by Lee Child
‘I’ll get some lab people to go take a look.’
‘It’s nearly dawn.’
‘All the better,’ Sorenson said. ‘Daylight always helps.’
‘No, I mean Karen Delfuenso’s kid will be waking up soon. Any news?’
‘The driver called me again. They dumped him. Delfuenso was still alive, the last he saw of her.’
‘How long ago was that?’
‘Long enough for the situation to have changed, I’m afraid.’
‘So I’m going to have to tell the kid.’
‘Just the facts. Don’t say anything more until we know for sure. And call her school principal. The kid won’t be fit to go today. And maybe you should keep the neighbour’s kid home too, for company. Does the neighbour work days?’
‘I’m pretty sure.’
‘Try to keep her home. Delfuenso’s kid is going to need a familiar face.’
‘Where are you now?’
‘I’m getting close. The driver is meeting me at a motel.’
‘Why would he do that?’
‘He says he’s an innocent passerby.’
‘Do you believe him?’
‘I’m not sure.’
By that point Sorenson had just passed the Shell station. She was turning right and left, right and left, endlessly south and east through the empty darkness, following the little blue accommodation boards. Her GPS showed the motel location about thirty miles ahead. She was about thirty minutes away, she thought. Her Crown Vic was doing OK across country. She was gunning it hard on the straightaways and then braking hard and hauling it like a land yacht through the turns. Like all Bureau cars it had the Police Interceptor suspension, which was better than stock. Not exactly a NASCAR prospect, but it was doing the job. Apart from the tyres, that was. They were shrieking and howling and complaining loudly. She was going to need a new set. Stony was going to be thrilled.
Reacher unlocked room five’s door and went inside and saw a standard motel arrangement. A queen bed on the left, a credenza opposite its foot, a closet in back in line with the credenza, and a bathroom in back in line with the bed. The walls were wood grain laminate a lot more orange than any natural tree, and the floor was brown carpet, and the bedspread was a colour halfway between the two. The room was no kind of an aesthetic triumph. That was for damn sure. But he didn’t care. He wasn’t planning on using it.
He switched on the bathroom light and left the bathroom door half open. He switched on the lamp on the far side night table. He pulled the curtains shut, all but an inch-wide crack. Then he stepped out to the cold again and locked up behind him.
He crossed the front lot and crossed the road and walked west into a frozen field, fifty yards, a hundred. He hunched down in his coat and turned around and squatted down and looked back. Room five looked exactly like it had a guy in it, just sitting there, just hanging out. Reacher had survived a long and difficult life by staying alert and being appropriately cautious. He wasn’t about to let the Scandinavian woman catch him unawares. He was going to hang back and stay out of sight until he was sure who she was, and who she had brought with her. Any kind of back-up or SWAT team, and he was out of there, never to return. If she was on her own, then maybe he would stroll over and introduce himself.
Or maybe he wouldn’t.
He watched the road, and waited.
THIRTY-FOUR
AFTER A LITTLE less than thirty minutes crouching in the cold Reacher saw headlights and blue and red strobes far away to his left, like an alien bubble rolling fast through the peaceful pre-dawn mist. About two miles away, he thought. Two minutes, at the speed it was doing. The headlights probed ahead and flicked up and down, and the strobes followed close behind. A single car, low and wide, all urgent and lonely. No back-up. No SWAT team.
So far so good.
The lights got brighter as the car got closer. Half a mile out he figured it was a Crown Victoria. A government car. A quarter of a mile out he figured it was dark blue. Two hundred yards out he figured it was the same car he had seen hours before, blasting west on the Interstate from Omaha. He fancied he could tell an individual car by its stance and its ride, like a fingerprint.
He watched as it braked hard and turned in under the porte cochère, counterclockwise, with the string of rooms behind it, like Alan King had done. He saw the reversing lights flash white as the transmission jammed into Park. He saw a woman get out.
