Read Never Go Back: (Jack Reacher 18) for Free Online Page A

Sixth Amendment, and so on. Do you think you’re the right person for the job?’
    ‘I’m what they’re giving you, so get used to it.’
    ‘I should see the evidence against me, at least. Don’t you think? Isn’t there something in the Sixth Amendment about that too?’
    ‘You didn’t do much paperwork sixteen years ago.’
    ‘We did some.’
    ‘I know,’ Sullivan said. ‘I’ve seen what there is of it. Among other things you did daily summaries. I have one that shows you heading out for an interview with Mr Rodriguez. Then I have a document from a county hospital ER showing his admission later the same day, for a head injury, among other things.’
    ‘And that’s it? Where’s the connection? He could have fallen down the stairs after I left. He could have been hit by a truck.’
    ‘The ER doctors thought he had been.’
    ‘That’s a weak case,’ Reacher said. ‘In fact it’s not really a case at all. I don’t remember anything about it.’
    ‘Yet you remember some stairs that Mr Rodriguez might have fallen down after your interview.’
    ‘Speculation,’ Reacher said. ‘Hypothesis. Figure of speech. Same as the truck. They’ve got nothing.’
    ‘They have an affidavit,’ Sullivan said. ‘Sworn out by Mr Rodriguez himself, some time later. He names you as his attacker.’

EIGHT

    SULLIVAN HAULED HER briefcase up on the booth’s vinyl bench. She took out a thick file and laid it on the table. She said, ‘Happy reading.’
    Which it wasn’t, of course. It was a long and sordid record of a long and sordid investigation into a long and sordid crime. The root cause was Operation Desert Shield, all the way back in late 1990, which was the build-up phase before Operation Desert Storm, which was the Gulf War the first time around, after Saddam Hussein of Iraq invaded his neighbour, the independent state of Kuwait. Half a million men and women from the free world had gathered over six long months, getting ready to kick Saddam’s ass, which in the end had taken all of one hundred hours. Then the half-million men and women had gone home again.
    The material wind-down had been the problem. Armies need a lot of stuff. Six months to build it up, six months to break it down. And the build-up had received a lot more in the way of care and attention than the wind-down. The wind-down had been piecemeal and messy. Dozens of nationalities had been involved. Long story short, lots of stuff had gone missing. Which was embarrassing. But the books had to be balanced. So some of the missing stuff was written off as destroyed, and some as damaged, and some as merely lost, and the books were closed.
    Until certain items started showing up on the streets of America’s cities.
    Sullivan asked, ‘You remember it yet?’
    ‘Yes,’ Reacher said. He remembered it very well. It was the kind of crime the 110th had been created to fight. Man-portable military weapons don’t end up on the streets by accident. They’re filched and diverted and stolen and sold. By persons unknown, but by persons in certain distinct categories. In logistics companies, mostly. Guys who have to move tens of thousands of tons a week with hazy bills of lading can always find ways of making a ton or two disappear, here and there, for fun and profit. Or a hundred tons. The 110th had been tasked to find out who and how and where and when. The unit was new, with its name to make, and it had gone at it hard. Reacher had spent hundreds of hours on it, and his team had spent many times more.
    He said, ‘But I still don’t remember any Juan Rodriguez.’
    Sullivan said, ‘Flip to the end of the file.’
    Which Reacher did, where he found he remembered Juan Rodriguez pretty well.
    Just not as Juan Rodriguez.

    The 110th had gotten a solid tip about a gangbanger in South Central LA, who went by the street name of Dog, which was alleged to be a contraction of Big Dog, because the guy was supposedly sizeable in terms of both status and physique. The DEA