“Good luck,” he said. “Lucky.”
She hoisted her bag on her shoulder and walked to the door and pushed out to the street. He watched her huddle into her sweatshirt and step away through the cold.
He was in bed before two o’clock in the morning. The motel room was warm. There was a heater under the window and it was blasting away to good effect. He set the alarm in his head for six-thirty. He was tired, but he figured four and a half hours would be enough. In fact they would have to be enough, because he wanted time to shower before heading out for breakfast.
16
It was a cliché that cops stop in at diners for doughnuts before, during, and after every shift, but clichés were clichés only because they were so often true. Therefore Reacher slipped into the same back booth at five to seven in the morning and fully expected to see Officer Vaughan enter inside the following ten minutes.
Which she did.
He saw her cruiser pull up and park outside. Saw her climb out onto the sidewalk and press both hands into the small of her back and stretch. Saw her lock up and pirouette and head for the door. She came in and saw him and paused for a long moment and then changed direction and slid in opposite him.
He asked, “Strawberry, vanilla, or chocolate? It’s all they’ve got.”
“Of what?”
“Milk shakes.”
“I don’t drink breakfast with jerks.”
“I’m not a jerk. I’m a citizen with a problem. You’re here to help. Says so on the badge.”
“What kind of problem?”
“The girl found me.”
“And had you seen her boyfriend?”
“Her husband, actually.”
“Really?” Vaughan said. “She’s young to be married.”
“I thought so, too. She said they’re in love.”
“Cue the violins. So had you seen him?”
“No.”
“So where’s your problem?”
“I saw someone else.”
“Who?”
“Not saw, actually. It was in the pitch dark. I fell over him.”
“Who?”
“A dead guy.”
“Where?”
“On the way out of Despair.”
“Are you sure?”
“Completely,” Reacher said. “A young adult male corpse.”
“Are you serious?”
“As a heart attack.”
“Why didn’t you tell me last night?”
“I wanted time to think about it.”
“You’re yanking my chain. There’s what out there, a thousand square miles? And you just happen to trip over a dead guy in the dark? That’s a coincidence as big as a barn.”
“Not really,” Reacher said. “I figure he was doing the same thing I was doing. Walking east from Despair to Hope, staying close enough to the road to be sure of his direction, far enough away to be safe. That put him in a pretty specific channel. I might have missed him by a yard, but I was never going to miss him by a mile.”
Vaughan said nothing.
“But he didn’t make it all the way,” Reacher said. “I think he was exhausted. His knees were driven pretty deep in the sand. I think he fell on his knees and pitched forward on his front and died. He was emaciated and dehydrated. No wounds, no trauma.”
“What, you autopsied this guy? In the dark?”
“I felt around.”
“Felt?”
“Touch,” Reacher said. “It’s one of the five senses we rely on.”
“So who was this guy?”
“Caucasian, by the feel of his hair. Maybe five-eight, one-forty. Young. No ID. I don’t know if he was dark or fair.”
“This is unbelievable.”
“It happened.”
“Where exactly?”
“Maybe four miles out of town, eight miles short of the line.”
“Definitely in Despair, then.”
“No question.”
“You should call the Despair PD.”
“I wouldn’t piss on the Despair PD if it was on fire.”
“Well, I can’t help you. It’s not my jurisdiction.”
The waitress came over. The day-shift woman, the witness to the coffee marathon. She was busy and harassed. The diner was filling up fast. Small-town America, at breakfast time. Reacher ordered coffee and eggs. Vaughan ordered coffee, too. Reacher took that as a good sign. He waited until the waitress had bustled away and said, “You can help me.”
Vaughan said, “How?”
“I want to go back and take a look, right now, in the daylight. You can drive me. We could be in and out, real fast.”
“It’s not my town.”
“Unofficial. Off duty. Like a tourist. You’re a citizen. You’re entitled to drive on their road.”
“Would you be able to find the place again?”
“I left a pile of stones on the shoulder.”
“I can’t do it,” Vaughan said. “I can’t poke around over there. And I sure as hell can’t take you there. You’ve been excluded. It would be unbelievably provocative.”
“Nobody would know.”
“You think? They’ve got one road in and one road out and two cars.”
