THIRTY-EIGHT

REACHER MADE THE GUY GET OUT OF THE TRUCK THE SAME WAY he had before, through the passenger door, awkward and unbalanced and unable to spring any surprises. He tracked him with the Glock and glanced beyond the wire and asked, 'Where are all the harvest trucks?'

The guy said, 'They're in Ohio. Back at the factory, for refurbishment. They're specialist vehicles, and some of them are thirty years old.'

'What are the two grey vans for?'

'This and that. Service and repairs, tyres, things like that.'

'Are there supposed to be three?'

'One is out. It's been gone a few days.'

'Doing what?'

'I don't know.'

Reacher asked, 'When do the big trucks get back?'

The guy said, 'Spring.'

'What's this place like in the early summer?'

'Pretty busy. The first alfalfa crop gets harvested early. There's a lot of preparation ahead of time and a lot of maintenance afterwards. This place is humming.'

'Five days a week?'

'Seven, usually. We're talking forty thousand acres here. That's a lot of output.' The guy closed the passenger door and took a step. Then he stopped dead, because Reacher had stopped dead. Reacher was staring ahead at the empty rectangle in front of the building. The cracked stones. The managerial parking lot. Nothing in it.

Reacher asked, 'Where do you normally park your truck, John?'

'Right out front there, by the doors.'

'Where do your buddies park?'

'Same place.'

'So where are they?'

The night-time silence clamped down and the young man's mouth came open a little, and he whirled around as if he was expecting his friends to be hiding somewhere behind him. Like a practical joke. But they weren't. He turned back and said, 'I guess they're out. They must have gotten a call.'

'From you?' Reacher asked. 'When you saw Mrs Duncan?'

'No, I swear. I didn't call. You can check my phone.'

'So who called them?'

'Mr Duncan, I guess. Mr Jacob, I mean.'

'Why would he?'

'I don't know. Nothing was supposed to happen tonight.'

'He called them but he didn't call you?'

'No, he didn't call me. I swear. Check my phone. He wouldn't call me anyway. I'm on sentry duty. I was supposed to stay put.'

'So what's going on, John?'

'I don't know.'

'Best guess?'

'The doctor. Or his wife. Or both of them together. They're always seen as the weakest link. Because of the drinking. Maybe the Duncans think they have information.'

'About what?'

'You, of course. About where you are and what you're doing and whether you're coming back. That's what's on their minds.'

'It takes five guys to ask those questions?'

'Show of force,' the kid said. 'That's what we're here for. A surprise raid in the middle of the night can shake people up.'

'OK, John,' Reacher said. 'You stay here.'

'Here?'

'Go to bed.'

'You're not going to hurt me?'

'You already hurt yourself. You showed no fight at all against a smaller, older man. You're a coward. You know that now. That's as good to me as a dislocated elbow.'

'Easy for you to say. You've got a gun.'

Reacher put the Glock back in his pocket. He folded the flap down and stood with his arms out, hands empty, palms forward, fingers spread.

He said, 'Now I don't. So bring it on, fat boy.'

The guy didn't move.

'Go for it,' Reacher said. 'Show me what you've got.'

The guy didn't move.

'You're a coward,' Reacher said again. 'You're pathetic. You're a waste of good food. You're a useless three-hundred-pound sack of shit. And you're ugly, too.'

The guy said nothing.

'Last chance,' Reacher said. 'Step up and be a hero.'

The guy walked away, head down, shoulders slumped, towards the dark building. He stopped twenty feet later and looked back. Reacher looped around the rear of the Yukon, to the driver's door. He got in. The seat was too far back. The kid was huge. But Reacher wasn't about to adjust it in front of the guy. Some stupid male inhibition, way in the back of his brain. He just started up and turned and drove away, and fixed it on the fly.

