Too Much Time Read online

  Contents

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Too Much Time

  Read on for an extract from Past Tense

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Roughly one significant crime is committed in the US every three seconds. So it’s not unlikely to find yourself witnessing one. Jack Reacher is minding his own business in a town in Maine when he sees a youth snatching a woman’s bag, and, like a good citizen, steps in to stop him. Politely invited by the cops to act as a witness, will Reacher be treated as the perfect patsy for a crime he didn’t commit?

  Too Much Time is a new novella which sees Jack Reacher, hero of no fixed abode, finding himself on the wrong side of the law. It is also available in No Middle Name, the complete Jack Reacher short story collection.

  Too Much Time

  Lee Child

  TOO MUCH TIME

  SIXTY SECONDS IN a minute, sixty minutes in an hour, twenty-four hours in a day, seven days in a week, fifty-two weeks in a year. Reacher ballparked the calculation in his head and came up with a little more than thirty million seconds in any twelve-month span. During which time nearly ten million significant crimes would be committed in the United States alone. Roughly one every three seconds. Not rare. To see one actually take place, right in front of you, up close and personal, was not inherently unlikely. Location mattered, of course. Crime went where people went. Odds were better in the centre of a city than the middle of a meadow.

  Reacher was in a hollowed-out town in Maine. Not near a lake. Not on the coast. Nothing to do with lobsters. But once upon a time it had been good for something. That was clear. The streets were wide, and the buildings were brick. There was an air of long-gone prosperity. What might once have been grand boutiques were now dollar stores. But it wasn’t all doom and gloom. Those dollar stores were at least doing some business. There was a coffee franchise. There were tables out. The streets were almost crowded. The weather helped. The first day of spring, and the sun was shining.

  Reacher turned into a street so wide it had been closed to traffic and called a plaza. There were café tables in front of blunt red buildings either side, and maybe thirty people meandering in the space between. Reacher first saw the scene head-on, with the people in front of him, randomly scattered. Later he realized the ones that mattered most had made a perfect shape, like a capital letter T. He was at its base, looking upward, and forty yards in the distance, on the crossbar of the T, was a young woman, walking at right angles through his field of view, from right to left ahead of him, across the wide street direct from one sidewalk to the other. She had a canvas tote bag hooked over her shoulder. The canvas looked to be medium weight, and it was a natural colour, pale against her dark shirt. She was maybe twenty years old. Or even younger. She could have been as young as eighteen. She was walking slow, looking up, liking the sun on her face.

  Then from the left-hand end of the crossbar, and much faster, came a kid running, head-on towards her. Same kind of age. Sneakers on his feet, tight black pants, sweatshirt with a hood on it. He grabbed the woman’s bag and tore it off her shoulder. She was sent sprawling, her mouth open in some kind of a breathless exclamation. The kid in the hood tucked the bag under his arm like a football, and he jinked to his right, and he set off running down the stem of the T, directly towards Reacher at its base.

  Then from the right-hand end of the crossbar came two men in suits, walking the same sidewalk-to-sidewalk direction the woman had used. They were about twenty yards behind her. The crime happened right in front of them. They reacted the same way most people do. They froze for the first split second, and then they turned and watched the guy run away, and they raised their arms in a spirited but incoherent fashion, and they shouted something that might have been Hey!

  Then they set out in pursuit. Like a starting gun had gone off. They ran hard, knees pumping, coat tails flapping. Cops, Reacher thought. Had to be. Because of the unspoken unison. They hadn’t even glanced at each other. Who else would react like that?

  Forty yards in the distance the young woman scrambled back to her feet, and ran away.

  The cops kept on coming. But the kid in the black sweatshirt was ten yards ahead of them, and running much faster. They were not going to catch him. No way. Their relative numbers were negative.

