was real big and strong. He was tormenting them. He was making them do disgusting things. At that point Bill didn’t know about him. Then he came back to town and found out, that night.”
“What happened?”
“Bill showed up in Ryantown, like he often did, out of nowhere, and for his first night we came down here, to the jazz lounge. There was a band we liked. They usually let us in. We were walking back to where we hid our bikes, and then all of a sudden the kid came walking toward us. He ignored Bill and started tormenting me on my own. Because he knew me. He was probably starting up again where he left off the last time. But Bill was hearing this stuff for the very first time. He couldn’t believe it. I got it to where we could walk away, but Bill didn’t come with me. The bomb went off. He took the kid apart.”
“Then what?”
“Then it became a different story. The kid put out a kind of death warrant. Bill started carrying brass knuckles. There were a couple of incidents. A couple of would-be friends, trying to make their bones. We figured rich kids got that a lot. Bill kept the emergency room busy. He sent the would-be friends their way. Then it was a background thing for a while. Bill was in and out of Ryantown. Then it blew up again. One night they ended up all alone, face to face. The first I knew about it was Bill showing up later, asking for a favor.”
“He wanted to borrow your birth certificate, to join the Marines.”
Stan nodded.
“He needed to bury the name William Reacher. He felt he had to do it. He needed the trail to go cold. It was a homicide, after all.”
“And he needed to be a year older than he really was,” Reacher said. “That’s what was wrong with the story he told. He said he ran away and joined the Marines at seventeen. No doubt that’s true, in and of itself. But he couldn’t have done it if the Marines knew he was seventeen. They wouldn’t have taken him. Not then. They already had too many people. It was September 1945. The war was over. They wouldn’t want a seventeen-year-old. Two years earlier, sure, no problem at all. They were fighting in the Pacific. They needed to keep the conveyor belt going. But not anymore. On the other hand, an eighteen-year-old was always entitled to volunteer. So he needed your ID.”
Stan nodded again.
“We thought it would make him safe,” he said. “And it did, I guess. The cops gave up. I left Ryantown soon afterward. I went birdwatching in South America and stayed there forty years. When I got home I had to sign up for all kinds of new things. I used the same birth certificate. I wondered what would happen if the system said the name Stan Reacher was already taken. But it all worked out fine.”
Reacher nodded.
“Thank you for explaining,” he said.
“What happened to him?” Stan said. “I never saw him again.”
“He became a pretty good Marine. He fought in Korea and Vietnam. He served in all kinds of other places. He married a Frenchwoman. Her name was Josephine. They got along. They had two boys. He died thirty years ago.”
“Did he have a happy life?”
“He was a Marine. Happy was not in the field manual. Sometimes he was satisfied. That was about as good as it got. But he was never unhappy. He felt he belonged. He had a structure he could rely on. I don’t think he would have chosen anything different. He kept on birdwatching. He loved his family. He was glad he had it. We all knew that. Sometimes we thought he was crazy. He wasn’t sure of his birthday. Now I understand why. Yours was July, and his was originally June. He would remember that, because of the birthday cards. I guess sometimes he got confused. Although he did fine with the name. I never heard him slip. He was always Stan.”
They talked a while longer. Reacher asked about the motel, and their theoretical relative Mark, but Stan had no information beyond a vague old family story about some other distant cousin getting rich during the postwar boom, and buying real estate, and then having a cascade of offspring, all kinds of children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Presumably Mark was one of them. Stan said he didn’t know, and didn’t