Hit the Road Jack

by Diane Capri

  “So your plan is what? Knock on doors looking for women of a certain age, collect Reacher and invite him out for a beer?”

  She was glad to see Gaspar grin, even if he was only seeking to lighten his mood more than anything. Lighthearted was better than glum.

  He said, “Not every woman of a certain age.”

  “What’s your criteria?” she asked, as if his plan might be worthwhile when she was fairly sure he was making things up as the conversation progressed.

  “Only the good-looking ones.”

  “Models?”

  “Who are single.”

  “Nuns?”

  “And smart.”

  “Coeds?”

  “And strong.”

  “Athletes?”

  He waited a couple of beats for her to catch on. When she said nothing, he flashed her the look again. “And also cops.”

  The suggestion snatched her breath away. She felt her heart slam hard in her chest and her nostrils gulped air. She steadied her voice as well as possible. “Because?”

  “Because he’s a smart psycho. With good taste in women.”

  Gaspar’s reasoning was sound, but she resisted. “Two women. That’s hardly a reliable pattern. And you’re just guessing about Duffy.”

  He replied, “I know why I’m here. I’m a charity case.” He slapped his right thigh with his open palm. “They screwed up. Now they owe me and they’re stuck with me and I can’t do the job. Don’t waste your time trying to make me feel better. I’m grateful for the work, but I’m expendable. I know it, they know it and you know it, too.”

  The possibility slamming Kim’s brain felt like a caroming racquetball. She’d given no thought to why she’d been chosen. She’d been too pleased with her luck. She’d developed a detailed career plan that included achieving FBI Director status one day. She needed opportunities to prove herself and this was one such chance. Nothing more she needed to know.

  When she failed to reply, Gaspar said, “Take off your rose-colored glasses, Sunshine. You think the boss picked you because you shoot straighter than the rest of us? Not to be a jerk, but get a grip.”

  Kim didn’t argue because his facts were solid and his conclusion flawless. She had no particular qualifications except that she was more expendable than he was because she had no spouse and no children. Albeit for different reasons, like Gaspar, her life belonged to the FBI and that was precisely the way she liked it. She’d tried and failed at love; she had no desire to travel that road again. She was alone by choice and she intended to remain so.

  Could the boss have thought she’d be Reacher bait? The idea seemed preposterous initially, but had quickly assumed potential, almost inevitability. Questions popped into her head. How could she entice Reacher to approach her? What could she offer him? What was she expected to extract in return? Why wasn’t she outraged that the boss simply assumed she would sacrifice herself when the moment came?

  The answer to the last question was simple. She’d sacrificed herself for the FBI before and she would do it again. The boss knew that, she knew that, and apparently Gaspar had worked it out, too.

  Kim was surprised to find herself so angry. “That’s your plan? We find Reacher and lure him into some compromising position and then, what? Fall on our swords?”

  Gaspar shrugged. Maybe he considered anew his problem in Miami. Or maybe he was giving Kim a chance to work out a better plan now that she’d faced facts. If she dared.

  CHAPTER TWO

  They drove westward in silence along the two-lane blacktop over hilly terrain another four miles before Kim saw the first group of modest homes lining the road on both sides. They were widely spaced and well kept, but only a few windows were illuminated from their interiors despite the dreary weather. Pole buildings, barns, and other indications of rural civilization seemed randomly placed according to no particular zoning plan for a mile or so until the Crown Vic passed a road sign proclaiming New Hope, Virginia’s city limits. It also claimed to have been named an All-American city a decade ago, which seemed more than a bit ambitious for the collection of dwellings they’d seen so far.

  The county road became Valley View, widened to four lanes, and the speed limit dropped to twenty-five miles an hour as they approached the town. Kim felt Gaspar tap his brake to disengage the cruise control. The big vehicle’s progress gradually slowed along the tarmac.

  Nothing obstructed her line of sight. Valley View ended ahead at a T-intersection with a landscaped ribbon of boulevard a bit farther west. A hundred feet before the intersection with Grand Parkway, Valley View sprouted a center left turn lane and a right turn lane and Kim observed traffic signals at each turning point. The signals for turning traffic from Valley View onto Grand Parkway cycled from red to green and back, but vehicles attempting to turn north were barely moving. Traffic turning southbound and eastbound was flowing slightly better, but without regard to the cycling signals, meaning cops she couldn’t see from her vantage point were most likely directing traffic.

