by Lee Child
Do they think I’m a terrorist?
They know you were driving the car for King and McQueen.
They got out of the car together and stood for a moment in the cold. The driver stretched with his arms straight and his hands held low and the passenger stretched with his elbows bent high and his fists near his ears. Reacher figured they would have Glocks in shoulder holsters and cuffs on their belts. And the Patriot Act and unlimited authority and all kinds of national security bullshit to back them up.
They glanced left, glanced right, and located the diner door.
Reacher took a last sip of his coffee and trapped two dollar bills under his mug. Then he slid out of his booth and stepped into the restroom corridor. He heard the front door open and he heard two pairs of shoes on the tile. He heard the hostess take two menus out of a slot. He walked down the corridor and pushed through the door and stepped out to the back lot.
He crossed the gap between buildings and tucked in behind the motel and tracked along its rear wall. He stopped at the only bathroom window with steam on it. He tapped on the glass and waited. The window opened a crack and he heard a hairdryer shut off. Sorenson’s voice said, ‘Reacher?’
He asked, ‘Are you decent?’
She said, ‘Relatively.’
He stepped up and looked in through the crack. She had a towel tucked tight around her. The top edge was up under her arms. The bottom edge was considerably north of her knees. Her hair was wet on one side of her parting, and dry on the other. Her skin was pale pink from the steam.
She looked pretty good.
He said, ‘Your Kansas City pals are in the diner.’
She said, ‘They’re not my pals.’
‘Did your tech people call yet?’
‘No.’
‘What’s keeping them?’
‘It’s probably a complicated procedure.’
‘I hope they’re good enough.’
‘Good enough for what?’
‘To tell me what I want to know.’
‘That will depend on what you want to know, won’t it?’
‘I’ll wait in the car,’ he said. ‘It’s behind a bar, two buildings along.’
She said, ‘OK.’
The window closed and he heard the click of the latch, and the roar of the hairdryer starting up again. He walked on north, through the back lot, past trash bins, past a pile of discarded mattresses, past an empty rotting carton that according to the printing on the outside had once held two thousand foam cups. He crossed the open no-man’s-land and slipped behind the next building, which seemed to be another cocktail lounge. He stepped over an empty bottle of no-name champagne.
And stopped.
Dead ahead of him and thirty yards away was Goodman’s car, behind the bar, exactly where he had left it. But stopped tight behind it in a perfect T was another car. Facing away. A sand-coloured Ford Crown Victoria. A government car for sure, but not FBI. Not the same as Sorenson’s car, or Dawson and Mitchell’s. It had different antennas on the trunk lid, and official U.S. licence plates. Its motor was running. White exhaust was pooling around its pipes.
It was blocking Goodman’s car.
Deliberately or inadvertently, Reacher wasn’t sure.
There was one man in it, behind the wheel. Reacher could see the back of the guy’s head. He had sandy hair, the exact same colour as his car. He was wearing a sweater. He was on the phone.
A sweater meant no shoulder holster. No shoulder holster meant no gun. No gun meant the guy wasn’t a plain clothes marshal or any other kind of an operational agent. Not the Justice Department, or the DEA or the ATF or the DIA or any of the many other three-letter agencies.
Ultimately the sweater meant the guy was no threat at all.
A bureaucrat, probably.
Clothes maketh the man.
Reacher walked on and stopped right next to the guy’s window and knocked on the glass. The guy startled and peered up and out with watery blue eyes. He fumbled for his button. The window came down.
Reacher said, ‘Move your car, pal. You’re blocking me in.’
The guy took his phone away from his ear and said, ‘Who are you?’
Reacher said, ‘I’m the sheriff.’
‘No you’re not. I met the sheriff last night. And he’s dead, anyway. He died this morning. So they say.’
‘I’m the new sheriff. I got promoted.’
‘What’s your name?’
‘What’s yours?’
The guy looked momentarily taken aback, as if suddenly conscious of a grievous etiquette offence. He said, ‘I’m Lester Lester, with the State Department.’
