Chapter 17
They had the argument right there on the street as they walked through Georgetown.
"Worried about my safety?" Neagley asked. "Because you shouldn't be. Nothing's going to happen to me. I can look after myself. And I can make my own decisions. "
"I'm not worried about your safety," Reacher said.
"What then? My performance? I'm way better than you. "
"I know you are. "
"So what's your problem?"
"Your license. You've got something to lose. "
Neagley said nothing.
"You've got a license, right?" Reacher said. "To be in the business you're in? And you've got an office and a job and a home and a fixed location. I'm going to disappear after this. You can't do that. "
"Think we're going to get caught?"
"I can afford to take the risk. You can't. "
"There's no risk if we don't get caught. "
Now Reacher said nothing.
"It's like you told Bannon," she said. "I'm lying there lined up on these guys, I'm going to get an itch in my spine. I need you to watch my back. "
"This isn't your fight. "
"Why is it yours? Because some woman your brother once dumped got herself killed doing her job? That's tenuous. "
Reacher said nothing.
"OK, it's your fight," Neagley said. "I know that. But whatever thing you've got in your head that makes it your fight makes it my fight too. Because I've got the same thing in my head. And even if we didn't think the same, if I had a problem, wouldn't you help me out?"
"I would if you asked. "
"So we're even. "
"Except I'm not asking. "
"Not right now. But you will be. You're two thousand miles from Wyoming and you don't have a credit card to buy a plane ticket with, and I do. You're armed with a folding knife with a three-inch blade and I know a guy in Denver who will give us any weapons we want, no questions asked, and you don't. I can rent a car in Denver to get us the rest of the way, and you can't. "
They walked on, twenty yards, thirty.
"OK," Reacher said. "I'm asking. "
"We'll get the clothes in Denver," she said. "I know some good places. "
They made it to Denver before three in the afternoon Mountain Time. The high plains lay all around them, tan and dormant. The air was thin and bitter cold. There was no snow yet, but it was coming. The runway plows were lined up and ready. The snowdrift fences were prepared. The car rental companies had shipped their sedans south and brought in plenty of new four-wheel-drives. Neagley signed for a GMC Yukon at the Avis counter. They shuttled to the lot and picked it up. It was black and shiny and looked a lot like Froelich's Suburban except it was two feet shorter.
They drove it into the city. It was a long, long way. Space seemed infinitely available even after D. C. , which wasn't the most crowded place in the East. They parked in a downtown garage and walked three blocks and Neagley found the store she was looking for. It was an all-purpose outdoor equipment place. It had everything from boots and compasses to zinc stuff designed to stop you getting sunburn on your nose. They bought a bird-watcher's spotting scope and a hiker's large-scale map of central Wyoming and then they moved to the clothing racks. They were full of the kind of stuff you could use halfway up the Rockies and then wear around town without looking like a complete idiot. Neagley went for a walker's heavy-duty outfit in greens and browns. Reacher duplicated his Atlantic City purchases at twice the price and twice the quality. This time he added a hat, and a pair of gloves. He dressed in the changing cubicle. Left Joe's last surviving suit stuffed in the garbage can.
Neagley found a pay phone on the street and stopped in the cold long enough to make a short call. Then they went back to the truck and she drove it out of the garage and through the city center toward the dubious part of town. There was a strong smell of dog food in the air.
"There's a factory here," she said.
Reacher nodded. "No kidding. "
She came off a narrow street into some kind of an industrial park and nosed through a tangle of low-built metal structures. There were linoleum dealers and brake shops and places where you could get four snow tires for ninety-nine bucks and other places where you could get your steering realigned for twenty. On one corner there was a long low workshop standing on its own in the center of a quarter-acre of cracked blacktop. The building had a closed roll-up door and a hand-painted sign that read: Eddie Brown Engineering.
"This is your guy?" Reacher asked.
Neagley nodded. "What do we want?"
Reacher shrugged. "No point planning it to death. Something short and something long, one of each, plus some ammunition, I guess. That should do it. "
She stopped in front of the roll-up door and hit the horn. A guy came out of a personnel entrance and got halfway to the car before he saw who it was. He was tall and heavy through the neck and shoulders. He had short fair hair and an open amiable face, but he had big hands and thick wrists and wasn't the sort of guy you'd mess with on a whim. He sketched a wave and ducked back inside and a moment later the big door started rolling up. Neagley drove in under it and it came back down behind them.
