top.’
‘They had guns,’ Reacher said. ‘They could have fought their way through the roadblocks. Or they could have held a gun to Delfuenso’s head. That might have worked. I don’t suppose either Nebraska or Iowa gives their troopers that kind of training.’
‘Big risk.’
‘What’s your point?’
‘They started out south of the Interstate and they finished up south of the Interstate. They couldn’t guarantee finding a hitchhiker. Not in the middle of winter. And they knew where the roadblocks were going to be, if there were going to be any at all. So why didn’t they go east on country roads, directly? Why choose to risk the highway in the first place?’
‘At one point they said they were heading to Chicago.’
‘How many people in Chicago?’
‘About three million in the city, and about eight in the metro area. Area codes are 312 and 773.’
‘Did you believe they were heading for Chicago?’
‘Not really. Not on reflection. Too far. Too ambitious for one night’s drive.’
‘So why did they take the Interstate?’
Now the rain clouds were closer. They were moving in like a black wall. The sun had gone. Reacher felt an angry wind rocking the car. The road ahead was straight and level, well constructed, two lanes but not narrow. Turns to the left and right were infrequent, and the east-west roads were little more than paved tracks between fields. They looked desolate, like they didn’t really lead anywhere.
He asked, ‘Have you got a map?’
Sorenson said, ‘Only electronic.’
She fired up her GPS, and Reacher saw it find a satellite. The small screen redrew and the car became a pulsing arrow moving down a thick grey line. The small roads left and right were represented as faint grey lines.
Sorenson said, ‘You can zoom in and out, if you want.’
Reacher found the right buttons and zoomed out. The arrow stayed the same size, but the grey lines got smaller. The north-south road they were on was a principal thoroughfare, but there was nothing equivalent running east and west until a crossroads thirty miles south of their current position.
‘That’s where we’re going,’ Sorenson said. ‘The old pumping station is right there.’
In the other direction there was no major east-west road until some distance north of the highway. Reacher said, ‘I guess speed might have been an issue. If they needed to get where they were going before dawn, then the Interstate might have been the only option. But I agree about the risk of exposure. And I’m not sure how speed was an issue, exactly. They were picked up, after all. They could have arranged the rendezvous for somewhere much closer. So altogether it would have been more logical to take off directly east from the crossroads, not north. That road looks as good as this one. I’m sure it runs all the way to Iowa.’
The first fat raindrops hit the windshield. Sorenson turned her lights and wipers on. A mile to the east the rain was heavy.
Sheriff Goodman saw the clouds. His car was still parked in the middle of the road. He was leaning on the fender again. He had decided that snatching a kid on foot was ridiculous. A whole day’s walk would get you precisely nowhere in Nebraska. So now he was wondering if the abductors had parked where he was parked, out of the mud. Maybe they were fastidious. Or maybe they had seen the mud and anticipated the danger and decided to avoid leaving tracks in the first place. Or maybe they were worried about witnesses, in which case maybe they had parked out of sight, a couple of hundred yards away. Which would still leave them exposed for a good few minutes. They would have to walk in, two or more unexplained pedestrians, and then they would have to walk out again, two or more men with a child in tow, possibly reluctant.
Then the first fat raindrops fell. Goodman watched them spatter on the mud. He checked the sky. He figured they were in for a short sharp downpour. Not uncommon. The state’s immense ground water reserves had to come from somewhere. He took a last look at the muddy gutter. Pretty soon it would be liquid, and pretty soon after that it would be skimmed over with fresh run-off from the fields, like silt, as flat and as fine as talcum powder. He wasn’t concerned. The investigation would not be set back. He wasn’t losing evidence, because there was no evidence to lose.
Then the rain got a little harder and he pushed off the fender. Or tried to. He got a sudden sharp pain in his shoulders. And his arms. And a savage dull pain in the centre of his chest. Like heartburn. But not heartburn. He hadn’t eaten anything.
He couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t move. His chest locked up solid. His knees gave way. He slid down the slick paint of the fender. He rested for a moment on his heels. He could feel the lip of the wheel arch digging into his back. He could smell the tyre. He could smell the rain. His arms wouldn’t move.