Reacher said, ‘Your parents were very economical people, weren’t they?’
‘Family tradition.’
‘Anyway, Lester, I need to get going now.’
The guy made no move.
Reacher said, ‘Two choices, Lester. Roll forward or backward.’
The guy did neither thing. Reacher saw the wheels turning in his head. A slow process. But the guy got there in the end. He stared. A big man. A broken nose. He said very loudly, ‘You’re the person we’re looking for. Aren’t you?’
‘No point asking me. I have no idea who you’re looking for.’
‘Get in the car.’
‘Why?’
‘I need to take you into custody.’
‘Are you kidding?’
‘You think the security of our nation is a joke?’
‘I think involving people like you in it is.’
Very loudly.
Reacher was suddenly aware of the phone, still in the guy’s hand.
Who was he on the phone to?
The diner?
Maybe the guy wasn’t so dumb after all.
FIFTY-TWO
REACHER WRENCHED THE car door open and tore the phone out of the guy’s hand and hurled it high in the air, right over the roof of the bar. Then he grabbed the guy by the scruff of his sweater and hauled him out of his seat and half dragged and half ran him back the way he had come, ten feet, twenty, and then he spun him around like a discus thrower and launched him towards the back wall of the cocktail lounge. Then he sprinted back and jammed himself into the guy’s seat and slammed the lever into gear and stamped on the gas. Gravel sprayed all over the place and the car shot forward and he stamped on the brake and more or less fell out the door and danced around the trunk of Goodman’s car to the driver’s door. He blipped the fob and tore the door open and started up and backed away from the back wall of the bar and swung the wheel hard.
The sand-coloured Crown Vic was still moving. He had left it in gear. He overtook it and turned tight around its hood and its slow roll caught him with a soft low-speed impact, its front end against his rear quarter. He fishtailed free and drove on through the gap between the bar and the next establishment in line. He glanced left and saw the sandy-haired guy limping as fast as he could after something, either Goodman’s car or his own, he wasn’t sure. After that last glimpse he looked away from the guy and focused forward and drove through the front lot and bounced over the camber of the main drag and squeezed through a gap into the back lots on the other side of the road.
Then he slowed down and took a breath and got straightened up and edged forward until he was lined up with the next gap south and had a distant view of the motel and the diner together.
No sign of Sorenson.
No action at the diner.
The blue Crown Vic was still parked. Still quiet. No one was rushing towards it. The diner door stayed resolutely closed. There was no commotion visible through the windows.
Reacher watched for a whole minute, until he was convinced.
The State Department guy had not been on the phone to the diner.
So then he watched the motel, and three minutes later Sorenson’s room door opened and she stepped out. She was in the same pant suit with the new shirt under it. She had her old shirt balled up in the new shirt’s wrapper. She was taking her laundry home.
A different approach. Because she had a home.
She stood for a second on the walkway outside her room, glancing left and right, head high, like a woman looking for a taxicab from a city sidewalk. Then she set off north towards the bar where he had said the car was parked. He turned the wheel and eased out through the gap and crunched through the front lot and bumped over the road again and swooped around and braked to a stop right next to her. He leaned over and opened her door and she slid into her seat like it was a manoeuvre they had rehearsed every day of their lives.
He said, ‘I had to move. I had a little trouble with your Mr Lester from the State Department.’
She said, ‘Mr Lester isn’t mine.’
Then he realized he had more trouble than he had thought. Far back in the mirror he saw Dawson and Mitchell burst out the diner door and run out into the parking lot. Both had phones to their ears. Their free hands were pumping and their jackets were flapping open. So Lester had in fact called the diner. But not deliberately. Not directly. In a very circuitous way instead. Probably he had been on the line with his people in Foggy Bottom, and his shouted You’re the person we’re looking for and the abrupt termination of the call had gotten some bright guy thinking, and that bright guy had immediately called the Hoover Building, and the Hoover Building had called Kansas City, and Kansas City had called Dawson and Mitchell on their cells, and were in fact probably still in the process of telling them The guy you’re looking for is currently kicking Lester Lester’s ass about twenty yards from you.