FBI Special Agent Julia Sorenson, presumably. The Scandinavian. She looked the part. That was for sure. She was tall, with long blonde hair. She was wearing black shoes and black pants and a black jacket with a blue shirt under it. She stood for a second and eased her back. Then she leaned into the car and slung a black pear-shaped bag over her shoulder. She took a small wallet from her pocket. ID, presumably. She looped around the hood and headed for the office door.
She took a gun off her hip.
Reacher stared left into the darkness. He saw no following vehicles. A one-two punch would have been reasonable tactics. Obvious, even. Bait, and then back-up. But it wasn’t happening.
Yet.
The woman walked up the flagstone path. Fast, but not running. She pulled the lobby door. She went inside.
Sorenson saw a standard-issue rural motel lobby, with sheet vinyl on the floor and four awful wicker armchairs, and a breakfast buffet table with coffee flasks and paper cups. There was a waist-high reception counter with walk-around space on the left and none on the right. There was an office door behind the counter, with a fresh bullet hole in the wall high above it.
There was TV sound behind the office door, and a rim of light all around it. Sorenson stood in the middle of the floor and called, ‘Hello?’
Loud and clear and confident.
The office door opened and a short fat man came out. He had strands of thin hair plastered to his skull with product. He was wearing a red sweater vest. His eyes bounced between Sorenson’s ID and her gun, back and forth, back and forth.
She said, ‘Where’s the man with the broken nose?’
He said, ‘I need to know who’s going to pay for the damage to my wall.’
She said, ‘I don’t know who. Not me, anyway.’
‘Isn’t there a federal scheme? Like victim compensation or something?’
‘We’ll discuss that later,’ she said. ‘Where’s the man with the broken nose?’
‘Mr Skowron? He’s in room five. He’s very rude. He called me a socialist.’
‘I need to borrow your master key.’
‘I could have been killed.’
‘Did you see what happened?’
The guy shook his head. ‘I was in the back room, resting. I heard a gunshot and I called it in. It was all over by the time I opened the door.’
‘I need to borrow your master key,’ Sorenson said again.
The guy dug in a bulging pocket and came out with a brass item on an unmarked ring. Sorenson put her ID away and took it from him. She asked, ‘Who are your other guests?’
‘They’re here to fish. There are lakes nearby. But mostly they drink. They didn’t even wake up when the gun was fired.’
‘Go back in the office,’ Sorenson said. ‘I’ll tell you when it’s safe to come out.’
Still no activity to the left. No lights, no cars. No back-up. Reacher watched carefully, the lobby, then the road, the lobby, then the road, like a tennis umpire. He saw the woman come back out, through the door, on to the flagstone path. She still had her gun in her hand. She hadn’t shot the fat man. She was clearly a person of considerable patience. She walked between the lobby and her car, past the Coke machine, and she headed down the row of rooms, on the sidewalk lit up by the bulkhead lights. She glanced at the doors as she walked. One, two, three, four.
She stopped just before room five.
She looked in through the crack between the curtains, just briefly, a duck of her head out and back. Then again, much longer, a careful survey of the sliver of the room she could see. No feet on t
he end of the bed. He’s in the bathroom, she was thinking. Reacher checked left again. No lights in the north. No noise, no movement. He checked to his right too, just to be sure. The back-up could have looped around a square on the chequerboard. Which would have been smart tactics. But there were no lights in the south, either. No noise, no movement. The woman wasn’t using her phone. No communication. No coordination. They wouldn’t have left her exposed for so long.
She was alone.
No back-up, no SWAT team.
Reacher saw her knock on room five’s door. He saw her wait, and knock again, harder. He saw her put her ear against the crack.
He stood up and started walking towards her, across the frozen dirt. He saw her put a key in the lock and turn it. He saw her enter the room, her gun up and ready. Twenty seconds later she came back out again.
She stood on the sidewalk next to the lawn chairs, glancing left, glancing right, staring straight ahead. Her gun was still in her hand, but down by her side. Reacher crunched onward over the frozen stubble. He stepped out of the field and on to the road.