The Yukon drove OK, but the brakes were a little spongy. The result of the panic stop, probably, back at the old roadhouse. Five years' wear and tear, all in one split second. But Reacher didn't care. He wasn't braking much. He was hustling hard, concentrating on speeding up, not slowing down. Twenty miles was a long distance, through the empty rural darkness.

He saw nothing the whole way. No lights, no other vehicles. No activity of any kind. He got back to the main two-lane north of the motel and five minutes later he passed the place. It was all closed up and dark. No blue neon. No activity. No cars, except the wrecked Subaru. It was still there, beaded over with dew, low down on slowly softening tyres, sad and inert, like road kill. Reacher charged onward past it, and then he made the right and the left and the right, along the boundaries of the dark empty fields, like twice before, to the plain ranch house with the post-and-rail fence and the flat, featureless yard.

There were lights on in the house. Plenty of them. Like a cruise ship at night on the open ocean. But there was no sign of uproar. There were no cars on the driveway. No pick-up trucks, no SUVs. No large figures in the shadows. No sound, no movement. Nothing. The front door was closed. The windows were intact.

Reacher turned in and parked on the driveway and walked to the door. He stood right in front of the spy hole and rang the bell. There was a whole minute's delay. Then the spy hole darkened and lightened and locks and chains rattled and the doctor opened up. He looked tired and battered and worried. His wife was standing behind him in the hallway, in the bright light, with the phone to her ear. The phone was the old-fashioned kind, big and black on a table, with a dial and a curly wire. The doctor's wife was not talking. She was just listening, concentrating hard, her eyes narrowing and widening.

The doctor said, 'You came back.'

Reacher said, 'Yes, I did.'

'Why?'

'Are you OK? The Cornhuskers are out and about.'

'We know,' the doctor said. 'We just heard. We're on the phone tree right now.'

'They didn't come here?'

'Not yet.'

'So where are they?'

'We're not sure.'

Reacher said, 'Can I come in?'

'Of course,' the doctor said. 'I'm sorry.' He stepped back and Reacher stepped in. The hallway was very warm. The whole house was warm, but it felt smaller than before, like a desperate little fortress. The doctor closed the door and turned two keys and put the chain back on. He asked, 'Did you see the police files?'

Reacher said, 'Yes.'

'And?'

'They're inconclusive,' Reacher said. He moved on into the kitchen. He heard the doctor's wife say, 'What?' She sounded puzzled. Maybe a little shocked. He glanced back at her. The doctor glanced back at her. She said nothing more. Just continued to listen, eyes moving, taking mental notes. The doctor followed Reacher into the kitchen.

'Want coffee?' he asked.

I'm not drunk, he meant.

Reacher said, 'Sure. Lots of it.'

The doctor set about filling the machine. The kitchen was even warmer than the hallway. Reacher took off his coat and hung it on the back of a chair.

The doctor asked, 'What do you mean, inconclusive?'

Reacher said, 'I mean I could make up a story about how the Duncans did it, but there's really no proof either way.'

'Can you find proof? Is that why you came back?'

Reacher said, 'I came back because those two Italian guys who were after me seem to have joined up with a regular United Nations of other guys. Not a peacekeeping force, either. I think they're all coming here. I want to know why.'

'Pride,' the doctor said. 'You messed with the Duncans, and they won't tolerate that. Their people can't handle you, so they've called in reinforcements.'

'Doesn't make sense,' Reacher said. 'Those Italians were here before me. You know that. You heard what Eleanor Duncan said. So there's some other reason. They have some kind of a dispute with the Duncans.'

'Then why would they help the Duncans in their own dispute with you?'

'I don't know.'

'How many of them are coming?' the doctor asked.

From the hallway his wife said, 'Five of them.' She had just gotten off the phone. She stepped into the kitchen and said, 'And they're not coming. They're already here. That was the message on the phone tree. The Italians are back. With three other men. Three cars in total. The Italians in their blue Chevy, plus two guys in a red Ford, and one guy in a black car that everyone swears is Seth Duncan's Cadillac.'

