Die Trying

by Child, Lee

  “What is it with people?” he said. “Burning automobiles? Some asshole burned a car out by the lake. We got to get it moved. Residents are giving us noise.”

  “Where exactly?” Milosevic asked him.

  The cop shrugged. He was anxious to be very precise.

  “That turnout on the shore,” he said. “On Sheridan Road, just this side of Washington Park. Never saw such a thing before, not in Wilmette.”

  Milosevic and Brogan went to check it out. They followed the cop in his shiny cruiser. He led them to the place. It wasn’t a car. It was a pickup, a ten-year-old Dodge. No license plates. Doused with gasoline and pretty much totally burned out.

  “Happened yesterday,” the cop said. “Spotted about seven-thirty in the morning. Commuters were calling it in, on their way to work, one after the other.”

  He circled around and looked over the wreck, carefully.

  “Not local,” he said. “That’s my guess.”

  “Why not?” Milosevic asked him.

  “This is ten years old, right?” the guy said. “Around here, there are a few pickups, but they’re toys, you know? Big V-8s, lots of chrome? An old thing like this, nobody would give it room on their driveway.”

  “What about gardeners?” Brogan asked. “Pool boys, something like that?”

  “Why would they burn it?” the cop said. “They needed to change it, they’d chop it in against a new one, right? Nobody burns a business asset, right?”

  Milosevic thought about it and nodded.

  “OK,” he said. “This is ours. Federal investigation. We’ll send a flatbed for it soon as we can. Meanwhile, you guard it, OK? And do it properly, for God’s sake. Don’t let anybody near it.”

  “Why?” the cop asked.

  Milosevic looked at him like he was a moron.

  “This is their truck,” he said. “They dumped it here and stole the Lexus for the actual heist.”

  The Wilmette cop looked at Milosevic’s agitated face and then he looked across at the burned truck. He wondered for a moment how four guys could fit across the Dodge’s bench seat. But he didn’t say anything. He didn’t want to risk more ridicule. He just nodded.

  17

  HOLLY WAS SITTING up on the mattress, one knee under her chin, the injured leg straight out. Reacher was sitting up beside her, hunched forward, worried, one hand fighting the bounce of the truck and the other hand plunged into his hair.

  “What about your mother?” he asked.

  “Was your father famous?” Holly asked him back.

  Reacher shook his head.

  “Hardly,” he said. “Guys in his unit knew who he was, I guess.”

  “So you don’t know what it’s like,” she said. “Every damn thing you do, it happens because of your father. I got straight A’s in school, I went to Yale and Harvard, went to Wall Street, but it wasn’t me doing it, it was this weird other person called General Johnson’s daughter doing it. It’s been just the same with the Bureau. Everybody assumes I made it because of my father, and ever since I got there half the people are still treating me especially nice, and the other half are still treating me especially tough just to prove how much they’re not impressed.”

  Reacher nodded. Thought about it. He was a guy who had done better than his father. Forged ahead, in the traditional way. Left the old man behind. But he’d known guys with famous parents. The sons of great soldiers. Even the grandsons. However bright they burned, their light was always lost in the glow.

  “OK, so it’s tough,” he said. “And the rest of your life you can try to ignore it, but right now it needs dealing with. It opens up a whole new can of worms.”

  She nodded. Blew an exasperated sigh. Reacher glanced at her in the gloom.

  “How long ago did you figure it out?” he asked.

  “Immediately, I guess,” she said. “Like I told you, it’s a habit. Everybody assumes everything happens because of my father. Me too.”

  “Well, thanks for telling me so soon,” Reacher said.

  She didn’t reply to that. They lapsed into silence. The air was stifling and the heat was somehow mixing with the relentless drone of the noise. The dark and the temperature and the sound were like a thick soup inside the truck. Reacher felt like he was drowning in it. But it was the uncertainty that was doing it to him. Many times he’d traveled thirty hours at a stretch in transport planes, worse conditions than these. It was the huge new dimension of uncertainty that was unsettling him.

