My car.
Reacher looked in the mirror again and mouthed, ‘This is your car?’
Delfuenso nodded, urgently and eagerly and desperately and happily.
TWENTY
SORENSON STEPPED BACK and turned and looked and said, ‘They went south first, and then they got back on the road and went north. Why?’
Goodman said, ‘That was the way they came. Maybe they didn’t know they could get back on the road any other way.’
‘Bullshit. They glance north, they see the old bar and an acre of gravel, and they know they can get out that way.’
‘So maybe they went for gas at the other station.’
‘Why would they? There’s a gas station right here, at this end of the strip, staring them right in the face. Or do you think they were worried about price comparisons?’
‘Maybe they saw the cameras.’
‘If one has cameras, the other has cameras too. You can bet on that.’
‘The price is the same anyway, both ends. It always is.’
‘So why did they loop back south?’
Goodman said, ‘For some other reason, I guess.’
Sorenson set off walking south, fast over the frozen gravel, past the back of a closed-up diner, past the back of a no-name bar, past the back of a broken-down motel, past the back of a lit-up and open convenience store.
She stopped.
Ahead of her was a wide gap, and then another bar, and then another cocktail lounge, and then nothing at all until the other gas station.
She said, ‘Let’s assume they didn’t want a drink or a meal. Let’s assume they weren’t interested in a room for the night. And if they wanted gas, they’d have used the nearer station. So why did they come back this way?’
‘The convenience store,’ Goodman said. ‘They needed something.’
They hustled around to its front door and went inside to bright cold fluorescent glare and the smell of old coffee and microwaved food and antiseptic floor cleaner. A bored clerk behind the register didn’t even raise his head. Sorenson scanned the ceiling. There were no cameras.
The aisles were close-packed with junk food and canned food and bread and cookies and basic toiletries, and automotive requirements like quarts of oil and gallons of antifreeze and screen wash and clip-on cup holders and patent self-extinguishing ashtrays and collapsible snow shovels. There were rubber overshoes for wet conditions, and tube socks, and white underwear for a dollar an item, and cheap T-shirts, and cheap denim shirts, and canvas work shirts, and canvas work pants.
Sorenson took a close look at the clothing aisle, and then she headed straight for the register, her ID at the ready. The clerk looked up.
‘Help you?’ he said.
‘Between about twenty past and half past midnight, who was in here?’
‘Me,’ the guy said.
‘No customers?’
‘Maybe one.’
‘Who?’
‘A tall skinny guy in a shirt and tie.’
‘No coat?’
‘It was like he ran in from a car. No time to get cold. No one walks here. This is the middle of nowhere.’
‘Did you see the car?’
The clerk shook his head. ‘I think the guy parked around the back. He sort of came around the corner. I guess that was my impression, anyway.’
Sorenson asked, ‘What did he buy?’
The guy straightened out a curling helix of register tape spilling out of a slot. He traced his thumbnail over pale blue ink, in an irregular pattern, stop and go, leaping backward from one time stamp to another, then pausing at an eleven-line entry.
‘Six items,’ he said. ‘Plus subtotal, tax, total, tender, and change.’
‘He paid cash?’
‘He must have, if I made change.’
‘You don’t remember?’
‘I don’t pay much attention. This is not a dream job, lady.’
‘What did he buy?’
The guy examined the tape. ‘Three of something, and three of something else.’
‘Three of what, and three of what else? This was tonight. This is not ancient history we’re talking about here. We’re not asking for a prodigious feat of memory.’
‘Water,’ the guy said. ‘I remember that. Three bottles, from the refrigerator cabinet.’
‘And?’
The guy looked at the tape again.
He said, ‘Three other things, all the same price.’
‘What three other things?’
‘I don’t remember.’
Sorenson said, ‘Have you been smoking tonight?’
The guy went wary.
He said, ‘Smoking what?’
‘Maybe that’s a question for Sheriff Goodman. You in shape for a search tonight?’
The guy didn’t answer that. He just bounced his hand up and down, rehearsing a triumphant finger snap, waiting to remember. Trying to remember. Then finally he smiled.
