“I know you are,” Reacher said back. He glanced around. The snow was falling hard. It was whipping and swirling. The crevasse they were in was like a cave with no roof. It was probably the loneliest place on the planet. The guy from the garage video pushed Neagley nearer. She stumbled and he caught up with her and pushed her off to one side and kept his handgun hard in her back.
“But who are you?” the Bismarck guy asked.
Reacher didn’t answer. Just checked the geometry. It wasn’t attractive. He was triangulated twelve feet from either guy, and the snow underfoot was slick and slow.
The Bismarck guy smiled. “You here to make the world safe for democracy?”
“I’m here because you’re a lousy shot,” Reacher said. “You got the wrong person on Thursday.” Then he moved very cautiously and pulled his cuff and checked his watch. And smiled. “And you lose again. It’s too late now. You’re going to miss him.”
The Bismarck guy just shook his head. “Police scanner. In our truck. We’re listening to Casper PD. Armstrong is delayed twenty minutes. There was a weather problem in South Dakota. So we decided to hang out and let you catch up with us.”
Reacher said nothing.
“Because we don’t like you,” the Bismarck guy said. He spoke along the rifle stock. His lips moved against it. “You’re poking around where you’re not welcome. In a purely private matter. In something that doesn’t concern you at all. So consider yourselves under arrest. You want to plead guilty?”
Reacher said nothing.
“Or you just want to plead?”
“Like you did?” Reacher said. “When that ball bat was getting close?”
The guy went quiet for a second.
“Your attitude isn’t helping your cause,” he said.
He paused again, five long seconds.
“The jury is back,” he said.
“What jury?”
“Me and my brother. That’s all the jury you’ve got. We’re your whole world right now.”
“Whatever happened, it was thirty years ago.”
“A guy does something like that, he should pay.”
“The guy died.”
The Bismarck cop shrugged. The rifle barrel moved. “You should read your Bible, my friend. The sins of the fathers, you ever heard of that?”
“What sins? You lost a fight, is all.”
“We never lose. Sooner or later, we always win. And Armstrong watched. Snot-nosed rich kid, all smiling and grinning. A man doesn’t forget a thing like that.”
Reacher said nothing. The silence was total. Each snowflake felt separately audible as it hissed and whirled through the air. Keep him talking, Reacher thought. Keep him moving. But he looked into the crazed eyes and couldn’t think of a thing to say.
“The woman goes in the truck,” the guy said. “We’ll have a little fun with her, after we deal with Armstrong. But I’m going to shoot you right now.”
“Not with that rifle,” Reacher said. Keep him talking. Keep him moving. “The muzzle is full of slush. It’ll blow up in your hands.”
There was a long silence. The guy calculated the distance between himself and Reacher, just a glance. Then he lowered the rifle. Reversed it in his hands, in and out fast, long enough to check. The muzzle was packed with icy snow. The M16 is on the Yukon’s backseat, Reacher thought. But the door is blocked shut by the drift.
“You want to bet your life on a little slush?” the Bismarck guy asked.
“Do you?” Reacher said. “The breech will blow, take your ugly face off. Then I’ll take the barrel and shove it up your ass. I’ll pretend it was a baseball bat.”
The guy’s face darkened. But he didn’t pull the trigger.
“Step away from the car,” he said, like the cop he was. Reacher took a long pace away from the Yukon, up and down in the snow, like wading.
“And another.”
Reacher moved again. He was six feet from the car. Six feet from his M16. Thirty feet from his nine-millimeter, far away in the snow. He glanced around. The Bismarck brother held the rifle in his left hand and put his right under his coat and came out with a handgun. It was a Glock. Black and square and ugly. Probably police department issue. He released the safety and leveled it one-handed at Reacher’s face.
“Not that one either,” Reacher said.
Keep him talking. Keep him moving.
“Why not?”
“That’s your work gun. Chances are you’ve used it before. So there are records. They find my body, the ballistics will come right back at you.”
