by Lee Child
He rolled up through the stink of gasoline exhaust. The truck was twenty yards ahead. Neagley was driving it as slow as she dared. He slipped and slid and chased after it. He swerved right to get in its wheel track. The ground rose. Neagley gunned it to maintain her momentum. He was running hard but she was driving away from him. He sprinted. He smashed the toes of his boots into the snow to keep from slipping. She slowed at the top of the rise. The truck went up and over. He saw the whole underside. The fuel tank, the differential. She braked gently and he caught the door handle and flung the door open and floundered downhill alongside the truck until he had built enough speed to fling himself inside. He hauled himself into the seat and slammed the door and she stamped hard on the gas and the violent battering roller coaster ride came back.
“Time?” she screamed.
He fought to keep his wrist still and stared at his watch. He was breathing too hard to speak. He just shook his head. They were at least ten minutes behind. And it was a crucial ten minutes. The Tahoe would arrive back at its starting point about two minutes into it and Armstrong would touch down after another five. Neagley drove on. She hurtled up the rises and took off and plunged hood-deep into the drifts and battered her way through and did it all over again. Without the wheel to hold on to Reacher was thrown all over the place. He fought the alternate weightlessness and physical pounding and caught blurred glimpses of the time on his watch. He stared through the windshield at the sky in the east. The sun was in his eyes. He dropped his gaze to the terrain. Nothing there. No Tahoe. It was long gone. All that remained were its tracks through the snow, deep twinned ruts that narrowed in the far distance ahead. They pointed resolutely toward the town of Grace like arrows. They were full of ice crystals that burned red and yellow against the early dawn light.
Then they changed. They swooped a tight ninety-degree left and disappeared into a north-south ravine.
“What?” Neagley shouted.
“Follow,” Reacher gasped.
The ravine was narrow, like a trench. It ran steeply downhill. The Tahoe’s tracks were clearly visible for fifty yards and then they swerved out of sight again, a sharp right behind a rock outcrop the size of a house. Neagley braked hard as the grade fell away. She stopped. She paused a beat and Reacher’s mind screamed, An ambush now? a split second after her foot hit the gas again and her hands turned the wheel. The Yukon locked into the Tahoe’s ruts and its two-ton weight slid it helplessly down the icy slope. The Tahoe burst out of hiding, backward, directly in front of them. It jammed to a skidding stop right across their path. Neagley was out of her door before the Yukon stopped moving. She rolled in the snow and floundered away to the north. The Yukon slewed violently and stalled in a snowdrift. Reacher’s door was jammed shut by the depth of the snow. He used all his strength and forced it half-open and scraped out through the gap. Saw the driver spilling from the Tahoe, slipping and falling in the snow. Reacher rolled away and pulled his Steyr from his pocket. Thrashed around to the back of the Yukon and crawled forward through the snow along its other side. The Tahoe driver was holding a rifle, rowing himself through the snow with its muzzle, slipping and sliding. He was heading for cover in the rock. He was the guy from Bismarck. No doubt about that. Lean face, long body. He even had the same coat on. He was bulling through the snowdrift with the coat flapping open and small snowstorms kicking outward from his knees at every step. Reacher raised the Steyr and steadied it against the Yukon’s fender and tracked the guy’s head. Tightened his finger on the trigger. Then he heard a voice, loud and urgent, right behind him.
“Hold your fire,” the voice called.
He turned and saw a second guy ten yards north and west. Neagley was stumbling through the snow directly ahead of him. He had her Heckler & Koch held low in his left hand. A handgun in his right, jammed in her back. He was the guy from the garage video. No doubt about that, either. Tweed overcoat, short, wide in the shoulders, a little squat. No hat this time. He had the same face as the Bismarck guy, a little fatter. The same graying sandy hair, a little thicker. Brothers.
“Throw the weapon down, sir,” he called.
It was a perfect cop line and he had a perfect cop voice. Neagley mouthed I’m sorry. Reacher reversed the Steyr in his hand. Held it by the barrel.
“Throw down the weapon, sir,” the squat guy called again.
His brother from Bismarck changed direction and plowed forward through the snow and moved in closer. He raised the rifle. It was a Steyr too, a long handsome gun. It was all covered with snow. It was pointing straight at Reacher’s head. The low morning sun made the shadow of the barrel ten feet long. Reacher thought: What happened to that lonely motel bed? Snowflakes swirled and the air was bitter cold. He pulled his arm back and tossed his pistol high in the air. It arced lazily thirty feet through the falling snow and landed and buried itself in a drift. The guy from Bismarck fumbled in his pocket with his left hand and pulled out his badge. Held it high in his palm. The badge was gold. It was backed by a worn leather slip. The leather was brown. The rifle wavered. The guy fumbled the badge away again and brought the rifle to his shoulder and held it level and steady.
“We’re police officers,” he said.
“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 woma
n 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 tu
rned 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.