On the inside the building was about half the size it should have been, but apart from that it looked convincing. The floor was grease-stained concrete and there were metalworkers' lathes here and there, and drilling machines and stacks of raw sheet metal and bundles of steel rods. But the back wall was ten feet closer on the inside than the exterior proportions dictated. Clearly there was a handsome-sized room concealed behind it.
"This is Eddie Brown," Neagley said.
"Not my real name," the big guy said.
He accessed the concealed room by pulling on a big pile of scrap metal. It was all welded together and welded in turn to a steel panel hidden behind it. The whole thing swung open on silent oiled hinges like a giant three-dimensional door. The guy calling himself Eddie Brown led them through it into a whole different situation.
The concealed room was as clean as a hospital. It was painted white and lined on all four sides by shelves and racks. On three walls the shelves held handguns, some of them boxed, some of them loose. The racks were full of long guns, rifles and carbines and shotguns and machine guns, yards of them, all of them neat and parallel. The air was full of the stink of gun oil. The fourth wall was lined like a library with boxes of ammunition. Reacher could smell the new brass and the crisp cardboard and faint traces of powder.
"I'm impressed," he said.
"Take what you need," Eddie said.
"Where do the serial numbers lead to?"
"The Austrian Army," Eddie said. "They kind of fizzle out after that. "
Ten minutes later they were back on the road, with Reacher's new jacket carefully spread out in the Yukon's load space over two nine-millimeter Steyr GBs, a Heckler amp; Koch MP5 unsilenced machine gun, an M16 rifle, and boxes full of two hundred rounds for each weapon.
They entered Wyoming after dark, driving north on I-25. They turned left at Cheyenne and picked up I-80. They rolled west to Laramie and then headed north. The town called Grace was still five hours away, well beyond Casper. The map showed it nestled in the middle of nowhere between towering mountains on one side and infinite grasslands on the other.
"We'll stop in Medicine Bow," Reacher said. "Sounds like a cool place. We'll aim to get to Grace at dawn tomorrow. "
Medicine Bow didn't look like much of a cool place in the dark, but it had a motel about two miles out with rooms available. Neagley paid for them. Then they found a steakhouse a mile in the other direction and ate twelve-ounce sirloins that cost less than a drink in D. C. The place closed up around them so they took the hint and headed back to their rooms. Reacher left his coat in the truck, to hide the firepower from curious eyes. They said goodnight in the lot. Reacher went straight to bed. He heard Neagley in the shower. She was singing to herself. He could hear it, throug
h the wall.
He woke up at four in the morning, Saturday. Neagley was showering again, and still singing. He thought: When the hell does she sleep? He rolled out of bed and headed for the bathroom. Turned his shower on hot, which must have made hers run cold, because he heard a muffled scream through the wall. So he turned it off again and waited until he heard her finish. Then he showered and dressed and met her out by the car. It was still pitch dark. Still very cold. There were flakes of snow blowing in from the west. They were drifting slowly through the parking lot lights.
"Can't find any coffee," Neagley said.
They found some an hour north. A roadside diner was opening for breakfast. They saw its lights a mile away. It was next to the mouth of a dirt road leading down through the darkness to the Medicine Bow National Forest. The diner looked like a barn, long and low, made out of red boards. Cold outside, warm inside. They sat at a table by a curtained window and ate eggs and bacon and toast and drank strong bitter coffee.
"OK, we'll call them one and two," Neagley said. "One is the Bismarck guy. You'll recognize him. Two is the guy from the garage video. We might recognize him from his build. But we don't really know what he looks like. "
Reacher nodded. "So we'll look for the Bismarck guy hanging out with some other guy. No point planning it to death. "
"You don't sound very enthusiastic. "
"You should go home. "
"Now that I've gotten you here?"
"I've got a bad feeling about this. "
"You're uptight that Froelich was killed. That's all. Doesn't mean anything's going to happen to me. "
He said nothing.
"We're two against two," Neagley said. "You and me against two bozos, and you're worried about it?"
"Not very," he said.