She heard him. Her face turned towards him, blindly locating the sound.
‘Hello,’ he said.
Her gun came up. A two-handed stance, feet braced. He saw her eyes lock on. He was looming up at her out of the dark. He said, ‘We spoke on the phone. I’m unarmed.’
The gun stayed where it was.
He crossed the road. He stepped into the motel’s front lot. The light from the dim bulkhead fixtures reached him.
The woman said, ‘Stop right there.’
He stopped right there.
The gun was a Glock 17. Black, boxy, with a dull polycarbonate sheen. Behind it her head was turned slightly to the side, as if quizzically. A strand of hair was across one eye. She was a lot better looking than Don McQueen. That was for damn sure.
She said, ‘Get down on the ground.’
He spread his fingers and held his hands out from his sides, his palms towards her. He said, ‘No need to get all excited. We’re on the same side here.’
‘I’ll shoot.’
‘No, you won’t.’
‘Why wouldn’t I?’
Reacher looked to his left. Her car was still all lit up under the porte cochère. She hadn’t killed the strobes. They were flashing red and blue from secret little mouse-fur mouldings on the rear parcel shelf. Further down the road there was nothing but darkness. In the other direction there was a new light on the horizon. Very far away. Not moving. Not a vehicle. Just a very faint orange glow, like a distant bonfire.
He said, ‘You won’t shoot because you don’t want to do the paperwork.’
She said nothing. ‘And it wouldn’t be righteous. I’m unarmed and I’m not offering an imminent threat. You’d lose your job. You’d go to jail.’
No response.
‘And you want to find Karen Delfuenso. You don’t have descriptions of the two guys. You don’t have the names they’re using. You don’t know the things they let slip. But I do. You need to keep me alive long enough to ask me questions, at least.’
The gun stayed where it was. But she stepped and shuffled to her left, turning all the way, keeping the front sight hard on him. She backed off twenty feet, until his path to room five’s door was covered but unobstructed. At first he thought she wanted him to go inside, but she said, ‘Sit down, in the lawn chair.’
He walked forward. The Glock’s muzzle tracked him all the way, from twenty feet. A confident markswoman. McQueen had missed from eight. He stopped next to the left-hand lawn chair. He turned around. He backed up, butt first. He sat down.
She said, ‘Lean back. Stick your legs out straight. Hang your arms over the sides.’
He complied, and ended up about as ready for instant action as his granddad’s granddad waking up from an afternoon nap. She was evidently a smart woman. A good improviser. The chair was cold against the backs of his thighs. White plastic, thoroughly chilled.
She stayed where she was, but she lowered the gun.
He was not what Sorenson had been expecting. Not exactly. He wasn’t a gorilla and he wasn’t like something out of a slasher movie. But she could see why he had been described that way. He was huge, for a start. He was one of the largest men she had ever seen outside the NFL. He was extremely tall, and extremely broad, and long-armed, and long-legged. The lawn chair was regular size, but it looked tiny under him. It was bent and crushed out of shape. His knuckles were nearly touching the ground. His neck was thick and his hands were the size of dinner plates. His clothes were creased and dirty. His hair was matted. His facial injury was awful. His nose was split and swollen and bruising had spread under his eyes.
A wild man. But not really. Underneath everything else he seemed strangely civilized. He had moved with a kind of considered grace, calm and contained. He had spoken the same way, thinking ahead whole paragraphs and essays in the split-second pauses between sentences. You won’t shoot because you don’t want to do the paperwork. Straight to the heart of the matter. Knowledgeable, and confident. His gaze was both wise and appealing, both friendly and bleak, both frank and utterly cynical. His focus was shifting fractionally in and out, his brows rising and falling a little, the shape of his mouth always changing, as if he was constantly thinking. As if there was a computer behind his eyes, running at full speed.
She raised her gun again.
She said, ‘I’m sorry, but I’m under orders to arrest you on sight and take you back to Nebraska.’
