had been mailed somewhere in the state of Utah on October 28. The flap had been opened a couple of times and resealed. Reacher eased it back and looked inside. Held it so Neagley could see.
There was nothing in the envelope except a miniature baseball bat. It was the kind of thing sold as a souvenir or given away as a token. It was plain lacquered softwood the color of honey. It was about an inch wide around the barrel and would have been about fifteen inches long except that it was broken near the end of the handle. It had been broken deliberately. It had been partially sawn through and then snapped where it was weak. The raw end had been scratched and scraped to make it look accidental.
"I don't have a temper problem," Armstrong said. "But you're right, my father did. We lived in a small town in Oregon, kind of lonely and isolated. It was a lumber town, basically. It was a mixed sort of place. The mill owners had big houses, the crew chiefs had smaller houses, the crews lived in shanties or rooming houses. There was a school. My mother owned the pharmacy. Down the road was the rest of the state, up the road was virgin forest. It felt like the frontier. It was a little lawless, but it wasn't too bad. There were occasional whores and a lot of drinking, but overall it was just trying to be an American town."
He went quiet for a moment. Placed his hands palms down on the desk and stared at them.
"I was eighteen," he said. "Finished with high school, ready for college, spending my last few weeks at home. My sister was away traveling somewhere. We had a mailbox at the gate. My father had made it himself, in the shape of a miniature lumber mill. It was a nice thing, made out of tiny strips of cedar. At Halloween in the previous year it had been smashed up, you know, the traditional Halloween thing where the tough kids go out cruising with a baseball bat, bashing mailboxes. My father heard it happening and he chased them, but he didn't really see them. We were a little upset, because it was a nice mailbox and destroying it seemed kind of senseless. But he rebuilt it stronger and became kind of obsessed about protecting it. Some nights he hid out and guarded it."
"And the kids came back," Neagley said.
Armstrong nodded.
"Late that summer," he said. "Two kids, in a truck, with a bat. They were big guys. I didn't really know them, but I'd seen them around before, here and there. They were brothers, I think. Real hard kids, you know, delinquents, bullies from out of town, the sort of kids you always stayed well away from. They took a swing at the box and my dad jumped out at them and there was an argument. They were sneering at him, threatening him, saying bad things about my mother. They said, bring her on out and we'll show her a good time with this bat, better than you can show her. You can imagine the gestures that went with it. So then there was a fight, and my dad got lucky. It was just one of those things, two lucky punches and he won. Or maybe it was his military training. The bat had bust in half, maybe against the box. I thought that would be the end of it, but he dragged the kids into the yard and got some logging chain and some padlocks and got them chained up to a tree. They were kneeling down, facing each other around the trunk. My dad's mind was gone. His temper had kicked in. He was hitting them with the broken bat. I was trying to stop him, but it was impossible. Then he said he was going to show them a good time with the bat, with the broken end, unless they begged him not to. So they begged. They begged long and loud."
He went quiet again.
"I was there all the time," he said. "I was trying to calm my father down, that's all. But these guys were looking at me like I was participating. There was this thing in their eyes, like I was a witness to their worst moment. Like I was seeing them being totally humiliated, which I guess is the worst thing you can do to a bully. There was absolute hatred in