They saw him. Or they saw Sorenson. They froze in place and pointed and then ran for their car.
Reacher hit the gas and the sudden acceleration dumped Sorenson back in the passenger seat and the car slewed and fishtailed over the gravel. Reacher fought the wheel and bumped down over the kerb at an angle and took off north up the road. He craned his neck and watched in the mirror and saw the blue Bureau car jam backward and turn and come after him.
‘Hold on,’ he said. ‘I’m a lousy driver.’
‘Now you tell me,’ Sorenson said. She scrabbled around and clipped her seat belt and pulled it tight around her. Reacher kept his foot down hard. A big V-8, police spec, plenty of power and torque. Not bad at all. Except that Dawson and Mitchell had the exact same car. Same V-8, same spec, same power and torque. And maybe less weight, without the light bar on the roof and the push bars front and rear. Better aerodynamics, certainly.
Reacher knew the Interstate was fifty miles ahead, and he knew there wasn’t much of anything else before that. There were some turns left and right, and there were some small stands of trees here and there, and there were occasional old wooden farm buildings standing all rotted and abandoned and unexplained in the fields. Apart from that there was just winter dirt, and it was all very flat. No dips, no valleys. No hills, no ridges.
Places to run.
No place to hide.
The road surface was bad, and the road bed had been heaved up and down by years of winter frosts and summer droughts. Acceptable at normal speeds, but dangerous going fast. Goodman’s cruiser was riding like a yacht on an ocean swell. The engine was howling and the wheel was writhing in Reacher’s hands. Dawson and Mitchell were maybe four hundred yards back, but they were gaining. Reacher jammed his foot down harder. Pedal to the metal. A hundred miles an hour.
Places to run.
No place to hide.
Puller, he thought.
He said, ‘Do you know how to work the radio?’
Sorenson said, ‘I could try.’
‘Find out where Puller is with his radar gun. Tell him he’s got a speeder heading north. A dark blue sedan.’
Reacher drove on. No steering involved. The road was dead straight. The car went weightless over dips and hollows. Never airborne, but not far from it. Sorenson took the microphone out of its clip and fiddled with switches. She cleared her throat and said, ‘Deputy Puller, what is your location?’
Puller’s voice came back over static: ‘Who is that?’
‘This is Agent Sorenson with the FBI. Where are you now?’
‘A mile shy of the county line, ma’am.’
‘North, south, east or west?’
‘North.’
‘OK, good. You have a speeder coming north towards you. A dark blue Ford Crown Victoria. Please stop the driver and caution him against his reckless and unsafe behaviour.’
‘Will do, ma’am.’
‘Out,’ Sorenson said. She hung up the microphone. She said, ‘How do you stop a car doing a hundred miles an hour? We’ll probably get Puller killed.’
‘In which case we’ll be helping the gene pool.’ Reacher hurtled onward. Dawson and Mitchell were now three hundred yards back. About six seconds, at a hundred miles an hour. But they were still gaining. Reacher scanned far ahead. Straight road, flat dirt, low horizon. No sign of Puller.
He asked, ‘Did your tech team call?’
Sorenson said, ‘Not yet. What’s on your mind?’
‘Motive,’ Reacher said. ‘Who snatches a dead woman’s kid? Especially a kid who saw nothing and knows nothing?’
‘How can the autopsy answer that question?’
‘It might not,’ Reacher said. ‘That’s what’s on my mind.’ His foot was hard on the boards. It was crushing the pedal. But the car was tapped out. It wouldn’t go any faster. A hundred was as good as it got. They passed a turn to the left. Another, on the right. Paved, but not much more than tracks between fields.
‘There,’ Sorenson said.
Reacher saw a dot on the horizon. A tiny smudge, vaguely black and white and gold against the brown. Puller’s cruiser, waiting on the shoulder. Maybe a mile away. Thirty-six seconds. No more turns before it. Far away to the right was a copse of trees. Faraway to the left was an old barn, swaybacked and grey with age.
