by Lee Child
The pumps were operational but the pay booth was closed up and dark. The guy from the U-Haul poked a credit card into a slot on the pump and pulled it out again. Reacher used his ATM card and did the same thing. The pump started up and Reacher selected regular unleaded and watched in horror as the numbers flicked around. Gas was expensive. That was for damn sure. More than three bucks for a gallon. The last time he had filled a car, the price had been a dollar. He nodded to the U-Haul guy, who nodded back. The U-Haul guy was a youngish well-built man with long hair. He was wearing a tight black short-sleeve shirt with a clerical collar. Some kind of a minister of religion. Probably played the guitar.
The phone rang in Reacher’s pocket. He left the nozzle wedged in the filler neck and turned away and answered. The Hope cop said, “Vaughan didn’t pick up her cell.”
Reacher said, “Try your radio. She’s out in the watch commander’s car.”
“Where?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Why is she out in the watch commander’s car?”
“Long story.”
“You’re the guy she’s been hanging with?”
“Just call her.”
“She’s married, you know.”
“I know. Now call her.”
The guy stayed on the line and Reacher heard him get on the radio. A call sign, a code, a request for an immediate response, all repeated once, and then again. Then the sound of dead air. Buzzing, crackling, the heterodyne whine of nighttime interference from high in the ionosphere. Plenty of random noise.
But nothing else.
No reply from Vaughan.
61
Reacher got out of the gas station ahead of the minister in the U-Haul and headed north as fast as the old Suburban would go. The drunk guy slept on next to him. He was leaking alcohol through his pores. Reacher cracked a window. The night air kept him awake and sober and the whistle masked the snoring. Cell coverage died eight miles north of Lamar. Reacher guessed it wouldn’t come back until they got close to the I-70 corridor, which was two hours ahead. It was four-thirty in the morning. ETA in Hope, around dawn. A five-hour delay, which was an inconvenience, but maybe not a disaster.
Then the Suburban’s engine blew.
Reacher was no kind of an automotive expert. He didn’t see it coming. He saw the temperature needle nudge upward a tick, and thought nothing of it. Just stress and strain, he figured, because of the long fast cruise. But the needle didn’t stop moving. It went all the way up into the red zone and didn’t stop until it was hard against the peg. The motor lost power and a hot wet smell came in through the vents. Then there was a muffled thump under the hood and strings of tan emulsion blew out of the ventilation slots in front of the windshield and spattered all over the glass. The motor died altogether and the Suburban slowed hard. Reacher steered to the shoulder and coasted to a stop.
Not good, he thought.
The drunk guy slept on.
Reacher got out in the darkness and headed around to the front of the hood. He used the flats of his hands to bounce some glow from the headlight beams back onto the car. He saw steam. And sticky tan sludge leaking from every crevice. Thick, and foamy. A mixture of engine oil and cooling water. Blown head gaskets. Total breakdown. Repairable, but not without hundreds of dollars and a week in the shop.
Not good.
Half a mile south he could see the U-Haul’s lights coming his way. He stepped around to the passenger door and leaned in over the sleeping guy and found a pen and an old service invoice in the glove compartment. He turned the invoice over and wrote: You need to buy a new car. I borrowed your cell phone. Will mail it back. He signed the note: Your hitchhiker. He took the Suburban’s registration for the guy’s address and folded it into his pocket. Then he ran fifty feet south and stepped into the traffic lane and held his arms high and waited to flag the U-Haul down. It picked him up in its headlights about fifty yards out. Reacher waved his arms above his head. The universal distress signal. The U-Haul’s headlights flicked to bright. The truck slowed, like Reacher knew it would. A lonely road, and a disabled vehicle and a stranded driver, both of them at least fleetingly familiar to the Good Samaritan behind the wheel.
The U-Haul came to rest a yard in front of Reacher, halfway on the shoulder. The window came down and the guy in the dog collar stuck his head out.
“Need help?” he said. Then he smiled, wide and wholesome. “Dumb question, I guess.”
