Reacher said nothing back. Just sat and waited.
“Exactly what happened at the restaurant?” Deerfield asked.
“Nothing happened,” Reacher said.
Deerfield shook his head. “You were under surveillance. My people have been following you for a week. Special Agents Poulton and Lamarr joined them tonight. They saw the whole thing.”
Reacher stared at him. “You’ve been following me for a week?”
Deerfield nodded. “Eight days, actually.”
“Why?”
“We’ll get to that later.”
Lamarr stirred and reached down again to her briefcase. She pulled out another file. Opened it and took out a sheaf of papers. There were four or five sheets clipped together. They were covered in dense type. She smiled icily at Reacher and reversed the sheets and slid them across the table to him. The air caught them and riffed them apart. The clip dragged on the wood and stopped them exactly in front of him. In them Reacher was referred to as the subject.
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They were a list of everything he had done and everywhere he had been in the previous eight days. They were complete to the last second. And they were accurate to the last detail. Reacher glanced from them to Lamarr’s smiling face and nodded.
“Well, FBI tails are obviously pretty good,” he said. “I never noticed.”
There was silence.
“So what happened in the restaurant?” Deerfield asked again.
Reacher paused. Honesty is the best policy, he thought. He scoped it out. Swallowed. Then he nodded toward Blake and Lamarr and Poulton. “These law school buffs would call it imperfect necessity, I guess. I committed a small crime to stop a bigger one happening.”
“You were acting alone?” Cozo asked.
Reacher nodded. “Yes, I was.”
“So what was don’t start a turf war with us all about?”
“I wanted it to look convincing. I wanted Petrosian to take it seriously, whoever the hell he is. Like he was dealing with another organization.”
Deerfield leaned all the way over the table and retrieved Lamarr’s surveillance log. He reversed it and riffed through it.
“This shows no contact with anybody at all except Ms. Jodie Jacob. She’s not running protection rackets. What about the phone log?”
“You’re tapping my phone?” Reacher asked.
Deerfield nodded. “We’ve been through your garbage, too.”
“Phone log is clear,” Poulton said. “He spoke to nobody except Ms. Jacob. He lives a quiet life.”
“That right, Reacher?” Deerfield asked. “You live a quiet life?”
“Usually,” Reacher said.
“So you were acting alone,” Deerfield said. “Just a concerned citizen. No contact with gangsters, no instructions by phone.”
He turned to Cozo, a question in his eyes. “You comfortable with that, James?”
Cozo shrugged and nodded. “I’ll have to be, I guess.”
“Concerned citizen, right, Reacher?” Deerfield said.
Reacher nodded. Said nothing.
“Can you prove that to us?” Deerfield asked.
Reacher shrugged. “I could have taken their guns. If I was connected, I would have. But I didn’t.”
“No, you left them in the Dumpster.”
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“I disabled them first.”
“With grit in the mechanisms. Why did you do that?”
“So nobody could find them and use them.”
Deerfield nodded. “A concerned citizen. You saw an injustice, you wanted to set it straight.”
Reacher nodded back. “I guess.”
“Somebody’s got to do it, right?”
“I guess,” Reacher said again.
“You don’t like injustice, right?”
“I guess not.”
“And you can tell the difference between right and wrong.”
“I hope so.”
“You don’t need the intervention of the proper authorities, because you can make your own decisions.”
“Usually.”
“Confident with your own moral code.”
“T ”
1 guess.
There was silence. Deerfield looked through the glare. “So why did you steal their money?” he asked. Reacher shrugged. “Spoils of battle, I guess. Like a trophy.” Deerfield nodded. “Part of the code, right?”
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1 guess.
“You play to your own rules, right?”
“Usually.”
“You wouldn’t mug an old lady, but it was OK to take money off of a couple of hard men.”
“I guess.”
“When they step outside what’s acceptable to you, they get what they get, right?”
“Right.”
“A personal code.”
Reacher said nothing. The silence built.
“You know anything about criminal profiling?” Deerfield asked suddenly.
Reacher paused. “Only what I read in the newspaper.”