Ugly, but fascinating.
Vaughan’s gaze traveled upward to his face.
“Bad news,” she said. “I went to the library.”
“You get bad news at libraries?”
“I looked at some books and used their computer.”
“And?”
“Trichloroethylene is called TCE for short. It’s a metal degreaser.”
“I know that.”
“It’s very dangerous. It causes cancer. Breast cancer, prostate cancer, all kinds of cancers. Plus heart disease, problems with the nervous system, strokes, liver disease, kidney disease, even diabetes. The EPA says a concentration of five parts per billion is acceptable. Some places have been measured twenty or thirty times worse than that.”
“Like where?”
“There was a case in Tennessee.”
“That’s a long way from here.”
“This is serious, Reacher.”
“People worry too much.”
“This isn’t a joke.”
He nodded.
“I know,” he said. “And Thurman uses five thousand gallons at a time.”
“And we drink the groundwater.”
“You drink bottled water.”
“Lots of people use tap.”
“The plant is twenty miles away. There’s a lot of sand. A lot of natural filtration.”
“It’s still a concern.”
Reacher nodded. “Tell me about it. I had two cups of coffee right there. One in the restaurant and one at the judge’s house.”
“You feel OK?”
“Fine. And people seem OK here.”
“So far.”
She went quiet.
He said, “What else?”
“Maria is missing. I can’t find her anywhere. The new girl.”
42
Vaughan hung around in the open doorway and Reacher grabbed his clothes and dressed in the bathroom. He called out, “Where did you look?”
“All over,” Vaughan called back. “She’s not here in the motel, she’s not in the diner, she’s not in the library, she’s not out shopping, and there isn’t anywhere else to go.”
“Did you speak to the motel clerk?”
“Not yet.”
“Then that’s where we’ll go first. She knows everything.” He came out of the bathroom, buttoning his shirt. The shirt was almost due for the trash, and the buttonholes were still difficult. He ran his fingers through his hair and checked his pockets.
“Let’s go,” he said.
The clerk was in the motel office, sitting on a high stool behind the counter, doing something with a ledger and a calculator. But she had no useful information. Maria had left her room before seven o’clock that morning, dressed as before, on foot, carrying only her purse.
“She ate breakfast before seven,” Reacher said. “The waitress in the diner told me.”
The clerk said she hadn’t come back. That was all she knew. Vaughan asked her to open Maria’s room. The clerk handed over her passkey immediately. No hesitation, no fuss about warrants or legalities or due process.Small towns, Reacher thought. Police work was easy. About as easy as it had been in the army.
Maria’s room was identical to Reacher’s, with only very slightly more stuff in it. A spare pair of jeans hung in the closet. They were neatly folded over the bar of a hanger. Above them on the shelf were one spare pair of cotton underpants, one bra, and one clean cotton T-shirt, all folded together in a low pile. On the floor of the closet was an empty suitcase. It was a small, sad, battered item. Blue in color, made from fiberboard, with a crushed lid, as if it had been stored for years with something heavy on top of it.
On the shelf next to the bathroom sink was a vinyl wash bag, white, with improbable pink daisies on it. It was empty, but it had clearly been overstuffed during transit. Its contents were laid out next to it, in a long line. Soaps, shampoos, lotions and ointments and unguents of every possible kind.
No personal items. They would have been in her purse.
“Day trip,” Vaughan said. “She’s expecting to return.”
“Obviously,” Reacher said. “She paid for three nights.”
“She went to Despair. To look for Ramirez.”
“That would be my guess.”
“But how? Did she walk?”
Reacher shook his head. “I would have seen her. It’s seventeen miles. Six hours, for her. If she left at seven she wouldn’t have arrived before one in the afternoon. I was on the road between eight-thirty and nine. I didn’t pass her along the way.”
“There’s no bus or anything. There’s never any traffic.”
“Maybe there was,” Reacher said. “I came in with an old guy in a car. He was visiting family, and then he was moving on to Denver. He’d head straight west. No reason to loop around. And if he was dumb enough to give me a ride, he’d have given Maria a ride for sure.”
“If he happened to leave this morning.”
“Let’s find out.”
They returned the passkey and got into Vaughan’s cruiser. She fired it up and they headed west to the hardware store. The sidewalk was piled high with an elaborate display. Ladders, buckets, barrows, gasoline-driven machines of various types. The owner was inside, wearing a brown coat. He confirmed that he had been building the display early that morning. He thought hard and memory dawned in his eyes and he confirmed that he had seen a small dark girl in a blue warm-up jacket. She had been standing on the far sidewalk, right at the edge of town, half-turned, looking east but clearly aiming to head west, gazing at the empty traffic lane with a mixture of optimism and hopelessness. A classic hitchhiker’s pose. Then later the store owner had seen a large bottle-green car heading west, a little before eight o’clock. He described the car as looking basically similar to Vaughan’s cruiser, but without all the police equipment.
“A Grand Marquis,” Reacher said. “Same platform. Same car. Same guy.”
