'That's where we're going,' Sorenson said. 'The old pumping station is right there.'
In the other direction there was no major east-west road until some distance north of the highway. Reacher said, 'I guess speed might have been an issue. If they needed to get where they were going before dawn, then the Interstate might have been the only option. But I agree about the risk of exposure. And I'm not sure how speed was an issue, exactly. They were picked up, after all. They could have arranged the rendezvous for somewhere much closer. So altogether it would have been more logical to take off directly east from the crossroads, not north. That road looks as good as this one. I'm sure it runs all the way to Iowa.'
The first fat raindrops hit the windshield. Sorenson turned her lights and wipers on. A mile to the east the rain was heavy.
Sheriff Goodman saw the clouds. His car was still parked in the middle of the road. He was leaning on the fender again. He had decided that snatching a kid on foot was ridiculous. A whole day's walk would get you precisely nowhere in Nebraska. So now he was wondering if the abductors had parked where he was parked, out of the mud. Maybe they were fastidious. Or maybe they had seen the mud and anticipated the danger and decided to avoid leaving tracks in the first place. Or maybe they were worried about witnesses, in which case maybe they had parked out of sight, a couple of hundred yards away. Which would still leave them exposed for a good few minutes. They would have to walk in, two or more unexplained pedestrians, and then they would have to walk out again, two or more men with a child in tow, possibly reluctant.
Then the first fat raindrops fell. Goodman watched them spatter on the mud. He checked the sky. He figured they were in for a short sharp downpour. Not uncommon. The state's immense ground water reserves had to come from somewhere. He took a last look at the muddy gutter. Pretty soon it would be liquid, and pretty soon after that it would be skimmed over with fresh run-off from the fields, like silt, as flat and as fine as talcum powder. He wasn't concerned. The investigation would not be set back. He wasn't losing evidence, because there was no evidence to lose.
Then the rain got a little harder and he pushed off the fender. Or tried to. He got a sudden sharp pain in his shoulders. And his arms. And a savage dull pain in the centre of his chest. Like heartburn. But not heartburn. He hadn't eaten anything.
He couldn't breathe. Couldn't move. His chest locked up solid. His knees gave way. He slid down the slick paint of the fender. He rested for a moment on his heels. He could feel the lip of the wheel arch digging into his back. He could smell the tyre. He could smell the rain. His arms wouldn't move.
He pitched sideways and sprawled on his back. He saw black clouds above him. He felt rain on his face. His chest was being crushed. Like it had a heavy weight on it. Like one time long ago in the gym when his spotter had stepped away and he had ended up with a two-hundred-pound barbell resting below his neck. He hadn't even been able to call out. He couldn't call out now. He had no air in his lungs. He couldn't move. He fought for a minute, and then he gave it up, because he knew with sudden strange certainty he would never move again.
He relaxed.
He lost all the feeling in his legs and his arms. Like they weren't even there. He was interested. He was dying from the extremities inward. His body was racing down a list, shedding one non-essential item after another. The animal organism, immensely evolved, programmed to maintain its core function just as long as it could. Programmed to redefine that core function ruthlessly and second by second. Legs? Who needs them? Arms? What for? It was the brain that counted. The brain would be the last thing to die.
Four minutes, he thought. That was the figure that came to him. He remembered his training. People drowning in ponds, kids choking on things, you get four minutes after the heart stops. He felt his life shrinking upward and inward, into his head. That's all he was now. A head. A brain. Nothing else. That was all he ever had been. That was all any human ever was. Cogito ergo sum. I think, therefore I am. There was no pain. Not any more. He was a brain, unsupported. He had no body. Like science fiction. Like a man from Mars. A space alien. He could still see. But his vision was dimming at the edges. Like an old TV. That's how it was going to happen. He understood. Finally. A question, answered. A mystery, solved. He was going to switch off like an old black-and-white TV, collapsing to a tiny spot of light that burned bright in the centre of the screen, before dimming and then disappearing for ever.
FORTY SEVEN
THE WIPERS THRASHED back and forth and the rain hammered on the roof of the car and bounced a foot off the road. Through the murk Reacher saw an oil company sign high above the plain, lit up bright. Less than half a mile away, he thought. Sorenson glanced at him and said, 'OK, pay attention. This is what the locals call Sin City. This is where it starts.'
She slowed the car. The gas station was on the left. But she turned right, into a lumpy gravel lot behind a no-name cinder block bar. She crunched on south and stopped behind a low beige building. There was a red Mazda parked at the back door. She said, 'This is where Delfuenso worked. It's a cocktail lounge. King and McQueen drove up from the crossroads in the red car.'
She rolled onward through the rain, bouncing and splashing through puddles, and she stopped again behind another low building. She said, 'This is a convenience store. This is where they bought the shirts and the water.' Then she bumped her way back to the road, and paused before turning. She said, 'They went north from here, and you know what happened after that.' But she went the other way and drove on south. Reacher saw dormant bean fields, with standing water in the plough ruts, and a sad wet quarter-mile of old farm machinery for sale, and then more bean fields. Then came low buildings with spilling rain gutters, and small forlorn strip malls. The town itself, such as it was. The GPS arrow was coming up to the crossroads. The north-south spine was about to meet the east-west spine. The map was fairly definitive. In terms of getting anywhere other than the local corner store, those two roads were the only long-distance options.
Sorenson turned west at the crossroads and a hundred yards later she stopped outside a low concrete bunker. It was maybe twenty feet long by fifteen deep and ten tall. It had a flat roof and no windows and an old metal door. It was soaked with rain, suddenly clean and tan. Reacher said, 'This is the old pumping station?'
Sorenson nodded. 'The dead guy was on the floor inside. King and McQueen were seen leaving in the red Mazda.'
Reacher looked ahead, and behind, and left, and right. He fiddled with the GPS until he had it zoomed out to a twenty-mile radius. At that scale there was nothing on the screen except the north-south road and the east-west road. Everything else had faded away to insignificance. He said, 'I think King and McQueen weren't local. It's likely they had never been here before. They probably came in off the Interstate, the same way we did. They saw the bars and the lounges. They didn't want to keep the red car, so they headed back there, which was the only kind of place they'd seen where it was likely they could find a replacement.'
'OK, but why didn't they come back to the crossroads and turn east from there?'
'Two reasons,' Reacher said. 'They're not local, so they didn't know for sure where that road goes. I assume Delfuenso didn't have GPS or maps in her glove box. But more importantly they'll have assumed the crossroads would be roadblocked from the start. Four birds with one stone, right there. North, south, east, west, no one can go anywhere except through that crossroads. Didn't the sheriff block it?'
'No,' Sorenson said. 'I don't think he did.'