A Wanted Man (3 page)

But what was it for? Eight cars was a big deal. And Reacher could see shotguns out. This was no kind of a routine check. This was not about seat belts or license tags. He asked, “Have you had the radio on? Has something bad happened?”

“Relax,” King said. “We get this from time to time. Escaped prisoner, most likely. There are a couple of big facilities west of here. They’re always losing people. Which is crazy, right? I mean, it ain’t brain surgery. It’s not like their doors don’t have locks.”

McQueen made eye contact in the mirror and said, “It’s not you, I hope.”

“Not me what?” Reacher asked.

“Who just escaped from jail.”

A smile in his voice.

“No,” Reacher said. “It’s definitely not me.”

“That’s good,” McQueen said. “Because that would get us all in trouble.”

They inched onward, in the impatient queue. Through a long glassy tunnel of windshields and rear windows Reacher could see the troopers at work. They were wearing their hats. They had shotguns held low and big Maglites held overhand. They were shining their flashlight beams into one car after another, front, back, up, down, counting heads, checking floors, sometimes checking trunks. Then, satisfied, they were waving cars away and turning to the next in line.

“Don’t worry, Karen,” King said, without turning his head. “You’ll be home again soon.”

Delfuenso didn’t reply.

King glanced back at Reacher and said, “She hates being on the road,” by way of explanation.

Reacher said nothing.

They crept forward. Up ahead the routine never changed. Eventually Reacher sensed a pattern. The only circumstance under which the troopers were checking trunks was when there was a male driver alone in a car. Which ruled out King’s escaped prisoner theory. No reason why an escaped prisoner couldn’t hide in the trunk of a car occupied by two people, or three, or four. Or five, or six, or a whole busload. Much more likely the troopers had gotten a specific tip about a lone guy hauling something large and something bad. Drugs, guns, bombs, stolen goods, whatever.

They crept forward. Now they were third in line. Both cars ahead had lone men at the wheel. Both got their trunks checked. Both got waved onward. McQueen rolled forward and stopped where a trooper told him to. One guy stepped in front of the hood and flicked his flashlight beam across the license plate. Four more stepped up, two on each side, and shone their lights in through the windows, front, back, counting. Then the guy in front stepped aside and the guy nearest McQueen waved him onward, his hand gesturing low and urgent, right in McQueen’s line of vision.

McQueen eased forward and hauled on the wheel and made the tight left turn, and then the tight right turn, and then he was facing a thousand miles of free-flowing emptiness ahead of him. He breathed out and settled in his seat, and beside him King breathed out and settled in his seat, and McQueen hit the gas and the car accelerated hard and drove on east, fast, like there was no more time to waste.

A minute later and across the barrier Reacher saw a car coming on equally fast in the opposite direction. A dark Ford Crown Victoria, with flashing blue lights behind the grille. A government vehicle, clearly, rushing toward some kind of a big emergency.

Chapter 5

The dark Crown Victoria was an FBI squad car out of the
Omaha field office. The duty agent there had taken Sheriff Goodman’s call and had reacted instantly. Goodman had said
professionals
, which in FBI terms meant organized crime, and organized crime was the FBI’s preferred diet, because reputations were made there, and glory and promotions were earned there. So an on-call Special Agent had been dispatched immediately, a decorated twenty-year Bureau veteran, highly qualified, highly experienced, and highly regarded.

Her name was Julia Sorenson, and she was just shy of forty-seven years old, and she had been in Omaha just shy of forty-seven very happy months. Omaha was not New York or D.C., but it was not a Bureau backwater, either. It was not Siberia. Not even close. For some unknown historical reason crime followed the railroad tracks, and Nebraska had some of the planet’s biggest rail yards within its state lines. So Sorenson’s talents were not being wasted. She was not frustrated and she was not unfulfilled.

She dialed as she drove and called Sheriff Goodman’s cell and told him she was on her way. She arranged to meet him at the crime scene, in one hour’s time.

