SEVENTEEN

THE PHONE WAS A CLUNKY OLD NOKIA. IT WAS ON THE KITCHEN counter. It hopped and buzzed and trilled the old Nokia tune that Reacher had heard a thousand times before, in bars, on buses, on the street. Dorothy snatched it up and answered. She said hello and then she listened, to what sounded like a fast slurred message of some kind, maybe a warning, and then she clicked off and dropped the phone like it was scalding hot.

'That was Mr Vincent,' she said. 'Over at the motel.'

Reacher said, 'And?'

'Two men were there. They're coming here. Right now.'

'Who?'

'We don't know. Men we've never seen before.' She opened the kitchen door and glanced down a hallway towards the front of the house. There was silence for a second and then Reacher heard the distant hiss of tyres on blacktop, the moan of a slowing engine, the sound of brakes, and then the crunch of a wheel on gravel, then another, then two more together, as a car turned in and bumped on to the track.

The woman said, 'Get out of here. Please. They can't know you're here.'

'We don't know who they are.'

'They're Duncan people. Who else would they be? I can't let them find you here. It's more than my life is worth.'

Reacher said, 'I can't get out of here. They're already on the track.'

'Hide out back. Please. I'm begging you. They can't find you here. I mean it.' She stepped out to the hallway, ready to meet them head on at the front door. They were close, and moving fast. The gravel was loud. She said, 'They might search. If they find you, tell them you snuck in the yard. Over the fields. Please. Tell them I didn't know. Make them believe you. Tell them you're nothing to do with me.' Then she closed the door on him and was gone.

Angelo Mancini folded the sheet of handwritten directions and put it in his pocket. They were on some lumpy, bumpy, piece-of-shit farm track, heading for some broken-down old woebegone piece-of-shit farmhouse that belonged in a museum or a history book. The navigation screen showed nothing at all. Just white space. Roberto Cassano was at the wheel, hitting every pothole. What did he care? They were Hertz's tyres, not his. Up ahead the front door opened and an old woman appeared on the step, clutching the jamb, like she would fall over if she let go.

Mancini said, 'That's a woman with a guilty secret, right there. Count on it.'

'Looks that way,' Cassano said.

Reacher checked the view across the yard at the back. Maybe sixty feet to the parked pick-up, maybe sixty more to the line of barns and sheds and coops and sties. He eased the door open. He turned back and checked the door to the front hallway. It was closed, but he could hear the car. It was crunching to a stop. Its doors were opening. He sensed the woman out there, staring at it, fearful and panicking. He shrugged and turned again to leave. His gaze passed over the kitchen table.

Not good.

They might search.

Tell them I didn't know.

The table held the remains of two breakfasts.

Two oatmeal bowls, two plates all smeared with egg, two plates all full of toast crumbs, two spoons, two knives, two forks, two coffee mugs.

He put his toast plate on his egg plate, and he put his oatmeal bowl on his toast plate, and he put his coffee mug in his oatmeal bowl, and he put his knife and fork and spoon in his pocket. He picked up the teetering stack of china and carried it with him, across the kitchen, out the door. He held the stack one-handed and pulled the door shut after him and set off across the yard. The ground was beaten dirt mixed with crushed stone and matted with winter weeds. It was reasonably quiet underfoot. But the shakes in his arm were rattling the mug in the bowl. He was making a tinkling noise with every step he took. It sounded as loud as a fire alarm. He passed the pick-up truck. Headed onward to a barn. It was an old swaybacked thing made from thin tarred boards. It was in poor condition. It had twin doors. Hinged in the conventional way, not sliders. The hinges were shot and the doors were warped. He hooked a heel behind one of them and forced his butt into the gap and pushed with his hip and scraped his way inside, back first, then his shoulders, then the stack of crockery.

