kind of cousin was he?”
“Neither one of us could count high enough. All we knew was I was Stan Reacher and he was William Reacher, and way back we both had the same ancestor in the Dakota Territory. I suppose the truth is Bill was a waif and stray. He seemed to be based up on the Canadian border. But he was always roaming. He spent a lot of time in Ryantown.”
“How old was he, the first time he came?”
“I was seven, so he was six. He stayed a whole year.”
“Did he have parents?”
“We supposed so. He never saw them. But they weren’t dead or anything. He got birthday cards every year. We thought they must be secret agents, undercover in a foreign country. Later we thought they were more likely organized crime. Whichever required a greater degree of secrecy. Which was sometimes hard to tell.”
“Was he already a birdwatcher at the age of six?”
“With the naked eye. Which he always thought was best of all. He wasn’t good at explaining why. He was only a kid. Later we understood. After we got binoculars. You get a bigger picture with the naked eye. You don’t get distracted by the close up beauty.”
“How did you get the binoculars?”
“That was much later. Bill would have been ten or eleven by then.”
“How did you get them?”
The old man looked down for a second.
He said, “You got to remember, it was a time, back then.”
“Did he steal them?”
“Not exactly. They were spoils of war. Some kid with a stupid vendetta. Bill ran out of patience. We had been reading old battle poems. He said he felt he should seize something. The binoculars and thirty-one cents were all the kid had.”
“You wrote about the rough-legged hawk together.”
The old man nodded.
“We sure did,” he said. “That was a fine piece of work. I would be proud of that today.”
“Do you remember September 1943?”
“I guess a few things in general.”
“Anything special?”
“It was a long time ago,” the old man said.
“Your name comes up in an old police report, about an altercation on the street. Late one evening. In fact not far from here. You were seen with a friend.”
“There were altercations on the street all the time.”
“This one involved a local bully who was beaten to death two years later.”
Stan Reacher said nothing.
“I’m guessing the friend you were seen with that night in September 1943 was your cousin Bill. I think he started something that took two years to finish.”
“Tell me again, who are you exactly?”
“I’m not exactly sure,” Reacher said. “As of right now, I’m thinking maybe your cousin Bill’s second son.”
“Then you know what happened.”
“I was a military cop. I saw it a dozen times.”
“Am I in trouble?”
“Not with me,” Reacher said. “The only person I’m mad at is myself. I guess I assumed this was the kind of thing that happened to other people.”
“Bill was a smart boy. He was always a step ahead, partly because he had a varied life. Streetwise, they would call it now. But he knew other stuff, too. He was good at his books. He knew a lot of science. He loved his birds. He liked to be left alone. He was a nice person, back when that meant something. But you better not mess with his sense of right and wrong. Underneath he was a bomb waiting to go off. He had it under control. He was a very self-disciplined person. He had a rule. If you did a bad thing, he would make sure you only did it once. Whatever it took. He was a good fighter, and he was brave as a lunatic.”
“Tell me about the kid he killed.”
Stan shook his head.
“I shouldn’t do that,” he said. “I would be confessing to a crime.”
“Were you involved?”
“Not at the end, I guess.”
“No one will bust you. You’re a hundred years old.”
“Not quite.”
“No one is interested. The cops filed it under NHI.”
“What does that mean?”
“No human involved.”
Stan nodded.
“I could agree with them,” he said. “That kid was every kind of bully. He had a grudge against anyone with one brain cell more. Which was a lot of people. He was the kind of kid who hung around four years after high school, doing the same old things to younger and younger victims. But in a nice car, wearing nice shoes, because his daddy was rich. His brain was rotting away from the inside. He became perverted. He started interfering with little boys and girls. He