Small Wars Read Online Free Page B

Robin Hood. Or an ogre from under a bridge. When the moon is full. Or whenever he needs to eat. Or something. Like a fairytale.”
    “Or maybe he comes down every day. But catches something only once in a while. Either way is possible. These are the Georgia woods. Think about carjacking in LA. Or getting mugged in New York City. Routine. Maybe this is the local version. Adapted to the environment.”
    “Then why did the carjacker not jack her car? Why did he execute her very clinically instead?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Why did she stop in the first place?”
    “He was blocking the road.”
    “She didn’t need to come close and talk to the guy. Being in War Plans doesn’t make her a total idiot. She went to West Point. She’s a woman driving alone. She should have stood back a hundred yards and made a threat assessment.”
    “Maybe she did.”
    “Yes or no?”
    “Yes. She did. She was a woman driving alone.”
    “In which case we conclude the guy was no threat. She drove right up to him, with her window open. Would she do that, for a weird six-seven stranger she had never seen before? With a broken-down pick-up truck? I’m sure she saw all the movies. With the chainsaws and the banjo music.”
    “OK, she felt safe with the guy. Maybe she knew him. Or thought she knew him. Or knew his type.”
    “Exactly,” Reacher said. “Which would make him active-duty military. Probably in uniform. Possibly even with a military vehicle. Not too far below in rank. Or maybe equal or even higher. For her to feel truly comfortable. This was a whole complicated performance. I want to get the right guy. Otherwise what’s the point? And I’ve always found a big part of getting the right guy is not getting the wrong guy.”
    “They’re going to say this guy has the right tires.”
    “So do a million other people.”
    “He has the right bullets.”
    “So do a million other people.”
    “He has the right feet.”
    —
    Neagley had read a lot of research into first impressions, those merciless subliminal split seconds where one human judges another, on a million different things, all at once like a computer, all leading to an instant and inevitable yes-no answer: Should I stay or should I go? Sadly the State Police’s suspect scored very low on that test. Neagley knew her own sense of threat assessment was likely to be more robust than Crawford’s, by an order of magnitude, but even so she would have kept her distance and approached warily, and only after locking her doors and getting her gun out.
    They saw the guy in a holding cell at the county police station, which was ten minutes from Smith. He had some kind of growth disorder. Pituitary, maybe. A hormone imbalance. He should have been average size, but the long bones in his arms and legs had been racked out way longer than nature could have intended, and his hands and feet were equally huge, and his face was very long, with a chisel of a chin below it, and a narrow-domed forehead above.
    Reacher asked, “Has he lawyered up?”
    The county sheriff said, “He waived. He believes innocent men don’t need lawyers.”
    “That’s groundwork for an insanity plea.”
    “No, I think he means it.”
    “Then it might be true. It sometimes is.”
    “He’s got the feet and the gun and the tires. That’s a rare combination.”
    “A guy with hands that big prefers a shotgun.”
    “He told us he owns a nine.”
    “He might. But does he use it?”
    “Think I should ask him? What else is he going to say?”
    “Did you match the footwear?”
    “It was raining again almost immediately. Photographs were all we got. No casts. Not that we could have gotten casts anyway. Wrong kind of mud. More like liquid peat. Too spongy. I apologize on behalf of the state of Georgia for the poor quality of our mud. Not what you expect, I know. But spongy or not, we measured the prints with a ruler. They were size fifteen. Just like the boots he was wearing when they brought him