“I need a ride,” Reacher said. “The engine blew.”
“Want me to take a look?”
Reacher said, “No.” He didn’t want the minister to see the drunk guy. From a distance he was out of sight on the reclined seat, below the window line. Close up, he was big and obvious. Abandoning a broken-down truck in the middle of nowhere was one thing. Abandoning a comatose passenger was another. “No point, believe me. I’ll have to send a tow truck. Or set fire to the damn thing.”
“I’m headed north to Yuma. You’re welcome to join me, for all or part of the way.”
Reacher nodded. Called up the map in his head. The Yuma road crossed the Hope road about two hours ahead. The same road he had come in on originally, with the old guy in the green Grand Marquis. He would need to find a third ride, for the final western leg. His ETA was now about ten in the morning, with luck. He said, “Thanks. I’ll jump out about halfway to Yuma.”
The guy in the dog collar smiled his wholesome smile again and said, “Hop in.”
The U-Haul was a full-sized pick-up frame overwhelmed by a box body a little longer and wider and a lot taller than a pick-up’s load bed. It sagged and wallowed and the extra weight and aerodynamic resistance made it slow. It struggled up close to sixty miles an hour and stayed there. Wouldn’t go any faster. Inside it smelled of warm exhaust fumes and hot oil and plastic. But the seat was cloth, as advertised, and reasonably comfortable. Reacher had to fight to stay awake. He wanted to be good company. He didn’t want to replicate the drunk guy’s manners.
He asked, “What are you hauling?”
The guy in the collar said, “Used furniture. Donations. We run a mission in Yuma.”
“We?”
“Our church.”
“What kind of a mission?”
“We help the homeless and the needy.”
“What kind of a church?”
“We’re Anglicans, plain vanilla, middle of the road.”
“Do you play the guitar?”
The guy smiled again. “We try to be inclusive.”
“Where I’m going, there’s an End Times Church.”
The minister shook his head. “An End Times congregation, maybe. It’s not a recognized denomination.”
“What do you know about them?”
“Have you read the Book of Revelation?”
Reacher said, “I’ve heard of it.”
The minister said, “Its correct title is The Revelation of Saint John the Divine. Most of the original is lost, of course. It was written either in Ancient Hebrew or Aramaic, and copied by hand many times, and then translated into Koine Greek, and copied by hand many times, and then translated into Latin, and copied by hand many times, and then translated into Elizabethan English and printed, with opportunities for error and confusion at every single stage. Now it reads like a bad acid trip. I suspect it always did. Possibly all the translations and all the copying actually improved it.”
“What does it say?”
“Your guess is as good as mine.”
“Are you serious?”
“Some of our homeless people make more sense.”
“What do people think it says?”
“Broadly, the righteous ascend to heaven, the unholy are left on earth and are visited by various colorful plagues and disasters, Christ returns to battle the Antichrist in an Armageddon scenario, and no one winds up very happy.”
“Is that the same as the Rapture?”
“The Rapture is the ascending part. The plagues and the fighting are separate. They co
me afterward.”
“When is all this supposed to happen?”
“It’s perpetually imminent, apparently.”
Reacher thought back to Thurman’s smug little speech in the metal plant. There are signs, he had said. And the possibility of precipitating events.
Reacher asked, “What would be the trigger?”
“I’m not sure there’s a trigger, as such. Presumably a large element of divine will would be involved. One would certainly hope so.”
“Pre-echoes, then? Ways to know it’s coming?”
The minister shrugged at the wheel. “End Times people read the Bible like other people listen to Beatles records backward. There’s something about a red calf being born in the Holy Land. End Times enthusiasts are real keen on that part. They comb through ranches, looking for cattle a little more auburn than usual. They ship pairs to Israel, hoping they’ll breed a perfect redhead. They want to get things started. That’s another key characteristic. They can’t wait. Because they’re all awfully sure they’ll be among the righteous. Which makes them self-righteous, actually. Most people accept that who gets saved is God’s decision, not man’s. It’s a form of snobbery, really. They think they’re better than the rest of us.”