“Right now they’re eating doughnuts in their restaurant.”
“You sure you didn’t dream this?”
“No dreaming involved,” Reacher said. “The kid had eyeballs like marbles and the inside of his mouth was parched like shoe leather. He’d been wandering for days.”
The waitress came back with the coffee and the eggs. The eggs had a sprig of fresh parsley arrayed across them. Reacher picked it off and laid it on the side of the plate.
Vaughan said, “I can’t drive a Hope police cruiser in Despair.”
“So what else have you got?”
She was quiet for a long moment. She sipped her coffee. Then she said, “I have an old truck.”
She made him wait on the First Street sidewalk near the hardware store. Clearly she wasn’t about to take him home while she changed her clothes and her vehicle. A wise precaution, he thought. Look at yourself, she had said. What do you see? He was getting accustomed to negative answers to that question. The hardware store was still closed. The window was full of tools and small consumer items. The aisle behind the door was piled high with the stuff that would be put out on the sidewalk later. For many years Reacher had wondered why hardware stores favored sidewalk displays. There was a lot of work involved. Repetitive physical labor, twice a day. But maybe consumer psychology dictated that large utilitarian items sold better when associated with the rugged outdoors. Or maybe it was just a question of space. He thought for a moment and came to no firm conclusion and moved away and leaned on a pole that supported a crosswalk sign. The morning had come in cold and gray. Thin cloud started at ground level. The Rockies weren’t visible at all, neither near nor far.
Close to twenty minutes later an old Chevrolet pick-up truck pulled up on the opposite curb. Not a bulbous old classic from the forties or a swooping space-age design from the fifties or a muscley El Camino from the sixties. Just a plain secondhand American vehicle about fifteen years old, worn navy blue paint, steel rims, small tires. Vaughan was at the wheel. She was wearing a red Windbreaker zipped to the chin and a khaki ball cap pulled low. A good disguise. Reacher wouldn’t have recognized her if he hadn’t been expecting her. He used the crosswalk and climbed in next to her, onto a small vinyl seat with an upright back. The cab smelled of leaked gasoline and cold exhaust. There were rubber floor mats under his feet, covered with desert dust, worn and papery with age. He slammed the door and Vaughan took off again. The truck had a wheezy four-cylinder motor. In and out real fast, he had said. But clearly fast was going to be a relative concept.
They covered Hope’s five miles of road in seven minutes. A hundred yards short of the line Vaughan said, “We see anybody at all, you duck down.” Then she pressed harder on the gas and the expansion joint thumped under the wheels and the tires set
up a harsh roar over Despair’s sharp stones.
“You come here much?” Reacher asked.
“Why would I?” Vaughan said.
There was no traffic ahead. Nothing either coming or going. The road speared straight into the hazy distance, rising and falling. Vaughan was holding the truck at a steady sixty. A mile a minute, probably close to its comfortable maximum.
Seven minutes inside enemy territory, she started to slow.
“Watch the left shoulder,” Reacher said. “Four stones, piled up.”
The weather had settled to a luminous gray light. Not bright, not sunny, but everything was illuminated perfectly. No glare, no shadows. There was some trash on the shoulder. Not much, but enough that Reacher’s small cairn was not going to stand out in glorious isolation like a beacon. There were plastic water bottles, glass beer bottles, soda cans, paper, small unimportant parts of vehicles, all caught on a long ridge of pebbles that had been washed to the side of the road by the passage of tires. Reacher twisted around in his seat. Nobody behind. Nobody ahead. Vaughan slowed some more. Reacher scanned the shoulder. The stones had felt big and obvious in his hands, in the dark. But now in the impersonal daylight they were going to look puny in the vastness.
“There,” Reacher said.
He saw his little cairn thirty yards ahead on the left. Three stones butted together, the fourth balanced on top. A speck in the distance, in the middle of nowhere. To the south the land ran all the way to the horizon, flat and essentially featureless, dotted with pale bushes and dark rocks and pitted with wash holes and low ridges.
“This is the place?” Vaughan asked.
“Twenty-some yards due south,” Reacher said.
He checked the road again. Nothing ahead, nothing behind.
