waistband. I followed it up with a left to match. The two blows folded him in a little and his face was right in front of me, so I hit him with my right elbow on the bridge of his already swollen nose.
"He ended up on his ass again. I looked over at your dad to see if he had a problem with the breach in etiquette. He said nothing. Seemed an elbow balanced out a blade."
Reacher nodded. "He taught Joe and me when we were still pretty young to use our elbows instead of our fists when we could. I'm sure he approved."
"The mob didn't agree. They howled. They hauled Tien to his feet and pushed him back into the middle, which was a mistake because his head was still foggy and his reactions were slow. His hands were up, but not too high in case I tried for his body again. I almost felt bad for doing it, but I took half a step and feinted another body blow with my left and he turned to his left as his right dropped to block my punch. My feet were set perfectly, and I pivoted to hit him with a hard straight right hand just over his heart. His whole body started to go slack, but before he had time to fall, I hit him again on his ear with a left cross that was the natural blow to follow the right. And BOOM, another shot ended the round.
"Your father had been standing just to one side beyond Tien and I had an unhindered view of him when he fired his Colt. He hadn't looked at a watch to know when the three minutes were done. He just knew. Damnedest thing.
"Tien was on his hands and knees. He might've gone all the way down if those brick cobbles hadn't been caked with soot and grime and worse things. He already had it all over his backside, and as close to unconscious as he must've been, he was still conscious enough to want to keep his frontside from ending up like his backside.
"Now that no one was clubbing me from behind, I was winning the fight, but the only thing I could think of was that your dad's Colt had only two more rounds in it, assuming he started with one in the chamber to begin with. Maybe he only had one round left. The mob knew the weapon's eight round capacity as well as I did. They glared at him like a pack of hungry wolves. He was cool and calm. Looked a little bored even."