  Now the kid was twenty yards from Reacher, dipping left, dipping right, running through the broken field. About three seconds away. With one obvious gap ahead of him. One clear path. Now two seconds away. Reacher stepped right, one pace. Now one second away. Another step. Reacher bounced the kid off his hip and sent him down in a sliding tangle of arms and legs. The canvas bag sailed up in the air and the kid scraped and rolled about ten more feet, and then the men in the suits arrived and were on him. A small crowd pressed close. The canvas bag had fallen to earth about a yard from Reacher’s feet. It had a zipper across the top, closed tight. Reacher ducked down to pick it up, but then he thought better of it. Better to leave the evidence undisturbed, such as it was. He backed away a step. More onlookers gathered at his shoulder.

  The cops got the kid sitting up, dazed, and they cuffed his hands behind him. One cop stood guard and the other stepped over and picked up the canvas bag. It looked flat and weightless and empty. Kind of collapsed. Like there was nothing in it. The cop scanned the faces all around him and fixed on Reacher. He took a wallet from his hip pocket and opened it with a practised flick. There was a photo ID behind a milky plastic window. Detective Ramsey Aaron, county police department. The picture was the same guy, a little younger and a lot less out of breath.

  Aaron said, ‘Thank you very much for helping us out with that.’

  Reacher said, ‘You’re welcome.’

  ‘Did you see exactly what happened?’

  ‘Pretty much.’

  ‘Then I’ll need you to sign a witness statement.’

  ‘Did you see the victim ran away afterwards?’

  ‘No, I didn’t see that.’

  ‘She seemed OK.’

  ‘Good to know,’ Aaron said. ‘But we’ll still need you to sign a statement.’

  ‘You were closer to it all than I was,’ Reacher said. ‘It happened right in front of you. Sign your own statement.’

  ‘Frankly, sir, it would mean more coming from a regular person. A member of the public, I mean. Juries don’t always like police testimony. Sign of the times.’

  Reacher said, ‘I was a cop once.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘In the army.’

  ‘Then you’re even better than a regular person.’

  ‘I can’t stick around for a trial,’ Reacher said. ‘I’m just passing through. I need to move on.’

  ‘There won’t be a trial,’ Aaron said. ‘If we have an eyewitness on the record, who is also a military veteran, with law enforcement experience, then the defence will plead it out. Simple arithmetic. Pluses and minuses. Like your credit score. That’s how it works now.’

  Reacher said nothing.

  ‘Ten minutes of your time,’ Aaron said. ‘You saw what you saw. What’s the worst thing could happen?’

  ‘OK,’ Reacher said.

  It was longer than ten minutes, even at first. They hung around and waited for a black-and-white to come haul the kid to the police station. Which showed up eventually, accompanied by an EMS truck from the fire house, to check the kid’s vital signs. To pass him fit for processing. To avoid an unexplained death in custody. Which all took time. But in the end the kid went in the back seat and the uniforms in the front, and the car drove away. The rubberneckers went back to meandering. Reacher and the two cops were left standing alone.

  The second cop said his name was Bush. No relation to the Bushes of Ke
nnebunkport. Also a detective with the county. He said their car was parked on the street beyond the far corner of the plaza. He pointed. Up where their intended stroll in the sun had begun. They all set out walking in that direction. Up the stem of the T, then a right turn along the crossbar, the cops retracing their earlier steps, Reacher following the cops.

  Reacher said, ‘Why did the victim run?’

  Aaron said, ‘I guess that’s something we’ll have to figure out.’

  Their car was an old Crown Vic, worn but not sagging. Clean but not shiny. Reacher got in the back, which he didn’t mind, because it was a regular sedan. No bulletproof divider. No implications. And the best legroom of all, sitting sideways, with his back against the door, which he was happy to do, because he figured the rear compartment of a cop car was very unlikely to spontaneously burst open from gentle internal pressure. He felt sure the designers would have thought of that consideration.

  The ride was short, to a dismal low-built concrete structure on the edge of town. There were tall antennas and satellite dishes on its roof. It had a parking lot with three unmarked sedans and a lone black-and-white cruiser all parked in a line, plus about ten more empty spaces, and the stove-in wreck of a blue SUV in one far corner. Detective Bush drove in and parked in a slot marked D2. They all got out. The weak spring sun was still hanging in there.