It was dark inside. No light in there, except blinding sparkles from chinks between the boards. They threw thin lines and spots of illumination across the floor. The floor was earth, soaked in old oil, matted with flakes of rust. The air smelled of creosote. He put the stack of china down. All around him was old machinery, uniformly brown and scaly with decay. He didn't know what any of it was. There were tines and blades and wheels and metal all bent and welded into fantastical shapes. Farm stuff. Not his area of expertise. Not even close.

He stepped back to the leaning doors and peered through a crack and looked and listened, and drew up rules of engagement in his head. He couldn't touch these guys, not unless he was prepared to go all the way and make them disappear for ever, and their car, and then force Vincent at the motel to hold his tongue, also for ever. Anything less than that, and it would all come back to Dorothy sooner or later. So prudence dictated he should stay quiet and out of sight, which he was prepared to do, maybe, just possibly, depending on what he heard from the house. One scream might be nerves or fright. Two screams, and he was going in there, come what may.

He heard nothing.

And he saw nothing, for ten long minutes. Then a guy stepped out the back door, into the yard, and another came out behind him. They walked ten paces and stopped and stood there side by side like they owned the place. They gazed left, gazed ahead, gazed right. City boys. They had shined shoes and wool pants and wool overcoats. They were both on the short side of six feet, both heavy in the chest and shoulders, both dark. Both regular little tough guys, like something out of a television show.

They tracked left a little, towards the pick-up truck. They checked the load bed. They opened a door and checked the cab. They moved on, towards the line of barns and sheds and coops and sties.

Directly towards Reacher.

They came pretty close.

Reacher rolled his shoulders and snapped his elbows and flapped his wrists and tried to work some feeling into his arms. He made a fist with his right hand, and then his left.

The two guys walked on, closer still.

They looked left. They looked right. They sniffed the air.

They stopped.

Shiny shoes, wool coats. City boys. They didn't want to be wading through pigshit and chicken feathers and turning over piles of old crap. They looked at each other and then the one on the right turned back to the house and called out, 'Hey, old lady, get your fat ass out here right now.'

Forty yards away, Dorothy stepped out the door. She paused a beat and then walked towards the two guys, slow and hesitant. The two guys walked back towards her, just as slow. They all met near the pick-up truck. The guy on the left stood still. The guy on the right caught Dorothy by the upper arm with one hand and used the other to take a pistol out from under his coat. A shoulder holster. The gun was some kind of a nickel-plated semi-automatic. Or stainless steel. Reacher was too far away to make out the brand. Maybe a Colt. Or maybe a copy. The guy raised it across his body and laid its muzzle against Dorothy's temple. He held the gun flat, like a punk in a movie. His thumb and three fingers were wrapped tight around the grip. The fourth finger was on the trigger. Dorothy flinched away. The guy hauled on her arm and pulled her back.

He called out, 'Reacher? Is that your name? You there? You hiding somewhere? You listening to me? I'm going to count to three. Then you come on out. If you don't, I'm going to shoot the old cow. I've got a gun to her head. Tell him, grandma.'

Dorothy said, 'There's no one here.'

The yard went quiet. Three people, all alone in a thousand acres.

Reacher stood still, right where he was, on his own in the dark.

He saw Dorothy close her eyes.

The guy with the gun said, 'One.'

Reacher stood still.

The guy said, 'Two.'

Reacher stood still.

The guy said, 'Three.'

EIGHTEEN

REACHER STOOD STILL AND WATCHED THROUGH THE CRACK. There was a long second's pause. Then the guy who had been counting dropped his hand and stuffed the gun back under his coat. He let go of the woman's arm. She staggered away a step. The two guys looked left, looked right, looked at each other. They shrugged. A test, passed. A precaution, properly explored. They turned and headed away around the side of the house and disappeared from sight. A minute later Reacher heard doors slam and an engine start and the crunch and whine of a car backing down the track. He heard it make the blacktop, he heard it change gear, he heard it drive away.

The world went quiet again.

