Never Go Back

FIFTY-ONE

Turner said, ‘Don’t stop,’ but Reacher braked anyway. He couldn’t help it. The girl looped around the parked coupé and stepped out to the sidewalk. She was wearing a yellow T-shirt and a blue denim jean jacket, and big black baggy pants, and yellow tennis shoes on her feet, with no socks, and no laces. She was slender and long-limbed, all knees and elbows, and her hair was the colour of summer straw. It was parted in the centre, and wavy, and it came halfway down her back. Her face was unformed, like teenagers’ faces are, but she had blue eyes, and cheekbones, and her mouth was set in a quizzical half-smile, as if her life was full of petty annoyances best tolerated with patience and goodwill.

She set off walking, west, away from them.

Turner said, ‘Eyes front, Reacher. Hit the gas and pass her and do not stop. Drive to the end of the road, right now. That’s an order. If it’s her, we’ll confirm later, and we’ll deal with it.’

So Reacher speeded up again, from walking pace to jogging, and they passed the girl just as she was passing the MP’s white compact. She didn’t seem to react to it in any way. Didn’t seem to know it was there for her. She hadn’t been told, presumably. Because what could they say? Hi there, miss, we’re here to arrest your father. Who you’ve never met. If he shows up, that is. Having just been told all about you.

Reacher kept one eye on the mirror and watched her grow smaller. Then he paused at the T, and turned left, and looked at her one more time, and then he drove away, and she was lost to sight.

No one came after them. They pulled over a hundred yards later, but the street behind them stayed empty. Which theoretically was a minor disappointment. Not that Reacher really registered it as such. In his mind right then the two surviving guys from the dented car were on the backest of all back burners, on a stovetop about ten miles deep.

He said, ‘They told me she was living in a car.’

‘Maybe her mom got a new job. Or a new boyfriend.’

‘Did you see any surveillance opportunities?’

‘Nothing obvious.’

‘Maybe we should join the crowd and park on the street. We’d be OK as long as we never got out of the car.’

‘We can do better than that,’ Turner said. She checked her map, and looked out through the Range Rover’s windows, all around, craning her neck, searching for high ground or elevated vantage points. Of which there were plenty to the south, where the Hollywood Hills rose up in the smog, but they were too distant, and in any case the front of the house would be invisible from the south. In the end she pointed a little north of west, at an off-ramp in the tangle where the 134 met the 101. It was raised up high, and its curve seemed to cradle the whole neighbourhood as it swooped around from one freeway to the next. She said, ‘We could fake a breakdown, if that ramp has a shoulder. Overheating, or something. This car certainly looks the part. We could stay there for hours. The FBI doesn’t do roadside assistance. If the LAPD stops for us, we’ll say sure, we’re about cooled down now, and we’ll get on our way.’

‘Warrant Officer Espin will have seen it,’ Reacher said. ‘He’ll have scoped out the terrain, surely. If he sees any kind of a parked vehicle up there, he’ll investigate.’

‘OK, if anything other than a marked LAPD cruiser stops for us, we’ll take off immediately, and if it’s Espin we’ll duke it out in the wilds of Burbank.’

‘We’ll lose him well before Burbank. I bet they gave him a four-cylinder rental.’

They wanted a pawn shop next, because they needed a quality item for a short spell of time, and fast, and unmemorably, and they were going to pay for it with a stolen credit card, so overall second-hand was the better market. They used surface streets to West Hollywood, and picked one of many establishments, and Reacher said to the guy, ‘Let me see your best binoculars.’

Of which there were many, mostly old. Which made sense. Reacher figured that back in his father’s day binoculars were bought simply because binoculars were bought. Every family had a pair. And an encyclopedia. No one used either. Or the clockwork eight-millimetre camera, if the family was a colonel’s or better. But they had to be provided. Part of a family man’s sacred duty. But now all those family men were dead, and their adult children’s houses were of finite capacity. So their stuff found itself stacked between the acoustic guitars and the college rings, still in the velvet-lined leather buckets it came in, and tagged with prices halfway between low and very.

