Second Son (Short Story): A Reacher Story Read online

  He turned his back on the East China Sea and walked inland, past identical little houses, across a four-way junction, into a perfect rectilinear matrix of yet more identical houses. They had been built quick and cheap, but they were in good order. They were meticulously maintained. He saw small doll-like local ladies on some of the porches. He nodded to them politely, but they all looked away. He saw no local Japanese kids. Maybe they were in school already. Maybe their semester had already started. He turned back and a hundred yards later found Joe out on the streets, looking for him.

  Joe said, “Did they tell you about the test?”

  Reacher nodded. “No big deal.”

  “We have to pass.”

  “Obviously we’ll pass.”

  “No, I mean we have to really pass this thing. We have to crush it. We have to knock it out of the park.”

  “Why?”

  “They’re trying to humiliate us, Reacher.”

  “Us? They don’t even know us.”

  “People like us. Thousands of us. We have to humiliate them back. We have to make them embarrassed they even thought of this idea. We have to piss all over their stupid test.”

  “I’m sure we will. How hard can it be?”

  Joe said, “It’s a new policy, so it might be a new kind of test. There might be all kinds of new things in it.”

  “Like what?”

  “I have no idea. There could be anything.”

  “Well, I’ll do my best with it.”

  “How’s your general knowledge?”

  “I know that Mickey Mantle hit .303 ten years ago. And .285 fifteen years ago. And .300 twenty years ago. Which averages out to .296, which is remarkably close to his overall career average of .298, which has to mean something.”

  “They’re not going to ask about Mickey Mantle.”

  “Who, then?”

  Joe said, “We need to know. And we have a right to know. We need to go up to that school and ask what’s in this thing.”

  Reacher said, “You can’t do that with tests. That’s kind of opposite to the point of tests, don’t you think?”

  “We’re at least entitled to know what part or parts of which curriculum is being tested here.”

  “It’ll be reading and writing, adding and subtracting. Maybe some dividing if we’re lucky. You know the drill. Don’t worry about it.”

  “It’s an insult.”

  Reacher said nothing.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Reacher brothers walked back together, across the four-way junction, and into the long concrete street. Their new place was ahead and on the left. In the distance the sliver of sea glowed pale blue in the sun. There was a hint of white sand. Maybe palm trees. Between their place and the sea there were kids out on the street. All boys. Americans, black and white, maybe two dozen of them. Marine families. Neighbors. They were clustered outside their own places, at the cheap end of the street, a thousand steps from the beach.

  Reacher said, “Let’s go take a look at the East China Sea.”

  Joe said, “I’ve seen it before. So have you.”

  “We could be freezing our butts off in Korea all winter.”

  “We were just on Guam. How much beach does a person need?”

  “As much as a person can get.”

  “We have a test in three days.”

  “Exactly. So we don’t have to worry about it today.”

  Joe sighed and they walked on, past their own place, toward the sliver of blue. Ahead of them the other kids saw them coming. They got up off curbstones and stepped over ditches and kicked and scuffed their way to the middle of the road. They formed up in a loose arrowhead, facing front, arms folded, chests out, more than twenty guys, some of them as young as ten, some of them a year or two older than Joe.

  Welcome to the neighborhood.

  The point man was a thick-necked bruiser of about sixteen. He was smaller than Joe, but bigger than Reacher. He was wearing a Corps T-shirt and a ragged pair of khaki pants. He had fat hands, with knuckles that dipped in, not stuck out. He was fifteen feet away, just waiting.

  Joe said quietly, “There are too many of them.”

  Reacher said nothing.

  Joe said, “Don’t start anything. I mean it. We’ll deal with this later, if we have to.”

  Reacher smiled. “You mean after the test?”

  “You need to get serious about that test.”

  They walked on. Forty different places. Forty different welcomes to forty different neighborhoods. Except that the welcomes had not been different. They had all been the same. Tribalism, testosterone, hierarchies, all kinds of crazy instincts. Tests of a different kind.

  Joe and Reacher stopped six feet from the bruiser and waited. The guy had a boil on his neck. And he smelled pretty bad. He said, “You’re the new kids.”

  Joe said, “How did you figure that out?”

  “You weren’t here yesterday.”

  “Outstanding deduction. You ever thought of a career with the FBI?”

  The bruiser didn’t answer that. Reacher smiled. He figured he could land a left hook right on the boil. Which would hurt like hell, probably.

  The bruiser said, “You going to the beach?”

  Joe said, “Is there a beach?”

  “You know there’s a beach.”

  “And you know where we’re going.”

  “This is a toll road.”

  Joe said, “What?”

  “You heard. You have to pay the toll.”

  “What’s the toll?”

  “I haven’t decided yet,” the bruiser said. “When I see what you’ve got, I’ll know what to take.”

  Joe didn’t answer.

  The guy said, “Understand?”

  Joe said, “Not even a little bit.”

  “That’s because you’re a retard. You two are the retard kids. We heard all about you. They’re making you take the retard test, because you’re retards.”