The store owner had not seen the car stop or the girl get in. But the inference was clear. Vaughan and Reacher drove the five miles to the town line. No real reason. They saw nothing. Just the smooth blacktop behind and the ragged gritty ribbon ahead.
“Is she in danger?” Vaughan asked.
“I don’t know,” Reacher said. “But she’s probably not having the best day of her life.”
“How will she get back?”
“I suspect she decided to worry about that later.”
“We can’t go there in this car.”
“So what else have you got?”
“Just the truck.”
“Got sunglasses? It’s breezy, without the windshield.”
“Too late. I already had it towed. It’s being fixed.”
“And then you went to the library? Don’t you ever sleep?”
“Not so much anymore.”
“Since when? Since what?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Your husband?”
“I said I don’t want to talk about it.”
Reacher said, “We need to find Maria.”
“I know.”
“We could walk.”
“It’s twelve miles.”
“And twelve miles back.”
“Can’t do it. I’m on duty in two hours.”
Reacher said, “She’s domiciled in Hope. At least temporarily. Now she’s missing. The HPD should be entitled to head over there in a car and make inquiries.”
“She’s from San Diego.”
“Only technically.”
“Technicalities matter, Reacher.”
“She took up residency.”
“With one change of underwear?”
“What’s the worst thing that can happen?”
“Despair could ask us for reciprocity.”
“They already grabbed it. Their deputies came by last night.”
“Two wrongs don’t make a right.”
“Says who?”
“Are you bullying me?”
�
�You’re the one with the gun.”
Vaughan started to say something, then shook her head and sighed and said, “Shit.” Then she jammed her foot on the gas and the Crown Vic shot forward. The tires had traction on Hope’s blacktop but lost it on Despair’s loose gravel. The rear wheels spun and howled and the car stumbled for a second and then accelerated west in a cloud of blue smoke.
They drove eleven miles into the setting sun with nothing to show for it except eyestrain. The twelfth mile was different. Way ahead in the glare Reacher saw the familiar distant sights, all in sharp silhouette and shortened perspective. Vague smudges, on the horizon. The vacant lot, on the left. The abandoned motor court, low and forlorn. The gas station, on the right. Farther on, the dry goods store in the first brick building.
Plus something else.
From a mile away it looked like a shadow. Like a lone cloud was blocking the sun and casting a random shape on the ground. He craned his neck and looked up at the sky. Nothing there. The sky was clear. Just the gray-blue of approaching evening.
Vaughan drove on.
Three-quarters of a mile out the shape grew width, and depth, and height. The sun blazed behind it and winked around its edges. It looked like a low wide pile of something dark. Like a gigantic truck had strewn earth or asphalt right across the road, shoulder to shoulder, and beyond.
The pile looked to be fifty feet wide, maybe twenty deep, maybe six high.
From a half-mile out, it looked to be moving.
From a quarter-mile out, it was identifiable.
It was a crowd of people.
Vaughan slowed, instinctively. The crowd was two or three hundred strong. Men, women, and children. They were formed up in a rough triangle, facing east. Maybe six people at the front. Behind the six, twenty more. Behind the twenty, sixty more. Behind the sixty, a vast milling pool of people. The whole width of the road was blocked. The shoulders were blocked. The rearguard spilled thirty feet out into the scrub on both sides.
Vaughan stopped, fifty yards out.
The crowd compressed. People pushed inward from the sides. They made a human wedge. A solid mass. Two or three hundred people. They held together, but they didn’t link arms.
They didn’t link arms because they had weapons in their hands.
Baseball bats, pool cues, ax handles, broom handles, split firewood, carpenters’ hammers. Two or three hundred people, pressed tight together, and moving. Moving as one. They were rocking in place from foot to foot and jabbing their weapons up and down in the air. Nothing wild. Their movements were small and rhythmic and controlled.
They were chanting.
At first Reacher heard only a primitive guttural shout, repeated over and over. Then he dropped his window an inch and heard the wordsOut! Out! Out! He hit the switch again and the glass thumped back up.
Vaughan was pale.
“Unbelievable,” she said.
“Is this some weird Colorado tradition?” Reacher asked.
“I never saw it before.”
“So Judge Gardner went and did it. He deputized the whole population.”
“They don’t look drafted. They look like true believers. What are we going to do?”
Out! Out! Out!
Reacher watched for a moment and said, “Drive on and see what happens.”
“Are you serious?”
“Try it.”
Vaughan took her foot off the brake and the car crept forward.
The crowd surged forward to meet it, short steps, crouched, weapons moving.
Vaughan stopped again, forty yards out.
Out! Out! Out!
Reacher said, “Use your siren. Scare them.”
“Scarethem ? They’re doing a pretty good job scaring me.”
The crowd had quit rocking from side to side. Now people were rocking back and forth instead, one foot to the other, jabbing their clubs and sticks forward, whipping them back, jabbing them forward again. They were dressed in work shirts and faded sundresses and jean jackets, but collectively in terms of their actions they looked entirely primitive. Like a weird Stone Age tribe, threatened and defensive.
“Siren,” Reacher said.