Reacher stayed right where he was, on his own in the dark. He wasn't dumb. Easiest thing in the world for one of the guys to be hiding behind the corner of the house, while his buddy drove away like a big loud decoy. Reacher knew all the tricks. He had used most of them. He had invented some of them himself.

Dorothy stood in the yard with one hand on the side of her truck, steadying herself. Reacher watched her. He guessed she was about thirty seconds away from gathering her wits and taking a breath and shouting that the guys were gone and he could come out now. Then he saw twenty-five years of habitual caution get the better of her. She pushed off the truck and walked the same path the two guys had taken. She was gone a whole minute. Then she came back, around the other side of the house. A full circle. Flat land all around. Wintertime. No place to hide.

She called, 'They're gone.'

He picked up the stack of plates and shouldered his way out between the barn's warped doors. He blinked in the light and shivered in the cold. He walked on and met her near the pick-up truck. She took the plates from him. He said, 'You OK?'

She said, 'I was a little worried there for a minute.'

'The safety catch was on. The guy never moved his thumb. I was watching. It was a bluff.'

'Suppose it hadn't been a bluff? Would you have come out?'

'Probably,' Reacher said.

'You did good with these plates. I suddenly remembered them, and thought I was a goner for sure. Those guys looked like they wouldn't miss much.'

'What else did they look like?'

'Rough,' she said. 'Menacing. They said they were here representing the Duncans. Representing them, not working for them. That's something new. The Duncans never used outsiders before.'

'Where will they go next?'

'I don't know. I don't think they know, either. Nowhere to hide is pretty much the same as nowhere to look, isn't it?'

'The doctor's, maybe?'
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'They might. The Duncans know you had contact.'

'Maybe I should head over there.'

'And maybe I should get back to the motel. I think they hurt Mr Vincent. He didn't sound too good on the phone.'

'There's an old barn and an old shed south of the motel. Off the road, to the west. Made of wood. All alone in a field. Whose are they?'

'They're nobody's. They were on one of the farms that got sold for the development that never happened. Fifty years ago.'

'I have a truck in there. I took it from the football players last night. Give me a ride?'

'No,' she said. 'I'm not driving you past the Duncan place again.'

'They don't have X-ray vision.'

'They do. They have a hundred pairs of eyes.'

'So you want me to walk past their place?'

'You don't have to. Head west across the fields until you see a cell tower. One of my neighbours leases half an acre to the phone company. That's how he pays his haulage. Turn north there and skirt the Duncan place on the blind side and then you'll see the barns.'

'How far is it?'

'It's a morning's walk.'

'I'll burn up all that breakfast.'

'That's what breakfast is for. Make sure you turn north, OK? South takes you near Seth Duncan's house, and you really don't want to go there. You know the difference between north and south?'

'I walk south, I get warmer. North, I get colder. I should be able to figure it out.'

'I'm serious.'

'What was your daughter's name?'

'Margaret,' the woman said. 'Her name was Margaret.'

So Reacher walked around the back of the barns and the sheds and the coops and the sties and struck out across the fields. The sun was nothing more than a bright patch of luminescence in the high grey sky, but it was enough to navigate by. After ten o'clock in the morning in Nebraska in the wintertime, and it was solidly east of south, behind his left shoulder. He kept it there for forty minutes, and then he saw a cell phone tower looming insubstantial in the mist. It was tall and skeletal, with a microwave receptor the shape of a bass drum, and cell antennas the shape of fungo bats. It had a tangle of dead brown weeds at its base, and it was surrounded by a token barbed wire fence. In the far distance beyond it was a farmhouse similar to Dorothy's. The neighbour's, presumably. The ground underfoot was hard and lumpy, all softball-sized clods and clarts of frozen earth, the wreckage from the last year's harvest. They rolled away either left or right or crushed under his heels as he walked.