He pitched sideways and sprawled on his back. He saw black clouds above him. He felt rain on his face. His chest was being crushed. Like it had a heavy weight on it. Like one time long ago in the gym when his spotter had stepped away and he had ended up with a two-hundred-pound barbell resting below his neck. He hadn’t even been able to call out. He couldn’t call out now. He had no air in his lungs. He couldn’t move. He fought for a minute, and then he gave it up, because he knew with sudden strange certainty he would never move again.
He relaxed.
He lost all the feeling in his legs and his arms. Like they weren’t even there. He was interested. He was dying from the extremities inward. His body was racing down a list, shedding one non-essential item after another. The animal organism, immensely evolved, programmed to maintain its core function just as long as it could. Programmed to redefine that core function ruthlessly and second by second. Legs? Who needs them? Arms? What for? It was the brain that counted. The brain would be the last thing to die.
Four minutes, he thought. That was the figure that came to him. He remembered his training. People drowning in ponds, kids choking on things, you get four minutes after the heart stops. He felt his life shrinking upward and inward, into his head. That’s all he was now. A head. A brain. Nothing else. That was all he ever had been. That was all any human ever was. Cogito ergo sum. I think, therefore I am. There was no pain. Not any more. He was a brain, unsupported. He had no body. Like science fiction. Like a man from Mars. A space alien. He could still see. But his vision was dimming at the edges. Like an old TV. That’s how it was going to happen. He understood. Finally. A question, answered. A mystery, solved. He was going to switch off like an old black-and-white TV, collapsing to a tiny spot of light that burned bright in the centre of the screen, before dimming and then disappearing for ever.
FORTY SEVEN
THE WIPERS THRASHED back and forth and the rain hammered on the roof of the car and bounced a foot off the road. Through the murk Reacher saw an oil company sign high above the plain, lit up bright. Less than half a mile away, he thought. Sorenson glanced at him and said, ‘OK, pay attention. This is what the locals call Sin City. This is where it starts.’
She slowed the car. The gas station was on the left. But she turned right, into a lumpy gravel lot behind a no-name cinder block bar. She crunched on south and stopped behind a low beige building. There was a red Mazda parked at the back door. She said, ‘This is where Delfuenso worked. It’s a cocktail lounge. King and McQueen drove up from the crossroads in the red car.’
She rolled onward through the rain, bouncing and splashing through puddles, and she stopped again behind another low building. She said, ‘This is a convenience store. This is where they bought the shirts and the water.’ Then she bumped her way back to the road, and paused before turning. She said, ‘They went north from here, and you know what happened after that.’ But she went the other way and drove on south. Reacher saw dormant bean fields, with standing water in the plough ruts, and a sad wet quarter-mile of old farm machinery for sale, and then more bean fields. Then came low buildings with spilling rain gutters, and small forlorn strip malls. The town itself, such as it was. The GPS arrow was co
ming up to the crossroads. The north-south spine was about to meet the east-west spine. The map was fairly definitive. In terms of getting anywhere other than the local corner store, those two roads were the only long-distance options.
Sorenson turned west at the crossroads and a hundred yards later she stopped outside a low concrete bunker. It was maybe twenty feet long by fifteen deep and ten tall. It had a flat roof and no windows and an old metal door. It was soaked with rain, suddenly clean and tan. Reacher said, ‘This is the old pumping station?’
Sorenson nodded. ‘The dead guy was on the floor inside. King and McQueen were seen leaving in the red Mazda.’
Reacher looked ahead, and behind, and left, and right. He fiddled with the GPS until he had it zoomed out to a twenty-mile radius. At that scale there was nothing on the screen except the north-south road and the east-west road. Everything else had faded away to insignificance. He said, ‘I think King and McQueen weren’t local. It’s likely they had never been here before. They probably came in off the Interstate, the same way we did. They saw the bars and the lounges. They didn’t want to keep the red car, so they headed back there, which was the only kind of place they’d seen where it was likely they could find a replacement.’
