by Lee Child
‘Why would I? You didn’t ask me. You didn’t explain yourselves. You still haven’t. And I only just remembered anyway.’
‘Twenty past midnight?’
‘About.’
‘Definitely a car alarm?’
‘No question. Pretty loud, too. The highlight of my night so far. Until you guys showed up.’
‘Where was it?’
The kid waved his hand.
‘Over there,’ he said. ‘Could have been behind Missy Smith’s lounge, for sure.’
‘OK,’ Sorenson said. ‘Thank you.’
Goodman asked her, ‘So what are we saying? They spent fifteen minutes stealing a getaway car?’
‘Maybe they did, and maybe they didn’t. But whatever, a car alarm going off is another good reason why the waitress might have stuck her head out the back. She would have been worried about her own car, if nothing else. We have to find her, right now. It’s time to go bang on some doors.’
Goodman checked his watch.
‘We better hurry,’ he said. ‘Those guys will be hitting the roadblocks about now. You should have put them a hundred miles out, not eighty.’
Sorenson didn’t reply.
FOURTEEN
NINE MINUTES, REACHER thought. Not ten. He had over-estimated the likely delay, but only slightly. The cops on foot had done a fine job of corralling the approaching flow, and the cops at the roadblock itself were evidently fast and efficient. Traffic was moving through at a reasonable clip. Reacher couldn’t see the search procedure in detail, because of the Dodge pick-up’s bulk right in front of him, but clearly the protocol was nothing more than quick and dirty. He rolled on, and paused, and rolled on, and paused, with the red-blue glare ahead of him getting brighter and fiercer with every car’s length he travelled. Next to him Alan King seemed to have gone to sleep, still with his face turned away and his chin ducked down. Don McQueen still had his arm over his eyes. Karen Delfuenso was still awake, but she had stopped blinking.
A hundred yards to go, Reacher thought. Three hundred feet. Maybe fifteen vehicles in the queue ahead. Eight minutes. Maybe seven.
Missy Smith lived in what is left when a family farm gets sold to an agricultural corporation. A driveway, a house, a car barn, a small square yard in front and a small square yard in back, all enclosed by a new rail fence, with ten thousand flat acres of someone else’s soybeans beyond. Sheriff Goodman drove up the driveway and parked twenty feet from the house. He lit up his roof lights. The first thing people did after a night-time knock on the door was to look out their bedroom window. Quicker to let the lights make the explanations, rather than get all tangled up in a whole lot of yelling and hollering.
Sorenson stayed in the car and let Goodman go make the inquiry. His county, his population, his job. She saw him knock, and she saw some upstairs curtains twitch, and she saw the front door open four minutes later, and she saw the old gal standing in the hallway, in a robe. Her hair was neatly brushed. Hence the four minutes.
Sorenson saw Goodman bow and scrape, and she saw him ask the question, and she saw Missy Smith answer it. She saw Goodman write something down, and she saw him read it back for confirmation, and she saw the old gal nod. She saw the front door close, and she saw the hallway light go off, and she saw Goodman trot back to the car.
‘Miles from here,’ he said. ‘As luck would have it.’
He turned the car around and headed back to the road.
The white Dodge pick-up truck got through the roadblock with no trouble at all. Cops peered into it from every angle and checked the load bed and then waved it onward. Reacher buzzed his window down and put his elbow on the door and squinted against the bright red-blue strobes and rolled the Chevy forward. A grizzled old trooper with stripes on his arm stepped up. He bent at the waist and scanned the car’s interior.
Looking for something.
But not finding it.
So the guy started to straighten up again, already dismissing the Chevy, already thinking about the next car in line, but his eyes came to rest on Reacher’s face, and his own eyes widened a little, as if in sympathy or wonder or appreciation, and he said, ‘Ouch.’
‘My nose?’ Reacher said.
‘That must have stung.’
‘You should see the other guy.’
‘Where is he now?’
‘Not in your state.’
‘That’s good to know,’ the trooper said. ‘You drive safe tonight, sir.’
Reacher asked, ‘Who are you looking for, captain?’
‘That’s very kind of you, sir, but I’m only a sergeant.’
‘OK, who are you looking for, sergeant?’
The guy paused.
Then he smiled.
‘Not you,’ he said. ‘That’s for sure. Not you.’
And then he moved a foot towards the rear of the car, ready to greet the next in line, and Reacher buzzed his window up and threaded through the improvised chicane, and then he got settled in his seat and took off again, accelerating through forty, fifty, sixty, seventy miles an hour, with nothing at all in front of him except darkness and the white Dodge’s tail lights already half a mile ahead.
FIFTEEN
THE ADDRESS MISSY Smith had given to Sheriff Goodman turned out to be what is left when a family farm gets sold to a homebuilding corporation. The farmland itself had been added to some giant remote holding, but a shallow acre had been retained alongside the road and a row of four small ranch houses had been built on it. They were maybe twenty years old. In the moonlight they all looked bravely maintained and in reasonable shape. They were all identical. They all had white siding, grey roofs, front lawns, short straight driveways, and mailboxes at the kerb, on stout wooden posts.
But there was one clear difference between them.
