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light bars were flashing bright
    in the shiny dark.
    “What?” Penney said again.
    Reacher said nothing. Just stopped where the cop told him and
    wound his window down. The night air blew in, cold and wet.
    The cop bent down. Reacher handed him his military ID. The
    cop played his flashlight over it and handed it back.
    “Who’s your passenger?” he asked.
    “My prisoner,” Reacher said. He handed over the arrest warrant.
    “He got ID?” the cop asked.
    Reacher leaned over and slipped the wallet out from inside
    Penney’s jacket, two-fingered like a pickpocket. Flipped it open
    and passed it through the window. A second cop stood in
    Reacher’s headlight beams and copied the plate number onto a
    clipboard. Stepped around the hood and joined the first guy.
    “Captain Reacher of the military police,” the first cop said.
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    The second cop wrote it down.
    “With a prisoner name of Edward Hendricks,” the first cop said.
    The second cop wrote it down.
    “Thank you, sir,” the first cop said. “You drive safe, now.”
    Reacher eased out from between the cruisers. Accelerated
    away into the rain. A mile later, he stopped again on the shoulder. Leaned over and unlocked Penney’s handcuffs. Put them
    back in his pocket. Penney rubbed his wrists.
    “I thought you were going to turn me in,” he said.
    Reacher shook his head. “Looked better for me that way. I
    wanted a prisoner in the car for everybody to see.”
    Reacher handed the wallet back.
    “Keep it,” he said.
    “Really?”
    “Edward Hendricks,” Reacher said. “That’s who you are now.
    It’s clean ID, and it’ll work. Think of it like a veteran’s benefit.
    One soldier to another.”
    Edward Hendricks looked at him and nodded and opened his
    door. Got out into the rain and turned up the collar of his leather
    jacket and started walking north. Reacher watched him until he
    was out of sight and then pulled away and took the next turn
    west. Turned north and stopped again where the road was lonely
    and ran close to the ocean. There was a wide gravel shoulder and
    a low barrier and a steep cliff with the Pacific tide boiling and
    foaming fifty feet below it.
    He got out of the car and opened the trunk and grasped the
    lapels of the jacket he had told Penney about. Took a deep breath
    and heaved. The corpse was heavy. Reacher wrestled it up out of
    the trunk and jacked it onto his shoulder and staggered with it
    to the barrier. Bent his knees and dropped it over the edge. The
    rocky cliff caught it and it spun and the arms and legs flailed
    limply. Then it hit the surf with a faint splash and was gone.

    It’s no accident that five of James Grippando’s ten thrillers
    are legal thrillers featuring Jack Swyteck, an explosive criminal defense lawyer. Grippando is a lawyer himself, though
    fortunately with far fewer demons than Jack. What’s it like
    to be Jack? Simply imagine that your father is Florida’s governor, your best friend was once on death row and your love
    life could fill an entire chapter in Cupid’s Rules of Love and
    War (Idiot’s Edition). Throw in an indictment for murder and
    a litany of lesser charges, and you’ll begin to get the picture.
    Readers of the Swyteck series know that Jack is a selfdescribed half-Cuban boy trapped in the body of a gringo.
    That’s a glib way of saying that Jack’s Cuban-born mother died
    in childbirth, and Jack was raised by his father and stepmother, with no link whatsoever to his Cuban heritage. Grippando is not Cuban, but he considers himself an “honorary
    Cuban” of sorts. His best friend since college was Cuban born
    and that family dubbed him their otro hijo, other son. Quite
    remarkable, considering that Grippando grew up in rural Illinois and spoke only “classroom” Spanish. When he first arrived in Florida, he had no idea that Cubans made better rice
    than the Chinese, or that a jolt of Cuban coffee was as much
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    a part of midafternoon in Miami as thunderclouds over