The Enemy

We put our bags on the floor and I put my sergeant’s paperwork on the bed. The counterpane felt slightly damp. I fiddled with the heater under the window until I got some warmth out of it.

“What next?” Summer asked.

“The phone records,” I said. “I’m looking for a call to a 919 area code.”

“That’ll be a local call. Fort Bird is 919 too.”

“Great,” I said. “There’ll be a million local calls.”

I spread the printout on the bed and started looking. There weren’t a million local calls. But there were certainly hundreds. I started at midnight on New Year’s Eve and worked forward from there. I ignored the numbers that had been called more than once from more than one phone. I figured those would be cab companies or clubs or bars. I ignored the numbers that had the same exchange code as Fort Bird. Those would be off-post housing, mainly. Soldiers on duty would have been calling home in the hour after midnight, wishing their spouses and children a happy new year. I concentrated on numbers that stood out. Numbers in other North Carolina cities. In particular I was looking for a number in another city that had been called once only maybe thirty or forty minutes after midnight. That was my target. I went through the printout, patiently, line by line, page by page, looking for it. I was in no hurry. I had all day.

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.