In Maine, Reacher contemplates the high rate of crime in the U.S. He watches as a young woman walks along when a small boy runs up to her and steals her bag off her shoulder. The victim runs away. Two cops, Aaron and Bush, who had watched the interaction run after the kid in unison. Reacher intersects the kid mid-run and the cops catch up, one grabbing the kid and the other the bag. 

Aaron asks Reacher to sign a witness statement and he tells them he used to be a cop in the army. The cops take Reacher to their station where they question him. They find out that he’s voluntarily homeless and Reacher accuses Aaron of following the woman. Aaron denies his line of questioning and tells Reacher he will be questioned by another set of detectives. 

The new detectives ask Reacher for his speculation about what happened at the crime scene and the police’s involvement. He assumes that the cops knew the bag was being passed off but didn’t know to whom or where and so they were watching it throughout the week. The detective accuses him of being part of the handoff plan and arrests him. Reacher asks for a public defender and she meets him in the jail. She doubts his story and has only previously argued one case, which she lost. The lawyer tells him the best he can do is a plea deal and that he’ll be moved to the state penitentiary tomorrow. 

Reacher asks for coffee in a cup and saucer and dinner and a young cop agrees to bring it to him. He knows that to deliver the food, he will have to open the cell because the saucer won’t fit through the bars. Instead, the prison guard makes him drink the coffee through the bars. Reacher asks for detective Aaron and the prison guard calls him in. Aaron tells him the recording of the crime was accidentally deleted. 

Reacher is transported to the state penitentiary where he gets in a fight with a muscular man in the yard. The man produces a shiv which Reacher grabs out of his reach and uses on the man. A guard approaches him and tells him they will return to the police department’s jail and meet Bush and his lawyer. When he’s left alone with the two, he grabs Bush’s car keys and makes a run for it, driving to a nearby payphone where he calls Aaron. He tells him he needs to investigate the girl and the boy from the crime scene to get a real answer. Later, he calls Aaron again and tells him he believes the cops set up for him to get knocked out by the man in the prison yard. He also tells Aaron that the boy and the girl were likely blackmailed into staging the crime and accuses another cop of setting it up in exchange for letting people off of crimes and parole. 

Together, Aaron and Reacher realize that the cop is a double-agent, working as a drug dealer too. 

When Reacher leaves the payphone station, he comes face-to-face with the cop he is accusing of the scheme and Reacher reveals this was his plan all along. After some back-and-forth, the cop is grabbed by Aaron’s men and Reacher is released from custody and returns to his vagabond lifestyle.