Then as Joe and I got older, we got moved around more. The Vietnam thing meant the military started shuffling people around the world faster and faster. Life became just a blur of bases. We never owned anything. We were only allowed one bag each on the transport planes.
We were together in that blur for sixteen years. Joe was the only constant thing in my life. And I loved him like a brother. But that phrase has a very precise meaning. A lot of those stock sayings do. Like when people say they slept like a baby. Do they mean they slept well? Or do they mean they woke up every ten minutes, screaming? I loved Joe
like a brother, which meant a lot of things in our family.
The truth was I never knew for sure if I loved him or not. And he never knew for sure if he loved me or not, either. We were only two years apart, but he was born in the fifties and I was born in the sixties. That seemed to make a lot more than two years’ worth of a difference to us. And like any pair of brothers two years apart, we irritated the hell out of each other. We fought and bickered and sullenly waited to grow up and get out from under. Most of those sixteen years, we didn’t know if we loved each other or hated each other.
But we had the thing that army families have. Your family was your unit. The men on the bases were taught total loyalty to their units. It was the most fundamental thing in their lives. The boys copied them. They translated that same intense loyalty onto their families. So time to time you might hate your brother, but you didn’t let anybody mess with him. That was what we had, Joe and I. We had that unconditional loyalty. We stood back to back in every new schoolyard and punched our way out of trouble together. I watched out for him, and he watched out for me, like brothers did. For sixteen years. Not much of a normal childhood, but it was the only childhood I was ever going to get. And Joe was just about the beginning and end of it. And now somebody had killed him. I sat there in the back of the police Chevrolet listening to a tiny voice in my head asking me what the hell I was going to do about that.
Finlay drove straight through Margrave and parked up outside the station house. Right at the kerb
opposite the big plate-glass entrance doors. He and Roscoe got out of the car and stood there waiting for me, just like Baker and Stevenson had fortyeight hours before. I got out and joined them in the noontime heat. We stood there for a moment and then Finlay pulled open the heavy door and we went inside. Walked back through the empty squad room to the big rosewood office.
Finlay sat at the desk. I sat in the same chair I’d used on Friday. Roscoe pulled a chair up and put it next to mine. Finlay rattled open the desk drawer. Took out the tape recorder. Went through his routine of testing the microphone with his fingernail. Then he sat still and looked at me.
`I’m very sorry about your brother,’ he said.
I nodded. Didn’t say anything.
`I’m going to have to ask you a lot of questions, I’m afraid,’ he said.
I just nodded again. I understood his position. I’d been in his position plenty of times myself.
`Who would be his next of kin?’ he asked.
`I am,’ I said. `Unless he got married without telling me.’
`Do you think he might have done that?’ Finlay asked me.
`We weren’t close,’ I said. `But I doubt it.’
`Your parents dead?’
I nodded. Finlay nodded. Wrote me down as next of kin.
`What was his full name?’
`Joe Reacher,’ I said. `No middle name.’
`Is that short for Joseph?’
`No,’ I said. `It was just Joe. Like my name is just Jack. We had a father who liked simple names.’
`OK,’ Finlay said. `Older or younger?’