‘Shirts,’ he said. ‘Three denim shirts, on special. Blue. Small, medium, and large. One of each.’
Sorenson and Goodman walked out of the store and looped around to the back lot again. Sorenson said, ‘Karen Delfuenso was their hostage and they planned to use her as their smokescreen, so they couldn’t let her stay in the skimpy top. Too memorable. They knew there could be roadblocks. So they made her change.’
‘They all changed,’ Goodman said. ‘Three people, three shirts.’
Sorenson nodded.
‘Bloodstains,’ she said. ‘Like the eyewitness told us. At least one of their suit coats was wet.’
‘We screwed up,’ Goodman said. ‘Both of us. I told the roadblocks two men in black suits. Then any two men. You told them any two men. But it wasn’t any two men. It was any three people, two men and a woman, all in blue denim shirts.’
Sorenson said nothing. Then her phone rang, and the Iowa State Police told her they had rewound their dashboard video and located Karen Delfuenso’s car. It had passed through their roadblock more than an hour ago. It had not attracted their attention because it had four people in it.
TWENTY-ONE
SORENSON HUNCHED AWAY from Goodman and switched her phone to her other hand and said, ‘Four people?’
The State Police captain in Iowa said, ‘It’s a kind of shadowy picture, but we can see them fairly clearly. Two in the front, and two in the back. And my sergeant remembers the driver.’
‘Can I talk to your sergeant?’
‘Can I shut down this roadblock?’
‘After I talk to your sergeant.’
‘OK, wait one.’
Sorenson heard scratchy sounds in her ear, and the filtered rattle of an idling truck engine. She turned back to Goodman and said, ‘We were even more wrong than we knew. There are four of them in the car.’ Then she heard a cell phone change hands and a rusty voice said, ‘Ma’am?’
She asked, ‘Who was in the car?’
The sergeant said, ‘Mostly I remember the driver.’
‘Male or female?’
‘Male. A big guy, with a busted nose. Badly busted. I mean raw, like a very recent injury. He looked like a gorilla with its face smashed in.’
‘Like the result of a fight?’
‘He more or less admitted it. But he said it didn’t happen in Iowa.’
‘You talked to him?’
‘Briefly. He was polite enough to me. Nothing to report, apart from the nose.’
‘Was he acting nervous?’
‘Not really. He was quiet. And stoic. He had to be, with a nose like that. He should have been in the hospital.’
‘What was he wearing?’
‘A winter coat.’
‘What about the passengers?’
‘I don’t really recall them very well.’
‘You’re not on the witness stand here, sergeant. You’re not under oath. Anything you can remember might help me.’
‘All I have is impressions. I don’t want to mislead you.’
‘Anything at all
might help.’
‘Well, I thought they were like Peter, Paul and Mary.’
‘Who?’
‘Folk singers. From back in the day. Before your time, maybe. They were all dressed the same. Like a singing group. Two men and a woman.’
‘Blue denim shirts?’
‘Exactly. Like a country music trio. I figured their trunk would be full of steel-strung guitars. I thought maybe they were heading from last night’s show to tonight’s. We see that sometimes. And the woman was all made up, like she had just come off stage.’
‘But the driver was different?’
‘I thought he was maybe a manager. Or a roadie. You know, big and rough. Just an impression, like I said.’
‘Anything else?’
‘Don’t quote me, OK?’
‘I won’t.’
‘There was an atmosphere. The woman looked mad. Or resentful, somehow. I thought maybe the shows weren’t going so well, and she wanted to quit the tour, but it was two against one. Or three, if the manager guy had a stake. It was late, but she was wide awake, like she had something on her mind. That was my impression, anyway.’
Sorenson said nothing.
The sergeant said, ‘They were the targets, right?’
Sorenson said, ‘The two men in the shirts, yes.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Not your fault.’
Then the captain came back on. He said, ‘Ma’am, you told us to look for two fugitives, not some family psychodrama involving a car full of vaudeville players.’
‘Not your fault,’ Sorenson said again.
‘Can I break down this roadblock now?’