The guy stood still for a long moment. Didn’t speak. Nothing in his face. But he put the Glock away again. Raised the rifle. Shuffled backward through the snow toward the Tahoe. The rifle traversed and stayed level with Reacher’s chest. Reacher thought: Just pull the damn trigger. Let’s all have a laugh. The guy fumbled behind him and opened the Tahoe’s rear door, driver’s side. Dropped the rifle in the snow and came out with a handgun, all in one move. It was an old M9 Beretta, scratched and stained with dried oil. The guy tracked forward again through the drift. Stopped six feet away from Reacher. Raised his arm. Unlatched the safety with his thumb and leveled the weapon straight at the center of Reacher’s face.
“Throw-down gun,” he said. “No records on this one.”
Reacher said nothing.
“Say goodnight now,” the guy whispered.
Nobody moved.
“On the click,” Reacher said.
He stared straight ahead at the gun. Saw Neagley’s face in the corner of his eye. Saw that she didn’t understand what he meant, but saw her nod anyway. It was just a fractional movement of her eyelids. Like half a blink. The Bismarck guy smiled. Tightened his finger. His knuckle shone white. He squeezed the trigger.
There was a dull click.
Reacher came out with his ceramic knife already open and brushed it sideways across the guy’s forehead. Then he caught the Beretta’s barrel in his left hand and jerked it up and jerked it down full force across his knee and shattered the guy’s forearm. Pushed him away and spun around. Neagley had hardly moved. But the guy from the garage video was inert in the snow by her feet. He was bleeding from both ears. She was holding her Heckler & Koch in one hand and the guy’s handgun in the other.
“Yes?” she said.
He nodded. She stepped a pace away so her clothes wouldn’t get splashed and pointed the handgun at the ground and shot the garage guy three times. Bang bang . . . bang. A double-tap to the head, and then an insurance round in the chest. The sound of the shots clapped and rolled like thunder. They both turned away. The Bismarck guy was stumbling around in the snow, completely blind. His forehead was sliced to the bone and blood was pouring out of the wound in sheets and running down into his eyes. It was in his nose and in his mouth. His panting breath was bubbling out through it. He was cradling his broken arm. Staggering about, left and right, turning circles, raising his left forearm to his face, trying to wipe the blood out of his eyes so he could see.
Reacher watched him for a moment, nothing in his face. Then he took the Heckler & Koch from Neagley and set it to fire a single round and waited until the guy had pirouetted around backward and shot him through the throat from the rear. He tried to put the bullet exactly where Froelich had taken hers. The spent brass expelled and hit the Tahoe twenty feet away with a loud clang and the guy pitched forward on his face and lay still and the snow turned bright red all around him. The crash of the shot rolled away and absolute silence rolled back to replace it. Reacher and Neagley stood still and held their breath and listened hard. Heard nothing except the sound of the snow falling.
“How did you know?” Neagley asked, quietly.
“It was Froelich’s gun,” he said. “They stole it from her kitchen. I recognized the scratches and the oil marks. She’d kept the clips loaded in a drawer for about five years.”
“It still might have fired,” Neagley said.
“The whole of life is a gamble,” Reacher said
. “From the very beginning to the very end. Wouldn’t you say?”
The silence closed in tighter. And the cold. They were alone in a thousand square miles of freezing emptiness, breathing hard, shivering, a little sick with adrenaline.
“How long will the church thing last?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” Neagley said. “Forty minutes? An hour?”
“So we don’t need to rush.”
He waded over and retrieved his Steyr from where it had fallen. The snow was already starting to cover the two bodies. He took wallets and badges from the pockets. Wiped his knife clean on the Bismarck guy’s twill coat. Opened all four of the Tahoe’s doors so the snow would drift inside and bury it quicker. Neagley wiped the garage guy’s pistol on her coat and dropped it. Then they floundered back to the Yukon and climbed inside. Took a last look back. The scene was already rimed with new snow, whitening fast. It would be gone within forty-eight hours. The icy wind would freeze the whole tableau inside a long smooth east-west drift until the spring sunshine released it again.
Neagley drove, slowly. Reacher piled the wallets on his knees and started with the badges. The truck was lurching gently and it took effort just to hold them still in front of his eyes long enough to look at them.
“County cops from Idaho,” he said. “Some rural place south of Boise, I think.”