THIRTY-FIVE
SORENSON’S WORDS JUST hung there in the cold night air. I’m under orders to arrest you on sight and take you back to Nebraska. The big guy paused a beat, and then he smiled, politely, generously, as if pretending to be amused by a joke he had in fact heard many times before, and he said, ‘Well, best of luck with that.’
He didn’t move. He just stayed there in the shaky chair, leaning back, legs straight out, arms dangling.
Sorenson said, ‘I’m serious.’
He said, ‘They were very disorganized, weren’t they?’
She said, ‘Who were?’
‘The two guys. I expect you’ve got a fairly substantial forensic trail.’
‘Who are you?’
‘I mean, jacking a car is always a sign of desperation, isn’t it? You can’t rely on it. There might be no traffic. You might pick the wrong victim and get shot in the face.’
‘What’s your point?’
‘They told me their names. And I think they were their real names. They didn’t sound like prepared aliases. And I don’t think they were. Because nothing else about those guys seemed very prepared.’
‘What names did they give you?’
‘Alan King and Don McQueen.’
‘King and McQueen? Those sound totally made up.’
‘Exactly. If they really were made up, they’d have chosen better. And it was OK if I knew. I wasn’t supposed to survive.’
‘What’s your point?’ Sorenson asked again.
‘The one calling himself Alan King said he had a brother who had been in the army, name of Peter King. That might be a good place to start.’
‘With what?’
‘Tracing them.’
‘Who are you?’ Sorenson asked again.
‘Tell me about your boss.’
‘Why would I?’
‘He’s ambitious, right? He wants a pat on the head. He thinks an arrest before the sun comes up is going to look good. And he might be right. It might look good. But flexibility would be a much better tactic here.’
‘Are you negotiating with me?’
‘I’m just saying there’s very little point in rushing back to Nebraska when Karen Delfuenso was last seen heading in the opposite direction. Your boss will understand that eventually. Delayed gratification is a good thing. It’s what built the middle class.’
‘You’re resisting arrest, technically. If I shot you now, it would be righteous.’
‘So go ahead. What do you think I
want, to live for ever?’
She didn’t reply.
He said, ‘I’ll tell you my name.’
She said, ‘I already know your name. You signed the motel register. Your name is Skowron.’
He said, ‘You see, that’s a convincing alias. You bought right into it. Moose Skowron, hit .309 for the Yankees in 1960, and .375 in the post-season.’
‘Your name is not Skowron?’
‘Hardly. I couldn’t hit Major League pitching. But you should pay attention to 1960. The World Series in particular. The Yankees were coming off their tenth pennant in twelve years, they outscored the Pirates 55 to 27, they outhit them .338 to .256, they hit ten home runs against four, they got two complete-game shutouts from Whitey Ford, and still they lost.’
‘What has baseball to do with anything?’
‘It’s an illustration. It’s a metaphor. It always is. I’m saying it’s always possible to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. That’s what you would be doing if you took me back to Nebraska.’
Sorenson was quiet for a second, and then she lowered her gun.
Reacher saw the gun go down, slowly but surely, and he thought: It’s in the bag. Nearly. Two minutes and twenty seconds of talking. A delay and a frustration for sure, but a lot faster than shouting or yelling or fighting. A lot faster, and also a lot safer. Bad as McQueen’s .22 Long Rifles would have been, Sorenson’s nine-millimetre Parabellums would be worse. Much worse. He said, ‘My name is Reacher. First name Jack. No middle name. I used to be a cop in the army.’
Sorenson asked, ‘And what are you now?’
‘Unemployed.’
‘Where do you live?’
‘Nowhere.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘It means what it says. I move from place to place.’
‘Why?’
‘Why not?’
‘And you really were hitching rides?’
‘I really was.’
‘Why are you going to Virginia?’
‘Personal reasons.’
‘Not a good enough answer.’
‘It’s all I can give you.’
‘I need more. I’m way out on a limb here.’
