They saw him. Or they saw Sorenson. They froze in place and pointed and then ran for their car.
Reacher hit the gas and the sudden acceleration dumped Sorenson back in the passenger seat and the car slewed and fishtailed over the gravel. Reacher fought the wheel and bumped down over the kerb at an angle and took off north up the road. He craned his neck and watched in the mirror and saw the blue Bureau car jam backward and turn and come after him.
'Hold on,' he said. 'I'm a lousy driver.'
'Now you tell me,' Sorenson said. She scrabbled around and clipped her seat belt and pulled it tight around her. Reacher kept his foot down hard. A big V-8, police spec, plenty of power and torque. Not bad at all. Except that Dawson and Mitchell had the exact same car. Same V-8, same spec, same power and torque. And maybe less weight, without the light bar on the roof and the push bars front and rear. Better aerodynamics, certainly.
Reacher knew the Interstate was fifty miles ahead, and he knew there wasn't much of anything else before that. There were some turns left and right, and there were some small stands of trees here and there, and there were occasional old wooden farm buildings standing all rotted and abandoned and unexplained in the fields. Apart from that there was just winter dirt, and it was all very flat. No dips, no valleys. No hills, no ridges.
Places to run.
No place to hide.
The road surface was bad, and the road bed had been heaved up and down by years of winter frosts and summer droughts. Acceptable at normal speeds, but dangerous going fast. Goodman's cruiser was riding like a yacht on an ocean swell. The engine was howling and the wheel was writhing in Reacher's hands. Dawson and Mitchell were maybe four hundred yards back, but they were gaining. Reacher jammed his foot down harder. Pedal to the metal. A hundred miles an hour.
Places to run.
No place to hide.
Puller, he thought.
He said, 'Do you know how to work the radio?'
Sorenson said, 'I could try.'
'Find out where Puller is with his radar gun. Tell him he's got a speeder heading north. A dark blue sedan.'
Reacher drove on. No steering involved. The road was dead straight. The car went weightless over dips and hollows. Never airborne, but not far from it. Sorenson took the microphone out of its clip and fiddled with switches. She cleared her throat and said, 'Deputy Puller, what is your location?'
Puller's voice came back over static: 'Who is that?'
'This is Agent Sorenson with the FBI. Where are you now?'
'A mile shy of the county line, ma'am.'
'North, south, east or west?'
'North.'
'OK, good. You have a speeder coming north towards you. A dark blue Ford Crown Victoria. Please stop the driver and caution him against his reckless and unsafe behaviour.'
'Will do, ma'am.'
'Out,' Sorenson said. She hung up the microphone. She said, 'How do you stop a car doing a hundred miles an hour? We'll probably get Puller killed.'
'In which case we'll be helping the gene pool.' Reacher hurtled onward. Dawson and Mitchell were now three hundred yards back. About six seconds, at a hundred miles an hour. But they were still gaining. Reacher scanned far ahead. Straight road, flat dirt, low horizon. No sign of Puller.
He asked, 'Did your tech team call?'
Sorenson said, 'Not yet. What's on your mind?'
'Motive,' Reacher said. 'Who snatches a dead woman's kid? Especially a kid who saw nothing and knows nothing?'
'How can the autopsy answer that question?'
'It might not,' Reacher said. 'That's what's on my mind.' His foot was hard on the boards. It was crushing the pedal. But the car was tapped out. It wouldn't go any faster. A hundred was as good as it got. They passed a turn to the left. Another, on the right. Paved, but not much more than tracks between fields.
'There,' Sorenson said.
Reacher saw a dot on the horizon. A tiny smudge, vaguely black and white and gold against the brown. Puller's cruiser, waiting on the shoulder. Maybe a mile away. Thirty-six seconds. No more turns before it. Far away to the right was a copse of trees. Faraway to the left was an old barn, swaybacked and grey with age.
Thirty seconds.
Twenty seconds.
'Hold tight,' Reacher said.
Fifteen seconds.
He clamped the wheel tight in his hands and came off the gas and stamped on the brakes. The front end dipped radically and he and Sorenson were thrown forward and he fought to keep the car straight. Dawson and Mitchell didn't slow down. They kept on coming. Puller's car was a hundred yards ahead. Then fifty. Then thirty. Then Reacher swung the wheel hard and drove off the road into the dirt on the right and Dawson and Mitchell were launched ahead of him like a slingshot. Reacher hugged a tight bouncing circle in the dirt and saw Dawson and Mitchell passing Puller at about seventy and Puller lighting up his strobes and his siren and pulling out behind them. Reacher continued the circular turn and thumped back up on the road and headed south, fast, back the way he had come, all the way to the turn he had seen on the left, which was now on the right. He braked hard and took it and pattered over the lumpy surface and turned in on a rutted track and came to a dead stop behind the old swaybacked barn. He got out and ran to the far corner of the ramshackle structure and peered out north.
Nothing in the distance. No sign of Dawson and Mitchell. Not yet. They were still out of sight, more than a mile to the north. He counted out time and space in his head. Right then they would be slowing, stopping, turning around, hassling with Puller, showing ID, arguing, yelling, getting frustrated.
Getting delayed.
Then they would be coming back south, as fast as they could. They would have seen his tight turn on the dirt, and they would be planning on chasing him all the way back to town.
Three minutes, he figured.
Maybe three minutes and ten seconds.
He waited.
And then he saw them, right on time, far away on the main drag, hustling left to right, north to south, doing about a hundred again. An impressive sight. The big stately sedan was really picking up its skirts. Its paint was winking in the watery sun. It was planted firmly on the blacktop, squatting at the rear, straddling the centre line. Reacher ran back past Goodman's car and peered out from the barn's other corner. He got a rear view of the blue Crown Vic blasting south. After ten seconds it was a tiny dot. After twenty seconds it was gone altogether.
He breathed out and walked back to the car. He got back in and closed the door. He sat slumped in the seat with his hands on his knees.
Silence. Nothing but the faithful idle of the engine, and clicks and ticks as stressed components cooled back down.
Sorenson said, 'You're not such a terrible driver.'
He said, 'Thank you.'
'What now?'
'We wait.'
'Where?'
'I guess this place is as good as any.'
She unzipped her black leather bag and took out Goodman's phone. She clipped it in its dashboard cradle. It chimed once to tell them it was charging.
Then it started to ring.
She leaned over and checked the window.
'My tech team,' she said.
FIFTY-THREE
SORENSON TOUCHED THE green button and Reacher heard telephone sounds over the speakers again, weirdly clear and detailed, like before. Sorenson said, 'You have something for me?'
A man's voice said, 'Yeah, we have some preliminary results.'
The voice was tired, and a little breathless. Reacher thought the guy was walking and talking at the same time. Probably stumbling out to the fresh air and the bright sunlight, after long and unpleasant hours in a white-tiled basement room. Breathing deep, blinking, yawning and stretching. Reacher could picture the scene. A pair of institutional doors, a short flight of concrete steps, a parking lot. Maybe planters and benches. Back in the day the guy would have been pausing at that point, to light a welcome cigarette.