The Reacher Experiment

by Jude Hardin

  “I’m using aliases because I have to. If we could meet somewhere in person—”

  “I really wasn’t expecting to ever hear from you again,” Kasey said.

  “It’s only been a few weeks.”

  “Yeah, well, a lot has happened in those few weeks.”

  “I’m in trouble, Kasey. You know that. And it’s really not my fault. If you could just give me a chance to explain everything—”

  “I’m late for work. Some of us have actual responsibilities, you know? You’re going to have to come to Barstow if you want to talk to me in person.”

  She hung up.

  The payphone gave Wahlman two dollars and thirty-five cents of his money back. He stuffed the coins and the bills into his pocket and returned to his seat across from Joe, where the Down-For-The-Count platter he’d ordered was waiting for him.

  “She never brought my coffee?” Wahlman asked.

  “Waiting for a fresh pot to brew,” Joe said. “You should have ordered tea. Who drinks coffee for lunch?”

  “Lots of people.”

  “Not at Jimmy’s, obviously. Hurry up and eat your food. We need to be back at the jobsite in about twenty minutes.”

  “Just let me know when you’re ready,” Wahlman said. “I’m not that hungry anyway.”

  He took a bite of his burger. It was good, in the way that hot greasy meat and cheese and onions and lettuce and tomatoes and pickles and mayonnaise and a bun grilled in butter always is.

  “Let me see that,” Joe said.

  “What?”

  “Let me see your burger where you bit into it.”

  “Why?”

  “Just humor me for a minute,” Joe said, making a circular motion with his index finger.

  “Whatever,” Wahlman said.

  He rotated the burger so Joe could see where he had bitten into it.

  “That burger’s well done,” Joe said.

  “So?”

  “So mine’s pink in the middle again. She must have gotten our orders mixed up when she delivered the plates to the table. She must have given me your plate, and she must have given you my plate.”

  Wahlman sighed. “You want this burger?” he asked.

  “Not after you already ate on it.”

  Wahlman shrugged. He took another bite of the burger, thought about what Kasey had said on the phone. You’re going to have to come to Barstow if you want to talk to me in person. Wahlman had learned some things about himself since he’d been on the run, and one of the things he’d learned was that he disliked backtracking. After he’d been to a place once, he didn’t want to go back to that place again. And it wasn’t just because people were trying to find him. It wasn’t because of the arrest warrant in Louisiana, or even because of the contract on his life. It was something in his nature. Something he had been born with. He’d felt it to some degree in the navy, but he’d never realized the full extent of the aversion until he’d abandoned his home in Florida and started traveling around the country. He had no desire to return to Chattanooga, or Louisville, or Quincy, or Dallas, or any of the other cities he’d spent time in over the past few months. He didn’t want to go back to any of those places.

  But Barstow was a different story.

  The exception to the rule.

  Wahlman did want to go back there. Because of Kasey. He wanted to go back, but there were reasons why he couldn’t. Three of them, to be exact. Three boneheads who’d challenged him out on the street one night. Three boneheads who’d lost. Severely.

  Barstow was off limits now. Forever. Kasey would just have to agree to meet with him somewhere else. He would have to convince her, somehow. He planned to call her tonight from his hotel room and give it a try.

  He glanced toward the drink station, to see if the coffee he’d ordered might be coming sometime before the turn of the century, and when he did he noticed a man sitting alone at a booth on the other side of the dining area. The booth had been vacant earlier. The man must have entered the restaurant while Wahlman was on the phone. There was something familiar about the man, something Wahlman couldn’t quite put his finger on.

  Then he noticed the leather coat that had been draped over the padded bench seat directly across from the man.

  It was long.

  Like a trench coat.

  2

  Wahlman had seen the man weeks ago. At the diner in Barstow. The Quick Street Inn, where Kasey worked. Now the man was in the Seattle area, at Jimmy’s Ringside, looking at a menu at 12:37 on a Thursday afternoon, the exact same time that Wahlman was in the Seattle area, at Jimmy’s Ringside, swallowing a bite of a cheeseburger. What were the odds?