  “Can you see what’s going on up there?” Kim asked, glad for the excuse to resume normal conversation.

  Gaspar stretched his neck and shoulders as he slowed closer to the bottleneck. “Looks like an old crash in the right northbound lane on the boulevard, doesn’t it?”

  “Hard to tell from here, but I’d say an hour ago, or more.” Through gaps in the traffic, Kim saw a white Ford F-150 truck with a cap on the bed stopped on Grand Parkway about thirty feet north of the intersection.

  The Crown Vic progressed haltingly along Valley View with no discernible rhythm to its forward movement. After a bit, Gaspar said, “There’s a blue Toyota Prius’s front end wedged under the truck’s back bumper. That Prius is crunched up like it hit a brick wall at twenty-five miles an hour, but the truck looks undamaged.”

  “I’m counting maybe seven sets of flashing lights. No sirens, so yeah, they’ve probably been there a while. Blue, red, and white, but no yellow,” Kim said.

  Gaspar groused, leaned his head back and closed his eyes. “One day they’re going to standardize emergency vehicle lighting in this country.”

  “Maybe. But right now, I’d say an ambulance is standing by, injuries were already dealt with, and locals are directing traffic and documenting the scene. But they’ve got no tow trucks to move the damaged vehicles out of the way, so they’ve got a snarl.” Kim’s mind appreciated the exercise of figuring out a simple, solvable puzzle for a change. Even though the solution was far from ideal. A tie-up at an intersection like this could take hours to resolve and she wasn’t excited about spending the night in New Hope, Virginia.

  “Seems like a lot of responders for a routine rear-end collision,” Gaspar said without looking. “So you’re probably right about the injuries.”

  Traffic continued to move slowly around the crash site. From time to time, Gaspar lifted his foot off the brake and allowed the Crown Vic to inch ahead. When they were close enough, Kim saw two uniformed police officers standing in the biting wind directing traffic, which was surprisingly heavy. They hadn’t seen a single vehicle on the road in the hour before they reached the city limits. She guessed the bulk of New Hope’s population must lie along Grand Boulevard. Or maybe this was rush hour.

  There wasn’t much to look at until they were allowed to make their own right turn and travel slowly past the crash site, craning their necks to watch the show along with the other gawkers.

  Kim saw a woman, clothes bloody, shivering under a too-small blanket, perhaps awaiting an ambulance. A towheaded boy, maybe about four years old and wearing a sweater and corduroy jeans stood a short distance away. Oddly for a crash victim, if he was one, the boy seemed to be chatting amiably with a uniformed policewoman. But it was the oversized mound Kim saw on the pavement covered by another dark blanket that caught her attention as Gaspar threaded the needle to move them beyond the scene.

  “Pull over on the right,” Kim said.

  “Are you sure you want to do that? Even if Re
acher’s lying dead under there, we’re supposed to be keeping a low profile, don’t forget.”

  She didn’t argue. Fifty feet from the official vehicles, Gaspar pulled off and parked on the wide gravel shoulder. They stepped out of the Crown Vic and into the stinging wind. The air smelled heavy with loam and exhaust. Humidity soaked her skin like a cold cloud bath.

  “Aren’t you Latin lovers supposed to be chivalrous? Why don’t you ever have a coat to offer me?” Kim teased, shivering from nerves as well as cold as they trudged through damp earth toward the body.

  “November’s always great beach weather in Miami and I don’t own a coat.” Gaspar had stuffed his hands in his trouser pockets after turning up his Banana Republic suit collar. “You’re a liberated female from Detroit. What’s your excuse?”

  Kim wondered that herself. She made a mental note to stop at the first affordable department store. Surely somewhere in this town she might be able to find a coat to fit her, even if she had to shop in the girls’ department.

  Gaspar didn’t dawdle even though his leg had to be cramped after all the driving. Kim struggled to keep up with his long strides. She didn’t know the full extent of his injuries and he’d made it clear she wasn’t going to find out more from him. Snooping into his background seemed disloyal; she’d wait until he trusted her enough to explain. He limped a little, but as they continued along he seemed to walk it out somehow.

