“What do you want?” the guy said.

“Two beers,” Reacher said.

“Apart from that?”

“Well, we’re already enjoying the ambiance and the friendly welcome.”

"People like you don’t come in a place like mine without wanting something.”

“We’re waiting for Bob,” Harper said.

“Bob who?”

“Bob with real short hair and an old Cadillac DeVille, ” Reacher said. “Bob from the Army, comes in here eight o’clock every night.”

“You’re waiting for him?”

“Yes, we’re waiting for him,” Harper said.

The guy smiled. Yellow teeth, some of them missing.

“Well, you’ve got a long wait, then,” he said.

“Why?”

“Buy a drink, and I’ll tell you.”

“We’ve been trying to buy a drink for the last five minutes,” Reacher said.

“What do you want?”

“Two beers,” Reacher said. “Whatever’s on tap.”

“Bud or Bud Light.”

“One of each, OK?”

The guy took two glasses down from an overhead rack and filled them. The room was still silent. Reacher could feel eight pairs of eyes on his back. The guy placed the beers on the bar. There was an inch of soapy foam on the top of each of them. The guy peeled two cocktail napkins from a stack and dealt them out like cards. Harper pulled a wallet from her pocket and dropped a ten between the glasses.

“Keep the change,” she said. “So why have we got a long wait for Bob?”

The guy smiled again and slid the ten backward. Folded it into his hand and put his hand in his pocket.

“Because Bob’s in jail, far as I know,” he said.

“What for?”

“Some Army thing,” the guy said. “I don’t know the details, and I don’t want to know the details. That’s how you do business in this part of the Garden State, miss, begging your damn pardon, your fancy ideas notwithstanding. ”

“What happened?” Reacher asked.

“Military policemen came in and grabbed him up right here, right in this room.”

“When?” Reacher asked.

“Took six of them to get him. They smashed a table. I just got a check from the Army. All the way from Washington, D.C. The Pentagon. In the mail.”

“When was this?” Reacher asked.

“When the check came? Couple days ago.”

“No, when did they arrest him?”

“I’m not sure,” the guy said. “They were still playing baseball, I remember that. Regular season, too. Couple months ago, I guess.”

24

THEY LEFT THE beer untouched on the bar and headed back to the parking lot. Unlocked the Nissan and slid inside.

“Couple months is no good,” Harper said. “Puts him right outside the picture.”

“He was never in the picture,” Reacher said. “But we’ll go talk to him anyway.”

“How can we do that? He’s in the Army system somewhere.”

He looked at her. “Harper, I was a military policeman for thirteen years. If I can’t find him, who can?”

“He could be anywhere.”

“No, he couldn’t. If this dump is his local bar, it means he was posted somewhere near here. Low-grade guy like that, a regional MP office will be handling him. Two-month time span, he’s not court-martialed yet, so he’s in a holding pattern at a regional MP HQ, which for this region is Fort Armstrong outside of Trenton, which is less than two hours away.”

“You sure?”

He shrugged. "Unless things have changed a hell of a lot in three years.”

“Some way you can check?” she asked.

“I don’t need to check.”

“We don’t want to waste time here,” she said.

He said nothing back and she smiled and opened her bag. Came out with a folded cellular phone the size of a cigarette packet.

“Use my mobile,” she said.

EVERYBODY USES MOBILES. They use them all the time, just constantly. It’s a phenomenon of the modern age. Everybody’s talk, talk, talking, all the time, little black telephones pressed up to their faces. Where does all that conversation come from? What happened to all that conversation before mobiles were invented? Was it all bottled up? Burning ulcers in people’s guts? Or did it just develop spontaneously because technology made it possible?

It’s a subject you’re interested in. Human impulses. Your guess is a small percentage of calls made represents useful exchange of information. But the vast majority must fall into one of two categories, either the fun aspect, the sheer delight of doing something simply because you can, or else the ego-building self-important bullshit aspect. And your observation is that it splits pretty much along gender lines. It’s not an opinion you’d care to voice in public, but privately you’re sure women talk because they enjoy it, and men talk because it builds them up. Hi, honey, I’m just getting off the plane, they say. So what? Like, who cares?

But you’re confident that men’s use of mobiles is more closely connected to their ego needs, so it’s necessarily a stronger attachment, and therefore a more frequent urge. So if you steal a phone from a man, it will be discovered earlier, and reacted to with a greater degree of upset. That’s your judgment. Therefore you’re sitting in the airport food court watching the women.

The other major advantage of women is that they have smaller pockets. Sometimes, no pockets at all. Therefore they carry bags, into which goes all their stuff. Their wallets, their keys, their makeup. And their mobile phones. They take them out to use them, maybe rest them on the table for a spell, and then put them right back in their bags. If they get up for a coffee refill, of course, they take their bags with them. That’s ingrained. Always keep your pocketbook with you. But some of them have other bags too. There are laptop cases, which these days are made with all kinds of extra compartments for the disks and the CD-ROM thing and the cables. And some of them have pockets for mobiles, little external leather rectangles the same shape as the cigarettes-and-lighter cases women carried back when people smoked. Those other cases, they don’t always take them with them. If they’re just stepping away to the beverage counter, they often leave them at the table, partly to keep their place claimed, partly because who can carry a pocketbook and a laptop case and a hot cup of coffee?

But you’re ignoring the women with the laptop cases. Because those expensive leather articles imply some kind of serious purpose. Their owners might get home in an hour and want to check their e-mail or finalize a pie chart or something, whereupon they open their laptop case and find their phone is gone. Police notified, account canceled, calls traced, all within an hour. No good at all.

So the women you’re watching are the nonbusiness travelers. The ones with the little nylon backpacks carried as cabin baggage. And you’re specifically watching the ones heading out of town, not in toward home. They’re going to make a last couple of calls from the airport and then stuff their phones into their backpacks and forget all about them, because they’re flying out of the local coverage area and they don’t want to pay roaming charges. Maybe they’re vacationing overseas, in which case their phones are as useless to them as their house keys. Something they have to take along, but not something they ever think about.

The one particular target you’re watching most closely is a woman of about twenty-three or -four, maybe forty feet away. She’s dressed comfortably like she’s got a long flight ahead, and she’s leaning back in her chair with her head tilted left and her phone trapped in her shoulder. She’s smiling vacantly as she talks, and playing with her nails. Picking at them and turning her hands in the light to look at them. This is a lazy say-nothing chat with a girlfriend. No intensity in her face. She’s just talking for the sake of talking.

Her carry-on bag is on the floor near her feet. It’s a small designer backpack, all covered in little loops and catches and zippers. It’s clearly so complicated to close that she’s left it gaping open. She picks up her coffee cup and puts it down again. It’s empty. She talks and checks her watch and cranes to look at the beverage counter. She wraps up the chat. Flips her phone closed and drops it in her backpack. Picks up a matching pocketbook and stands up and wheels away to get more coffee.