THIRTY-NINE

REACHER POURED HIMSELF A CUP OF COFFEE AND THOUGHT FOR a long moment and said, 'I left Seth Duncan's Cadillac at the Marriott.'

The doctor's wife asked, 'So how did you get back here?'

'I took a Chevy Malibu from one of the bad guys.'

'That thing on the driveway?'

'No, that's a GMC Yukon I took from a football player.'

'So what happened with the Cadillac?'

'I left a guy stranded. I stole his car, and then I guess he stole mine. Probably not deliberate tit for tat. Probably just coincidental, because there wasn't really an infinite choice down there. He didn't want some piece-of-shit pick-up truck, obviously, and he didn't want anything with big-time security built in. The Cadillac fit the bill. Probably the only thing that did. Or else he was just plain lazy, and didn't want to look around too long. The Cadillac was right there. We were all in the same hotel.'

'Did you see the guys?'

'I didn't see the Italians. But I saw the other four.'

'That makes six, not five. Where's the other one?'

'I promise you something,' Reacher said. 'The guy who took the Cadillac put his bag on the back seat, not in the trunk.'

'How do you know?'

'Because that's where the sixth guy is. In the trunk. I put him there.'

'Does he have air?'

'He doesn't need air. Not any more.'

'Sweet Jesus. What happened?'

Reacher said, 'I think whatever else they're doing, they're coming here to get me first. Like a side issue of some kind. Like mission creep. I don't know why, but that's the only way I can explain it. The way I see it, they all assembled tonight in the Marriott and the Italians announced the mission and gave the others a description, probably vague and definitely secondhand, because they haven't actually laid eyes on me yet, and then I bumped into one of the others after that, in the lobby, and he was looking at me, like he was asking himself, is that the guy? Can it be? Can it? I could see him thinking. We got out to the lot and he put his hand in his pocket and I hit him. You ever heard of commotio cordis?'

'Chest wall trauma,' the doctor said. 'Causes fatal cardiac dysrhythmia.'

'Ever seen it?'

'No.'

'Neither had I. But I'm here to tell you, it works real good.'

'What was in his pocket?'

'A knife and a gun and an ID from Vegas.'

'Vegas?' the doctor said. 'Do the Duncans have gambling debts? Is that the dispute?'

'Possible,' Reacher said. 'No question the Duncans have been living beyond their means for a long time. They've been getting some extra income from somewhere.'

'Why say that? They've been extorting forty farms for thirty years. And a motel. That's a lot of money.'

'No, it isn't,' Reacher said. 'Not really. This isn't the wealthiest area in the world. They could be taking half of what everyone earns, and that wouldn't buy them a pot to piss in. But Seth lives like a king and they pay ten football players just to be here. They couldn't do all that on the back of a seasonal enterprise.'

The doctor's wife said, 'We should worry about that later. Right now the Cornhuskers are on the loose, and we don't know where or why. That's what's important tonight. Dorothy Coe might be coming over.'

'Here?' Reacher asked. 'Now?'

The doctor said, 'That's what happens sometimes. With the women, mostly. It's a support thing. Like a sisterhood. Whoever feels the most vulnerable clusters together.'

His wife said, 'Which is always Dorothy and me, and sometimes others too, depending on exactly what the panic is.'

'Not a good idea,' Reacher said. 'From a tactical point of view, I mean. It gives them one target instead of multiple targets.'

'It's strength in numbers. It works. Sometimes those boys can act a little inhibited. They don't necessarily like witnesses around, when they're sent after women.'

They took cups of coffee and waited in the dining room, which had a view of the road. The road was dark. There was nothing moving on it. It was indistinguishable from the rest of the nighttime terrain. They sat quiet for a spell, on hard upright chairs, with the lights off to preserve their view out the window, and then the doctor said, 'Tell us about the files.'

'I saw a photograph,' Reacher said. 'Dorothy's kid was Asian.'

