Nothing to Lose

47

From the plant to the Hope town line was fifteen miles by road, but Reacher made it into a twenty-mile excursion by looping around to the north, through the scrub. He figured that the townsfolk would have reorganized fairly fast, and there was no obvious way of winning the consequent twin confrontations at both ends of Main Street. So he avoided them altogether. He hammered the deputy’s old truck across the rough ground and navigated by the glow of the fire to his right. It looked to be going strong. In his experience brick buildings always burned well. The contents went first, and then the floors and the ceilings, and then the roof, with the outer walls holding up and forming a tall chimney to enhance the air flow. And when the walls finally went, the collapse blasted sparks and embers all over the place, to start new fires. Sometimes a whole city block could be taken out by one cigarette and one book of matches.

He skirted the town on a radius he judged to be about four miles and then he shadowed the road back east a hundred yards out in the dirt. When the clock in his head hit midnight he figured he was less than a mile short of the line. He veered right and bounced up onto the tarred pebbles and finished the trip like a normal driver. He thumped over the line and Hope’s thick blacktop made the ride go suddenly quiet.

Vaughan was waiting a hundred yards ahead.

She was parked on the left shoulder with her lights off. He slowed and held his arm out his window in a reassuring wave. She put her arm out her own window, hand extended, fingers spread, an answering gesture. Or a traffic signal. He coasted and feathered the brakes and the steering and came to a stop with his fingertips touching hers. To him the contact felt one-third like a mission-accomplished high-five, one-third like an expression of relief to be out of the lions’ den again, and one-third just plain good. He didn’t know what it felt like to her. She gave no indication. But she left her hand there a second longer than she needed to.

“Whose truck?” she asked.

“The senior deputy’s,” Reacher said. “His name is Underwood. He’s very sick.”

“With what?”

“He said I did it to him.”

“Did you?”

“I gave a sick man a couple of contusions, which I don’t feel great about. But I didn’t give him diarrhea or blisters or sores and I didn’t make his hair fall out.”

“So is it TCE?”

“Thurman said not.”

“You believe him?”

“Not necessarily.”

Vaughan held up a plastic bottle of water.

Reacher said, “I’m not thirsty.”

“Good,” Vaughan said. “This is a sample. Tap water, from my kitchen. I called a friend of a friend of David’s. He knows a guy who works at the state lab in Colorado Springs. He told me to take this in for testing. And to find out how much TCE Thurman actually uses.”

“The tank holds five thousand gallons.”

“But how often does it get used up and refilled?”

“I don’t know.”

“How can we find out?”

“There’s a purchasing office, probably full of paperwork.”

“Can we get in there?”

“Maybe.”

Vaughan said, “Go dump that truck back over the line. I’ll drive you to town. We’ll take a doughnut break.”

So Reacher steered the truck backward into the sand and left it there, keys in. Way behind him he could see a faint red glow on the horizon. Despair was still on fire. He didn’t say anything about it. He just walked forward and crossed the line again and climbed in next to Vaughan.

“You smell of cigarettes,” she said.

“I found one,” he said. “I smoked a half-inch, for old times’ sake.”

“They give you cancer, too.”

“I heard that. You believe it?”

“Yes,” she said. “I do, absolutely.”

She took off east, at a moderate speed, one hand on the wheel and the other in her lap. He asked her, “How’s your day going?”

“A gum wrapper blew across the street in front of me. Right there in my headlights. Violation of the anti-littering ordinance. That’s about as exciting as it gets in Hope.”

“Did you call Denver? About Maria?”

She nodded.

“The old man picked her up,” she said. “By the hardware store. He confirmed her name. He knew a lot about her. They talked for half an hour.”

“Half an hour? How? It’s less than a twenty-minute drive.”

“He didn’t let her out in Despair. She wanted to go to the MP base.”

They got to the diner at twenty minutes past midnight. The college-girl waitress was on duty. She smiled when she saw them walk in together, as if some kind of a long-delayed but pleasant inevitability had finally taken place. She looked to be about twenty years old, but she was grinning away like a smug old matchmaker from an ancient village. Reacher felt like there was a secret he wasn’t privy to. He wasn’t sure that Vaughan understood it either.

They sat opposite each other in the back booth. They didn’t order doughnuts. Reacher ordered coffee and Vaughan ordered juice, a blend of three exotic fruits, none of which Reacher had ever encountered before.

“You’re very healthy,” he said.

“I try.”

“Is your husband in the hospital? With cancer, from smoking?”

She shook her head.

“No,” she said. “He isn’t.”

Their drinks arrived and they sipped them in silence for a moment and then Reacher asked, “Did the old guy know why Maria wanted to go to the MPs?”

“She didn’t tell him. But it’s a weird destination, isn’t it?”

