“What’s your name?” he asked.
She glanced to her right. “Anne.”
Reacher nodded again. Whatever her name was, it wasn’t Anne. Anne was probably a sister’s name. Or a best friend’s. Or a cousin’s. Generally people liked to stay close to home with phony names.
The girl who wasn’t called Anne asked, “Wereyou unfairly accused?”
Reacher shook his head. “A vagrant is exactly what I am.”
“Why did you go there?”
“I liked the name. Why didyou go there?”
She didn’t answer.
He said, “Anyway, it wasn’t much of a place.”
“How much of it did you see?”
“Most of it, the second time.”
“You went back?”
“I took a good look around, from a distance.”
“And?”
“It still wasn’t much of a place.”
The girl went quiet. Reacher saw her weighing her next question. How to ask it. Whether to ask it. She put her head on one side and looked beyond him.
“Did you see any people?” she asked.
“Lots of people,” Reacher said.
“Did you see the airplane?”
“I heard one.”
“It belongs to the guy with the big house. Every night he takes off at seven and comes back at two o’clock in the morning.”
Reacher asked, “How long were you there?”
“One day.”
“So how do you know the plane flies every night?”
She didn’t answer.
“Maybe someone told you,” Reacher said.
No reply.
Reacher said, “No law against joyriding.”
“People don’t joyride at night. There’s nothing to see.”
“Good point.”
The girl was quiet for another minute, and then she asked, “Were you in a cell?”
“Couple of hours.”
“Anyone else in there?”
“No.”
“When you went back, what people did you see?”
Reacher said, “Why don’t you just show me his picture?”
“Whose picture?”
“Your boyfriend’s.”
“Why would I do that?”
“Your boyfriend is missing. As in, you can’t find him. That was Officer Vaughan’s impression, anyway.”
“You trust cops?”
“Some of them.”
“I don’t have a picture.”
“You’ve got a big bag. Probably all kinds of things in there. Maybe a few pictures.”
She said, “Show me your wallet.”
“I don’t have a wallet.”
“Everyone has a wallet.”
“Not me.”
“Prove it.”
“I can’t prove a negative.”
“Empty your pockets.”
Reacher nodded. He understood.The boyfriend is some kind of a fugitive. She asked about my job. She needs to know I’m not an investigator. An investigator would have compromising ID in his wallet. He lifted his butt off the bench and dug out his cash, his old passport, his ATM card, his motel key. His toothbrush was in his room, assembled, standing upright in a plastic glass next to the sink. The girl looked at his stuff and said, “Thanks.”
He said, “Now show me his picture.”
“He’s not my boyfriend.”
“Isn’t he?”
“He’s my husband.”
“You’re young, to be married.”
“We’re in love.”
“You’re not wearing a ring.”
Her left hand was on the table. She withdrew it quickly, into her lap. But there had been no ring on her finger, and no tan line.
“It was kind of sudden,” she said. “Kind of hurried. We figured we’d get rings later.”
“Isn’t it a part of the ceremony?”
“No,” she said. “That’s a myth. I’m not pregnant either, just in case that’s what you’re thinking.”
“Not for a minute.”
“Good.”
“Show me the picture.”
She hauled the gray messenger bag into her lap and rooted around for a moment and came out with a fat leather wallet. There was a billfold part straining against a little strap, and a change-purse part. There was a plastic window on the outside with a California driver’s license behind it, with her picture on it. She unpopped the little strap and opened the billfold and riffled through a concertina of plastic photograph windows. Slid a slim fingertip into one of them and eased a snapshot out. She passed it across the table. It had been cut down out of a standard six-by-four one-hour print. The edges were not entirely straight. It showed the girl standing on a street with golden light and palm trees and a row of neat boutiques behind her. She was smiling widely, vibrant with love and joy and happiness, leaning forward a little as if her whole body was clenching with the onset of uncontrollable giggles. She was in the arms of a guy about her age. He was very tall and blond and heavy. An athlete. He had blue eyes and a buzz cut and a dark tan and a wide smile.
“This is your husband?” Reacher asked.
The girl said, “Yes.”
15
Reacher squared the snapshot on the tabletop in front of him. Looked at the girl across from him and asked, “How old is this photo?”
“Recent.”
“May I see your driver’s license?”
“Why?”
“Something I need to check.”
“I don’t know.”
“I already know your name isn’t Anne. I know you don’t go to school in Miami. My guess would be UCLA. This photograph looks like it was taken somewhere around there. It has that LA kind of feel.”
The girl said nothing.
Reacher said, “I’m not here to hurt you.”
She paused and then slid her wallet across the table. He glanced at her license. Most of it was visible behind the milky plastic window. Her name was Lucy Anderson. No middle name. Anderson, hence Anne, perhaps.
“Lucy,” he said. “I’m pleased to meet you.”
“I’m sorry about not telling you the truth.”
“Don’t worry about it. Why should you?”
“My friends call me Lucky. Like a mispronunciation. Like a nickname.”
“I hope you always are.”
“Me too. I have been so far.”
