A Wanted Man

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 coming 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.