  Reacher said, “Joe, now that’s an insult.”

  The big guy said, “So the little retard talks, does he?”

  Joe said, “You seen that new statue in the square in Luzon?”

  “What about it?”

  “The last kid who picked a fight with my brother is buried in the pedestal.”

  The guy looked at Reacher and said, “That doesn’t sound very nice. Are you a psycho retard?”

  Reacher said, “What’s that?”

  “Like a psychopath.”

  “You mean do I think I’m right to do what I do and feel no remorse afterward?”

  “I guess.”

  Reacher said, “Then yes, I’m pretty much a psychopath.”

  Silence, except for a distant motorbike. Then two motorbikes. Then three. Distant, but approaching. The big kid’s gaze jumped to the four-way junction at the top of the street. Behind him the arrowhead formation broke up. Kids wandered back to the curbs and their front yards. A bike slowed and turned into the street and puttered slowly along. On it was a Marine in BDUs. No helmet. An NCO, back from the base, his watch finished. He was followed by two more, one of them on a big Harley. Disciplinarian dads, coming home.

  The big kid with the boil said, “We’ll finish this another time.”

  Joe said, “Be careful what you wish for.”

  Reacher said nothing.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Stan Reacher was a quiet man by nature, and he was quieter than ever at breakfast on the fourth morning of his new command, which was turning out to be a tough gig. Back in the States the presidency had changed hands a little prematurely, and the Joint Chiefs had scrambled to present the new guy with a full range of options for his review. Standard practice. The start of every new administration was the same. There were plans for every imaginable theoretical contingency, and they had all been dusted off. Vietnam was effectively over, Korea was a stalemate, Japan was an ally, the Soviet Union was the same as ever, so China was the new focus. There had been a lot of public hoo-hah about detente, but equally there had been a lot of private planning for war. The Chinese were going to have to be beaten sooner or later, and Stan Reacher was going to have to play his part. He had been told so on his second morning.

  He had been given command of four rifle companies and he had been handed a top-secret file defining their mission, which was to act as the tip of an immense spear that would land just north of Hangzhou and then punch through clockwise to isolate Shanghai. Tough duty. Casualty estimates were frightening. But ultimately a little pessimistic, in Stan’s opinion. He had met his men and he had been impressed. On Okinawa it was always hard to avoid mental comparisons with the ghosts of the freak Marine generation that had been there thirty years before, but the current crop was good. Real good. They all shared Stan’s personal allegiance to the famous old saying: War is not about dying for your country. It’s about making the other guy die for his. For the infantry it all came down to simple arithmetic. If you could inflict two casualties for every one you took, you were ahead. If you could inflict five, you were winning. Eight or ten, the prize was in the bag. And Stan felt his guys could do eight or ten, easy.

  But China’s population was immense. And fanatical. They would keep on coming. Men, and then boys. Women too, probably. Boys no older than his own sons. Women like his wife. He watched them eat, and imagined husbands and fathers a thousand miles away doing the same thing. A Communist army would draft a kid Joe’s age without a second thought. Reacher’s age, even, especially a big kid like that. And then the women. And then the girls. Not that Stan was either sentimental or conflicted. He would put a round through anyone’s head and sleep like a baby. But these were strange times. That was for damn sure. Having kids made you think about the future, but being a combat Marine made the future a theory, not a fact.

  He had no real plans for his sons. He wasn’t that kind of a father. But he assumed they would stay military. What else did they know? In which case Joe’s brains would keep him safe. Not that there weren’t plenty of smart guys on the front lines. But Joe wasn’t a fighter. He was like a rifle built without a firing pin. He was all there physically, but there was no trigger in his head. He was like a nuclear launch console instead, full of are-you-really-sure failsafes and interlocks and sequenced buttons. He thought too much. He did it quickly, for sure, but any kind of delay or hesitation was fatal at the start of a fight. Even a split second. So privately Stan figured Joe would end up in Intelligence, and he figured he would do a pretty good job there.

  His second son was a whole different can of worms. The kid was going to be huge. He was going to be an eighth of a ton of muscle. Which was a frightening prospect. The kid had come home bruised and bloodied plenty of times, but as far as Stan knew he hadn’t actually lost a fight since he was about five years old. Maybe he had never lost a fight. He had no trigger either, but not in the same way as his big brother. Joe was permanently set to safe, and Reacher was permanently jammed wide open on full auto. When he was grown, he was going to be unstoppable. A force of nature. A nightmare for somebody. Not that he ever started anything. His mother had trained him early and well. Josie was smart about things like that. She had seen the danger coming. So she had taught him never, ever, ever to start trouble, but that it was perfectly OK to react if someone else started it first. Which was a sight to see. The smart money brings a gun to a knife fight. Reacher brought a hydrogen bomb.

