by Lee Child
“Sir, I wish you hadn’t used those words.”
“At ease, Morgan. I was speaking negatively. I was telling you what I wasn’t going to do.”
“No laughing matter.”
“I’m not laughing.”
“I need to see those vehicle documents, sir.”
“You’re overstepping your authority.”
“Sir, I need to see them real quick.”
“You got a JAG lawyer on post?”
“Negative, sir.”
“You happy to make this decision on your own?”
Morgan didn’t answer. He stepped close to the fender again and a tanker truck blew by. It had an orange hazardous chemicals diamond on the back and a stainless-steel body polished so bright that Reacher saw himself reflected in it like a funhouse mirror. Then its slipstream died away and Morgan stepped back into position and said, “Sir, I need you to show me those documents. Just wave them at me, if you like. To prove to me you can put your hands on them.”
Reacher shrugged and leaned over and opened the glove box lid. Dug through ballpoint pens and envelopes of facial tissues and other miscellaneous junk and found a small plastic wallet. The wallet was black and was printed with a silver shape resembling a steering wheel. It was the kind of cheap thing found for sale at gas stations and car washes, alongside air fresheners shaped like conifer trees and ball compasses that attached to windshields with suction cups. The plastic was stiff and brittle with age and the black color had leached to a dusty gray.
Reacher opened the wallet, out of Morgan’s sight. On the left behind a plastic window was a current insurance certificate. On the right, a current registration.
Both were made out to David Robert Vaughan, of Hope, Colorado.
Reacher kept the wallet open with his thumb and waved it in Morgan’s direction, long enough for the documents to register, short enough for neither of them to be read.
Morgan said, “Sir, thank you.”
Reacher put the wallet back in the glove box and slammed the lid.
Morgan said, “Sir, now it’s time to be moving along.”
Which gave Reacher another problem. If he moved forward, he would be in Despair township. If he U-turned, Morgan would wonder why he had suddenly gotten cold feet and abandoned Hope as a destination, and would be tempted to call in the plate.
Which was the greater danger?
Morgan, easily. A contest between the Despair PD and a combat MP unit was no kind of a contest at all. So Reacher put the truck in gear and turned the wheel.
“Have a great day, Corporal,” he said, and hit the gas. A yard later he passed the little green sign and temporarily increased Despair’s population by one, all the way up to 2692.
22
The sturdy two-lane continued basically straight for five miles to the recycling plant’s vehicle gate. An unsignposted left fork speared off into the brush and formed the western end of Despair’s only through road. Reacher paused for an approaching semi loaded with bright steel bars and then waited again for a container truck heading for Canada. Then he made the left and bounced up onto the uneven surface and drove on and saw all the same stuff he had seen the day before, but in reverse order. The plant’s long end wall, welded metal, bright white paint, the sparks and the smoke coming from the activity inside, the moving cranes. He stretched a long arm across the cab and dropped the passenger window and heard the noise of clanging hammers and smelled the acrid odors of chemical compounds.
He got to the acres of parking near the personnel gate and saw the clockwise security Tahoe bouncing across the scrub in the distance far to his right. Its counterclockwise partner was right there in the lot, black tinted windows, coming on slow, looking to cross the road at a right angle. Reacher sped up and the Tahoe slowed down and crossed right behind him. Reacher saw it slide past, huge in his mirror. He drove on and then the plant was behind him and downtown Despair was looming up three miles ahead on the right. The low brick cubes, sullen in the afternoon light. The road was clear. It rose and fell and meandered gently left and right, avoiding any geological formation larger than a refrigerator. Cheap engineering, never graded or straightened since its origin as a cart track.
A mile ahead, a cop car pulled out of a side street.
It was unmistakable. A Crown Vic, white and gold, black push bars on the front, a light bar on the roof, antennas on the trunk lid. It nosed out and paused a beat and turned left.
West.
Straight toward Reacher.
Reacher checked his speed. He was doing fifty, which was all that was comfortable. He had no idea of the local limit. He dropped to forty-five, and cruised on. The cop was less than a mile away, coming on fast. Closing speed, more than a hundred miles an hour. Time to contact, approximately thirty-five seconds.
Reacher cruised on.
The sun was behind him, and therefore in the cop’s eyes, which was a good thing. The old Chevy truck had a plain untinted windshield, which was a bad thing. Ten seconds before contact Reacher took his left hand off the wheel and put it against his forehead, like he was massaging his temple against a headache. He kept his speed steady and stared straight ahead.
The cop car blew past.
Reacher put his hand back on the wheel and checked his mirror.
The cop was braking hard.
Reacher kept one eye on the mirror and ran a fast calculation. He had maybe fifteen miles to go before the Hope town line and the arthritic old Chevy would top out at about seventy, max, which gave him a thirteen-minute trip. The Crown Vic was not a fantastically powerful car but the Police Interceptor option pack gave it a low axle ratio for fast acceleration and twin exhausts for better breathing. It would do ninety, comfortably. Therefore it would overhaul him within three minutes, just about level with the abandoned motor court, at the start of twelve whole miles of empty road.
Not good.