‘Yes,’ Sorenson said. ‘And I need an APB on that plate number, all points east of you.’
‘I have no units on the road east of me, lady. I had to bring them all here. Face it, ma’am, whoever those guys are, they’re long gone now.’
Reacher could wink, but only with his left eye. A childhood inheritance. As a kid he had slept mostly on his left side, and on waking would keep his left eye closed against the pillow and open only his right, to peer around whatever darkened bedroom he happened to be in. And he wasn’t sure Delfuenso could see his left eye. Not from the back seat, with the mirror set the way it was. And to mess with his vision was not a good idea at eighty miles an hour, anyway. So he raised his right hand off the shifter, so she could see it, and then he dropped it back.
He jabbed his thumb to the left. No mirror involved. They were both facing the same way. Left was left. He tapped his index finger three times. Then left again, one tap. Then right, nine, his pale finger fast but clear in the low light, and then left, ten, and left, one, and left, three, and finally left, eleven.
He looked in the mirror and raised his eyebrows, to supply the question mark.
Carjack?
Delfuenso nodded back at him, eagerly.
A definite yes.
Which explained a lot of things.
But not the matching outfits.
Reacher took his hand off the shifter and plucked at the shoulder of his coat, finger and thumb, and he looked quizzically in the mirror and mouthed, ‘Shirts?’
Delfuenso glanced left, glanced right, frustrated, as if unable to find a quick way to explain. Then she looked hard to her left, as if checking on McQueen, and she started to unbutton her shirt. Reacher watched the road with one eye and the mirror with the other. Three buttons, four, five. Then Delfuenso pulled her shirt wide open and Reacher saw a tiny black and silver garment under it, like fancy underwear, like a bodice, laced tight against her stomach, her breasts resting high and proud on a fabric shelf made from two vestigial cups.
Reacher nodded in the mirror. He had seen similar outfits. Most men had. Every soldier had. She was a roadhouse waitress, maybe a bartender. She had been coming off her shift, maybe getting into her car, maybe waiting at a light, and the two guys had pounced. They had stopped somewhere and bought her a shirt, to eliminate an APB’s inevitable headline description: a dark-haired woman wearing practically nothing.
Delfuenso started buttoning up again. Reacher jabbed his finger in Alan King’s direction and his thumb in Don McQueen’s, and then he opened his hand and raised it uncertainly, questioningly, like a universal semaphore: Why them too?
Delfuenso opened her mouth and closed it, and then she started blinking again, a long and laborious sequence.
Forward two, forward twelve, backward twelve, backward twelve, forward four.
B-L-O-O-D, blood.
Backward twelve, backward thirteen.
O-N, on.
Backward seven, forward eight, forward five, forward nine, backward nine.
T-H-E-I-R, their.
‘Blood on their clothes?’ Reacher mouthed.
Delfuenso nodded.
Reacher drove on through the darkness, with the white Dodge’s tail lights still a mile ahead, past quiet lonely exits spaced miles apart, with questions in his head spinning like plates on sticks.
TWENTY-TWO
SHERIFF GOODMAN HUNCHED deeper into his coat against the cold and turned a full circle in the convenience store’s back lot. He said, ‘I assume they parked here. Therefore they probably changed here too. Maybe they trashed their old jackets. The knife too, possibly. We should check the trash cans.’
Sorenson said, ‘You volunteering?’
‘I have deputies with nothing better to do.’
‘OK,’ Sorenson said. ‘But it’s probably a waste of time. A buck gets ten they pitched the jackets in Delfuenso’s trunk. And they probably dropped the knife down one of the water pipes in the bunker.’
‘Are you going to try a third roadblock?’
‘Iowa doesn’t have the manpower.’
‘Illinois, then. If they’re staying on the Interstate, they’re most likely going all the way to Chicago. You could have the Illinois cops waiting for them, right on the state line.’
‘They have to know they’re pushing their luck. They’ve survived twice. They won’t risk a third time. They’re going to take back roads now. Or go to ground somewhere.’
‘So we’re done with roadblocks?’
‘I think there’s nothing more to be gained.’
‘Will their thinking match yours?’