Past Tense (Jack Reacher #23)(115)

“I guess a few things in general.”

“Anything special?”

“It was a long time ago,” the old man said.

“Your name comes up in an old police report, about an altercation on the street. Late one evening. In fact not far from here. You were seen with a friend.”

“There were altercations on the street all the time.”

“This one involved a local bully who was beaten to death two years later.”

Stan Reacher said nothing.

“I’m guessing the friend you were seen with that night in September 1943 was your cousin Bill. I think he started something that took two years to finish.”

“Tell me again, who are you exactly?”

“I’m not exactly sure,” Reacher said. “As of right now, I’m thinking maybe your cousin Bill’s second son.”

“Then you know what happened.”

“I was a military cop. I saw it a dozen times.”

“Am I in trouble?”

“Not with me,” Reacher said. “The only person I’m mad at is myself. I guess I assumed this was the kind of thing that happened to other people.”

“Bill was a smart boy. He was always a step ahead, partly because he had a varied life. Streetwise, they would call it now. But he knew other stuff too. He was good at his books. He knew a lot of science. He loved his birds. He liked to be left alone. He was a nice person, back when that meant something. But you better not mess with his sense of right and wrong. Underneath he was a bomb waiting to go off. He had it under control. He was a very self-disciplined person. He had a rule. If you did a bad thing, he would make sure you only did it once. Whatever it took. He was a good fighter, and he was brave as a lunatic.”

“Tell me about the kid he killed.”

Stan shook his head.

“I shouldn’t do that,” he said. “I would be confessing to a crime.”

“Were you involved?”

“Not at the end, I guess.”

“No one will bust you. You’re a hundred years old.”

“Not quite.”

“No one is interested. The cops filed it under NHI.”

“What does that mean?”

“No human involved.”

Stan nodded.

“I could agree with them,” he said. “That kid was every kind of bully. He had a grudge against anyone with one brain cell more. Which was a lot of people. He was the kind of kid who hung around four years after high school, doing the same old things to younger and younger victims. But in a nice car, wearing nice shoes, because his daddy was rich. His brain was rotting away from the inside. He became perverted. He started interfering with little boys and girls. He was real big and strong. He was tormenting them. He was making them do disgusting things. At that point Bill didn’t know about him. Then he came back to town and found out, that night.”

“What happened?”

“Bill showed up in Ryantown, like he often did, out of nowhere, and for his first night we came down here, to the jazz lounge. There was a band we liked. They usually let us in. We were walking back to where we hid our bikes, and then all of a sudden the kid came walking toward us. He ignored Bill and started tormenting me on my own. Because he knew me. He was probably starting up again where he left the off last time. But Bill was hearing this stuff for the very first time. He couldn’t believe it. I got it to where we could walk away, but Bill didn’t come with me. The bomb went off. He took the kid apart.”

“Then what?”

“Then it became a different story. The kid put out a kind of death warrant. Bill started carrying brass knuckles. There were a couple of incidents. A couple of would-be friends, trying to make their bones. We figured rich kids got that a lot. Bill kept the emergency room busy. He sent the would-be friends their way. Then it was a background thing for a while. Bill was in and out of Ryantown. Then it blew up again. One night they ended up all alone, face to face. The first I knew about it was Bill showing up later, asking for a favor.”

“He wanted to borrow your birth certificate, to join the Marines.”

Stan nodded.

“He needed to bury the name William Reacher. He felt he had to do it. He needed the trail to go cold. It was a homicide, after all.”

“And he needed to be a year older than he really was,” Reacher said. “That’s what was wrong with the story he told. He said he ran away and joined the Marines at seventeen. No doubt that’s true, in and of itself. But he couldn’t have done it if the Marines knew he was seventeen. They wouldn’t have taken him. Not then. They already had too many people. It was September 1945. The war was over. They wouldn’t want a seventeen-year-old. Two years earlier, sure, no problem at all. They were fighting in the Pacific. They needed to keep the conveyor belt going. But not anymore. On the other hand, an eighteen-year-old was always entitled to volunteer. So he needed your ID.”

Stan nodded again.

“We thought it would make him safe,” he said. “And it did, I guess. The cops gave up. I left Ryantown soon afterward. I went birdwatching in South America and stayed there forty years. When I got home I had to sign up for all kinds of new things. I used the same birth certificate. I wondered what would happen if the system said the name Stan Reacher was already taken. But it all worked out fine.”