Behind him the Crown Vic was pulling through a fast U-turn.
Why?
Despair was a company town but its road had to be a public thoroughfare. Any Hope resident would use it to head home off the Interstate. Some Kansas residents would do the same. Unfamiliar vehicles in Despair could not possibly be rarities.
Reacher checked the mirror again. The Crown Vic was accelerating after him. Nose high, tail squatting low.
Maybe the security guy in the counterclockwise Tahoe had called it in. Maybe he had seen Reacher’s face and recognized it. Maybe the deputies from the family restaurant took turns as the security drivers.
Reacher drove on. He hit the first downtown block.
Ten blocks ahead, a second Crown Vic pulled out.
And stopped, dead across the road.
Reacher braked hard and hauled on the wheel and pulled a fast right into the checkerboard of downtown streets. A desperation move. He was the worst guy in the world to win a car chase. He wasn’t a great driver. He had taken the evasive-driving course at Fort Rucker during the MP Officers’ Basic School and had impressed nobody. He had scraped a passing grade, mostly out of charity. A year later the school had moved to Fort Leonard Wood and the obstacle course had gotten harder and he knew he would have failed it. Time and chance. Sometimes it helps a person.
Sometimes it leaves a person unprepared.
He hit three four-way stops in succession and turned left, right, left without pausing or thinking. The streets were boxed in tight by dour brick buildings but his sense of direction was better than his driving and he knew he was heading east again. Downtown traffic was light. He got held up by a woman driving slow in an old Pontiac but the blocks were short and he solved his problem by turning right and left again and bypassing her one block over.
The chase car didn’t show behind him. Statistics were on his side. He figured the downtown area was about twelve blocks square, which meant there were about 288 distinct lengths of road between opportunities to turn off, which meant that if he kept moving, the chances of direct confrontation were pretty low.
Bu
t the chances of ever getting out of the maze were pretty low, too. As long as the second cop was blocking Main Street at its eastern end, then Hope was unavailable as a destination. And presumably the metal plant Tahoes were on duty to the west. And presumably Despair was full of helpful citizens with four-wheel-drive SUVs that would be a lot quicker over open ground than Vaughan’s ancient Chevy. They could get up a regular posse.
Reacher turned a random left, just to keep moving. The chase car flashed through the intersection, dead ahead. It moved left to right and disappeared. Reacher turned left on the same street and saw it in his mirror, moving away from him. Now he was heading west. His gas tank was more than a quarter full. He turned right at the next four-way and headed north two blocks to Main Street. He turned east there and took a look ahead.
The second Crown Vic was still parked across the road, blocking both lanes just beyond the dry goods store. Its light bar was flashing red, as a warning to oncoming traffic. It was nearly eighteen feet long. One of the last of America’s full-sized sedans. A big car, but at one end it was leaving a gap of about four feet between the front of its hood and the curb, and about three feet between its trunk and the curb at the other.
No good. Vaughan’s Chevy was close to six feet wide.
Back at Fort Rucker the evasive driving aces had a mantra: Keep death off the road: Drive on the sidewalk. Which Reacher could do. He could get past the cop with two wheels up on the curb. But then what? He would be faced with a twelve-mile high-speed chase, in a low-speed vehicle.
No good.
He turned right again and headed back to the downtown maze. Saw the first Crown Vic flash past again, this time hunting east to west, three blocks away. He turned left and headed away from it. He slowed and started looking for used-car lots. In the movies, you parked at the end of a line of similar vehicles and the cops blew past without noticing.
He found no used-car lots.
In fact he found nothing much at all. Certainly nothing useful. He saw the police station twice, and the grocery store and the barber shop and the bar and the rooming house and the faded old hotel that he had seen before, on his walk down to the restaurant he had been thrown out of. He saw a storefront church. Some kind of a strange fringe denomination, something about the end times. The only church in town, Vaughan had said, where the town’s feudal boss was the lay preacher. It was an ugly one-story building, built from brick, with a squat steeple piled on top to make it taller than the neighboring buildings. The steeple had a copper lightning rod on it and the grounding strap that ran down to the street had weathered to a bright verdigris green. It was the most colorful thing on display in Despair, a vivid vertical slash among the dullness.
He drove on. He looked, but he saw nothing else of significance. He would have liked a tire bay, maybe, where he could get the old Chevy up on a hoist and out of sight. He could have hidden out and gotten Vaughan’s bad geometry fixed, all at the same time.
He found no tire bays.
He drove on, making random turns left and right. He saw the first Crown Vic three more times in the next three minutes, twice ahead of him and once behind him in his mirrors. The fourth time he saw it was a minute later. He paused at a four-way and it came up at the exact same moment and paused in the mouth of the road directly to his right. Reacher and the cop were at right angles to each other, nose to nose, ten feet apart, immobile. The cop was the same guy who had arrested him. Big, dark, wide. Tan jacket. He looked over and smiled. Gestured Go ahead like he was yielding, as if he had been second to the line.