  But the kid could think, too. He wasn’t academic like Joe, but he was practical. His IQ was probably about the same, but it was a get-the-job-done type of street smart IQ, not any kind of for-the-sake-of-it cerebral indulgence. Reacher liked facts, for sure, and information too, but not theory. He was a real-world character. Stan had no idea what the future held for the guy. No idea at all, except he was going to be too big to fit inside a tank or an airplane cockpit. So it was going to have to be something else.

  But anyway, the future was still far off, for both of them. They were still kids. They were still just his fair-haired boys. Stan knew that right then Joe’s horizons stretched no further than the start of the new semester, and Reacher’s stretched no further than a fourth cup of coffee for breakfast. Which the kid got up and poured, right on cue. And also right on cue Joe said, “I’m going to walk up to the school today and ask them about this test.”

  “Negative on that,” Stan said.

  “Why not?”

  “Two reasons. First, never let them see you sweat. Second, I put in a requisition form yesterday and I’m expecting a delivery today.”

  “Of what?”

  “A telephone.”

  “Mom will be here.”

  “I won’t,” Josie said. “I have errands to run.”

  “All day?”

  “Probably. I have to find a store cheap enough to feed you the eight pounds of protein you seem to need at every meal. Then I have to go have lunch with the other mothers at the Officers’ Club, which will probably tie me up all afternoon, if Okinawa is still the same as it was last time we were here, which it probably is.”

  “Reacher can wait home for the telephone,” Joe said. “He doesn’t need a babysitter.”

  “That’s beside the point,” Stan said. “Go swimming, go play ball, go chase girls, but don’t go ask about the test. Just do your best when it rolls around.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  At that moment it was very late in the previous evening in Paris, and the retired schoolteacher was back on the phone with the Navy station on Guam. Laurent Moutier’s housekeeper had whispered to him that they really ought to try to get hold of the old man’s daughter. But the schoolteacher was getting nowhere. The duty lieutenant on Guam had no personal insight into the Pentagon’s plans for China, but Stan Reacher’s new posting was classified as secret, so no foreign citizen was going to hear a thing about it. Not from the Navy. No sir. No way, no how.

  Moutier heard the audible half of the back-and-forth from his bed. He could understand English a little. Enough to get by, and just enough to hear things between the lines. He knew exactly how the military worked. Like practically every other twentieth-century male human in Europe he had been in the service. He was already thirty years old when World War One broke out, but he volunteered immediately and survived all four years, Verdun and the Somme included, and he came out the other end with a chestful of medals and no scars longer than his middle finger, which was statistically the same thing as completely unscathed. On his day of demobilization a lugubrious one-armed, one-eyed brigadier wished him well and then added, apropos of nothing, “Mark my words, Moutier, a great war leaves a country with three armies: an army of cripples, an army of mourners, and an army of thieves.”

  And Moutier found all three immediately, on his return to Paris. There were mourners everywhere. Mothers, wives, fiancées, sisters, old men. Someone said that if you gave every dead soldier a one-page obituary, just one lousy page to list all his hopes and dreams, then the resulting pile of paper would still stand taller than the Eiffel Tower itself.

  Thieves were everywhere, some solo, some in mobs or gangs, some with a political tint. And Moutier saw cripples all day long, some in the natural course of events, but many more at work, because his furniture repair operation had been commandeered by the government and told to make wooden legs for the next ten years. Which Moutier did, out of parts of tables bought up cheap from bankrupt restaurants. It was entirely possible there were veterans in Paris stumping around on the same furniture they had once dined off.

  The ten-year government contract expired a week before the Wall Street Crash, and the next ten years were hard, except that he met the woman who quickly became his wife, a beauty foolish enough to take on a battered forty-five-year-old wreck like him. And a year later they had their only child, a mop-haired girl they called Josephine, who had grown up and married a Marine from New Hampshire in America, and who was currently completely uncontactable, despite the vast array of technological innovations Moutier had witnessed in his lifetime, many of them invented by the Americans themselves.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Stan Reacher pulled his field cap low and walked away to work. A minute later Josie headed out shopping, with a big bag and a thin purse. Reacher sat on the curb, waiting for the kid with the boil to come out to play. Joe stayed inside. But not for long. Thirty minutes later he came out with combed hair and a jacket. He said, “I’m going to take a walk.”

  “To the school?” Reacher asked.

  “Least said, soonest mended.”

  “They’re not humiliating you. You’re humiliating yourself. How does scoring a hundred percent make you feel good when you already asked what the questions were?”

  “It’s a matter of principle.”

  “Not my principle,” Reacher said. “My principle is they set these things so average people can pass them, which gives me enough of a chance that I don’t feel I have to get my panties in a wad beforehand.”

  “You want people to think you’re average?”

  “I don’t care what people think.”

  “You know you have to wait here for the delivery, right?”

  “I’ll be here,” Reacher said. “Unless the fat smelly kid comes out with so many friends I end up in the hospital.”

  “Nobody’s coming out with anybody. They all went to a ballgame. This morning, in a bus. I saw them. They’ll be gone all day.”

  CHAPTER NINE