  “I’m going to the restroom,” Wahlman said.

  “Again?” Joe said. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m all right.”

  Wahlman slid out of the booth and started walking, kept his eyes straight ahead, focusing on the trophy display against the front wall. When he passed the cashier’s counter, he didn’t take a right, toward the alcove that led to the restrooms. He took a left, toward the exit. Joe’s back was to him. Joe couldn’t see what he was doing. But the man with the leather trench coat could see what he was doing just fine. The man with the leather trench coat had a clear line of sight all the way to the front of the restaurant. Acutely aware of the man’s position—and that his presence probably wasn’t a coincidence—Wahlman made an effort to keep his movements smooth and ordinary. Just a casual little stroll to get something out of the truck. Maybe he’d forgotten his wallet. Or his reading glasses. Or whatever. He pushed his way through the swinging glass door and sauntered across the concrete sidewalk that lined the perimeter of the building, out to the slightly damp asphalt of the parking lot, walking a little faster as he went. Which, as it turned out, was a natural thing to do, because of the drizzle, which had gotten a little heavier over the past fifteen minutes or so.

  When he got to Joe’s truck, he opened the driver side door and slid in behind the wheel and punched in the code to start the motor. Now was the time to drop the act of casual indifference. Now was the time to get out of there. Fast. He slammed the truck into gear and weaved his way out of the parking lot, out to the four-lane highway that led back to the subdivision where he and Joe had been working. Only he didn’t turn into the subdivision. He drove past the gated entrance and took a right at the next light. Toward the interstate. Toward wherever. He couldn’t go very far north, because that would put him in Canada, and he didn’t have a passport, or even a driver’s license. He couldn’t go very far west, because that would put him in the Puget Sound, and as nice as Joe’s truck was, it didn’t have the amphibious capabilities that some of the more expensive models on the market were equipped with. Wahlman was trying to decide between south and east when he glanced into the rearview mirror and saw a pair of headlights. They were about a hundred yards behind him and closing in fast.

  Wahlman floored the accelerator. There was a traffic signal just ahead. It turned yellow. Wahlman sped through it. The light turned red, but the car behind Wahlman didn’t stop. Now it was only about twenty yards away.

  Ten.

  Five.

  Wahlman could see the car clearly in his rearview mirror now. It was a two-seater. Some kind of sports car. Dark gray, about the same shade as the pavement. And the sky. Thick billowing clouds the color of molten lead now, rolling in from the west, reflecting off the little car’s windshield, making it impossible for Wahlman to see the driver’s face, making it impossible to see whether or not anyone was in the passenger seat.

  Wahlman didn’t think so. The man with the leather trench coat had been alone at the diner in Barstow, and he’d been alone at Jimmy’s Ringside. Maybe he was a private investigator, hired by the New Orleans Police Department, hired to find Wahlman and alert the nearest law enforcement agency for temporary detainment pending extradition back to Louisiana. But if that was the case, why hadn’t Wahlman been taken into custody in Barstow? He’d been sitting five stools away fr
om the man. Four stools away from the man’s coat. The man could have easily phoned the police, and the police could have easily come and taken Wahlman away. But that didn’t happen.

  Which meant that the man was probably not a private investigator.

  Which meant that things were probably about to get a lot worse for Rock Wahlman.

  There was a loud pop, like the sound of a hammer slamming into a tray of ice cubes. It occurred in conjunction with the appearance of a hole about the size of a quarter in Joe’s windshield. Just below the rearview mirror. Just to the right of Wahlman’s head.

  Wahlman didn’t turn around to look, but he figured that there was a similar hole in the truck’s back window, and he figured that the holes, front and back, had been bored by a single slug, and that the slug had been fired from a large-caliber handgun, probably a .45 or a 9mm. He knew that such projectiles traveled at a high velocity, faster than the speed of sound, and he knew that this particular one had come very close to gathering some blood and bone and brain tissue on its way out of Joe’s cab.