Reacher was a lousy driver, but he wasn’t stupid. No way was he going to let the cop get behind him, heading in the same direction. He jammed the old Chevy into reverse and backed away. The cop darted forward, turning, aiming to follow. Reacher waited until the guy was halfway through the maneuver and jammed the stick back into Drive and snaked past him, close, flank to flank. Then he hung a left and a right and a left again until he was sure he was clear.
Then he drove on, endlessly. He concluded that his random turns weren’t helping him. He was as likely to turn into trouble as away from it. So mostly he stayed straight, until he ran out of street. Then he would turn. He ended up driving in wide concentric circles, slow enough to be safe, fast enough that he could kick the speed up if necessary without the weak old motor bogging down.
He passed the church and the bar and the grocery and the faded old hotel for the third time each. Then the rooming house. Its door slid behind his shoulder and opened. In the corner of his eye he saw a guy step out.
A young guy.
A big guy.
Tall, and blond, and heavy. An athlete. Blue eyes and a buzz cut and a dark tan. Jeans and a white T-shirt under a gray V-neck sweater.
Reacher stamped on the brake and turned his head. But the guy was gone, moving fast, around the corner. Reacher shoved the stick into Reverse and backed up. A horn blared and an old SUV swerved. Reacher didn’t stop. He entered the four-way going backward and stared down the side street.
No guy. Just empty sidewalk. In his mirror Reacher saw the chase car three blocks west. He shoved the stick back into Drive and took off forward. Turned left, turned right, drove more wide aimless circles.
He didn’t see the young man again.
But he saw the cop twice more. The guy was nosing around through distant intersections like he had all the time in the world. Which he did. Two-thirty in the afternoon, half the population hard at work at the plant, the other half baking pies or slumped in armchairs watching daytime TV, the lone road bottlenecked at both ends of town. The cop was just amusing himself. He had Reacher trapped, and he knew it.
And Reacher knew it, too.
No way out.
Time to stand and fight.
23
Some jerk instructor at the Fort Rucker MP School had once trotted out the tired old cliché to assume makes an ass out of you and me. He had demonstrated at the classroom chalkboard, dividing the word into ass, u, and me. On the whole Reacher had agreed with him, even if the guy was a jerk. But sometimes assumptions just had to be made, and right then Reacher chose to assume that however half-baked the Despair cops might be, they wouldn’t risk shooting with bystanders in the line of fire. So he pulled to the curb outside the family restaurant and got out of Vaughan’s truck and took up a position leaning on one of the restaurant’s floor-to-ceiling plate glass windows.
Behind him, the same waitress was on duty. She had nine customers eating late lunches. A trio, a couple, four singletons, equally distributed around the room.
Collateral damage, just waiting to happen.
The window glass was cold on Reacher’s shoulders. He could feel it through his shirt. The sun was still out but it was low in the sky and the streets were in shadow. There was a breeze. Small eddies of grit blew here and there on the sidewalk. Reacher unbuttoned his cuffs and folded them up on his forearms. He arched his back against the cramp he had gotten from sitting in the Chevy’s undersized cab for so long. He flexed his hands and rolled his head in small circles to loosen his neck.
Then he waited.
The cop showed up two minutes and forty seconds later. The Crown Vic came in from the west and stopped two intersections away and paused, like the guy was having trouble processing the information visible right in front of him. The truck, parked. The suspect, just standing there. Then the car leapt forward and came through the four-ways and pulled in tight behind the Chevy, its front fender eight feet from where Reacher was waiting. The cop left the engine running and opened his door and slid out into the roadway. Déjà vu all over again. Big guy, white, maybe forty, black hair, wide neck. Tan jacket, brown pants, the groove in his forehead from his hat. He took his Glock off his belt and held it straight out two-handed and put his spread thighs against the opposite fender and stared at Reacher across the width of the hood.
Sound tactics, except for the innocents behind the glass.
The cop called out, “Freeze.”
�
��I’m not going anywhere,” Reacher said. “Yet.”
“Get in the car.”
“Make me.”
“I’ll shoot.”
“You won’t.”
The guy went blank for a beat and then shifted his focus beyond Reacher’s face to the scene inside the restaurant. Reacher was absolutely certain that the Despair PD had no Officer Involved Shooting investigative team, or even any kind of Officer Involved Shooting protocol, so the guy’s hesitation was down to pure common sense. Or maybe the guy had relatives who liked to lunch late.
“Get in the car,” the guy said again.
Reacher said, “I’ll take a pass on that.” He stayed relaxed, leaning back, unthreatening.
“I’ll shoot,” the cop said again.
“You can’t. You’re going to need backup.”
The cop paused again. Then he shuffled to the left, back toward the driver’s door. He kept his eyes and the gun tight on Reacher and fumbled one-handed through the car window and grabbed up his Motorola microphone and pulled it all the way out until its cord went tight. He brought it to his mouth and clicked the button. Said, “Bro, the restaurant, right now.” He clicked off again and tossed the microphone back on the seat and put both hands back on the gun and shuffled back to the fender.
And the clock started ticking.
One guy would be easy.
Two might be harder.
The second guy had to move, but Reacher couldn’t afford for him to arrive.
No sound, except the idling cruiser and the distant clash of plates