'I was like old Moose Skowron, I guess. Most years I hit over 300. When it mattered I could step it up to 375.'
'Did you get medals?'
'We all got medals.'
'Why don't you live anywhere?'
'Do you have a house?'
'Of course.'
'Is it a pure unalloyed pleasure?'
'Not entirely.'
'So there's your answer.'
'How do we find these guys if they switched cars again?'
'Lots of ways,' Reacher said.
A mile out the fire took on a shape, wide at the base, narrow above. Half a mile out Reacher saw strange jets and fans and lobes of flame, pale blue and roaring and almost invisible. He figured the fuel line was failing, maybe at the seams or where the metal was stressed by folds and turns. He figured the tank itself was holding, but vapour was cooking off and boiling out through tiny cracks and fissures, sideways, upward, downward, like random and violent blowtorches, the tongues of flame as strong and straight as metal bars, some of them twenty or thirty feet long. Inside the fireball the car itself was a vague cherry-red shape, jerking and wriggling and dancing in the boiling air. Reacher buzzed his window down and heard the distant noise. He put his hand in the freezing slipstream and felt faint warmth on his palm.
'Don't get too close,' he said.
Sorenson eased up and slowed down. She said, 'Do you think the tank will blow?'
'Probably not. The gas is boiling and bleeding off. There's no big pressure build-up. Combustion is too vigorous to let any kind of blowback happen. So far, anyway.'
'How much gas do you think is left?'
'Now? I'm not sure. The tank was full less than forty miles ago.'
'So what do we do?'
'We wait. Until it either blows up or calms down enough for us to recognize what kind of car it was.'
Sorenson stopped three hundred yards from the fire, and like good cops everywhere she pulled off the road and on to the shoulder, at least a yard, and then she backed up and parallel-parked herself another whole foot into the weeds. A cautious woman. There was no chance of getting rear-ended, because there was no traffic. Reacher faced front and watched and waited. He expected a fast decision. The gas couldn't last long. On the road the car had used plenty. And that was to produce just a few puny horsepower. A hundred at most, to haul a mid-size sedan down a completely flat highway. Now the same tank was feeding a fire as intense as a phosphorus bomb. A thousand times more powerful. Like a jet engine, literally.
He asked, 'Where did they jack the car, right back at the beginning? At a light?'
Beside him Sorenson shook her head. 'Behind the cocktail lounge where Delfuenso works. I think they tried to steal the car first. She came out, either because of the alarm, or she was leaving anyway.'
'She had her bag,' Reacher said.
'Then she was leaving anyway. They stopped and bought shirts, and then they hit the road.'
'And water.'
'How did you know that?'
'I drank some of it. It was still cold. What were they running from?'
'They stabbed a guy to death.'
'In the cocktail lounge?'
'No, in an abandoned pumping station three miles away. Some kind of strange rendezvous.'
'So how did they get three miles to the cocktail lounge? Did they walk?'
'They used the victim's car.'
'Why didn't they keep it?'
'It was bright red and foreign. There was an eyewitness.'
'To the stabbing itself?'
'More or less. To the getaway, certainly.'
'Who was the eyewitness?'
'A farm worker, about fifty.'
'Was he any good to you?'
'No worse than usual. Not the sharpest knife in the drawer. Excuse the pun. He saw the dead guy go in, followed by the two perps. He saw the perps come out and drive away.'
'Where was their own car? Didn't they have one?'
'No one knows.'
'If they had their own car, they'd have used it, surely. They must have driven in with the guy they stabbed.'
'My tech person thinks they didn't.'
'Who was the guy they stabbed?'
'A trade attache. Like a foreign service guy. He worked in our embassies overseas. He was an Arabic speaker, apparently.'
'What did they stab him with?'
'Not sure. Something big. An eight- or nine-inch blade. A hunting knife, probably.'
'What was the foreign service guy doing in Nebraska?'
'No one knows. They say he was between postings. The red car was rented in Denver. At the airport. So presumably the guy flew in from somewhere and drove the rest of the way. No one has mentioned a reason why he would do that. Or from where. But the State Department is worried about it. They sent a guy.'
'Already?'
'My tech team fingerprinted the dead guy, and it's been fun and games ever since. Bureau counterterrorism showed up un-announced, and the State Department guy came, and my SAC has been up all night, and the eyewitness disappeared.'
'Weird,' Reacher said.
In the end the fire died just as fast as the sun came up. On the left the eastern skies cracked purple and pink and gold, and dead ahead the unspent gas ran out, and the smaller blaze ebbed, and the bigger blaze came over the horizon. Cold daylight lit the scene and gave heft and form to the blackened shell. The car was parked on the shoulder, facing south, as far off the road as Sorenson was. The tyres were burned away. All the glass was gone. The paint had vaporized. The sheet metal was scorched grey and purple in fantastic whorls. For twenty yards all around the winter stubble had burned and blackened. An arc of blacktop was bubbling and smoking. There were last licks of flame here and there, low and timid and hesitant compared to what had come before.
Sorenson bumped back on to the road and drove closer. Reacher looked at the shell. Ashes to ashes. It had started out that way, all bare and shiny in the factory, and it was ending up the same way, all gutted and empty.
It was an Impala. No question about it. Reacher knew the shape of its trunk, the flat of its flanks, the hump of its roof, the pitch of its hood. He was getting a three-quarters rear view, but he was totally sure. It was Delfuenso's Chevy.
All gutted and empty.
My car.
Reacher stared.
It wasn't empty.
THIRTY-SEVEN
REACHER WAS THE first to get out. He closed his door and stood next to the Crown Vic's hood, with cold on his back and heat on his face. He was five feet closer than he had been before, and therefore his angle was five feet better.
All the glass was gone. All the rubber was gone, all the plastics, all the vinyl, all the high-tech space age materials. All that was left was metal, the parts designed to be visible still curved and moulded, the parts designed to be hidden all sharp and knifelike and exposed. In particular the rear parcel shelf had lost its padding and its loudspeakers and its soundproof mat and its mouse-fur covering. What was left was a stamped steel cross-member, corrugated here and there for strength, drilled here and there with holes, but otherwise as plain and brutal as a blade. Its front edge was perfectly straight.
Except it wasn't.
Reacher took three more steps. The heat was astonishing. The front of the parcel shelf looked different on the right than the left. On the right its straight edge was compromised by a humped shape completely unrelated to engineering necessity. It was an organic shape, odd and random, in no way similar to the stamped angularity all around it.
It was a human head, burned smooth and tiny by the fire.
Sorenson got out of her car.
Reacher said, 'Stay there, OK?'
He turned away and took a breath from the cold side, and another, until his lungs were full. He turned back and started walking. He kept his distance, looping wide, until he was level with the side of the shell. Then he darted in, until he felt the blacktop hot and sticky under the soles of his boots.