‘OK, but why didn’t they come back to the crossroads and turn east from there?’
‘Two reasons,’ Reacher said. ‘They’re not local, so they didn’t know for sure where that road goes. I assume Delfuenso didn’t have GPS or maps in her glove box. But more importantly they’ll have assumed the crossroads would be roadblocked from the start. Four birds with one stone, right there. North, south, east, west, no one can go anywhere except through that crossroads. Didn’t the sheriff block it?’
‘No,’ Sorenson said. ‘I don’t think he did.’
‘He should have. That was a mistake. But no big deal, because they ran away from it anyway. They went north, and they saw no obvious way east until they hit the highway. At night, in the dark, those side roads must have looked hopeless. So that’s why they took the Interstate. No choice.’
‘OK,’ Sorenson said. ‘I’ll buy that.’
‘The bigger question is how they got here in the first place. If they didn’t drive in from Denver with the dead guy, and if they didn’t have a car of their own, then they must have gotten a ride in with someone else. In other words they were dropped off here. Just like they were picked up again later. Possibly by the same people. In which case, why didn’t whoever it was just wait around for them? Why abandon them to a long and dangerous interlude? The only answer is whatever happened in the pumping station wasn’t supposed to happen. Maybe King and McQueen were supposed to get a ride with the dead guy. But they killed him instead. For some unexplained reason. Which left them improvising like crazy.’
Sorenson’s phone rang. Loud and dramatic through the speakers. She checked the caller ID. ‘Omaha,’ she said. ‘The field office.’
‘Don’t answer it,’ Reacher said.
She didn’t. She let it go. It rang for a long time, and then it cut off. Reacher said, ‘We should go see Delfuenso’s house. Or her neighbour’s, anyway. We should check it out. And we should talk to the neighbour’s kid. Maybe she remembered something about the men. They’re likely the same crew who vanished the eyewitness. Maybe the same crew who dropped King and McQueen here in the first place.’
Sorenson said, ‘I can’t remember where Delfuenso’s house is. It was the middle of the night.’
Her phone trilled once. A voice mail message.
‘Don’t listen to it,’ Reacher said.
She didn’t. Instead she scrolled through her list of contacts until she found Sheriff Goodman’s cell number. She hit Call and the phone dialled. Reacher heard the purr of the ring tone through the speakers, slow and sonorous, patient, no kind of urgency.
It rang for a long time, on and on.
There was no answer.
‘Weird,’ Sorenson said.
She backed away from the old pumping station and turned around and headed back towards the crossroads. Before she got there she turned off into a side street. Reacher knew what she was doing. The sheriff’s department wouldn’t be on a main drag. It would be in back somewhere, where land was cheaper, where a big lot wouldn’t be a drain on the public purse. She nosed around corners and passed all kinds of places, but none of them was a police station. She came out again south of the crossroads and tried again in another quadrant.
‘There,’ Reacher said. He had seen a shortwave antenna on the roof of a low tan building. The building had a fenced lot big enough for a small handful of cruisers. The lot was empty, except for puddles, where the blacktop was holed by age. The whole place was old and worn, but it looked like it was maintained to a reasonable paramilitary standard. Nothing like the army, but nothing like a regular civilian establishment either.
Sorenson parked in the lot and they hustled through the downpour and found a woman behind a counter in the lobby doing double duty as receptionist and dispatcher. Sorenson showed her ID and asked where Sheriff Goodman was. The woman tried his car on the radio and got no result. She tried his cell from her landline console and got no result on that, either. She said, ‘Maybe he went home to take a nap. He’s an old man and he’s been awake for a long time.’
‘We need Karen Delfuenso’s address,’ Sorenson said. ‘And directions.’
The woman behind the counter provided both. North and east of the crossroads, out in the empty farmland, maybe eight miles distant. Basically left and right and left and right at every opportunity. Another chequerboard. They drove out there slowly. The eastern horizon was bright. The rain was rolling out, but slower than it had rolled in. Reacher was tired. He felt hollowed out. Every cell in his body was thrilling and buzzing with exhaustion. He had been awake most of two days. Not the longest he had ever endured, but up there. He guessed Sorenson was feeling just as bad. She was pale to begin with, and she was going blue around the eyes.