  First responders handled the chaotic scene appropriately, Kim noticed. Maybe this was a small town in the middle of nowhere, but officials performed as if they’d been well trained. Emergent needs had been attended to. Now they were processing the crime scene and handling traffic. No one seemed interested in the blanket or the body that lay beneath.

  When Otto and Gaspar approached, a plain-clothes official standing off to the side noticed. He was a slim man, maybe forty-five or fifty, graying chestnut hair and thick black brows. He didn’t ask if they knew the parties involved in the crash, but his tone was friendly when he said, “I’m afraid you folks are going to have to return to your car.”

  Gaspar waited for Otto to take the lead. Partly because stopping was her idea, but leading was also her job. She pulled out her badge wallet and held it in her left hand as she extended her right to shake, counting on the local guy to return her gesture automatically, which he did.

  “Looks like you have your hands full here,” Kim said, friendly too, slipping her badge back into her pocket. Now he’d have to request it if he wanted a closer look. Most times, they didn’t. All cops knew an FBI shield at a glance. Gaspar didn’t offer a glimpse of his. All cops knew FBI agents traveled in pairs.

  “Chief Paul Brady, New Hope PD,” he said, a voice that might sing tenor in the church choir. “You must have been diverted here, huh? Sorry to interrupt your work, but thanks for coming so quickly. Rest of your team on the way?”

  Brady’s words jolted her spine like a Taser strike. Why would a local chief call the FBI on a traffic fatality? Sure, headquarters was only a couple of hours away, but the FBI’s jurisdiction didn’t include traffic crashes under normal circumstances.

  Kim injected her tone with cooperative officiousness. “Why’d you call us?”

  Chief Brady said, “I didn’t initially. Witnesses said carjacking. Never been common around here and I hadn’t heard the term for at least a decade.”

  Carjacking wasn’t FBI jurisdiction, either, but Kim didn’t say so. She figured Brady for a guy who had to tell a story in his own way and his own time. “Uh, huh.”

  Brady stuck his paws inside his jacket pockets. “The thing kinda snowballed. First caller reported a rear end collision. I sent a patrol unit out here to process that. A minute or two later, second caller said road rage. Said a huge guy got out of the truck with a shotgun. I quick dispatched another unit. Third caller said the truck driver bashed the Prius’s window with the shotgun butt, dragged the woman out of the Prius and beat her with the gun like it was a club.” Brady wagged his head back and forth as if he couldn’t believe road rage would lead to such savagery, even though he knew it had. “When my officers arrived on the scene, they found the woman battered, the guy dead on the ground, and the boy screaming inside the car. That’s when I grabbed my coat and dashed over here.”

  Gaspar shivered in the cold dampness, scowling as Brady’s tale unfolded too slowly. Her partner wasn’t interested in explaining things to annoyed colleagues arriving any moment. Kim knew because she felt the same way.

  But she needed to see the big guy under that blanket. She didn’t actually believe Reacher was lying under there. Not really. She didn’t believe he’d been in New Hope at all. Not yesterday or ever. But one quick look would settle it and she was ten feet away and she wasn’t leaving until she knew for sure.

  Gaspar prodded Brady to get to the relevant facts supporting FBI jurisdiction. “Domestic terrorists? Contraband in the car? She killed him with an illegal weapon? Guy’s a Native American?”

  Brady’s scowl matched Gaspar’s now as the alpha males squared off. Kim intervened to avoid a stalemate, which would be worse than a skirmish at the moment. “You’d know everybody in town, Chief. Who are these folks?”

  Maybe Brady didn’t want a skirmish, either. “Well, see, that’s the thing. The Prius is a rental from West Virginia. The F-150 is a Maryland rental. We ran the plates. Both were picked up a week ago using a corporate credit card. We’re running that down now, but we keep hitting dead ends on the paper trail.”

  “No ID on the deceased?”

  “None.”

  “The woman?”

  “Says her name is Jill Hill, but she has no ID, either.”

  “What about the boy?” Gaspar asked. “He looks like a little man who knows his name and address to me.”