“That’s it? Red calves?”
“Most enthusiasts believe that a major war in the Middle East is absolutely necessary, which is why they’ve been so unhappy about Iraq. Apparently what’s happening there isn’t bad enough for them.”
“You sound skeptical.”
The guy smiled again.
“Of course I’m skeptical,” he said. “I’m an Anglican.”
There was no more conversation after that, either theological or secular. Reacher was too tired and the guy behind the wheel was too deep into night-driving survival mode, where nothing existed except the part of the road ahead that his headlights showed him. His eyes were wedged open and he was sitting forward, as if he knew that to relax would be fatal. Reacher stayed awake, too. He knew the Hope road wouldn’t be signposted and it wasn’t exactly a major highway. The guy behind the wheel wouldn’t spot it on his own.
It arrived exactly two hours into the trip, a lumpy two-lane crossing their path at an exact right angle. It had stop signs, and the main north-south drag didn’t. By the time Reacher called it and the minister reacted and the U-Haul’s overmatched brakes did their job they were two hundred yards past it. Reacher got out and waved the truck away and waited until its lights and its noise were gone. Then he walked back through the dark empty vastness. Predawn was happening way to the east, over Kansas or Missouri. Colorado was still pitch black. There was no cell phone signal.
No traffic, either.
Reacher took up station on the west side of the junction, standing on the shoulder close to the traffic lane. East-west drivers would have to pause at the stop sign opposite, and they would get a good look at him twenty yards ahead. But there were no east-west drivers. Not for the first ten minutes. Then the first fifteen, then the first twenty. A lone car came north, trailing the U-Haul by twenty miles, but it didn’t turn off. It just blasted onward. An SUV came south, and slowed, ready to turn, but it turned east, away from Hope. Its lights grew small and faint and then they disappeared.
It was cold. There was a wind coming out of the east, and it was moving rain clouds into the sky. Reacher turned his collar up and crossed his arms over his chest and trapped his hands under his biceps for warmth. Cloudy diffused streaks of pink and purple lit up the far horizon. A new day, empty, innocent, as yet unsullied. Maybe a good day. Maybe a bad day. Maybe the last day. The end is near, Thurman’s church had promised. Maybe a meteorite the size of a moon was hurtling closer. Maybe governments had suppressed the news. Maybe rebels were right then forcing the locks on an old Ukrainian silo. Maybe in a research lab somewhere a flask had cracked or a glove had torn or a mask had leaked.
Or maybe not. Reacher stamped his feet and ducked his face into his shoulder. His nose was cold. When he looked up again he saw headlights in the east. Bright, widely spaced, far enough away that they seemed to be static. A large vehicle. A truck. Possibly a semi trailer. Coming straight toward him, with the new dawn behind it.
Four possibilities. One, it would arrive at the junction and turn right and head north. Two, it would arrive at the junction and turn left and head south. Three, it would pause at the stop sign and then continue west without picking him up. Four, it would pause and cross the main drag and then pause again to let him climb aboard.
Chances of a happy ending, twenty-five percent. Or less, if it was a corporate vehicle with a no-passenger policy because of insurance hassles.
Reacher waited.
When the truck was a quarter-mile away he saw that it was a big rigid panel van, painted white. When it was three hundred yards away he saw that it had a refrigerator unit mounted on top. Fresh food delivery, which would have reduced the odds of a happy outcome if it hadn’t been for the stop signs. Food drivers usually didn’t like to stop. They had schedules to keep, and stopping a big truck and then getting it back up to speed could rob a guy of measurable minutes. But the stop signs meant he had to slow anyway.
Reacher waited.
He heard the guy lift off two hundred yards short of the junction. Heard the hiss of brakes. He raised his hand high, thumb extended. I need a ride. Then he raised both arms and waved. The distress semaphore. I really need a ride.