Thirty seconds.
Twenty seconds.
‘Hold tight,’ Reacher said.
Fifteen seconds.
He clamped the wheel tight in his hands and came off the gas and stamped on the brakes. The front end dipped radically and he and Sorenson were thrown forward and he fought to keep the car straight. Dawson and Mitchell didn’t slow down. They kept on coming. Puller’s car was a hundred yards ahead. Then fifty. Then thirty. Then Reacher swung the wheel hard and drove off the road into the dirt on the right and Dawson and Mitchell were launched ahead of him like a slingshot. Reacher hugged a tight bouncing circle in the dirt and saw Dawson and Mitchell passing Puller at about seventy and Puller lighting up his strobes and his siren and pulling out behind them. Reacher continued the circular turn and thumped back up on the road and headed south, fast, back the way he had come, all the way to the turn he had seen on the left, which was now on the right. He braked hard and took it and pattered over the lumpy surface and turned in on a rutted track and came to a dead stop behind the old swaybacked barn. He got out and ran to the far corner of the ramshackle structure and peered out north.
Nothing in the distance. No sign of Dawson and Mitchell. Not yet. They were still out of sight, more than a mile to the north. He counted out time and space in his head. Right then they would be slowing, stopping, turning around, hassling with Puller, showing ID, arguing, yelling, getting frustrated.
Getting delayed.
Then they would be coming back south, as fast as they could. They would have seen his tight turn on the dirt, and they would be planning on chasing him all the way back to town.
Three minutes, he figured.
Maybe three minutes and ten seconds.
He waited.
And then he saw them, right on time, far away on the main drag, hustling left to right, north to south, doing about a hundred again. An impressive sight. The big stately sedan was really picking up its skirts. Its paint was winking in the watery sun. It was planted firmly on the blacktop, squatting at the rear, straddling the centre line. Reacher ran back past Goodman’s car and peered out from the barn’s other corner. He got a rear view of the blue Crown Vic blasting
south. After ten seconds it was a tiny dot. After twenty seconds it was gone altogether.
He breathed out and walked back to the car. He got back in and closed the door. He sat slumped in the seat with his hands on his knees.
Silence. Nothing but the faithful idle of the engine, and clicks and ticks as stressed components cooled back down.
Sorenson said, ‘You’re not such a terrible driver.’
He said, ‘Thank you.’
‘What now?’
‘We wait.’
‘Where?’
‘I guess this place is as good as any.’
She unzipped her black leather bag and took out Goodman’s phone. She clipped it in its dashboard cradle. It chimed once to tell them it was charging.
Then it started to ring.
She leaned over and checked the window.
‘My tech team,’ she said.
FIFTY-THREE
SORENSON TOUCHED THE green button and Reacher heard telephone sounds over the speakers again, weirdly clear and detailed, like before. Sorenson said, ‘You have something for me?’
A man’s voice said, ‘Yeah, we have some preliminary results.’
The voice was tired, and a little breathless. Reacher thought the guy was walking and talking at the same time. Probably stumbling out to the fresh air and the bright sunlight, after long and unpleasant hours in a white-tiled basement room. Breathing deep, blinking, yawning and stretching. Reacher could picture the scene. A pair of institutional doors, a short flight of concrete steps, a parking lot. Maybe planters and benches. Back in the day the guy would have been pausing at that point, to light a welcome cigarette.
Sorenson said, ‘Go ahead.’
The guy said, ‘You want me to be honest?’
‘You usually are.’
‘Then I can’t promise you the incineration was post mortem. It might have been. Or it might not have been. There’s something that might have been damage to what might have been a rib. If I squint a bit I could see it as a gunshot wound to the chest. Which might have been enough. It’s in what would have been the general area of the heart. But I wouldn’t say so in court. The other side would laugh me out of the room. There’s far too much heat damage for conclusions about external injuries.’
