Review
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Praise for No Middle Name
“Captivating . . . classic [Lee] Child . . . This volume
demonstrates what his fans already know: he’s a born storyteller
and an astute observer.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Lee Child, like his creation, always knows exactly what he’s
doing—and he does it well. Time in his company is never
wasted.”—Evening Standard
Praise for Lee Child
“There’s a reason [Lee] Child is considered the best of the best
in the thriller genre.”—Associated Press
“This series [is] utterly addictive.”—Janet Maslin, The New York
Times
“Jack Reacher is today’s James Bond, a thriller hero we can’t get
enough of. I read every one as soon as it appears.”—Ken Follett
“The Reacher novels are easily the best thriller series
going.”—NPR
“Reacher’s just one of fiction’s great mysterious
strangers.”—Maxim
“Irresistible Reacher remains just about the best butt-kicker in
thriller-lit.”—Kirkus Reviews
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About the Author
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Lee Child is the author of twenty-one New York Times
bestselling Jack Reacher thrillers, twelve of which have reached
the #1 position. All of his novels have been optioned for major
motion pictures—including Jack Reacher (based on One ) and
Jack Reacher: Never Go Back. Foreign rights in the Reacher series
have sold in one hundred territories. A native of England and a
former television director, Lee Child lives in New York City.
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Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
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Sixty seconds in a minute, sixty minutes in an hour,
twenty-four hours in a day, seven days in a week, fifty-two
weeks in a year. Reacher ballparked the calculation in his head
and came up with a little more than thirty million seconds in any
twelve-month span. During which time nearly ten million
significant crimes would be committed in the United States alone.
Roughly one every three seconds. Not rare. To see one actually
take place, right in front of you, up close and personal, was not
inherently unlikely. Location mattered, of course. Crime went
where people went. Odds were better in the center of a city than
the middle of a meadow.
Reacher was in a hollowed-out town in Maine. Not near a lake.
Not on the coast. Nothing to do with lobsters. But once upon a
time it had been good for something. That was clear. The streets
were wide, and the buildings were brick. There was an air of
long-gone prosperity. What might once have been grand boutiques
were now dollar stores. But it wasn’t all doom and gloom. Those
dollar stores were at least doing some business. There was a
coffee franchise. There were tables out. The streets were almost
crowded. The weather helped. The first day of spring, and the sun
was shining.
Reacher turned in to a street so wide it had been closed to
traffic and called a plaza. There were café tables in front of
blunt red buildings either side, and maybe thirty people
meandering in the space between. Reacher first saw the scene
head-on, with the people in front of him, randomly scattered.
Later he realized the ones that mattered most had made a perfect
shape, like a capital letter T. He was at its base, looking
upward, and forty yards in the distance, on the crossbar of the
T, was a young woman, walking at right angles through his field
of view, from right to left ahead of him, across the wide street,
direct from one sidewalk to the other. She had a canvas tote bag
hooked over her shoulder. The canvas looked to be medium weight,
and it was a natural color, pale against her dark shirt. She was
maybe twenty years old. Or even younger. She could have been as
young as eighteen. She was walking slow, looking up, liking the
sun on her face.
Then from the left-hand end of the crossbar, and much faster,
came a kid running, head-on toward her. Same kind of age.
Sneakers on his feet, tight black pants, sweatshirt with a hood
on it. He grabbed the woman’s bag and tore it off her shoulder.
She was sent sprawling, her mouth open in some kind of breathless
exclamation. The kid in the hood tucked the bag under his arm
like a football, and he jinked to his right, and he set off
running down the stem of the T, directly toward Reacher at its
base.
Then from the right-hand end of the crossbar came two men in
suits, walking the same sidewalk-to-sidewalk direction the
woman had used. They were about twenty yards behind her. The
crime happened right in front of them. They reacted the same way
most people do. They froze for the first split second, and then
they turned and watched the guy run away, and they raised their
arms in a spirited but incoherent fashion, and they shouted
something that might have been Hey!
Then they set out in pursuit. Like a starting had gone off.
They ran hard, knees pumping, coattails flapping. Cops, Reacher
thought. Had to be. Because of the unspoken unison. They hadn’t
even glanced at each other. Who else would react like that?
Forty yards in the distance the young woman scrambled back to her
feet, and ran away.
The cops kept on coming. But the kid in the black sweatshirt was
ten yards ahead of them, and running much faster. They were not
going to catch him. No way. Their relative numbers were negative.
Now the kid was twenty yards from Reacher, dipping left, dipping
right, running through the broken field. About three seconds
away. With one obvious gap ahead of him. One clear path. Now two
seconds away. Reacher stepped right, one pace. Now one second
away. Another step. Reacher bounced the kid off his hip and sent
him down in a sliding tangle of arms and legs. The canvas bag
sailed up in the air and the kid scraped and rolled about ten
more feet, and then the men in the suits arrived and were on him.
A small crowd pressed close. The canvas bag had fallen about a
yard from Reacher’s feet. It had a zipper across the top, closed
tight. Reacher ducked down to pick it up, but then he thought
better of it. Better to leave the evidence undisturbed, such as
it was. He backed away a step. More onlookers gathered at his
shoulder.
The cops got the kid sitting up, dazed, and they cuffed his hands
behind him. One cop stood guard and the other stepped over and
picked up the canvas bag. It looked flat and weightless and
empty. Kind of collapsed. Like there was nothing in it. The cop
scanned the faces all around him and fixed on Reacher. He took a
wallet from his hip pocket and opened it with a practiced flick.