Her license said she was coming up to twenty years old. It said her address was an apartment on a street he knew to be close to the main UCLA campus. He had been in LA not long before. Its geography was still familiar to him. Her sex was specified as female, which was clearly accurate, and her eyes were listed as blue, which was an understatement.
She was five feet eight inches tall.
Which made her husband at least six feet four. Maybe six feet five. He towered over her. He was huge. He looked to be well over two hundred pounds. Maybe Reacher’s own size. Maybe even bigger. His arms were as thick as the palm trunks behind him.
Not the guy in the dark. Not even close. Way too big. The guy in the dark had been Lucy Anderson’s size.
Reacher slid the wallet back across the table. Followed it with the photograph.
Lucy Anderson asked, “Did you see him?”
Reacher shook his head.
“No,” he said. “I didn’t. I’m sorry.”
“He has to be there somewhere.”
“What’s he running from?”
She looked to the right. “Why would he be running from something?”
“Just a wild guess,” Reacher said.
“Who are you?”
“Just a guy.”
“How did you know my name wasn’t Anne? How did you know I’m not in school in Miami?”
“A long time ago I was a cop. In the military. I still know things.”
Her skin whitened behind her freckles. She fumbled the photograph back into its slot and fastened the wallet and thrust it deep into her bag.
; “You don’t like cops, do you?” Reacher asked.
“Not always,” she said.
“That’s unusual, for a person like you.”
“Like me?”
“Safe, secure, middle class, well brought up.”
“Things change.”
“What did your husband do?”
She didn’t answer.
“And who did he do it to?”
No answer.
“Why did he go to Despair?”
No response.
“Were you supposed to meet him there?”
Nothing.
“Doesn’t matter, anyway,” Reacher said. “I didn’t see him. And I’m not a cop anymore. Haven’t been for a long time.”
“What would you do now? If you were me?”
“I’d wait right here in town. Your husband looks like a capable guy. He’ll probably show up, sooner or later. Or get word to you.”
“I hope so.”
“Is he in school, too?”
Lucy Anderson didn’t answer that. Just secured the flap of her bag and slid off the bench sideways and stood up and tugged the hem of her skirt down. Five-eight, maybe one-thirty, blonde and blue, straight, strong, and healthy.
“Thank you,” she said. “Good night.”
“Good luck,” he said. “Lucky.”
She hoisted her bag on her shoulder and walked to the door and pushed out to the street. He watched her huddle into her sweatshirt and step away through the cold.
He was in bed before two o’clock in the morning. The motel room was warm. There was a heater under the window and it was blasting away to good effect. He set the alarm in his head for six-thirty. He was tired, but he figured four and a half hours would be enough. In fact they would have to be enough, because he wanted time to shower before heading out for breakfast.
16
It was a cliché that cops stop in at diners for doughnuts before, during, and after every shift, but clichés were clichés only because they were so often true. Therefore Reacher slipped into the same back booth at five to seven in the morning and fully expected to see Officer Vaughan enter inside the following ten minutes.
Which she did.
He saw her cruiser pull up and park outside. Saw her climb out onto the sidewalk and press both hands into the small of her back and stretch. Saw her lock up and pirouette and head for the door. She came in and saw him and paused for a long moment and then changed direction and slid in opposite him.
He asked, “Strawberry, vanilla, or chocolate? It’s all they’ve got.”
“Of what?”
“Milk shakes.”
“I don’t drink breakfast with jerks.”
“I’m not a jerk. I’m a citizen with a problem. You’re here to help. Says so on the badge.”
“What kind of problem?”
“The girl found me.”
“And had you seen her boyfriend?”
“Her husband, actually.”
“Really?” Vaughan said. “She’s young to be married.”
“I thought so, too. She said they’re in love.”
“Cue the violins. So had you seen him?”
“No.”
“So where’s your problem?”
“I saw someone else.”
“Who?”
“Not saw, actually. It was in the pitch dark. I fell over him.”
“Who?”
“A dead guy.”
“Where?”
“On the way out of Despair.”
“Are you sure?”
“Completely,” Reacher said. “A young adult male corpse.”
“Are you serious?”
“As a heart attack.”
“Why didn’t you tell me last night?”
“I wanted time to think about it.”
“You’re yanking my chain. There’s what out there, a thousand square miles? And you just happen to trip over a dead guy in the dark? That’s a coincidence as big as a barn.”
“Not really,” Reacher said. “I figure he was doing the same thing I was doing. Walking east from Despair to Hope, staying close enough to the road to be sure of his direction, far enough away to be safe. That put him in a pretty specific channel. I might have missed him by a yard, but I was never going to miss him by a mile.”
Vaughan said nothing.
“But he didn’t make it all the way,” Reacher said. “I think he was exhausted. His knees were driven pretty deep in the sand. I think he fell on his knees and pitched forward on his front and died. He was emaciated and dehydrated. No wounds, no trauma.”
“What, you autopsied this guy? In the dark?”
“I felt around.”
“Felt?”
“Touch,” Reacher said. “It’s one of the five senses we rely on.”
“So who was this guy?”