They found a pair they liked, powerful but not too heavy, and adjustable enough to fit both their faces, and Baldacci paid, and they walked back to the car.

Turner said, ‘I think we should wait for dusk. Nothing will happen before then, anyway. Not if her mom has a new job. And we have a black car. Espin won’t even see it in the dark. But the street itself should be lit up enough for binoculars.’

‘OK,’ Reacher said. ‘We should eat first, I guess. This could take hours. How long are you prepared to stay up there?’

‘As long as it takes. As many times as it takes.’

‘Thank you.’

‘In all of my dating history, I don’t know if this is the smartest thing I’ve ever done, or the dumbest.’

They ate in West Hollywood, well and slowly and expensively, on Peter Paul Lozano’s dime, and they let late afternoon turn into early evening, and as soon as the street lights were brighter than the sky they got back in the car and took Sunset Boulevard to the 101. Traffic was bad, as always, but the sky used the wasted minutes to get darker and darker, so that by the time they took the curving off-ramp the day had gone completely.

There was no official shoulder on the ramp, but there was more than a shoulder’s width of painted chevrons on the right side, to define the traffic lane through the curve, so they pulled over as if their dashboard was lit up like a Christmas tree. Turner had the new old binoculars out and ready, and they rolled forward until she figured they had as good a view as they were going to get. Reacher shut the motor down. They were about three hundred yards from the blue front door, and about forty feet above it. Just like the field manual. A straight line, with elevation. More than satisfactory. Not bad at all. The house was quiet. The blue door was closed. The old red coupé was still on the driveway. The FBI Malibu had gone from the street, but the Hummer was still there, as was the small white compact sixty feet from it. The rest of the automotive roster had changed a little. Day-shift workers were heading home, and night-shift workers were heading out.

They took turns with the binoculars. Reacher twisted around in the driver’s seat and rested his back on the door, and looked out beyond Turner next to him, through her open window. The optical image was dark and indistinct. No night-vision enhancement. But it was adequate. Behind him cars sped past, just feet away, a steady procession, all of them leaving the 101 and joining the 134. None of them stopped to help. They just rocked the old truck with their slipstreams, and sped onward, oblivious.

Romeo called Juliet and said, ‘They were just in West Hollywood. They bought something in a pawn shop, on Baldacci’s card, and then they ate at a very expensive restaurant, on Lozano’s.’

Juliet said, ‘What would they want from a pawn shop?’

‘Doesn’t matter. The point is they were in West Hollywood, whiling away the hours, apparently aimlessly, which one assumes they wouldn’t do if there were things still on their agenda, like determining Ms Dayton’s current location, for instance. So I think we should assume they have it now.’

‘How did they get it?’

‘Doesn’t matter how. What matters is what they’re going to do next. Possibly they were in West Hollywood just hiding out until dark. In which case they’re probably back at the house by now, about to begin a lengthy period of surveillance.’

‘Our boys aren’t there any more.’

‘Then get them back. Tell them to look at the neighbourhood with a military eye and work out where a skilled team would be watching from. There can’t be more than a handful of suitable vantage points. They won’t be hunkered down in a neighbour’s back yard, for instance. They’re probably fairly distant. The field manual calls for a line of sight plus elevation. Upstairs in an empty building, perhaps, or a water tower, or a parking garage. Tell our boys to compile a list of possibilities, and then tell them to split up and investigate. More efficient that way. We need this done tonight.’

‘You can buy guns in a pawn shop.’

‘But they didn’t. There’s a waiting period. California has laws. And they only spent thirty dollars.’

‘On the credit card. There could have been a side deal in cash. Lozano and Baldacci had plenty with them on the plane.’

‘An illegal purchase? Then they wouldn’t have stuck around to eat. Not in the same neighbourhood. They’d have been too nervous. They’d have gone somewhere else. That’s my sense. So assume they’re still unarmed.’

‘I hope you’re right about that,’ Juliet said. ‘It would make things easier.’

Turner spent thirty minutes with the binoculars, and then she passed them back to Reacher, blinking and rubbing her eyes. He widened them out to fit, and adjusted the focus, which took a big turn of the wheel. Either he was half blind, or she was.