He turned north at the tower. The sun had moved on. Now it was high and almost behind him, an hour before the season's drab version of noon. There was no warmth in it. Just light, a little brighter than the rest of the day. Far ahead, to the right, he could see a smudge on the horizon. The three Duncan houses, he guessed, grouped together at the end of their long shared driveway. He couldn't make out any detail. Certainly nothing man-sized. Which meant no one there could make out any man-sized detail either, in reverse. Same number of miles east to west as west to east, same grey gloom, same mist. But even so, he tracked left a little, following a curve, maintaining his distance, making sure.

Dorothy the housekeeper sat Mr Vincent down in a red velvet chair and sponged the blood off his face. He had a split lip and a cut brow and a lump the size of an egg under his eye. He had apologized for being so slow with his warning call. He had passed out, he said, and had scrambled for the phone as soon as he came around.

Dorothy told him to hush up.

On the other side of the circular room one of the bar stools was lying on its side and a mirrored panel on the bar back had been shattered. Shards of silvered glass had fallen among the bottles like daggers. One of the NASA mugs was broken. Its handle had come right off.

* * *

Angelo Mancini had the doctor's shirt collar bunched in his left hand and he had his right hand bunched into a fist. The doctor's wife was sitting in Roberto Cassano's lap. She had been ordered to, and she had refused. So Mancini had hit her husband, hard, in the face. She had refused again. Mancini had hit her husband again, harder. She had complied. Cassano had his hand on her thigh, his thumb an inch under the hem of her skirt. She was rigid with fear and shuddering with revulsion.

'Talk to me, baby,' Cassano whispered, in her ear. 'Tell me where you told Jack Reacher to hide.'

'I didn't tell him anything.'

'You were with him twenty minutes. Last night. The weirdo at the motel told us so.'

'I didn't tell him anything.'

'So what were you doing there for twenty minutes? Did you have sex with him?'

'No.'

'You want to have sex with me?'

She didn't answer.

'Shy?' Cassano asked. 'Bashful? Cat got your tongue?'

He moved his hand another inch, upward. He licked the woman's ear. She ducked away. Just twisted at the waist and leaned right over, away from him.

He said, 'Come back, baby.'

She didn't move.

He said, 'Come back,' a little louder.

She straightened up. He got the impression she was about to puke. He didn't want that. Not all over his good clothes. But he licked her ear one more time anyway, just to show her who was boss. Mancini hit the doctor one more time, just for fun. Travelling men, roaming around, getting the job done. But wasting their time in Nebraska, that was for sure. No one knew a damn thing. The whole place was as barren as the surface of the moon, with much less to do. Who would stay? This guy Reacher was long gone, obviously, totally in the wind, probably halfway to Omaha by the time the sun came up, rumbling along in the stolen truck, completely unnoticed by the county cops, who clearly sat around all night with their thumbs up their butts, because hadn't they missed every single one of the deliveries roaring through from Canada to Vegas? For months? Hadn't they? Every single one?

Assholes.

Yokels.

Retards.

All of them.

Cassano jerked upright and spilled the doctor's wife off his lap. She sprawled on the floor. Mancini punched the doctor one more time, and then they left, back to the rented Impala parked outside.

Reacher kept the three smudged shapes far to his right and tracked onward. He was used to walking. All soldiers were. Sometimes there was no alternative to a long fast advance on foot, so soldiers trained for it. It had been that way since the Romans, and it was still that way, and it would stay that way for ever. So he kept on going, satisfied with his progress, enjoying the small compensations that fresh air and country smells brought with them.

Then he smelled something else.

Up ahead was a tangle of low bushes, like a miniature grove. Wild raspberries or wild roses, maybe, a remnant, somehow spared by the ploughs, now bare and dormant but still thick and dense with thorns. There was a thin plume of smoke coming from them, from right in the middle, horizontal and almost invisible on the wind. It smelled distinctive. Not a wood fire. Not a cigarette.


Marijuana.