'Vietnamese,' the doctor's wife said. 'Artie Coe did a tour over there. Something about it affected him, I guess. When the boat people thing started, they stepped up and adopted.'

'Did many people from here go to Vietnam?'

'A fair number.'

'Did the Duncans go?'

'I don't think so. They were in an essential occupation.'

'So was Arthur Coe.'

'Different strokes for different folks.'

'Who was chairman of the local draft board?'

'Their father. Old man Duncan.'

'So the boys didn't keep on farming to please him. They kept on to keep their asses out of the war.'

'I suppose.'

'Good to know,' Reacher said. 'They're cowards, too, apart from anything else.'

The doctor said, 'Tell us about the investigation.'

'Long story,' Reacher said. 'There were eleven boxes of paper.'

'And?'

'The investigation had problems,' Reacher said.

'Like what?'

'One was a conceptual problem, and the others were details. The lead detective was a guy called Carson, and the ground kind of shifted under his feet over a twelve-hour period. It started out as a straightforward missing persons issue, and then it slowly changed to a potential homicide. And Carson didn't really revisit the early phase in the light of the later phase. The first night, he had people checking their own outbuildings. Which was reasonable, frankly, with a missing kid. But later he never really searched those outbuildings independently. Only one of them, basically, for an old couple who hadn't done it themselves. Everyone else self-certified, really. In effect they said no sir, the kid ain't here, and she never was, I promise. At some point Carson should have started over and treated everyone as a potential suspect. But he didn't. He focused on the Duncans only, based on information received. And the Duncans came out clean.'

'You think it was someone else?'

'Could have been anyone else in the world, just passing through. If not, it could have been any of the local residents. Probably not Dorothy or Arthur Coe themselves, but that still leaves thirty-nine possibilities.'

The doctor's wife said, 'I think it was the Duncans.'

'Three different agencies disagree with you.'

'They might be wrong.'

Reacher nodded in the dark, his gesture unobserved.

'They might be,' he said. 'There might have been another conceptual error. A failure of imagination, anyway. It's clear that the Duncans never left their compound, and it's clear that the kid never showed up there. There are reliable witnesses to both of those facts. Four boys were building a fence. And the science came up negative, too. But the Duncans could have had an accomplice. A fifth man, essentially. He could have scooped up the kid and taken her somewhere else. Carson never even thought about that. He never checked known associates. And he should have, probably. You wait five years to build a fence, and you happen to be doing it on the exact same day a kid disappears? Could have been a prefabricated alibi. Carson should have wondered, at least. I would have, for sure.'

'Who would the fifth man have been?'

'Anyone,' Reacher said. 'A friend, maybe. One of their drivers, perhaps. It's clear a vehicle was involved, otherwise why was the bike never found?'

'I always wondered about the bike.'

'Did they have a friend? Did you ever see one, when you were babysitting?'

'I saw a few people, I guess.'

'Anyone close? This would have been a very intimate type of relationship. Shared enthusiasms, shared passions, absolute trust. Someone into the same kind of thing they were into.'

'A man?'

'Almost certainly. The same kind of creep.'

'I'm not sure. I can't remember. Where would he have taken her?'

'Anywhere, theoretically. And that was another major mistake. Carson never really looked anywhere else, apart from the Duncans' compound. It was crazy not to search the transportation depot, for instance. As a matter of fact I don't think that was a real problem, because it seems like that place is real busy in the early part of the summer, seven days a week. Something to do with alfalfa, whatever that is. No one would take an abducted kid to a work site full of witnesses. But there was one other place Carson should have checked for sure. And he didn't. He ignored it completely. Possibly because of ignorance or confusion.'

'Which was where?'

But Reacher didn't get time to answer, because right then the window blazed bright and the room filled with moving lights and shadows. They played over the walls, the ceiling, their faces, alternately stark white and deep black.

Headlight beams, strobing through the posts of the fence.

A car, coming in fast from the east.