“Very,” Reacher said. “It’s an active-service forward operating base. Visitors wouldn’t be permitted. Not even if she knew one of the grunts. Not even if one of the grunts was her brother or her sister.”

“Combat MPs use women grunts?”

“Plenty.”

“So maybe she’s one of them. Maybe she was reporting back on duty, after furlough.”

“Then why would she have booked two more nights in the motel and left all her stuff there?”

“I don’t know. Maybe she was just checking something.”

“She’s too small for a combat MP.”

“They have a minimum size?”

“The army always has had, overall. These days, I’m not sure what it is. But even if she squeezed in, they’d put her somewhere else, covertly.”

“You sure?”

“No question. Plus she was too quiet and timid. She wasn’t military.”

“So what did she want from the MPs? And why isn’t she back yet?”

“Did the old guy actually see her get in?”

“Sure,” Vaughan said. “He waited, like an old-fashioned gentleman.”

“Therefore a better question would be, if they let her in, what did they want from her?”

Vaughan said, “Something to do with espionage.”

Reacher shook his head. “I was wrong about that. They’re not worried about espionage. They’d have the plant buttoned up, east and west, probably with a presence inside, or at least on the gates.”

“So why are they there?”

“They’re guarding the truck route. Which means they’re worried about theft, of something that would need a truck to haul away. Something heavy, too heavy for a regular car.”

“Something too heavy for a small plane, then.”

Reacher nodded. “But that plane is involved somehow. This morning I was barging around and therefore they had to shut down the secret operation for a spell, and tonight the plane didn’t fly. I didn’t hear it, and I found it later, right there in its hangar.”

“You think it only flies when they’ve been working on the military stuff?”

“I know for sure it didn’t when they hadn’t been, so maybe the obverse is true, too.”

“Carrying something? In or out?”

“Maybe both. Like trading.”

“Secrets?”

“Maybe.”

“People? Like Lucy Anderson’s husband?”

Reacher drained his mug. Shook his head. “I can’t make that work. There’s a logic problem with it. Almost mathematical.”

“Try me,” Vaughan said. “I did four years of college.”

“How long have you got?”

“I’d love to catch whoever dropped the gum wrapper. But I could put that on the back burner, if you like.”

Reacher smiled. “There are three things going on over there. The military contract, plus something else, plus something else again.”

“OK,” Vaughan said. She moved the saltshaker, the pepper shaker, and the sugar shaker to the center of the table. “Three things.”

Reacher moved the saltshaker to one side, immediately. “The military contract is what it is. Nothing controversial. Nothing to worry about, except the possibility that someone might steal something heavy. And that’s the MPs’ problem. They’re straddling the road, they’ve got six Humvees, they’ve got thirty miles of empty space for a running battle, they can stop any truck they need to. No special vigilance required from the townspeople. No reason for the townspeople to get excited at all.”

“But?”

Reacher cupped his hands and put his left around the pepper shaker and his right around the sugar shaker. “But the townspeopleare excited about something.All of them. Theyare vigilant. Today they all turned out in defense of something.”

“What something?”

“I have no clue.” He held up the sugar shaker, in his right hand. “But it’s the bigger of the two unknowns. Because everyone is involved in it. Let’s call it the right hand, as in the right hand doesn’t know what the left is doing.”

“What’s the left hand?”

Reacher held up the pepper shaker, in his left hand. “It’s smaller. It involves a subset of the population. A small, special subgroup. Everyone knows about the sugar, mostdon’t know about the pepper, a few know about both the sugarand the pepper.”

“And we don’t know about either.”

“But we will.”

“How does this relate to Lucy Anderson’s husband not being taken out by plane?”

Reacher held up the sugar shaker. A large glass item, in his right hand. “Thurman flies the plane. Thurman is the town boss. Thurman directs the larger unknown. It couldn’t happen any other way. And if the Anderson guy had been a part of it, everyone would have been aware. Including the town cops and Judge Gardner. Thurman would have made sure of that. Therefore Lucy Anderson would not have been arrested, and she would not have been thrown out as a vagrant.”

“So Thurman’s doing something, and everyone is helping, but a few are also working on something else behind his back?”

Reacher nodded. “And that something the few are working on behind his back involves these young guys.”

“And the young guys either get through or they don’t, depending on who they bump into first, the many right-hand people or the few left-hand people.”

“Exactly. And there’s a new one now. Name of Rogers, just arrested, but I didn’t see him.”

“Rogers? I’ve heard that name before.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know.”

“Wherever, he was one of the unlucky ones.”

“The odds will always be against them.”

“Exactly.”

“Which was Ramirez’s problem.”

“No, Ramirez didn’t bump into anyone,” Reacher said. “I checked the records. He was neither arrested nor helped.”

“Why? What made him different?”

“Great question,” Reacher said.

“What’s the answer?”

“I don’t know.”