“Caucasian, by the feel of his hair. Maybe five-eight, one-forty. Young. No ID. I don’t know if he was dark or fair.”
“This is unbelievable.”
“It happened.”
“Where exactly?”
“Maybe four miles out of town, eight miles short of the line.”
“Definitely in Despair, then.”
“No question.”
“You should call the Despair PD.”
“I wouldn’t piss on the Despair PD if it was on fire.”
“Well, I can’t help you. It’s not my jurisdiction.”
The waitress came over. The day-shift woman, the witness to the coffee marathon. She was busy and harassed. The diner was filling up fast. Small-town America, at breakfast time. Reacher ordered coffee and eggs. Vaughan ordered coffee, too. Reacher took that as a good sign. He waited until the waitress had bustled away and said, “Youcan help me.”
Vaughan said, “How?”
“I want to go back and take a look, right now, in the daylight. You can drive me. We could be in and out, real fast.”
“It’s not my town.”
“Unofficial. Off duty. Like a tourist. You’re a citizen. You’re entitled to drive on their road.”
“Would you be able to find the place again?”
“I left a pile of stones on the shoulder.”
“I can’t do it,” Vaughan said. “I can’t poke around over there. And I sure as hell can’t takeyou there. You’ve been excluded. It would be unbelievably provocative.”
“Nobody would know.”
“You think? They’ve got one road in and one road out and two cars.”
“Right now they’re eating doughnuts in their restaurant.”
“You sure you didn’t dream this?”
“No dreaming involved,” Reacher said. “The kid had eyeballs like marbles and the inside of his mouth was parched like shoe leather. He’d been wandering for days.”
The waitress came back with the coffee and the eggs. The eggs had a sprig of fresh parsley arrayed across them. Reacher picked it off and laid it on the side of the plate.
Vaughan said, “I can’t drive a Hope police cruiser in Despair.”
“So what else have you got?”
She was quiet for a long moment. She sipped her coffee. Then she said, “I have an old truck.”
She made him wait on the First Street sidewalk near the hardware store. Clearly she wasn’t about to take him home while she changed her clothes and her vehicle. A wise precaution, he thought.Look at yourself, she had said.What do you see? He was getting accustomed to negative answers to that question. The hardware store was still closed. The window was full of tools and small consumer items. The aisle behind the door was piled high with the stuff that would be put out on the sidewalk later. For many years Reacher had wondered why hardware stores favored sidewalk displays. There was a lot of work involved. Repetitive physical labor, twice a day. But maybe consumer psychology dictated that large utilitarian items sold better when associated with the rugged outdoors. Or maybe it was just a question of space. He thought for a moment and came to no firm conclusion and moved away and leaned on a pole that s
upported a crosswalk sign. The morning had come in cold and gray. Thin cloud started at ground level. The Rockies weren’t visible at all, neither near nor far.
Close to twenty minutes later an old Chevrolet pick-up truck pulled up on the opposite curb. Not a bulbous old classic from the forties or a swooping space-age design from the fifties or a muscley El Camino from the sixties. Just a plain secondhand American vehicle about fifteen years old, worn navy blue paint, steel rims, small tires. Vaughan was at the wheel. She was wearing a red Windbreaker zipped to the chin and a khaki ball cap pulled low. A good disguise. Reacher wouldn’t have recognized her if he hadn’t been expecting her. He used the crosswalk and climbed in next to her, onto a small vinyl seat with an upright back. The cab smelled of leaked gasoline and cold exhaust. There were rubber floor mats under his feet, covered with desert dust, worn and papery with age. He slammed the door and Vaughan took off again. The truck had a wheezy four-cylinder motor.In and out real fast, he had said. But clearlyfast was going to be a relative concept.
They covered Hope’s five miles of road in seven minutes. A hundred yards short of the line Vaughan said, “We see anybody at all, you duck down.” Then she pressed harder on the gas and the expansion joint thumped under the wheels and the tires set up a harsh roar over Despair’s sharp stones.
“You come here much?” Reacher asked.
“Why would I?” Vaughan said.
There was no traffic ahead. Nothing either coming or going. The road speared straight into the hazy distance, rising and falling. Vaughan was holding the truck at a steady sixty. A mile a minute, probably close to its comfortable maximum.
Seven minutes inside enemy territory, she started to slow.
“Watch the left shoulder,” Reacher said. “Four stones, piled up.”
The weather had settled to a luminous gray light. Not bright, not sunny, but everything was illuminated perfectly. No glare, no shadows. There was some trash on the shoulder. Not much, but enough that Reacher’s small cairn was not going to stand out in glorious isolation like a beacon. There were plastic water bottles, glass beer bottles, soda cans, paper, small unimportant parts of vehicles, all caught on a long ridge of pebbles that had been washed to the side of the road by the passage of tires. Reacher twisted around in his seat. Nobody behind. Nobody ahead. Vaughan slowed some more. Reacher scanned the shoulder. The stones had felt big and obvious in his hands, in the dark. But now in the impersonal daylight they were going to look puny in the vastness.
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