17 A Wanted Man

by Lee Child

  And: They shot at me. But: They missed. Either extreme good fortune, or extremely good playacting. Getting shot at by the indisputably guilty helped build credibility. Perhaps all concerned had figured that out well ahead of time.

  Then her low-fuel warning pinged at her and a little lamp lit up yellow. Dumb. Not a great time to run out of gas. Not a great place, either. Iowa was a lonely state. Exits were many miles apart. Each one was an event in its own right. She took the next she saw, a no-name turn a little east of Des Moines. She could see gas station lights ahead, blue and white in the mist. The ramp led to a two-lane county road, and she saw the gas station itself a hundred feet away to the south. It was a big place, set up for trucks as well as cars. The car part had six pumps. There was a small pay hut, and a bathroom block standing alone on the edge of the lot. Across the street was a long barn-shaped building with Food And Drink All Day All Night painted in white on the slope of its roof.

  She pumped the gas and heard the nasal voice in her head again: I’ve lost them anyway. The roads out here are impossible. I’m going to have to come at this from a different direction. Twenty-two words. Resignation, frustration, and then a new resolution. The first-person singular, used twice. The instinctive assumption of individual personal responsibility for the fate of another. And determination. And knowledge, too. She had said One would think a BOLO for two men would logically include more than two. A BOLO. A be-on-the-lookout. He hadn’t needed to ask what it meant. He already knew. Then he had said: Troopers don’t infer things. They don’t take the initiative. Nine times out of ten it gets them in trouble. Which was a perceptive comment. As was: I think they were expecting roadblocks and they wanted cover. Which matched her own thinking exactly.

  Resolute, responsible, determined, knowledgeable, and perceptive.

  Driving two murderers in a stolen car.

  With a hostage.

  Why am I calling you?

  Who the hell was this guy?

  THIRTY-TWO

  REACHER SPILLED BROCHURES out of the tourist-attraction rack in the lobby until he found one with something approximating a map. It was not an outstanding example of the cartographer’s art. But it was the best the place had to offer. It was basically a hand-drawn rectangle with Kansas City at the bottom left, and St Louis at the bottom right, and Des Moines at the top left, and Cedar Rapids at the top right. In between those four anchoring cities was a lot of white space, with a bunch of little icons describing things Reacher wasn’t interested in.

  He was interested in the white space itself, particularly the upper half of it. The Iowa half. Thirtieth out of fifty in population, twenty-sixth out of fifty in land area, but Iowa had a quarter of America’s best-grade topsoil all to itself, and therefore it was at the head of the list when it came to corn and soybeans and hogs and cattle. Which meant spare, sparse habitation, and miles between neighbours, and lonely isolated buildings of uncertain purpose, and a kind of live-and-let-live lack of curiosity about who was doing what, and where and when and how and why they were doing it at all.

  The two worst places to search were densely populated cities, and wide open countryside. Reacher had succeeded in those environments many times, but he had failed there too. Also many times.

  Behind him the fat man said, ‘Who’s going to pay for the hole in my wall?’

  Reacher said, ‘Not me.’

  ‘Well, someone will have to.’

  ‘What are you, a socialist? Pay for it yourself. Or fix it yourself. It isn’t brain surgery. Two minutes and a tub of spackle will take care of it.’

  ‘It’s not right that a person should just burst in here and do a thing like that.’

  Reacher said, ‘I’m busy.’

  ‘Doing what?’

  ‘I’m thinking.’

  ‘You’re looking at a blank sheet of paper.’

  ‘You got a better map?’

  ‘It wasn’t right.’

  ‘Shit happens. Get over it.’

  ‘That bullet could have come through the wall and hit me.’

  ‘Are you kidding? Look where it is.’

  ‘But whoever fired it didn’t know I was short. Not in advance. How could they? It was completely reckless. It was totally irresponsible.’

  ‘You think?’

  ‘I could have been hurt.’

  ‘But you weren’t. So don’t worry about it.’