  He also knew that it’s extremely difficult to drive a vehicle and effectively shoot a gun at the same time. You have to steer with your right hand, stick your left arm out the driver side window, find your target and take aim, hoping all the while that your vehicle, or whatever you’re aiming at, doesn’t move a fraction of an inch to the left, or a fraction of an inch to the right, hoping that there’s not a slight dip in the pavement, or a slight rise, or that any number of other factors that could adversely affect the trajectory of the bullet when you pull the trigger don’t adversely affect the trajectory of the bullet when you pull the trigger. Wahlman knew from experience how difficult it was to drive a vehicle and effectively shoot a gun at the same time, especially when the vehicle was traveling at a high speed—one hundred and eighteen miles per hour, to be exact—which made him think that maybe the man with the leather trench coat wasn’t working alone after all. It’s somewhat easier to shoot from a car if you aren’t the one driving it. You can steady the gun with both hands, and you can focus entirely on the target. It’s still something of a crapshoot, but if you have the right training, and if you squeeze off enough rounds, there’s a fairly good chance that at least one of your bullets will hit what you want it to hit.

  And one is usually all it takes.

  With those things in mind, Wahlman was thinking that the man with the trench coat probably had a partner, and that the partner, who was obviously a highly skilled marksperson, was probably doing the shooting. Wahlman was thinking that, and he was pretty sure of it, until he glanced up at the rearview mirror and saw a muzzle flash coming from the driver side of the sports car and heard another loud pop as another slug drilled its way through the windshield.

  No partner.

  The guy was just good.

  A third bullet punched its way through the glass, and this time Wahlman actually heard the projectile whistle past his right ear.

  Joe was probably aware by now that his nice red truck was not in the parking lot anymore, and that the guy he’d hired named Calvin hadn’t really gone to the restroom. Someone at the private security company that monitored the nice red truck’s GPS tracking system twenty-four-seven was probably watching a nice red luminescent dot move at a fairly fast clip on an electronic map right now, and a call would probably be going out to the police soon, if it hadn’t already. Somehow, Wahlman needed to abandon the truck and get far enough away from it to avoid being captured by the police, and at the same time he needed to get far enough away from the assassin in the car behind him to avoid being dead.

  He opened Joe’s glove compartment and started ferreting through the papers in there, hoping that Joe wasn’t really the straight-laced law-abiding citizen that he seemed to be, hoping to find something to defend himself with. A pistol would have been nice. A hand grenade would have been better. All he found was a bunch of receipts and some paper envelopes and a package of cheap cigars and a lighter and a bottle of cheap cologne and two condoms in a little box that had contained three before it had been opened. Wahlman thought about pulling the items out onto the seat and trying to assemble some sort of explosive device with them. The cologne probably had a good amount of alcohol in it. You could soak a strip of paper from one of the cigars with some of the cologne, and then you could stuff the paper down into the bottle and light it with the lighter, and then you could chuck your miniature Molotov cocktail out the window, and then it would smash through the little gray sports car’s windshield and blow the little gray sports car and the driver to smithereens, and then you could hide the truck in the woods and hike on up to the interstate and hitch a ride to Portland or somewhere. You might be able to do all that if you weren’t traveling at speeds in excess of a hundred miles an hour, and if you didn’t need at least one hand on the steering wheel at all times, and if you weren’t whizzing past a sign that said ROAD CONSTRUCTION 2 MILES AHEAD BE PREPARED TO STOP.

  Wahlman took his foot off the accelerator.

  Slowed down to eighty.

  Another bullet whistled past his head.

  There had to be a way out of this. There had to be a way to survive. Only there wasn’t. Wahlman was going to die, and there was nothing he could do about it.