He put both badges into his pocket. Opened the Bismarck guy’s wallet. It was a brown leather trifold, dry and cracked and molded around the contents. There was a milky plastic window on the inside with a police ID behind it. The guy’s lean face stared out from the photograph.
“His name was Richard Wilson,” he said. “Basic grade detective.”
There were two credit cards and an Idaho driver’s license in the wallet. And scraps of paper, and almost three hundred dollars in cash. He spilled the paper on his knees and put the cash in his pocket. Opened the garage guy’s wallet. It was phony alligator, black, and it had an ID from the same police department.
“Peter Wilson,” he said. He checked the driver’s license. “A year younger.”
Peter had three credit cards and nearly two hundred dollars. Reacher put the cash in his pocket and glanced ahead. The snow clouds were behind them and the sky was clear in the east. The sun was out and in their eyes. There was a small black dot in the air. The church tower was barely visible, almost twenty miles away. The Yukon bounced its way toward it, relentlessly. The black dot grew larger. There was a gray blur of rotors above it. It looked motionless in the air. Reacher steadied himself against the dash and looked up through the windshield. There was a tinted band across the top of the glass. The helicopter eased down through it. He could make out its shape. It was fat and bulbous at the front. Probably a Night Hawk. It picked up a visual on the church and turned toward it. It drifted in like a fat insect. The Yukon bounced gently over washboard depressions. The wallets slid off Reacher’s knees and the paper scraps scattered. The helicopter was hovering. Then it was swinging in the air, turning its main door toward the church.
“Golf clubs,” Reacher said. “Not tool samples.”
“What?”
He held up a scrap of paper. “A UPS receipt. Next-day air. From Minneapolis. Addressed to Richard Wilson, arriving guest, at a D.C. motel. A carton, a foot square, forty-eight inches long. Contents, one bag of golf clubs.”
Then he went quiet. Stared at another scrap of paper.
“Something else,” he said. “For Stuyvesant, maybe.”
They watched the distant helicopter land and they stopped right there in the middle of the empty grassland. Got out into the freezing cold sunshine and walked aimless circles and stretched and yawned. The Yukon ticked loudly as it cooled. Reacher piled the badges with the police IDs and the drivers’ licenses on the passenger seat and then hurled the empty wallets far into the landscape.
“We need to sanitize,” he said. They wiped their prints off all four weapons and threw them into the grass, north and south and east and west. Emptied the spare rounds from their pockets and hurled them away in looping brassy swirls through the sunlight. Followed them with the bird watcher’s scope. Reacher kept his hat and gloves. And the ceramic knife. He had grown fond of it.
Then they drove the rest of the way to Grace slow and easy and bumped up out of the grassland and through the wrecked fence and across the graveyard. Parked near the waiting helicopter and got out. They could hear the groan of the organ and the sound of people singing inside the church. No crowds. No media. It was a dignified scene. There was a Casper PD cruiser parked at a discreet distance. There was an Air Force crewman in a flight suit standing next to the helicopter. He was alert and vigilant. Probably not an Air Force crewman at all. Probably one of Stuyvesant’s guys in a borrowed outfit. Probably had a rifle hidden just inside the cabin door. Probably a Vaime Mk2.
“You OK?” Neagley asked.
“I’m always OK,” Reacher said. “You?”
“I’m fine.”
They stood there for fifteen minutes, not really sure if they were hot or cold. There was a loud mournful piece from the distant organ, and then quiet, and then the muffled sound of feet moving on dusty boards. The big oak door opened and a small crowd filtered out into the sunshine. The vicar stood outside the door with Froelich’s parents and spoke to everybody as they left.
Armstrong came out after a couple of minutes with Stuyvesant at his side. They were both in dark overcoats. They were surrounded by seven agents. Armstrong spoke to the vicar and shook hands with the Froelichs and spoke some more. Then his detail brought him away toward the helicopter. He saw Reacher and Neagley and detoured near them, a question in his face.
“We all live happily ever after,” Reacher said.
Armstrong nodded once.
“Thank you,” he said.
“You’re welcome,” Reacher said.
Armstrong hesitated a second longer and then turned away without shaking hands and walked on toward the chopper. Stuyvesant came next, on his own.