  ‘I could have been killed.’

  ‘Look where it is,’ Reacher said again. ‘It would have missed if you were standing on your own shoulders.’

  Then the phone rang in the office and the guy ducked back in to answer it. He came straight back out and said, ‘It’s the FBI, for the man with the broken nose. That would be you, I suppose.’

  Reacher said, ‘Pretty soon it could be either one of us, if you don’t stop yapping at me.’

  He took the map with him to the desk and picked up the receiver. It was the Scandinavian woman again. Originally from Minnesota. Julia Sorenson. She said, ‘You’re still there.’

  ‘Evidently,’ Reacher said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I told you why. The roads here are like graph paper. Pointless trying to follow anyone more than two minutes ahead.’

  ‘Does it matter exactly which route they take? They’re heading basically south. We should assume they have a destination in mind. They’re not going to stay in Iowa.’

  Reacher said, ‘I don’t agree.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Daylight is coming. Town and county cops will be back on duty by seven or eight in the morning. And those guys must be assuming their plate number is everywhere by now. Plus descriptions, of them and the car. They won’t risk much more. They can’t. So they’ll hole up before dawn. Somewhere right here in Iowa.’

  ‘They could get into Missouri before the break of day.’

  ‘But they won’t. They’ll assume the Missouri troopers will be waiting right on the line. Troopers like to do that. Like a welcome and a warning. With the new day’s BOLOs taped right on their dashboards.’

  ‘They can’t stay in Iowa either,’ Sorenson said. ‘They can’t really stay anywhere. If they assume their plate number is everywhere, they’ll assume we’re calling motel keepers too.’

  ‘They won’t be using a motel. I think they have a specific place to go. A place of their own. Because their choice of exit off the Interstate was not random. I wouldn’t have taken it. No sane person would have taken it. It was just a no-name back road. But they knew it well. They knew where they were going. They knew the gas station was there, and they knew this motel was here, too. No way of knowing either thing unless they’ve been here before.’

  ‘You could be right.’

  ‘Equally I could be wrong.’

  ‘Which is it?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Will they hole up all day?’

  ‘I would.’

  ‘That’s risky. They’d be sitting ducks.’

  ‘Sitting ducks, yes. But not really risky. Ninety minutes after peeling out of here they’ll be somewhere inside an empty five-thousand-square-mile box. You planning to go door-to-door, hoping for the best?’

  ‘How would you do it?’

  ‘Have you made a decision about my personal situation?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Then you may never know how I would do it.’

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Just a guy,’ Reacher said.

  ‘What kind of guy?’

  ‘Why did you call me back?’

  ‘To try and find out what kind of guy you are.’

  ‘And what’s your conclusion so far?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I’m an innocent passerby. That’s all. That’s the kind of guy I am.’

  ‘Everyone always says they’re innocent.’

  ‘And sometimes they’re telling the truth.’

  ‘Stay right there,’ Sorenson said. ‘I’ll be with you in less than an hour.’


  Sorenson drove on, somewhere between ninety and a hundred, one eye on the road ahead, the other on her GPS map. She was getting close to the no-name turn. And she could see the nasal guy’s point. No sane person would have taken it. The landscape ahead looked infinitely dark and infinitely empty. No lights of any kind, no features, no items of interest.

  They knew where they were going.

  Then her phone rang yet again. It was Perry, her SAC. Stony, her boss. He said, ‘I found out a little more about the victim.’

  ‘That’s good,’ Sorenson said. ‘The guy the State Department sent out wouldn’t say a word.’

  ‘Mr Lester? I went over his head. Not that State had much to conceal. Turns out the victim was a trade attaché. A salesman, basically. A dealmaker. That’s all, really. His job was to oil the wheels for American exporters.’

  ‘Where did he serve?’

  ‘I wasn’t told. But they let slip he was an Arabic speaker. Draw your own conclusions.’

  ‘Why was he in Nebraska?’