  “He is all of that,” Chief Brady’s mouth lifted in a slight grin. “Cute kid. Charmed every one of us. He says his name is Brook and he’s asking if the giant went to climb the beanstalk.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Kim nodded and took a deep breath. “Let’s go see what you’ve got before any more daylight gets away from us.”

  She began walking toward the body, leaving chief Brady and Gaspar no choice but to follow. The F-150 and the Prius were almost bonded together at the crumple, meaning they had to walk around. Kim made her way through small openings between official vehicles attempting to block the crime scene from gawkers. Various personnel were milling around while they waited for the FBI to take over. Kim had no intention of doing so. Her immediate plan was to confirm that Reacher was lying dead under the blanket. Or not.

  Depending on how this went, Kim might or might not want to leave. Less than a minute later Otto and Gaspar stood beside the hulking mound. Her body hummed as if she were electrically connected to a power source. This could be him. The assignment would be over. She wasn’t sure how she felt about that; nor did her feelings matter. It was what it was.

  Gaspar asked a paramedic to remove the cover.

  When they lifted the blanket, Kim required only the briefest glance to settle her questions. She glanced at Gaspar. He nodded.

  His face was a mess. His nose was pulped and his cheekbones smashed. Hair was fair and long, hung over his ears and below his collar. He had the thick neck and heavy shoulders of a bodybuilder. His thighs bulged inside indigo jeans. He wore heavy work boots on his feet. The shotgun remained clutched in his right hand. Dead eyes stared at nothing. His forehead was red and swollen and might yet bruise, even though his heart had finally ceased pumping not long after he cracked his skull open on the pavement’s edge. Bad luck, falling just there, where frost had heaved the pavement to a sharp edge harder than the guy’s head.

  No doubt he seemed like a giant to the boy. He was about 6’2” tall, maybe 220 pounds. The man really was huge. But not big enough to be Jack Reacher.

  While she dealt with the adults, Gaspar approached the remaining eyewitness. Kim pulled out her smart phone and snapped a few photos before she asked the par
amedics to replace the blanket. She noticed the deepening dusk and glanced at her Seiko to check the time. Soon, the official FBI team would arrive. She hoped they were bringing sufficient lighting. In another thirty minutes, they’d be working with only insufficient ambient light to process the scene.

  She turned her attention next to the woman. Jill Hill. The name sounded silly enough to be real, but Kim figured it was more likely made up on the spur of the moment when someone asked and Jill wasn’t prepared with a better lie. Because she had the phone out already, she snapped a few pictures of Ms. Hill, too.

  Ms. Hill shivered under the blanket the paramedic had wrapped around her. Her blonde hair was matted with blood, probably from a scalp laceration. Scalp wounds bled like faucets. An effort had been made to wipe the blood from her battered, swollen face, but her broken nose was going to require surgery. Maybe her cheekbones were broken, too. It was hard to say given the lighting conditions. When she watched Kim, her pupils were uneven and nonreactive.

  Kim was no doctor, but like all FBI agents she’d had extensive emergency first aid training. And what she saw alarmed her. She waved Chief Brady over and reported quietly, “She needs to be transported now.”

  Brady said, “We didn’t think she was emergent. We were waiting for FBI to make the call.”

  Instead of asking why again, Kim said, “Now’s the time.” She understood the protocols for concurrent FBI jurisdiction. But if Jill Hill died for killing this man, Kim wanted that to be a decision made by the justice system and not the result when law enforcement failed to provide treatment.

  Gaspar had crouched low, eye-to-eye with the boy, engaged in lively conversation. He was an adorable child who looked maybe a little familiar. Blonde curls, dancing blue eyes, sweetly cherubic cheeks, and a bubbly smile accentuated by a heart-shaped full mouth. Kim noticed only one odd note: Whatever happened here seemed not to have troubled him overmuch.

  Kim tapped Gaspar on the shoulder. He looked up and she tilted her head toward the Crown Vic. He nodded agreement. They’d been here too long. The unmistakable whap-whap-whap of a helicopter, no doubt bringing the FBI agents actually assigned to the case, grew louder. If they hurried, they could be gone before the official team disembarked.