There was a photo ID behind a milky plastic window. Detective
Ramsey Aaron, county department. The picture was the same
guy, a little younger and a lot less out of breath.
Aaron said, “Thank you very much for helping us out with that.”
Reacher said, “You’re welcome.”
“Did you see exactly what happened?”
“Pretty much.”
“Then I’ll need you to sign a witness statement.”
“Did you see the victim ran away afterward?”
“No, I didn’t see that.”
“She seemed OK.”
“Good to know,” Aaron said. “But we’ll still need you to sign a
statement.”
“You were closer to it all than I was,” Reacher said. “It
happened right in front of you. Sign your own statement.”
“Frankly, sir, it would mean more coming from a regular person. A
member of the public, I mean. Juries don’t always like
testimony. Sign of the times.”
Reacher said, “I was a cop once.”
“Where?”
“In the army.”
“Then you’re even better than a regular person.”
“I can’t stick around for a trial,” Reacher said. “I’m just
passing through. I need to move on.”
“There won’t be a trial,” Aaron said. “If we have an eyewitness
on the record, who is also a veteran, with law
experience, then the defense will plead it out.
Simple arithmetic. Pluses and minuses. Like your credit score.
That’s how it works now.”
Reacher said nothing.
“Ten minutes of your time,” Aaron said. “You saw what you saw.
What’s the worst thing could happen?”
“OK,” Reacher said.
It was longer than ten minutes, even at first. They hung around
and waited for a black-and-white to come haul the kid to the
station. Which showed up eventually, accompanied by an EMS
truck from the firehouse, to check the kid’s vital signs. To
pronounce him fit for processing. To avoid an unexplained death
in custody. Which all took time. But in the end the kid went in
the back seat and the uniforms in the front, and the car drove
away. The rubberneckers went back to meandering. Reacher and the
two cops were left standing alone.
The second cop said his name was Bush. No relation to the Bushes
of Kennebunkport. Also a detective with the county. He said their
car was parked on the street beyond the far corner of the plaza.
He pointed. Up where their intended stroll in the sun had be.
They all set out walking in that direction. Up the stem of the T,
then a right turn along the crossbar, the cops retracing their
earlier steps, Reacher following the cops.
Reacher said, “Why did the victim run?”
Aaron said, “I guess that’s something we’ll have to figure out.”
Their car was an old Crown Vic, worn but not sagging. Clean but
not shiny. Reacher got in the back, which he didn’t mind, because
it was a regular sedan. No bulletproof divider. No implications.
And the best legroom of all, sitting sideways, with his back
against the door, which he was happy to do, because he figured
the rear compartment of a cop car was very unlikely to
spontaneously burst open from gentle internal pressure. He felt
sure the designers would have thought of that consideration.
The ride was short, to a dismal low-built concrete structure on
the edge of town. There were tall antennas and satellite dishes
on its roof. It had a parking lot with three unmarked sedans and
a lone black-and-white cruiser all parked in a line, plus about
ten more empty spaces, and the stove-in wreck of a blue SUV in
one far corner. Detective Bush drove in and parked in a slot
marked D2. They all got out. The weak spring sun was still
hanging in there.
“Just so you understand,” Aaron said. “The less money we put in
our buildings, the more we can put in catching the bad guys. It’s
about priorities.”
“You sound like the mayor,” Reacher said.
“Good guess. It was a selectman, making a speech. Word for word.”
They went inside. The place wasn’t so bad. Reacher had been in
and out of government buildings all his life. Not the elegant
marble palaces of D.C. necessarily, but the grimy beat-up places
where government actually happened. And the county cops were
about halfway up the scale, when it came to luxurious
surroundings. Their main problem was a low ceiling. Which was
simple bad luck. Even government architects succumbed to fashion
sometimes, and back when atomic was a big word they briefly
favored brutalist structures made of thick concrete, as if the
1950s public would feel reassured the forces of order were
protected by apparently nuclear-resistant structures. But
whatever the reason, the bunker-like mentality too often spread
inside, with ed airless spaces. Which was the county
department’s only real problem. The rest was pretty good. Basic,
maybe, but a smart guy wouldn’t want it much more complicated. It
looked like an OK place to work.
Aaron and Bush led Reacher to an interview room on a corridor
parallel to the detectives’ pen. Reacher said, “We’re not doing
this at your desk?”
“Like on the TV shows?” Aaron said. “Not allowed. Not anymore.
Not since 9/11. No unauthorized access to operational areas.
You’re not authorized until your name appears as a cooperating
witness in an official printed file. Which yours hasn’t yet,
obviously. Plus our insurance works best in here. Sign of the
times. If you were to slip and fall, we’d rather there was a
camera in the room, to prove we were nowhere near you at the
time.”
“Understood,” Reacher said.
They went in. It was a standard facility, perhaps made even more
oppressive by a compressed, hunkered-down feeling, coming from
the obvious thousands of tons of concrete all around. The inside
face was unfinished, but painted so many times it was smooth and
slick. The color was a pale government green, not helped by
ecological bulbs in the fixtures. The air looked sea. There
was a large mirror on the end wall. Without doubt a one-way
window.
Reacher sat down facing it, on the bad-guy side of a crossways
table, site Aaron and Bush, who had pads of paper and
fistfuls of pens. First Aaron warned Reacher that both audio and
video were taking place. Then Aaron asked Reacher for
his full name, and his date of birth, and his Social Security
number, all of which Reacher supplied truthfully, because why
not? Then Aaron asked for his current address, which started a
whole big debate.
Reacher said, “No fixed abode.”
Aaron said, “What does that mean?”
“What it says. It’s a well-known form of words.”
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