  ‘Just so you understand,’ Aaron said. ‘The less money we put in our buildings, the more we can put in catching the bad guys. It’s about priorities.’

  ‘You sound like the mayor,’ Reacher said.

  ‘Good guess. It was a selectman, making a speech. Word for word.’

  They went inside. The place wasn’t so bad. Reacher had been in and out of government buildings all his life. Not the elegant marble palaces of D.C. necessarily, but the grimy beat-up places where government actually happened. And the county cops were about halfway up the scale, when it came to luxurious surroundings. Their main problem was a low ceiling. Which was simple bad luck. Even government architects succumbed to fashion sometimes, and back when atomic was a big word they briefly favoured brutalist structures made of thick concrete, as if the 1950s public would feel reassured the forces of order were protected by apparently nuclear-resistant facilities. But whatever the reason, the bunker-like mentality too often spread inside, with cramped airless spaces. Which was the county police department’s only real problem. The rest was pretty good. Basic, maybe, but a smart guy wouldn’t want it much more complicated. It looked like an OK place to work.

  Aaron and Bush led Reacher to an interview room on a corridor parallel to the detectives’ pen. Reacher said, ‘We’re not doing this at your desk?’

  ‘Like on the TV shows?’ Aaron said. ‘Not allowed. Not any more. Not since 9/11. No unauthorized access to operational areas. You’re not authorized until your name appears as a cooperating witness in an official printed file. Which yours hasn’t yet, obviously. Plus our insurance works best in here. Sign of the times. If you were to slip and fall, we’d rather there was a camera in the room, to prove we were nowhere near you at the time.’

  ‘Understood,’ Reacher said.

  They went in. It was a standard facility, perhaps made even more oppressive by a compressed, hunkered-down feeling, coming from the obvious thousands of tons of concrete all around. The inside face was unfinished, but painted so many times it was smooth and slick. The colour was a pale government green, not helped by ecological bulbs in the fixtures. The air looked seasick. There was a large mirror on the end wall. Without doubt a one-way window.

  Reacher sat down facing it, on the bad-guy side of a crossways table, opposite Aaron and Bush, who had pads of paper and fistfuls of pens. First Aaron warned Reacher that both audio and video recording was taking place. Then Aaron asked Reacher for his full name, and his date of birth, and his Social Security number, all of which Reacher supplied truthfully, because why not? Then Aaron asked for his current address, which started a whole big debate.

  Reacher said, ‘No fixed abode.’

  Aaron said, ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘What it says. It’s a well-known form of words.’

  ‘You don’t live anywhere?’

  ‘I live plenty of places. One night at a time.’

  ‘Like in an RV? Are you retired?’

  ‘No RV,’ Reacher said.

  Aaron said, ‘In other words you’re homeless.’

  ‘But voluntarily.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘I move from place to place. A day here, a day there.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I like to.’

  ‘Like a tourist?’

  ‘I suppose.’

  ‘Where’s your luggage?’

  ‘I don’t use any.’

  ‘You have no stuff?’

  ‘I saw a little book in a store at the airport. Apparently we’re supposed to get rid of whatever doesn’t bring us joy.’

  ‘So you junked your stuff?’

  ‘I already had no stuff. I figured that part out years ago.’

  Aaron stared down at his pad of paper, unsure. He said, ‘So what would be the best word for you? Vagrant?’

  Reacher said, ‘Itinerant. Distributed. Transient. Episodic.’

  ‘Were you discharged from the military with any kind of diagnosis?’

  ‘Would that hurt my credibility as a witness?’

  ‘I told you, it’s like a credit score. No fixed address is a bad thing. PTSD would be worse. Defence counsel might speculate about your potential reliability on the stand. They might knock you down a point or two.’