Three of the houses had cars on their driveways.
The fourth didn’t.
And the fourth was the address Missy Smith had given to Sheriff Goodman.
‘Not good,’ Sorenson said.
‘No,’ Goodman said.
All four houses were dark, as was to be expected in the middle of the night. But somehow the house with no car looked darker than the other three. It looked quiet, and undisturbed, and empty.
Sorenson climbed out of the car. The road was nothing more than an old farm track, blacktopped over. It was badly drained. Rain and run-off from the fields had left mud in the gutters. Sorenson stepped over it and waited at the mouth of the empty driveway. Goodman stepped over the mud and joined her there. Sorenson checked the mailbox. Reflex habit. It was empty, as was to be expected for an evening worker. An evening worker picks up her mail before going to work, not after.
The mailbox was white, like all the others. It had a name on it, spelled out in small stick-on letters. The name was Delfuenso.
‘What’s her first name?’ Sorenson asked.
Goodman said, ‘Karen.’
Sorenson said, ‘Go knock on the door, just to be sure.’
Goodman went.
He knocked.
No response.
He knocked again, long and loud.
No response.
Sorenson cut across the lawn to the neighbour’s door. She rang the bell, once, twice, three times. She took out her ID, and held it ready. She waited. Two minutes later the door opened and she saw a guy in pyjamas. He was middle-aged and grey. She asked him if he had seen his neighbour come home that night.
The guy in pyjamas said no, he hadn’t.
She asked him if his neighbour lived alone.
The guy said yes, she did. She was divorced.
She asked him if his neighbour owned a car.
The guy said yes, she did. A pretty decent one, too. Not more than a few years old. Bought with money from the divorce. Just saying.
She asked him if his neighbour always drove to work.
The guy said yes, she did. It was that or walk.
She asked him if his neighbour’s car was usually parked on the driveway.
Sorenson asked him if his neighbour ever spent the night away from home.
The guy said no, she didn’t. She worked at the lounge and came home every night at ten past midnight, regular as clockwork, except for when she had the clean-up overtime, when it was maybe twelve thirty-five or so. Mrs Delfuenso was a nice woman and a good neighbour and the guy hoped nothing bad had happened to her.
Sorenson thanked him and told him he was free to go back to bed. The guy said he hoped he had been helpful. Sorenson said he had been. The guy said if she wanted to know more, she should go talk to the other neighbour. They were closer. Friends, really. They did things for each other. For instance, Mrs Delfuenso’s kid slept over there, while Mrs Delfuenso was working.
Sorenson said, ‘Karen has a child?’
‘A daughter,’ the guy said. ‘Ten years old. Same as the neighbour’s kid. They sleep over there and then Mrs Delfuenso takes over and gives them breakfast and drives them to the school bus in the morning.’
SIXTEEN
REACHER HAD NEVER been hypnotized, but in his opinion driving empty highways at night came close. Basal and cognitive demands were so low they could be met by the smallest sliver of the brain. The rest coasted. The front half had nothing to do, and the back half had nothing to fight. The very definition of relaxation. Time and distance seemed suspended. The Dodge’s tail lights would be for ever distant. Reacher felt he could drive a thousand hours and never catch them.
Normally numbers would fill the void in his head. Not that he was a particularly competent mathematician. But numbers called to him, twisting and turning and revealing their hidden facets. Perhaps he would glance down and see that he was doing 76 miles an hour, and he would see that 76 squared was 5,776, which ended in 76, where it started, which made 76 an automorphic number, one of only two below 100, the other being 25, whose square was 625, whose square was 390,625, which was interesting.
Or perhaps he would take advantage of the fact that all the cops for miles around were on roadblock duty behind him, and let his speed creep up to 81, and muse about how one divided by eighty-one expressed as a decimal came out as .012345679, which then recurred literally for ever, 012345679 over and over and over again, until the end of time, longer even than it would take to catch up to the Dodge.
But that night words came to him first.
Specifically four words, spoken by Alan King: plus whatever Karen wants. The coffee order. Two with cream and sugar, plus whatever Karen wants. Which attacked Reacher’s impression of them as a team. Team members knew each other’s coffee orders by heart. They had stood on line together a hundred times, in rest areas, in airports, at Starbucks, at shabby no-name shacks. They had ordered together in diners and in restaurants. They had fetched and carried for each other.
But King had not known how Karen liked her coffee.
Therefore Karen was not a team member, or not a regular team member, or perhaps she was a new team member. A recent addition to the roster. Which might explain why she wasn’t talking. Perhaps she felt unsure of her place. Perhaps she simply didn’t like her new associates. Perhaps they didn’t like her. Certainly Alan King had spoken impatiently and even contemptuously about her, right in her presence. Like she wasn’t there. He had said, Karen doesn’t drive. After she hadn’t ordered coffee, he had said, Nothing for Karen, then.
They were not a trio. King and McQueen were a duo, barely tolerating an interloper.
Sorenson met Goodman back on Karen Delfuenso’s empty oil-stained driveway, and she told him about Delfuenso’s kid.
‘Jesus,’ Goodman said. He glanced at the other neighbour’s house. ‘And the kid is in there now?’