  “So what about your mother?” he asked her again.

  She shook her head.

  “She died,” she said. “I was twenty, in school. Some weird cancer.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. Paused, nervously. “Brothers and sisters?”

  She shook her head again.

  “Just me,” she said.

  He nodded, reluctantly.

  “I was afraid of that,” he said. “I was kind of hoping this could be about something else, you know, maybe your mother was a judge or you had a brother or a sister who was a congressman or something.”

  “Forget it,” she said. “There’s just me. Me and Dad. This is about Dad.”

  “But what about him?” he said. “What the hell is this supposed to achieve? Ransom? Forget about it. Your old man’s a big deal, but he’s just a soldier, been clawing his way up the Army pay scales all his life. Faster than most guys, I agree, but I know those pay scales. I was on those scales thirteen years. Didn’t make me rich and they won’t have made him rich. Not rich enough for anybody to be thinking about a ransom. Somebody wanted a ransom out of kidnapping somebody’s daughter, there are a million people ahead of you in Chicago alone.”

  Holly nodded.

  “This is about influence,” she said. “He’s responsible for two million people and two hundred billion dollars a year. Scope for influence there, right?”

  Reacher shook his head.

  “No,” he said. “That’s the problem. I can’t see what this is liable to achieve.”

  He got to his knees and crawled forward along the mattresses.

  “Hell are you doing?” Holly asked him.

  “We got to talk to them,” he said. “Before we get where we’re going.”

  He lifted his big fist and started pounding on the bulkhead. Hard as he could. Right behind where he figured the driver’s head must be. He kept on pounding until he got what he wanted. Took a while. Several minutes. His fist got sore. But the truck lurched off the pavement and started slowing. He felt the front wheels washing into gravel. The brakes bit in. He was pressed up against the bulkhead by the momentum. Holly rolled a couple of feet along the mattress. Gasped in pain as her knee twisted against the motion.

  “Pulled off the highway,” Reacher said. “Middle of nowhere.”

  “This is a big mistake, Reacher,” Holly said.

  He shrugged and took her hand and helped her into a sitting position, back against the bulkhead. Then he slid forward and put himself between her and the rear doors. He heard the three guys getting out of the cab. Doors slammed. He heard their footsteps crunching over the gravel. Two coming down the right flank, one down the left. He heard the key sliding into the lock. The handle turned.

  The left-hand rear door opened two inches. First thing into the truck was the muzzle of the shotgun. Beyond it, Reacher saw a meaningless sliver of sky. Bright blue, small white clouds. Could have been anywhere in the hemisphere. Second thing into the truck was a Glock 17. Then a wrist. The cuff of a cotton shirt. The Glock was rock-steady. Loder.

  “This better be good, bitch,” he called.

  Hostile. A lot of tension in the voice.

  “We need to talk,” Reacher called back.

  The second Glock appeared in the narrow gap. Shaking slightly.

  “Talk about what, asshole?” Loder called.

  Reacher listened to the stress in the guy’s voice and watched the second Glock trembling through its random zigzags.

  “This isn’t going to work, guys,”
he said. “Whoever told you to do this, he isn’t thinking straight. Maybe it felt like some kind of a smart move, but it’s all wrong. It isn’t going to achieve anything. It’s just going to get you guys in a shitload of trouble.”

  There was silence at the rear of the truck. Just for a second. But long enough to tell Reacher that Holly was right. Long enough to know he’d made a bad mistake. The steady Glock snapped back out of sight. The shotgun jerked, like it had just changed ownership. Reacher flung himself forward and smashed Holly down flat on the mattress. The shotgun barrel tipped upward. Reacher heard the small click of the trigger a tiny fraction before an enormous explosion. The shotgun fired into the roof. A huge blast. A hundred tiny holes appeared in the metal. A hundred tiny points of blue light. Spent shot rattled and bounced down and ricocheted around the truck like hail. Then the sound of the gun faded into the hum of temporary deafness.