"Maybe they won't even show. Bannon figured they'd know it was a trap. "
"They'll show," Reacher said. "They've been challenged. It's a testosterone thing. And they've got more than enough screws loose to jump right on it. "
"Nothing's going to happen to me, if they do. "
"I'd feel bad if it did. "
"It's not going to," she said.
"Tell me I'm not making you do this. "
"My own free will," she said.
He nodded. "So let's go. "
They got back on the road. Snowflakes hung in the headlight beams. They drifted in weightlessly from the west and shone bright in the light and then whipped backward as they drove. They were big flakes, dry and powdery, not many of them. The road was narrow. It wandered left and right. The surface was lumpy. All around it in the darkness was a vastness so large it sucked the noise of the car away into nothing. They were driving in a bright tunnel of silence, leaping ahead from one lonely snowflake to the next.
"I guess Casper will have a police department," Reacher said.
Neagley nodded at the wheel. "Could be a hundred strong. Casper is nearly as big as Cheyenne. Nearly as big as Bismarck, actually. "
"And they'll be responsible for Grace," Reacher said.
"Alongside the state troopers, I guess. "
"So any other cops we find there are our guys. "
"You're still certain they're cops?"
He nodded. "It's the only way everything makes sense. The initial contact with Nendick and Andretti in the cop bars, the familiarity with the NCIC, the access to the government weapons. Plus the way they slip in and out everywhere. Crowds, confusion, a gold shield gets you anywhere. And if Armstrong's right and their dad was a cop, that's a pretty good predictor. It's a family trade, like the military. "
"My dad wasn't in the military. "
"But mine was, so there's fifty percent right away. Better than most other professions. And you know what the clincher is?"
"What?"
"Something we should have figured long ago. But we just skated right on by. We missed it, totally. The two dead Armstrongs. How the hell do you just find two white guys with fair hair and blue eyes and the right dates of birth and the right faces and above all the right first and last names? That's a very tall order. But these guys did it. And there's only one practical way of doing it, which is the national DMV database. Driver's license information, names, addresses, dates of birth, photographs. It's all right there, everything you need. And nobody can get into it, except cops, who can dial it right up. "
Neagley was silent for a moment.
"OK, they are cops," she said.
"They sure are. And we're brain dead for not spotting it on Tuesday. "
"But cops would have heard of Armstrong long ago, wouldn't they?"
"Why would they? Cops know about their own little world, that's all, same as anybody else. If you worked in some rural police department in Maine or Florida or outside San Diego you might know the New York Giants quarterback or the Chicago White Sox center fielder but there's no reason why you would have heard of North Dakota's junior senator. Unless you were a politics junkie, and most people aren't. "
Neagley drove on. Way to the right, far to the east, a narrow band of sky was a fraction lighter than it had been. It had turned the color of dark charcoal against the blackness beyond it. The snow was no heavier, no lighter. The big lazy flakes drifted in from the mountains, floating level, sometimes rising.
"So which is it?" she asked. "Maine or Florida or San Diego? We need to know, because if they're flying in they won't be armed with anything they can't pick up here. "
"California is a possibility," Reacher said. "Oregon isn't. They wouldn't have revealed their specific identity to Armstrong if they still lived in Oregon. Nevada is a possibility. Or Utah or Idaho. Anywhere else is too far. "
"For what?"
"To be on a reasonable radius from Sacramento. How long does a stolen cooler of ice last?"
Neagley said nothing.
"Nevada or Utah or Idaho," Reacher said. "That's my guess. Not California. I think they wanted a state line between them and the place they went for the thumb. Feels better, psychologically. I think they're a long day's drive from Sacramento. Which means they're probably a long day's drive from here, too, in the other direction. So I think they'll be coming in by road, armed to the teeth. "
"When?"
"Today, if they've got any sense. "
"The bat was mailed in Utah," Neagley said.
Reacher nodded. "OK, so scratch Utah. I don't think they wanted to mail anything in their home state. "
"So Idaho or Nevada," Neagley said. "We better watch for license plates. "
"This is a tourist destination. There are going to be plenty of out-of-state plates. Like we've got Colorado plates. "
"How will they aim to do it?"