‘Unless she sleepwalks. And she’s expecting to see her mommy in the morning.’
‘We shouldn’t tell her. Not yet. Not until we’re sure.’
‘We’re not going to tell her. Not now. But we have to talk to the neighbour. It’s still possible this whole thing is nothing. Something innocent might have come up, and Karen might have left a message.’
‘You think?’
‘No, not really. But we have to check.’
So they cut across the other lawn together and Sorenson tried to weight her knock so that a sleeping adult might hear it, but sleeping children wouldn’t. Hard to do. Her first attempt woke nobody. Her second might have woken everybody. Certainly it brought a tired woman of about thirty to the door.
There had been no message from Karen Delfuenso.
SEVENTEEN
THE NEXT WORDS into Reacher’s empty mind had been spoken by the grizzled old State Police sergeant: Not you. Eventually they led to numbers, first six, then three, then one. Six because they contained six letters, and three because each word had three letters, and taken together they had three vowels and three consonants. Reacher had no patience for people who claimed that y was a vowel.
Three, and six.
Good numbers.
A circle could be drawn through any three points not on a straight line.
Take any three consecutive numbers, the largest divisible by three, and add them up, and then add the digits of the result, again and again if necessary, until just a single number is left.
That number will be six.
But eventually the words Not you led past the number six, and then past the number three, and then all the way down to the number one, simply because of their content. Reacher had asked: Who are you looking for, sergeant? The sergeant had answered: Not you. Not: Not you guys or Not you people.
Not you.
They were looking for a lone individual.
Which was consistent with what had happened at the earlier roadblock. Reacher had gotten a better view back there, and he had seen men driving alone getting extra scrutiny.
But: Not you.
Which meant that the cops had at least a rough description of the guy they were looking for, and that Reacher categorically wasn’t that guy. Why not? There could be a million reasons. Right off the bat Reacher was tall, white, old, and heavy. And so on, and so forth. Therefore the target might be short, black, young, and skinny. And so on, and so forth.
But the sergeant had paused first, and thought, and smiled. The Not you had been emphatic, and a little wry. Maybe even a little rueful. As if the difference between Reacher and the description had been a total contrast. Or completely drastic. But it wasn’t possible to be drastically tall, unless they were looking for a dwarf or a midget, in which case the merest glance into the car would have sufficed. It wasn’t possible to be drastically white. White or black was an everyday difference. No one thought of degrees of blackness or whiteness. Not any more. Reacher wasn’t drastically old either, unless their target was a fetus. And Reacher wasn’t outstandingly heavy, unless their target was practically skeletal.
Not you. Said right after Reacher’s deliberate mistake about the guy’s rank, which would have been understood as a pro-forma compliment, just one regular guy to another, probably one veteran to another. Common ground.
Not you. Emphatic, wry, rueful, and good-natured. Just one regular guy to another, one vet to another, right back, equally. Still surfing on the earlier stuff about the busted nose. Referring back to it, in a way. A continuation of the banter. Common ground, established and repeated.
Therefore the guy they were looking for didn’t have a busted nose.
But then, most people didn’t have a busted nose.
Which meant the sergeant had been generalizing. As if to say: I’m pretty sure our description would have included that nose of yours, for instance.
Which meant they had been told their targ
et didn’t have anything especially noticeable about him. No first-glance singularities. Nothing obvious. No scars, no tattoos, no missing ears, no glass eyes, no yard-long beard, no weird haircut.
Reacher had been a cop for thirteen years, and he remembered the rote expression very well: no distinguishing marks.
Sorenson and Goodman stepped over the muddy gutter again and climbed back into Goodman’s car and Sorenson said, ‘You should check in with your dispatcher. You should see if anyone reported a lone woman wandering about, maybe confused or disoriented. From now on our working hypothesis is that the two guys stole Delfuenso’s car. And they might have hit her over the head to get it.’
‘They might have killed her.’
‘We have to hope for the best. So you should get your deputies to check the area behind the lounge, too. Very carefully. She could be unconscious in the shadows somewhere.’
‘By now she’d be halfway frozen to death.’
‘So you should do it quickly.’
So Goodman got on the radio, and Sorenson got on her cell, to check in with the distant troopers in two separate states. They were both negative on a pair of men travelling together, with average appearance and no distinguishing marks, and they were negative on bloodstained clothing, and they were negative on bladed weapons. Sorenson did the math in her head. The two guys were almost certainly already through. Time and space said so. But she asked the troopers to stay in place for another hour. The two guys could have had a flat tyre. Or some other kind of unexpected delay. She didn’t want to have the roadblocks dismantled only for the guys to roll through the vacated space five minutes later.
Then she clicked off her call and Goodman told her his dispatcher hadn’t heard a thing, and that all his deputies were searching hard, behind the Sin City lounge and all over town.
EIGHTEEN
REACHER DROVE ON, with Alan King fast asleep next to him and Don McQueen fast asleep behind him. Karen Delfuenso was still awake, still upright and tense. Reacher could feel her gaze on his face in the mirror. He glanced up and made eye contact. She was staring at him. Staring hard, as if mutely willing him to understand something.