  Then he remembered that the bed of Joe’s truck was equipped with a tilting mechanism. Like a dump truck. He flipped the toggle switch on the right side of the dashboard, the one directly beneath the radio. He’d activated the mechanism once before. Yesterday, when he’d needed to drop off some rolls of barbed wire at Joe’s storage lot. So he knew what was supposed to happen. The bed was supposed to start rising away from the frame. It was supposed to tilt at an angle that would allow the cargo to slide off. The only thing back there at the moment was a crate of decking screws, purchased at the home supply center that morning when Joe had arranged for his deliveries, meant to be used tomorrow, to attach the wooden panels to the wooden posts. The crate would probably split open when it hit the pavement, and the decking screws would probably go everywhere, and some of them would probably end up under the little gray sports car, and there’s nothing quite like a tire blowing out at eighty miles an hour to totally ruin an assassin’s day.

  But when Wahlman flipped the switch, nothing happened. The bed didn’t tilt, and the crate of screws didn’t slide off, and the man with the leather trench coat didn’t lose control of the car he was driving.

  Wahlman figured that the truck had been equipped with some sort of safety device that prevented the bed from tilting while the truck was moving. He glanced down at the dashboard. There was a square button to the left of the steering wheel. It was about the size of a Scrabble tile. The letters KMO were printed underneath it, and underneath the letters there was a little red lens that probably had a little light bulb behind it.

  Wahlman had no idea what the K stood for, but he hoped that the M stood for manual and that the O stood for override. He pressed the button in with his left index finger. The little red light started flashing and a buzzer started sounding and the bed started tilting. Wahlman stopped the mechanism before the front edge of the bed rose to the level of the roof of the cab, thinking that the safety device had been installed for a reason, thinking that if the bed rose too high it would act as sort of a wing at these speeds, creating lift that could potentially flip the truck over backwards. Which might or might not ruin the assassin’s day, but would definitely ruin Wahlman’s.

  The rear window was blocked now, but Wahlman could still see behind the truck, using the big rectangular mirrors that were bolted to the front fenders, just in front of the top door hinges. The wooden crate slid off the bed and smashed into the pavement and splintered into a million pieces. The decking screws went everywhere, just as planned, but none of the tires on the little gray sports car blew out, and the man with the leather trench coat didn’t lose control. Maybe some of the screws had punctured some of the tires, causing slow leaks that would be a nuisance later on. But slow leaks didn’t do Wahl
man any good at the moment. He needed slow leaks like he needed a hole in the head. Which, unfortunately, was exactly what he was going to get if the man with the leather trench coat had his way.

  At least the rear window was shielded now. Wahlman heard a couple of bullets ping off the heavy steel bed as he tried to think of what to do next.

  He needed to do something.

  And he needed to do it fast.

  Because half a mile ahead there was a guy in an orange vest holding a portable stop sign.

  One way or another, this thing was going to end in a matter of seconds.

  And Wahlman couldn’t imagine how it could possibly end in his favor.

  3

  Kasey wasn’t really late for work. She’d called in sick. Again. Seven times in the past five weeks. Four times in the past two. She’d been waiting tables at The Quick Street Inn for a little over two years, and she considered Greg, the owner, to be her friend as well as her boss, but she knew that he wouldn’t be able to keep her on the schedule if she continued missing shifts. He would have to fire her. She knew that, but she didn’t really care.

  She poured herself another glass of vodka and stared out the dining room window, noticing the weeds in her back yard and not really caring about those either.

  Her cell phone trilled. It was Natalie. Her daughter.

  “Why aren’t you at school?” Kasey asked.

  “I am at school,” Natalie said. “I’m waiting for you to pick me up.”

  Natalie was in the ninth grade. School let out at three o’clock. It wasn’t even one yet.

  “What are you talking about?” Kasey asked.

  “We got out early today. Remember? I told you last night. You said you’d pick me up and take me shopping for some new jeans.”

  “That’s right,” Kasey said, although she didn’t actually recall the conversation. “I am so sorry, honey. It totally slipped my mind. Go ahead and take the bus home. I’m not feeling very well today, but maybe we can—”