“Happily?” he repeated.
Reacher gathered the badges and the IDs and the licenses from his pockets. Stuyvesant cupped his hands to take them all.
“Maybe more happily than we thought,” Reacher said. “They weren’t yours, that’s for sure. They were cops, from Idaho, near Boise. You’ve got the addresses there. I’m sure you’ll find what you need. The computer, the paper and the printer, Andretti’s thumb in the freezer. Something else, maybe.”
He took a scrap of paper from his pocket.
“I found this too,” he said. “It was in one of the wallets. It’s a register receipt. They went to the grocery store late on Friday and bought six TV dinners and six big bottles of water.”
“So?” Stuyvesant said.
Reacher smiled. “My guess is they weren’t doing their regular weekly marketing, not in the middle of everything else they were doing. I think maybe they were making sure Mrs. Nendick could eat while they came out here. I think she’s still alive.”
Stuyvesant snatched the receipt and ran for the helicopter.
Reacher and Neagley said their good-byes at the Denver airport late the next morning, Monday. Reacher signed over his fee check to her and she bought him a first-class ticket on United to New York La Guardia. He walked her to the gate for her Chicago flight. People were already boarding. She didn’t say anything. Just placed her bag on the floor and stood still directly in front of him. Then she stretched up and hugged him, fast, like she didn’t really know how to do it. She let go after a second and picked up her bag and walked down the jetway. Didn’t look back.
He made it into La Guardia late in the evening. Took a bus and a subway to Times Square and walked Forty-second Street until he found B. B. King’s new club. A four-piece guitar band was just finishing its first set. They were pretty good. He listened until the set ended and then walked back to the ticket taker.
“Was there an old woman here last week?” he asked. “Sounded a little like Dawn Penn? With
an old guy on keyboards?”
The ticket taker shook his head.
“Nobody like that,” the guy said. “Not here.”
Reacher nodded once and stepped out into the shiny darkness. It was cold on the street. He headed west for the Port Authority and a bus out of town.
Persuader
CHAPTER 1
The cop climbed out of his car exactly four minutes before he got shot. He moved like he knew his fate in advance. He pushed the door against the resistance of a stiff hinge and swiveled slowly on the worn vinyl seat and planted both feet flat on the road. Then he grasped the door frame with both hands and heaved himself up and out. He stood in the cold clear air for a second and then turned and pushed the door shut again behind him. Held still for a second longer. Then he stepped forward and leaned against the side of the hood up near the headlight.
The car was a seven-year-old Chevy Caprice. It was black and had no police markings. But it had three radio antennas and plain chrome hubs. Most cops you talk to swear the Caprice is the best police vehicle ever built. This guy looked like he agreed with them. He looked like a veteran plain-clothes detective with the whole of the motor pool at his disposal. Like he drove the ancient Chevy because he wanted to. Like he wasn’t interested in the new Fords. I could see that kind of stubborn old-timer personality in the way he held himself. He was wide and bulky in a plain dark suit made from some kind of heavy wool. He was tall but stooped. An old man. He turned his head and looked north and south along the road and then craned his thick neck to glance back over his shoulder at the college gate. He was thirty yards away from me.
The college gate itself was purely a ceremonial thing. Two tall brick pillars just rose up from a long expanse of tended lawn behind the sidewalk. Connecting the pillars was a high double gate made from iron bars bent and folded and twisted into fancy shapes. It was shiny black. It looked like it had just been repainted. It was probably repainted after every winter. It had no security function. Anybody who wanted to avoid it could drive straight across the lawn. It was wide open, anyway. There was a driveway behind it with little knee-high iron posts set eight feet back on either side. They had latches. Each half of the gate was latched into one of them. Wide open. The driveway led on down to a huddle of mellow brick buildings about a hundred yards away. The buildings had steep mossy roofs and were overhung by trees. The driveway was lined with trees. The sidewalk was lined with trees. There were trees everywhere. Their leaves were just about coming in. They were tiny and curled and bright green. Six months from now they would be big and red and golden and photographers would be swarming all over the place taking pictures of them for the college brochure.
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