in any way at all. It’ll be a purely accidental by-product of me
standing up for Nendick and his wife, and an old guy called
Andretti, and two people called Armstrong, and Crosetti, and
especially for Froelich, who was my brother’s friend.’
There was silence.
‘Will this stay confidential?’ Armstrong asked.
Reacher nodded. ‘It’ll have to. Purely for my sake.’
‘Sounds like you’re contemplating a very serious course of
action.’
‘People play with fire, they get burned.’
hat’s the law of the jungle.’
‘Where the hell else do you think you live?’
Armstrong was quiet, another long moment.
‘So then you’ll know my secret and I’ll know yours,’ he said.
Reacher nodded. ‘And we’ll all live happily ever after.’
There was another long silence. It lasted a whole minute.
Reacher saw Armstrong the politician fade away, and Armstrong
the man replace him.
‘You’re wrong in most ways,’ he said. ‘But not all of them.’
He leaned down and opened a drawer. Took out a padded
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mailer and tossed it on the desk. It skidded on the shiny wood
and came to rest an inch from the edge.
‘I guess this counts as the first message,’ he said. ‘It arrived
on election day. I suppose the Secret Service must have been a
little puzzled, but they didn’t see anything really wrong with it.
So they passed it right along.’
The mailer was a standard commercial stationery product.
It was addressed to Brook Armstrong, United States Senate,
Washington D.C. The address was printed on a familiar self
adhesive label in the familiar computer font, Times New Roman,
fourteen point, bold. It had been mailed somewhere in the state
of Utah on 28 October. The flap had been opened a couple of
times and resealed. Reacher eased it back and looked inside.
Held it so Neagley could see.
There was nothing in the envelope except a miniature baseball
bat. It was the kind of thing sold as a souvenir or given
away as a token. It was plain lacquered softwood the colour of
honey. It was about an inch wide around the barrel and would
have been about fifteen inches long except that it was broken
near the end of the handle. It had been broken deliberately. It
had been partially sawn through and then snapped where it was
weak. The raw end had been scratched and scraped to make it
look accidental.
‘I don’t have a temper problem,’ Armstrong said. ‘But you’re
right, my father did. We lived in a small town in Oregon, kind
of lonely and isolated. It was a lumber town, basically. It was
a mixed sort of place. The mill owners had big houses, the
crew chiefs had smaller houses, the crews lived in shanties or
rooming houses. There was a school. My mother owned the
pharmacy. Down the road was the rest of the state, up the road
was virgin forest. It felt like the frontier. It was a little lawless,
but it wasn’t too bad. There were occasional whores and a lot
of drinking, but overall it was just trying to be an American
town.’
He went quiet for a moment. Placed his hands palm down on
the desk and stared at them.
‘I was eighteen,’ he said. ‘Finished with high school, ready for
college, spending my last few weeks at home. My sister was
away travelling somewhere. We had a mailbox at the gate. My
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father had made it himself, in the shape of a miniature lumber mill. It was a nice thing, made out of tiny strips of cedar. At
Hallowe’en in the previous year it had been smashed up, you
know, the traditional Hallowe’en thing where the tough kids go
out cruising with a baseball bat, bashing mailboxes. My father
heard it happening and he chased them, but he didn’t really
see them. We were a little upset, because it was a nice mailbox
and destroying it seemed kind of senseless. But he rebuilt it
stronger and became kind of obsessed about protecting it.
Some nights he hid out and guarded it.’
‘And the kids came back,’ Neagley said.
Armstrong nodded. ‘Late that summer,’ he said. Fwo kids, in
a truck, with a bat. They were big guys. I didn’t really know