  ‘I was in the 110th MP,’ Reacher said. ‘I’m not scared of PTSD. PTSD is scared of me.’

  ‘What was the 110th MP?’

  ‘An elite unit.’

  ‘How long have you been out?’

  ‘Longer than I was in.’

  ‘OK,’ Aaron said. ‘But this is not my call. It’s about the numbers now, pure and simple. Trials happen inside laptop computers. Special software. Ten thousand simulations. The majority trend. A couple of points either way could be crucial. No fixed address isn’t ideal, even without anything else.’

  ‘Take it or leave it,’ Reacher said.

  They took it, like Reacher knew they would. They could never have too much. They could always lose some of it later. Perfectly normal. Plenty of good work got wasted, even on slam-dunk successful cases. So he ran through what he had seen, carefully, coherently, completely, beginning to end, left to right, near to far, and afterwards they all agreed that must have been about all of it. Aaron sent Bush to get the audio typed and printed, ready for Reacher’s signature. Bush left the room, and Aaron said, ‘Thank you again.’

  ‘You’re welcome again,’ Reacher said. ‘Now tell me your interest.’

  ‘Like you saw, it happened right in front of us.’

  ‘Which I’m beginning to think is the interesting part. I mean, what were the odds? Detective Bush parked in the D2 slot. Which means he’s number two on the detective squad. But he drove the car and now he’s doing your fetching and carrying. Which means you’re number one on the detective squad. Which means the two biggest names in the most glamorous division in the whole county police department just happened to be taking a stroll in the sun twenty yards behind a girl who just happened to get robbed.’

  ‘Coincidence,’ Aaron said.

  Reacher said, ‘I think you were following her.’

  ‘Why do you think that?’

  ‘Because you don’t seem to care what happened to her afterwards. Possibly because you know who she is. You know she’ll be back soon, to tell you all about it. Or you know where to find her. Because you’re blackmailing her. Or she’s a double agent. Or maybe she’s one of your own, working undercover. Whichever, you trust her to look out for herself. You’re not worried about her. It’s the bag you’re interested in. She was violently robbed, but you followed the bag, not her. Maybe the bag is important. Although I don’t see how
. It looked empty to me.’

  ‘Sounds like a real big conspiracy going on, doesn’t it?’

  ‘It was your choice of words,’ Reacher said. ‘You thanked me for my help. My help in what exactly? A spontaneous split second emergency? I don’t think you would have used that phrase. You would have said wow, that was something, huh? Or an equivalent. Or just a raised eyebrow. As a bond, or an icebreaker. Like we’re just two guys, shooting the shit. But instead you thanked me quite formally. You said, Thank you very much for helping us out with that.’

  Aaron said, ‘I was trying to be polite.’

  Reacher said, ‘But I think that kind of formality needs a longer incubation. And you said with that. With what? For you to internalize something as that, I think it would need to be a little older than a split second. It would need to be previously established. And you used a continuous tense. You said I was helping you out. Which implies something ongoing. Something that existed before the kid snatched the bag and will continue afterwards. And you used the plural pronoun. You said thanks for helping us out. You and Bush. With something you already own, with something you’re already running, and it just came off the rails a little bit, but ultimately the damage wasn’t too bad. I think it was that kind of help you were thanking me for. Because you were extremely relieved. It could have been much worse, if the kid had gotten away, maybe. Which is why you said thank you very much. Which was way too heartfelt for a trivial mugging. It seemed more important to you.’

  ‘I was being polite.’

  ‘And I think my witness statement is mostly for the chief of police and the selectmen, not a computer game. To show them how it wasn’t your fault. To show them how it wasn’t you who just nearly screwed up some kind of a long-running operation. That’s why you wanted a regular person. Any third party would do. Otherwise all you would have is your own testimony, on your own behalf. You and Bush, watching each other’s back.’

  ‘We were taking a stroll.’

  ‘You didn’t even glance at each other. Not a second thought. You just chased after that bag. You’d been thinking about that bag all day. Or all week.’