  Reacher felt the slam of the door. The sliver of daylight cut off. He felt the rock of the vehicle as the three men climbed back into the cab. He felt the shake as the rough diesel caught. Then a forward lurch and a yaw to the left as the truck pulled back onto the highway.

  FIRST THING REACHER heard as his hearing came back was a quiet keening as the air whistled out through the hundred pellet holes in the roof. It grew louder as the miles rolled by. A hundred high-pitched whistles, all grouped together a couple of semitones apart, fighting and warbling like some kind of demented birdsong.

  “Insane, right?” Holly said.

  “Me or them?” he said.

  He nodded an apology. She nodded back and struggled up to a sitting position. Used both hands to straighten her knee. The holes in the roof were letting light through. Enough light that Reacher could see her face clearly. He could interpret her expression. He could see the flicker of pain. Like a blind coming down in her eyes, then snapping back up. He knelt and swept the spent pellets off the mattress. They rattled across the metal floor.

  “Now you’ve got to get out,” she said. “You’ll get yourself killed soon.”

  The highlights in her hair flashed under the random bright illumination.

  “I mean it,” she said. “Qualified or not, I can’t let you stay.”

  “I know you can’t,” he said.

  He used his discarded shirt to sweep the pellets into a pile near the doors. Then he straightened the mattresses and lay back down. Rocked gently with the motion. Stared at the holes in the sheet metal above him. They were like a map of some distant galaxy.

  “My father would do what it takes to get me back,” Holly said.

  Talking was harder than it had been before. The drone of the motor and the rumble of the road were complicated by the high-pitched whistle from the roof. A full spectrum of noise. Holly lay down next to Reacher. She put her head next to his. Her hair fanned out and brushed his cheek and fell to his neck. She squirmed her hips and straightened her leg. There was still space between their bodies. The decorous V shape was still there. But the angle was a little tighter than it had been before.

  “But what can he do?” Reacher said. “Talk me through it.”

  “They’re going to make some kind of demand,” she said. “You know, do this or do that, or we hurt your girl.”

  She spoke slowly and there was a tremor in her voice. Reacher let his hand drop into the space between them and found hers. He took it and squeezed gently.

  “Doesn’t make any sense,” he said. “Think about it. What does your father do? He implements long-term policy, and he’s responsible for short-term readiness. Congress and the President and the Defense Secretary thrash out the long-term policy, right? So if the Joint Chairman tried to stand in their way, they’d just replace him. Especially if they know he’s under this kind of pressure, right?”

  “What about short-term readiness?” she said.

  “Same sort of a thing,” Reacher said. “He’s only chairman of a committee. The individual Chiefs of Staff are in there, too. Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines. If they’re all singing a different song from what your father is reporting upward, that’s not going to stay a secret for long, is it? They’ll just replace him. Take him out of the equation altogether.”

  Holly turned her head. Looked straight at him.

  “Are you sure?” she said. “Suppose these guys are working for Iraq or something? Suppose Saddam wants Kuwait again. But he doesn’t want another Desert Storm. So he has me kidnapped, and my father says sorry, can’t be done, for all kinds of invented reasons?”

  Reacher shrugged.

  “The answer’s right there in the words you used,” he said. “The reasons would be invented. Fact is, we could do Desert Storm again, if we had to. No problem. Everybody knows that. So if your father started denying it, everybody would know he was bullshitting, and everybody would know why. They’d just sideline him. The military is a tough place, Holly, no room for sentiment. If that’s the strategy these guys are pursuing, they’re wasting their time. It can’t work.”

  She was quiet for a long moment.

  “Then maybe this is about revenge,” she said slowly. “Maybe somebody is punishing him for something in the past. Maybe I’m going to Iraq. Maybe they want to make him apologize for Desert Storm. Or Panama, or Grenada, or lots of things.”

  Reacher lay on his back and rocked with the motion. He could feel slight breaths of air stirring, because of the holes in the roof. He realized the truck was now a lot cooler, because of the new ventilation. Or because of his new mood.