*  *  *

Goodman was
in his car when he took that call. He had one deputy securing the crime scene and babysitting the eyewitness, and all the others were blocking the local roads out of the county. Which left himself as the only available mobile unit. He was out and about, looking for the bright red car.

His county was large but not geographically complicated. A century earlier someone had drawn a square on a map, and the shape had stuck. The square was transected twice, first by a two-lane road running all the way across it left to right, west to east, and again by a two-lane road running bottom to top, south to north. Those two roads met near the middle of the square and made a crossroads, around which a town of eight thousand people had grown up. Cross-county traffic east to west and west to east was light, because the Interstate fifty miles north ran parallel and took most of the load. But traffic north to south and south to north was markedly heavier, because in one direction the Interstate attracted traffic, and in the other direction it dumped it out. It had taken local businesspeople about five minutes to notice that pattern, and three miles out of town to the north they had developed a long ragged strip with gas and diesel and diners and motels and bars and convenience stores and cocktail lounges. Relaxed citizens thought of the place as merely another business district, and uptight citizens called it Sin City. It was subject to exactly the same laws, rules, and regulations as the rest of the county, but for fifty years in an unspoken way those laws and rules and regulations had been enforced with a very light touch. The result was keno and poker machines in the bars, and strippers in the cocktail lounges, and rumors of prostitution in the motels, and a river of tax revenue into the county’s coffers.

Two-way traffic, just like the two-lane road.

Goodman was headed to Sin City. For no moral reason, but simply because the place was the last stop before the distant highway, and it was pocked with abandoned lots and long-dead enterprises and windowless cinder block walls. If you wanted to stash a getaway car and transfer to it unmolested, it was about the only game in town.

He cleared the crossroads and left the respectable neighborhoods behind. Next came a soybean field, and then came a quarter-mile
stretch of shoulder with old fourth-hand farm machinery parked on it. All of it was for sale, but most of it had waited so long for a buyer it had rusted solid. Then came more beans, and then came Sin City’s glow in the distance. There were gas stations at each end of the strip, one on the west side of the road and one on the east, both of them as big as stadium parking lots, for the eighteen-wheelers, both of them lit up bright by lights on tall poles, both of them with oil company signs hoisted high enough to see for miles. In between were the diners and the motels and the bars and the convenience stores and the cocktail lounges, all of them variously scattered on both sides of the road at random angles, some of them lit, some of them not, all of them standing alone in parking lots made of crushed stone. Some had survived fifty years, and some had been abandoned to weedy decay long ago.

Goodman started on the east side of the two-lane. He looped past a diner he patronized from time to time, driving slow and one-handed, using the other on the interior handle for the spotlight mounted on his windshield pillar, checking the parked vehicles. He drove around the back of the diner, past the trash bins, and then onward, circling a cocktail lounge, checking a motel, finding nothing. The gas station at the end of the strip had a couple of fender-bent sedans parked near its lube bays, but neither was bright red, and judging by the grime on their windshields both had been there for a good long spell.

Goodman waited for passing traffic and then nosed across the road and started again on the west side, at the north end, where the first establishment was a bar made of cinder blocks painted cream about twenty years before. No windows. Just ventilators on the roof, like mushrooms. No red cars anywhere near it. Next place in line was a cocktail lounge, fairly clean, said to be Sin City’s most salubrious. Goodman turned to figure-eight around the front of it, and his pillar spotlight lagged a little, and there it was.

A bright red import, parked neatly behind the lounge.

Chapter 6

Reacher leaned to his right a little, to see past Don
McQueen’s head and through the windshield to the road in front, which put his shoulder nominally in Karen Delfuenso’s space. She leaned a corresponding amount to her own right, hard against her door, to preserve her distance. Reacher saw the flat spread of headlight beams, and beyond them nothing but darkness rushing at him, with a lonely pair of red tail lights far away in the distance. The speedometer was showing eighty miles an hour. Fuel was showing three-quarters full. Engine temperature was showing dead-on normal. There was a Stovebolt logo on the airbag cover, which meant the car was a Chevrolet. Total recorded miles were just over forty thousand. Not a new car, but not an old one, either. It was humming along quite happily.