  ‘No one knows.’

  ‘Business or pleasure?’

  ‘Not business, as far as I can tell. He was on leave between postings.’

  ‘You know that two counterterrorism guys came up from Kansas City?’

  ‘Yes, I heard that. Might mean something. Might not. Those guys are always looking for reasons to freak out. They have a big budget to justify.’

  Sorenson said nothing.

  Perry said, ‘We have a budget to justify too. I hear you made contact with the driver.’

  Sorenson said, ‘He claims he was a hitchhiker. He claims they dumped him at gunpoint. I’ll be meeting with him inside an hour.’

  ‘Good. Arrest him on sight. Homicide, kidnapping, grand theft auto, breaking the speed limit, anything else you can think of. Bring him back here immediately, in handcuffs.’

  THIRTY-THREE

  SHERIFF VICTOR GOODMAN did the obvious, cautious thing, which was to drive the route between the old pumping station and the farm where the eyewitness lived, which was eleven miles to the north and west of town. On the way out there he drove slowly and paid careful attention to the right-hand shoulder of the road. There was ice here and there. Overall the land was pretty flat, but at a detailed level there were humps and bumps and bad cambers and ragged edges. According to a deputy who knew the guy, the eyewitness drove a well-used Ford Ranger pick-up truck. It was too old for ABS, and assuming it was unloaded it would be light and skittery at the back end. Skids and slides were possible, even likely, because it was late and the guy was probably hurrying. And a skid or a slide at speed could put the guy fifty feet into a field, easily, and maybe even tip him over, if the tyres caught a rut or a furrow. So Goodman used the beam on his windshield pillar, near and far, back and forth, slowing to a walk on the curves, making sure.

  He found nothing.

  The house the guy lived in was a modest affair. Eighty years previously it might have anchored an independent one-man fifty-acre spread. Now it was a leftover, after two or three rounds of farm consolidations, these days either rented to or provided for a labourer. It had a sagging ridgeline and milky glass in the windows. It was dark and still. Goodman got out of his cruiser and pounded on the door and yelled and hollered.

  Then he waited, and three minutes later a dishevelled woman came to the door, in night clothes. The common law wife. No, the guy was not home yet. No, he didn’t make a habit of staying out all night. Yes, he always called if he was going to be late. No, she had no idea where he was.

  So Goodman got back in his car and drove the same road back to the pumping station, slowly and carefully, using his pillar spot all the way, this time paying close attention to the other shoulder, and watching the first fifty feet of brittle stubble beyond it.

  He saw nothing.

  So then he drove other routes, in descending order of likelihood. His county was not geographically complicated. The central crossroads created four quadrants, northwest, northeast, southeast, and southwest, each one of them to some varying extent filled in with random ribbons of development. It was conceivable the guy had chosen to thread his way home through an arbitrary and indirect route. Conceivable, but unlikely. Gas was expensive and there was no reason to add unnecessary miles. There was no reason to think the guy had a second lady friend willing to receive a late-night visit. But Goodman was a thorough man, so he checked.

  But he found no old Ford Ranger pick-up trucks parked anywhere in the northwestern quadrant. Or in the northeastern quadrant. Or in the southwestern.

  The southeastern quadrant was the least likely of all. To get there the guy would have had to turn his back on home, and why would he do that well after midnight? And the southeastern quadrant was mostly commercial, anyway. The two-lane county road leading south was lined on both sides by small strip malls. The road leading east was the same. There were seed merchants and dry goods stores and groceries and gun shops and pawn shops. There was a bank. There was a pharmacy, and a John Deere dealership. All of those establishments closed at five o’clock each afternoon. There was angled street parking in front of the stores, uniformly unoccupied at night, and larger lots behind, mostly empty, and old barns used for storage, all locked up tight.

  Sheriff Goodman checked them all anyway. He was a thorough man. He drove slowly south, looking down the alleys between the buildings, then looping back north through the back lots on the right, then going south again and paying attention to the other side of the road, before coming north again through the back lots on the left.