  “Too arcane,” he said. “You’d have to be a pretty acute analyst to blame the Joint Chairman for all that stuff. There’s a string of more obvious targets. Higher-profile people, right? The President, the Defense Secretary, Foreign Service people, field generals. If Baghdad was looking for a public humiliation, they’d pick somebody their people could identify, not some paper shuffler from the Pentagon.”

  “So what the hell is this about?” Holly said.

  Reacher shrugged again.

  “Ultimately, nothing,” he said. “They haven’t thought it through properly. That’s what makes them so dangerous. They’re competent, but they’re stupid.”

  THE TRUCK DRONED on another six hours. Another three hundred and fifty miles, according to Reacher’s guess. The inside temperature had cooled, but Reacher wasn’t trying to estimate their direction by the temperature anymore. The pellet holes in the roof had upset that calculation. He was relying on dead reckoning instead. A total of eight hundred miles from Chicago, he figured, and not in an easterly direction. That left a big spread of possibilities. He trawled clockwise around the map in his head. Could be in Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana. Could be in Texas, Oklahoma, the southwest corner of Kansas. Probably no farther west than that. Reacher’s mental map had brown shading there, showing the eastern slopes of the mountains, and the truck wasn’t laboring up any grades. Could be in Nebraska or South Dakota. Maybe he was going to pass right by Mount Rushmore, second time in his life. Could have kept on past Minneapolis, into North Dakota. Eight hundred miles from Chicago, anywhere along a giant arc drawn across the continent.

  THE LIGHT COMING in through the pellet holes had been gone for hours when the truck slowed and steered right. Up a ramp. Holly stirred and turned her head. Looked straight at Reacher. Questions in her eyes. Reacher shrugged back and waited. The truck paused and swung a right. Cruised down a straight road, then hung a left, a right, and continued on straight, slower. Reacher sat up and found his shirt. Shrugged himself into it. Holly sat up.

  “Another hideout,” she said. “This is a well-planned operation, Reacher.”

  This time it was a horse farm. The truck bumped down a long track and turned. Backed up. Reacher heard one of the guys getting out. His door slammed. The truck lurched backward into another building. Reacher heard the exhaust noise beat against the walls. Holly smelled horse smell. The engine died. The other two guys got out. Reacher heard the three of them grouping at the rear of the truck. Their key slid into the lo
ck. The door cracked open. The shotgun poked in through the gap. This time, not pointing upward. Pointing level.

  “Out,” Loder called. “The bitch first. On its own.”

  Holly froze. Then she shrugged at Reacher and slid across the mattresses. The door snapped wide open and two pairs of hands seized her and dragged her out. The driver moved into view, aiming the shotgun straight in at Reacher. His finger was tight on the trigger.

  “Do something, asshole,” he said. “Please, just give me a damn excuse.”

  Reacher stared at him. Waited five long minutes. Then the shotgun jabbed forward. A Glock appeared next to it. Loder gestured. Reacher moved slowly forward toward the two muzzles. Loder leaned in and snapped a handcuff onto his wrist. Looped the chain into the free half and locked it. Used the chain to drag him out of the truck by the arm. They were in a horse barn. It was a wooden structure. Much smaller than the cow barn at their previous location. Much older. It came from a different generation of agriculture. There were two rows of stalls flanking an aisle. The floor was some kind of cobbled stone. Green with moss.

  The central aisle was wide enough for horses, but not wide enough for the truck. It was backed just inside the door. Reacher saw a frame of sky around the rear of the vehicle. A big, dark sky. Could have been anywhere. He was led like a horse down the cobbled aisle. Loder was holding the chain. Stevie was walking sideways next to Reacher. His Glock was jammed high up against Reacher’s temple. The driver was following, with the shotgun pressed hard into Reacher’s kidney. It bumped with every step. They stopped at the end stall, farthest from the door. Holly was chained up in the space opposite. She was wearing a handcuff, right wrist, chain looped through the spare half into an iron ring bolted into the back wall of the stall.