“We’re OK,” he said.
Vaughan passed the cairn and pulled to the right shoulder and turned a wide circle across both lanes. Came back east and stopped exactly level with the stones. She put the transmission in park and left the engine running.
“Stay here,” she said.
“Bullshit,” Reacher said. He got out and stepped over the stones and waited on the shoulder. He felt tiny in the lit-up vastness. In the dark the world had shrunk to an arm’s length around him. Now it felt huge again. Vaughan stepped alongside him and he walked south with her through the scrub, at a right angle to the road, five paces, ten, fifteen. He stopped after twenty paces and confirmed his direction by glancing behind him. Then he stood still and checked all around, first on a close radius, and then wider.
He saw nothing.
He stood on tiptoe and craned his neck and searched.
There was nothing there.
17
Reacher turned a careful one-eighty and stared back at the road to make sure he hadn’t drifted too far either west or east. He hadn’t. He was right on target. He walked five paces south, turned east, walked five more paces, turned around, walked ten steps west.
Saw nothing.
“Well?” Vaughan called.
“It’s gone,” he said.
“You were just yanking my chain.”
“I wasn’t. Why would I?”
“How accurate could you have been, with the stones? In the dark?”
“That’s what I’m wondering.”
Vaughan walked a small quiet circle, all around. Shook her head.
“It isn’t here,” she said. “If it ever was.”
Reacher stood still in the emptiness. Nothing to see. Nothing to hear, except Vaughan’s truck idling patiently twenty yards away. He walked ten more yards east and started to trace a wide circle. A quarter of the way through it, he stopped.
“Look here,” he said.
He pointed at the ground. At a long line of shallow crumbled oval pits in the sand, each one a yard apart.
Vaughan said, “Footprints.”
“My footprints,” Reacher said. “From last night. Heading home.”
They turned west and backtracked. Followed the trail of his old footprints back toward Despair. Ten yards later they came to the head of a small diamond-shaped clearing. The clearing was empty.
“Wait,” Reacher said.
“It’s not here,” Vaughan said.
“But it was here. This is the spot.”
The crusted sand was all churned up by multiple disturbances. There were dozens of footprints, facing in all directions. There were scrapes and slides and drag marks. There were small depressions in the scrub, some fairly precise, but most not, because of the way the dry sand had crumbled and trickled down into the holes.
Reacher said, “Tell me what you see.”
“Activity,” Vaughan said. “A mess.”
“A story,” Reacher said. “It’s telling us what happened.”
“Whatever happened, we can’t stay here. This was supposed to be in and out, real fast.”
Reacher stood up straight and scanned the road, west and east.
Nothing there.
“Nobody coming,” he said.
“I should have brought a picnic,” Vaughan said.
Reacher stepped into the clearing. Crouched down and pointed two-fingered at a pair of neat parallel depressions in the center of the space. Like two coconut shells had been pressed down into the sand, hard, on a north-south axis.
“The boy’s knees,” he said. “This is where he gave it up. He staggered to a stop and half-turned and fell over.” Then he pointed to a broad messed-up stony area four feet to the east. “This is where I landed after I tripped over him. On these stones. I could show you the bruises, if you like.”
“Maybe later,” Vaughan said. “We need to get going.”
Reacher pointed to four sharp impressions in the sand. Each one was a rectangle about two inches by three, at the corners of a larger rectangle about two feet by five.
“Gurney feet,” he said. “Folks came by and collected him. Maybe four or five of them, judging by all the footprints. Official folks, because who else carries gurneys?” He stood up and checked and pointed north and west, along a broad ragged line of footprints and crushed vegetation. “They came in that way, and carried him back out in the same direction, back to the road. Maybe to a coroner’s wagon, parked a little ways west of my cairn.”
“So we’re OK,” Vaughan said. “The proper authorities have got him. Problem solved. We should get going.”
Reacher nodded vaguely and gazed due west. “What should we see over there?”
“Two sets of incoming footprints,” Vaughan said. “The boy’s and yours, both heading east out of town. Separated by time, but not much separated by direction.”
“But it looks like there’s more than that.”
They skirted the clearing and formed up again west of it. They saw four separate lines of footprints, fairly close together.