  He found nothing. He repeated the same procedure on the road leading east, all the way out into open country and then back again, checking both sides, checking the alleys, checking the storefronts, checking the rear lots.

  And there it was.

  An old Ford Ranger pick-up truck, parked neatly behind Gus Bantry’s hardware store.

  Reacher folded the inadequate map and put it in his back pocket. He checked the view out the office window. Still dark. But dawn was coming. He looked at the fat man and said, ‘You want to rent me a room?’

  The fat man didn’t answer.

  Reacher said, ‘I could give you money and you could give me a key. You could call it running a business.’

  The guy responded by stepping out to the well behind the counter and unpinning a notice from the wall. It was a sheet of paper laminated in plastic, with a cursive script and pale inkjet printing spelling out a simple sentence: Management reserves the right to refuse service. The plastic was lightly dusted with gypsum powder, from the bullet hole.

  Reacher said, ‘I’m the good guy here. You heard me on the phone with the federal authorities. It was an amicable conversation.’

  The guy said, ‘I can’t afford any more trouble.’

  ‘You’ve had all the trouble you’re likely to get tonight. From here on in it’s going to be all about an investigation. You could have ten agents here for a week. Or more than ten, or more than a week. How does that compare to your usual winter occupancy?’

  The guy paused.

  Reacher said, ‘OK, we’ll all go somewhere else.’

  The guy said, ‘Forty dollars.’

  ‘Twenty.’

  ‘Thirty.’

  ‘Don’t push it. These guys have an office of budgetary responsibility. They see something they don’t like, they’ll call the IRS, just for fun.’

  ‘Twenty-five dollars.’

  ‘Deal,’ Reacher said. He dug in his other back pocket and came out with a wad of crumpled bills. He counted out twenty-five bucks, a ten and two fives and five singles.

  The fat man said, ‘A week in advance.’

  ‘Don’t push it,’ Reacher said again.

  ‘OK, two nights.’

  Reacher added a twenty and another five. He said, ‘I’ll take a room in the middle of the row. No neighbours either side.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I’m a solitary soul.’

  The fat man trawled through a drawer and
came out with a brass key on a leather fob, which had the number 5 printed in faded gilt on one side, and some mailing instructions on the other. He said, ‘You have to sign the register.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Iowa law.’

  Reacher put himself down as Bill Skowron, who had hit .375 for the Yankees in the World Series just weeks before Reacher was born. The fat man handed over the key and Reacher headed for his room.

  Sheriff Goodman called Julia Sorenson on her cell. He told her he had found the eyewitness’s truck.

  Sorenson asked, ‘Any signs of a disturbance?’

  Goodman said, ‘No, it was just parked, like normal. Behind a hardware store, real neat and tidy, just like the Mazda behind the cocktail lounge.’

  ‘Locked?’

  ‘Yes, which is a little unusual here, to be honest. People don’t normally lock their cars. Especially not twenty-year-old beaters.’

  ‘No sign of the guy himself?’

  ‘Nothing. Like he just vanished.’

  ‘Is there a bar nearby, or a rooming house?’

  ‘Nothing. It’s a strip mall.’

  ‘I’ll get some lab people to go take a look.’

  ‘It’s nearly dawn.’

  ‘All the better,’ Sorenson said. ‘Daylight always helps.’

  ‘No, I mean Karen Delfuenso’s kid will be waking up soon. Any news?’

  ‘The driver called me again. They dumped him. Delfuenso was still alive, the last he saw of her.’

  ‘How long ago was that?’

  ‘Long enough for the situation to have changed, I’m afraid.’

  ‘So I’m going to have to tell the kid.’

  ‘Just the facts. Don’t say anything more until we know for sure. And call her school principal. The kid won’t be fit to go today. And maybe you should keep the neighbour’s kid home too, for company. Does the neighbour work days?’

  ‘I’m pretty sure.’