Then after the final right-hand turn Reacher saw a row of four small ranch houses all alone in the emptiness. There was a cop car parked in the middle of the road. Sorenson said, ‘He’s here after all. That’s Sheriff Goodman’s car. And that’s Karen Delfuenso’s house, second from the right.’
She parked on the kerb twenty feet back, and they got out.
FORTY-EIGHT
THEY FOUND GOODMAN where he had fallen, on his back, hard up against the front wheel of his car. His eyes were full of rainwater. New drops splashed into the tiny pools and overflowed down his cheeks like tears. His mouth was open and water was pooling in his throat. His clothes were soaked. He looked like a drowned man. His skin was already ice cold. He had no pulse. He looked slack and collapsed and empty, like only dead people can. All the invisible thousand muscular tensions of the living were gone.
He’s an old man and he’s been awake for a long time.
Not any more, Reacher thought.
‘How old was he?’ he asked.
‘Late sixties,’ Sorenson said. ‘Maybe early seventies. Too young to die, anyway. He was a nice man. A good man, like his name. Was it a heart attack?’
‘Probably,’ Reacher said. ‘Stress, exhaustion, and worry. That kind of thing. Not good for a person. Cops should get paid more.’
‘No argument from me on that point.’
‘Did he tell us what we need to know?’
‘I don’t think he knew what we need to know.’
‘I guess we should call it in.’
So they got back in Sorenson’s car, and she dialled the department’s switchboard number on her cell. The woman behind the counter answered, and Sorenson broke the news. The woman cried. Sorenson clicked off and they waited, wet, cold, and tired, staring ahead through the windshield, not seeing much, and not saying anything.
Next on scene was a very large thirty-five-year-old man in a deputy’s car. He was fair-haired and bulky and red-faced, and he was wearing a padded nylon jacket open over a uniform. The jacket had a sergeant’s
stripes on the sleeves. The guy came to Sorenson’s window and bent down. The jacket fell open and Reacher saw a black plate with the name Puller over one shirt pocket and a sheriff’s department star over the other. The star had the words Chief Deputy on it. The guy knocked on the window with fat red knuckles. Sorenson didn’t lower her glass. She just pointed. The guy walked towards his chief’s car with short nervous steps, like he was approaching a fortified position. Like he was expecting an armed enemy to open fire. He made it around to the passenger side and stopped. He looked down. Then he staggered away to the shoulder and bent double and threw up in the mud.
Reacher noticed the rain had stopped.
A long moment later the guy named Puller straightened up a little and stared out over the open land. He was green in the face. Not sentimental about the old man, but upset by the sight of a corpse. Reacher got out of the car. The road was still streaming, but the air felt suddenly fresh and dry. Sorenson got out on her side. The guy named Puller started back towards them and they all met as a threesome in the space between the cars.
Sorenson asked, ‘Are you the department’s second in command?’
Puller said, ‘I guess so.’
‘Then you guess wrong. As of now you’re the chief. Acting chief, anyway. And you’ve got things to do. You need to bring us up to speed, for instance.’
‘With what?’
‘There’s a missing kid here.’
‘I didn’t really keep up with that.’
‘Why not?’
‘I do traffic mostly. To and from the Interstate. Up beyond Sin City. You know, with the radar gun.’
‘Were you briefed on what happened here last night?’
‘We all were.’
‘But you didn’t keep up with it?’
‘I do traffic mostly.’
‘Didn’t Sheriff Goodman take you off your normal duties?’
‘He took us all off.’
‘So why didn’t you pay attention?’
‘He didn’t really tell me what to do.’
Reacher asked, ‘Were you dropped on the head as a baby?’
The guy named Puller didn’t answer.
Sorenson said, ‘Call your dispatcher and arrange for an ambulance to take the body away.’
‘OK.’