She said, ‘I want to call Sergeant Leach again. I want to know she’s OK.’

He said, ‘Give her my best.’ He half listened to Turner’s end of the conversation while he watched what was happening three hundred yards away. Which was nothing much. The Hummer stayed where it was, and the small white compact stayed where it was. No one went in or out through the blue front door. Sergeant Leach was apparently OK. As was her cooperative friend Margaret Vega. At that point, at least. So far. The conversation was short. Turner said nothing explicit, but between the lines Leach seemed to be agreeing with her that the die was cast, and the only available options were win big or go home.

The blue door stayed closed. Most of the time Reacher kept the binoculars trained hard on it, but then for maybe four seconds out of every twenty he started a fragmented exploration of the neighbourhood. He traced his way back down the street, and out through the elbow where they had come in, with the bakery truck outside the grocery, and the dumped bike, and the car with no wheels. Then came the main drag, which was Vineland Avenue, about as far south of the freeway as the law office was north.

He went back to the blue door, which stayed closed.

And then he traced his way down the street again, but went the other way at the far end, right instead of left, and he found an identical elbow, like a mirror image. The same kind of zoning, and the same kinds of issues. And then the main drag again, still Vineland, but a further quarter mile south. Which made the neighbourhood not quite a rectangle. It was taller on the right than the left. Like a pennant. Some way above its top right corner was the freeway, and then the law office, and some way below its bottom right corner was an old coach diner, all lit up and shiny.

Reacher knew which way he would walk.

He went back to the blue door, which stayed closed.

It stayed closed until a minute before eight o’clock. And then it opened, and she came out again, just the same as before. Same long-limbed stride, almost graceful, same hair, same shirt, same jacket, same shoes. Presumably no socks or laces, and possibly the same wry expression, but it was dark, and the optics had limits.

Just the same as before.

But she turned the other way.

She went east, not west. Away from the freeway interchange. Towards the main drag. No one went with her. No shadow, and no protection. Reacher pointed, and Turner nodded.

He said, ‘Do you think it’s possible they didn’t tell either one of them?’

She said, ‘Obviously they didn’t tell the kid. They can’t say, we found your daddy but decided to arrest him instead.’

‘Can they say that to the mother? She’s not going to get much child support if they throw away the key.’

‘What’s on your mind?’

‘They didn’t send anyone with her. Which they should have. If I can’t get to her in the house, then I’ll try to get to her when she leaves. That’s obvious, surely. But no one is with her. The only logical reason is that they haven’t told them, and they can’t explain away four guys following them everywhere, so they don’t follow them everywhere.’

‘Plus they’re cheapskates. If they told them, they’d have to put a woman support officer in the house. Which would cost money.’

‘OK, so if mother and child are bait but don’t know it, and they leave the house, then all Espin or anyone else can do is a long-distance tail, and an occasional pass in a vehicle.’

‘Agreed.’

‘But no one is moving and neither vehicle has started its engine.’

‘Maybe they wait until she’s out of sight.’

‘Let’s see if they do.’

They didn’t. The girl turned right at the far end of the street, and disappeared, but back at her house no one moved, and neither car started.

Turner said, ‘Maybe there’s another team.’

‘Would you approve that budget?’

‘Of course I would.’

‘Would they? If they won’t even put a woman officer in the house?’

‘OK, there’s only one team and it’s not moving. Laziness and complacency. Plus it must be hard to get a parking spot.’

‘They’re not moving because they think I’m dumb enough to walk up the driveway and knock on the door.’

Then a car drove in, all the way from the far end of the neighbourhood, coming off Vineland, and coming through the elbow they had used before. Its lights swung right and left, and then it came down the street, head-on and blinding, past the Hummer, past the blue door, almost level with the small white compact, and then it stopped, and backed up fast, past the house again, past the Hummer, and all the way back to the last parking spot on the street, which was evidently much farther away than its driver desired. The car parallel-parked neatly and its headlights shut off, and two guys got out, far off and indistinct, just moving shadows really, one maybe larger than the other.

The lizard brain stirred, and a billion years later Reacher leaned forward an inch.