"Edward Fox," Reacher said. "They want to survive, and they're reasonable with a rifle. Hundred and twenty yards in Minnesota, ninety in D. C. They'll aim to get him in the church doorway, somewhere like that. Maybe out in the graveyard. Drop him right next to somebody else's headstone. "
Neagley slowed and turned right onto Route 220. It was a better road, wider, newer blacktop. It ran with a river wandering next to it. The sky was lighter in the east. Up ahead was a faint glow from the city of Casper, twenty miles north. The snow was still blowing in from the west, slow and lazy.
"So what's our plan?" Neagley asked.
"We need to see the terrain," Reacher said.
He looked sideways out the window. He had seen nothing but darkness since leaving Denver.
They stopped on the outer edge of Casper for gas and more coffee and a bathroom. Then Reacher took a turn at the wheel. He picked up Route 87 north out of town and drove fast for thirty miles because Route 87 was also I-25 again and was wide and straight. And he drove fast because they were late. Dawn was in full swing to the east and they were still well short of Grace. The sky was pink and beautiful and the light came in brilliant horizontal shafts and lit the mountainsides in the west. They were meandering through the foothills. On their
right, to the east, the world was basically flat all the way to Chicago and beyond. On their left, distant in the west, the Rocky Mountains reared two miles high. The lower slopes were dotted with stands of pine and the peaks were white with snow and streaked with gray crags. For miles either side of the ribbon of road was high desert, with sagebrush and tan grasses blazing purple in the early sun.
"Been here before?" Neagley asked.
"No," he said.
"We need to turn," she said. "Soon, east toward Thunder Basin. "
He repeated the name in his head, because he liked the sound of the words. Thunder Basin. Thunder Basin.
He made a shallow right off the highway onto a narrow county road. There were signposts to Midwest and Edgerton. The land fell away to the east. Pines a hundred feet tall threw morning shadows a hundred yards long. There was endless ragged grassland interrupted here and there by the remains of old industrial enterprises. There were square stone foundations a foot high and tangles of old iron.
"Oil," Neagley said. "And coal mining. All closed down eighty years ago. "
"The land looks awful flat," Reacher said.
But he knew the flatness was deceptive. The low sun showed him creases and crevices and small escarpments that were nothing compared to the mountains on his left but were a long way from being flat. They were in a transition area, where the mountains shaded randomly into the high plains. The geological tumult of a million years ago rippled outward all the way to Nebraska, frozen in time, leaving enough cover to hide a walking man in a million different places.
"We need it to be totally flat," Neagley said.
Reacher nodded at the wheel. "Except for maybe one little hill a hundred yards from where Armstrong is going to be. And another little hill a hundred yards back from it, where we can watch from. "
"It isn't going to be that easy. "
"It never is," Reacher said.
They drove on, another whole hour. They were heading north and east into emptiness. The sun rose well clear of the horizon. The sky was banded pink and purple. Behind them the Rockies blazed with reflected light. Ahead and to the right the grasslands ran into the distance like a stormy ocean.
There was no more snow in the air. The big lazy flakes had disappeared.
"Turn here," Neagley said.
"Here?" He slowed to a stop and looked at the turn. It was just a dirt road, leading south to the middle of nowhere.
"There's a town down there?" he asked.
"According to the map," Neagley said.
He backed up and made the turn. The dirt road ran a mile through pines and then broke out with a view of absolutely nothing.
"Keep going," Neagley said.
They drove on, twenty miles, thirty. The road rose and fell. Then it peaked and the land fell away in front of them into a fifty-mile-wide bowl of grass and sage. The road ran ahead through it straight south like a faint pencil line and crossed a river in the base of the bowl. Two more roads ran into the bridge from nowhere. There were tiny buildings scattered randomly. The whole thing looked like a capital letter K, lightly peppered with habitation where the three lines of the letter met.
"That's Grace, Wyoming," Neagley said. "Where this road crosses the south fork of the Cheyenne River. "
Reacher eased the Yukon to a stop. Put it in park and crossed his arms on the top of the wheel. Leaned forward with his chin on his hands and stared ahead through the windshield.
"We should be on horses," he said.
"Wearing white hats," Neagley said. "With Colt. 45s. "
"I'll stick with the Steyrs," Reacher said. "How many ways in?"
Neagley traced her finger over the map.