Reacher settled back in his seat, and Delfuenso tracked his movement. Alan King half turned in the front and said, “My brother was in the army. Peter King. Maybe you knew him.”

“It’s a very big institution,” Reacher said.

King smiled, a little sheepish.

“Sure,” he said. “Dumb comment, I guess.”

“But a common one. Everyone assumes we all knew each other. I don’t know why. I mean, how many people live where you live?”

“A million and a half, maybe.”

“Do you know them all?”

“I don’t even know my neighbors.”

“There you go. What branch was your brother in?”

“He was an artilleryman. He went to the Gulf the first time around.”

“So did I.”

“Then maybe you did know him.”

“We were half a million strong. Everyone went.”

“What was it like?”

“Didn’t your brother tell you?”

“We don’t talk.”

“It was hot,” Reacher said. “That’s most of what I remember.”

“What branch were you in?”

“I was a cop,” Reacher said. “Military Police. Criminal Investigation Division, man and boy.”

King half shrugged, half nodded, and said nothing more. He faced front again and stared out into the darkness.

On the shoulder a sign flashed by:
Welcome to Iowa
.

Sheriff Goodman aimed
his car into the lounge’s rear lot and put his headlights on bright. The parked import was not a Toyota, or a Honda, or a Hyundai, or a Kia. It was a Mazda. A Mazda 6, to be precise. A five-door hatch, but the rear profile was sleek, so it looked pretty much like a regular four-door sedan. It was a late model. It was fire-engine red. It was empty, but not yet dewed over. It hadn’t been parked for long.

Next to it on both sides were plenty of empty spaces. Behind it was fifty yards of weedy gravel, and then basically nothing all the way to the Denver suburbs seven hundred miles to the west. In front of it was the lounge’s rear door, which was a plain steel rectangle set in a mud-colored stucco wall.

A good spot. Not overlooked. No witnesses. Goodman pictured the two guys climbing out of the Mazda, shucking their suit coats, stepping across to their new ride, getting in, taking off.

What new ride?

No idea.

Taking off to where?

Not east or west, because they couldn’t get out of the county east or west without first driving south, back to the crossroads, and no one drives a getaway vehicle back toward the scene of the crime. So they had carried on north, obviously. Because the Interstate was up in that direction, just waiting there for them beyond the dark horizon, like a big anonymous magnet.

Therefore they were long gone. Either they had gotten out of the county minutes before the local northern roadblock had been set up, or they had gotten through it undetected minutes afterward because at that point the deputies were still looking for a bright red car.

Goodman’s own fault, and he knew it.

He got on his radio and told his guys to close down their local roadblocks. He told them exactly why. He told two of them to secure the area behind the cocktail lounge, and he told the rest of them to resume their general duties. He called the highway patrol’s dispatcher, and got no good news. He checked his watch and calculated time and speed and distance, and he breathed in and breathed out, and he put his car in gear, and he set off back to the crime scene again, ready for his appointment with Special Agent Julia Sorenson.

His fault.

The two men were out of the state already.

It was the FBI’s problem now.

Chapter 7

Julia Sorenson found the crossroads easily enough, which
was not surprising, because her GPS showed it to be the only cartographical singularity for miles around. She made the right turn, as instructed, and she drove west a hundred yards toward a pool of light, and she saw a concrete bunker with a sheriff’s car and a deputy’s cruiser parked right next to it.

The crime scene, exactly as described.

She understood the cars better than the bunker. The cars were Crown Vics like her own, but painted up in county colors and fitted with push bars front and rear and light bars on their roofs. The bunker was harder to explain. It was rectangular, maybe twenty feet long and fifteen feet deep and ten feet tall. It had a flat concrete roof and no windows. Its door was metal, bowed and scuffed and dented. The whole structure looked old and tired and settled. The concrete itself was worn by wind and weather, spalled and pitted, hollowed out here and there into fist-sized holes. Brown flinty stones had been exposed, some of them smooth, some of them split and shattered.