Vaughan lit it up. It was a modern synthesized unit, shatteringly loud in the emptiness, sequencing randomly from a basicwhoop-whoop-whoop to a manicpock-pock-pock to a hysterical digital cackling.
It had no effect.
No effect at all.
The crowd didn’t flinch, didn’t move, didn’t miss a beat.
Reacher said, “Can you get around them?”
Vaughan shook her head. “This car is no good on the scrub. We’d bog down and they’d be all over us.”
“So fake them out. Drift left, then sneak past on the right real fast.”
“You think?”
“Try it.”
She took her foot off the brake again and crept forward. She turned the wheel and headed for the wrong side of the road and the crowd in front of her tracked the move, slow and infinitely fluid. Two or three hundred people, moving as one, like a pool of gray mercury, changing shape like an ameba. Like a disciplined herd. Vaughan reached the left shoulder.
“Can’t do it,” she said. “There’s too many of them.”
She stopped again, ten feet from the front rank.
She killed the siren.
The chanting grew louder.
Out! Out! Out!
Then the note dropped lower and the rhythm changed down. As one, the people started banging their clubs and sticks on the ground and shouting only every other beat.
Out!
Crash!
Out!
Crash!
They were close enough now to see clearly. Their faces jerked forward with every shouted word, gray and pink and contorted with hate and rage and fear and anger. Reacher didn’t like crowds. He enjoyed solitude and was a mild agoraphobic, which didn’t mean he was afraid of wide-open spaces. That was a common misconception. He liked wide-open spaces. Instead he was mildly unsettled by theagora, which was an ancient Greek word for a crowded public marketplace. Random crowds were bad enough. He had seen footage of stampedes and stadium disasters. Organized crowds were worse. He had seen footage of riots and revolutions. A crowd two hundred strong was the largest animal on the face of the earth. The heaviest, the hardest to control, the hardest to stop. The hardest to kill. Big targets, but after-action reports always showed that crowds took much less than one casualty per round fired.
Crowds had nine lives.
“What now?” Vaughan asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. He especially didn’t care for angry organized crowds. He had been in Somalia and Bosnia and the Middle East, and he had seen what angry crowds could do. He had seen the herd instinct at work, the anonymity, the removal of inhibition, the implied permissions of collective action. He had seen that an angry crowd was the most dangerous animal on the face of the earth.
Out!
Crash!
Out!
Crash!
He said, quietly, “Put the shifter in Reverse.”
Vaughan moved the lever. The car settled back on its haunches, like prey ready to flee.
He said, “Back up a little.”
Vaughan backed up and steered and got straight on the center line and stopped again, thirty yards out. Ninety feet. The distance from home plate to first base.
“What now?” she asked.
The crowd had tracked the move. It had changed shape again, back to what it had been at the beginning. A dense triangle, with a blunt vanguard of six men, and a wide base that petered out thirty feet into the scrub on both sides of the thoroughfare.
Out!
Crash!
Out!
Crash!
Reacher stared ahead through the windshield. He dropped his window again. He felt a change coming. He sensed it. He wanted to be a split second ahead of it.
Vaughan asked, “What do we do?”
Reacher said, “I’d feel better in a Humv
ee.”
“We’re not in a Humvee.”
“I’m just saying.”
“What do we do in a Crown Vic?”
Reacher didn’t have time to answer. The change came. The chanting stopped. There was silence for a second. Then the six men at the front of the crowd raised their weapons high, with clamped fists and straight arms.
They screamed a command.
And charged.
They bolted forward, weapons high, screaming. The crowd streamed after them. Two or three hundred people, full speed, yelling, falling, stumbling, stampeding, eyes wide, mouths open, faces contorted, weapons up, free arms pumping. They filled the windshield, a writhing mob, a frantic screaming mass of humanity coming straight at them.
They got within five feet. Then Vaughan stamped on the gas. The car shot backward, the engine screaming, the low gear whining loud, the rear tires howling and making smoke. She got up to thirty miles an hour going backward and then she flung the car into an emergency one-eighty and smashed the shifter into Drive. Then she stamped on the gas. She accelerated east and didn’t stop for miles, top speed, engine roaring, her foot jammed down. Reacher had been wrong in his earlier assessment. Way too cautious. A Crown Vic with the Police Interceptor pack was a very fast car. Good for a hundred and twenty, easily.
43
They got airborne over the peak of the rise that put the distant Rockies close again and then Vaughan lifted off the gas and took most of the next mile to coast to a stop. She craned her neck and spent a long minute staring out the back window. They were still deep in Despair’s territory. But all was quiet behind them. She slumped in her seat and dropped both hands to her lap.
“We need the State Police,” she said. “We’ve got mob rule back there and a missing woman. And whatever exactly Ramirez was to those people, we can’t assume they’re going to treat his girlfriend kindly.”
“We can’t assume anything,” Reacher said. “We don’t know for sure she’s there. We don’t even know for sure that the dead guy was Ramirez.”
“You got serious doubts?”
“The state cops will. It’s a fairy tale, so far.”
“So what do we do?”
“We verify.”
“How?”
“We call Denver.”
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