The truck stopped at the line on the east side of the junction. Neither one of its direction indicators was flashing. A good sign. There was no traffic north or south, so it moved on again immediately, diesel roaring, gears grinding, heading west across the main drag, straight toward Reacher. It accelerated. The driver looked down. The truck kept on moving.
Then it slowed again.
The air brakes hissed loud and the springs squealed and the truck came to a stop with the cab forty feet west of the junction and the rear fender a yard out of the north-south traffic lane. Reacher turned and jogged back and climbed up on the step. The window came down and the driver peered out from seven feet south. He was a short, wiry man, incongruously small in the huge cab. He said, “It’s going to rain.”
Reacher said, “That’s the least of my problems. My car broke down.”
The guy at the wheel said, “My first stop is Hope.”
Reacher said, “You’re the supermarket guy. From Topeka.”
“I left there at four this morning. You want to ride along?”
“Hope is where I’m headed.”
“So quit stalling and climb aboard.”
Dawn chased the truck all the way west, and overtook it inside thirty minutes. The world lit up cloudy and pale gold and the supermarket guy killed his headlights and sat back and relaxed. He drove the same way Thurman had flown his plane, with small efficient movements and his hands held low. Reacher asked him if he often carried passengers and he said that about one morning in five he found someone looking for a ride. Reacher said he had met a couple of women who had ridden with him.
“Tourists,” the guy said.
“More than that,” Reacher said.
“You think?”
“I know.”
“How much?”
“All of it.”
“How?”
“I figured it out.”
The guy nodded at the wheel.
“Wives and girlfriends,” he said. “Looking to be close by while their husbands and boyfriends pass through the state.”
“Understandable,” Reacher said. “It’s a tense time for them.”
“So you know what their husbands and boyfriends are?”
“Yes,” Reacher said. “I do.”
“And?”
“And nothing. Not my business.”
“You’re not going to tell anyone?”
“There’s a cop called Vaughan,” Reacher said. “I’m going to have to tell her. She has a right to know. She’s involved, two ways around.”
“I know her. She’s not goin
g to be happy.”
Reacher said, “Maybe she will be, maybe she won’t be.”
“I’m not involved,” the guy said. “I’m just a fellow traveler.”
“You are involved,” Reacher said. “We’re all involved.”
Then he checked his borrowed cell phone again. No signal.
There was nothing on the radio, either. The supermarket guy hit a button that scanned the whole AM spectrum from end to end, and he came up with nothing. Just static. A giant continent, mostly empty. The truck hammered on, bouncing and swaying on the rough surface. Reacher asked, “Where does Despair get its food?”
“I don’t know,” the guy said. “And I don’t care.”
“Ever been there?”
“Once. Just to take a look. And once was enough.”
“Why do people stay there?”
“I don’t know. Inertia, maybe.”
“Are there jobs elsewhere?”
“Plenty. They could head west to Halfway. Lots of jobs there. Or Denver. That place is expanding, for sure. Hell, they could come east to Topeka. We’re growing like crazy. Nice houses, great schools, good wages, right there for the taking. This is the land of opportunity.”
Reacher nodded and checked his cell phone again. No signal.
They made it to Hope just before ten in the morning. The place looked calm and quiet and unchanged. Clouds were massing overhead and it was cold. Reacher got out on First Street and stood for a moment. His cell phone showed good signal. But he didn’t dial. He walked down to Fifth and turned east. From fifty yards away he saw that there was nothing parked on the curb outside Vaughan’s house. No cruiser, no black Crown Vic. Nothing at all. He walked on, to get an angle and check the driveway.
The old blue Chevy pick-up was in the driveway. It was parked nose-in, tight to the garage door. It had glass in its windows again. The glass was still labeled with paper barcodes and it was crisp and clear except where it was smeared in places with wax and handprints. It looked very new against the faded old paint. The ladder and the wrecking bar and the flashlight were in the load bed. Reacher walked up the stepping-stone path to the door and rang the bell. He heard it sound inside the house. The neighborhood was still and silent. He stood on the step for thirty long seconds and then the door opened.