Reacher was familiar with the smell. All cops are, even military cops. Grunts get high like anyone else, off duty. Sometimes even on duty. Reacher guessed what he was smelling was a fine sativa, probably not imported junk from Mexico, probably a good home-grown strain. And why not, in Nebraska? Corn country was ideal for a little clandestine farming. Corn grew as high as an elephant's eye, and dense, and a twenty-foot clearing carved out a hundred yards from the edge of a field was as secret a garden as could be planted anywhere. More profitable than corn, too, even with all the federal subsidies. And these people had their haulage fees to meet. Maybe someone was sampling his recent harvest, judging its quality, setting its price in his mind.

It was a kid. A boy. Maybe fifteen years old, maybe sixteen. Reacher walked on and looked down into the chest-high thicket and found him there. He was quite tall, quite thin, with the kind of long centre-parted hair Reacher hadn't seen on a boy for a long time. He was wearing thick pants and a surplus parka from the old West German army. He was sitting on a spread-out plastic grocery bag, his knees drawn up, his back against a large granite rock that jutted up from the ground. The rock was wedge-shaped, as if it had been broken out of a bigger boulder and rolled into a different position far from its source. And the rock was why the ploughs had spared the thicket. Big tractors with vague steering had given it a wide berth, and nature had taken advantage. Now the boy was taking advantage in turn, hiding from the world, getting through his day. Maybe not a semi-commercial grower after all. Maybe just an amateur enthusiast, with mail-order seeds from Boulder or San Francisco.

'Hello,' Reacher said.

'Dude,' the boy said. He sounded mellow. Not high as a kite. Just cruising gently a couple of feet off the ground. An experienced user, probably, who knew how much was too much and how little was too little. His thought processes were slow, and right there in his face. First: Am I busted? Then: No way.

'Dude,' he said again. 'You're the man. You're the guy the Duncans are looking for.'

Reacher said, 'Am I?'

The kid nodded. 'You're Jack Reacher. Six-five, two-fifty, brown coat. They want you, man. They want you real bad.'

'Do they?'

'We had Cornhuskers at the house this morning. We're supposed to keep our eyes peeled. And here you are, man. You snuck right up on me. I guess your eyes were peeled, not mine. Am I right?' Then he lapsed into a fit of helpless giggles. He was maybe a little higher than Reacher had thought.

Reacher said, 'You got a cell phone?'

'Hell yes. I'm going to text my buddies. I'm going to tell them I've seen the man, large as life, twice as natural. Hey, maybe I could put you on the line with them. That would be a kick, wouldn't it? Would you do that? Would you talk to my buds? So they know I'm not shitting them?'

'No,' Reacher said.

The kid went instantly serious. 'Hey, I'm with you, man. You got to lie low. I can dig that. But dude, don't worry. We're not going to rat you out. Me and my buds, I mean. We're on your side. You're putting it to the Duncans, we're with you all the way.'

Reacher said nothing. The kid concentrated hard and lifted his arm high out of the brambles and held out his joint.

'Share?' he said. 'That would be a kick too. Smoking with the man.'

The joint was fat and well rolled, in yellow paper. It was about half gone.

'No, thanks,' Reacher said.

'Everyone hates them,' the kid said. 'The Duncans, I mean. They've got this whole county by the balls.'

'Show me a county where someone doesn't.'

'Dude, I hear you. The system stinks. No argument from me on that score. But the Duncans are worse than usual. They killed a kid. Did you know that? A little girl. Eight years old. They took her and messed her up real bad and killed her.'

'Did they?'

'Hell yes. Definitely.'

'You sure?'

'No question, my friend.'

'It was twenty-five years ago. You're what, fifteen?'

'It happened.'

'The FBI said different.'

'You believe them?'

'As opposed to who? A stoner who wasn't even born yet?'

'The FBI didn't hear what I hear, man.'

'What do you hear?'

'Her ghost, man. Still here, after twenty-five years. Sometimes I sit out here at night and I hear that poor ghost screaming, man, screaming and wailing and moaning and crying, right here in the dark.'