We watched the road.
All quiet.
I opened my door and got out of the car. I stepped right on the edge of the rail bed. The left-hand rail was no more than a yard away. It was gleaming in the moonlight. I figured the train was ten miles south of us. Passing through Marietta, maybe, right at that moment.
Deveraux got out on her side and we met behind the Caprice's trunk. Eleven fifty-one. Nine minutes to go. We watched the road.
All quiet.
Deveraux stepped back around and opened a rear door. She checked the back seat. She said, "Just in case. We might as well be ready."
"Too cramped," I said.
"You don't like doing it in cars?"
"They don't make them wide enough."
She checked her watch.
She said, "We won't make it back to Toussaint's in time."
I said, "Let's do it right here. On the ground."
She smiled.
Then wider.
"Sounds good to me," she said. "Like Janice Chapman."
"If she did," I said. I took off my BDU jacket and spread it out on the weeds, as long and wide as it would go.
We watched the road.
All quiet.
She took off her gun belt and stowed it on the rear seat of the car. Eleven fifty-four. Six minutes. I knelt down and put my ear on the rail. I heard a faint metallic whisper. Almost not there at all. The train, six miles south.
We watched the road.
We saw a hint of a glow in the east.
Headlights.
Deveraux said, "Good old Butler."
The glow grew brighter, and we heard rushing tires and a straining engine in the silence of the night. Then the glow changed to delineated beams and the noise grew louder and a second later Butler's car flashed left-to-right in front of us and thwacked over the crossing without slowing down at all. He went airborne on the lee side and crashed back to earth with a yelp of rubber and a cloud of dust. Then he was gone.
Four minutes to go.
We were neither refined nor elegant. We wrenched our shoes off and pulled our pants down and abandoned all adult sophistication in favor of pure animal instinct. Deveraux hit the deck and got comfortable on my jacket and I went down right on top of her and propped myself up on my palms and watched for the glimmer of the train's headlight in the distance. Not there yet. Three minutes to go.
She wrapped her legs around my hips and we got going, fast and hard from the first moment, anxious, desperate, insanely energetic. She was gasping and panting and rolling her head from side to side and grabbing fistfuls of my T-shirt and hauling on it. Then we were kissing and breathing both at the same time, and then she was arching her back and grinding her head on the ground, straining her neck, opening her eyes, looking at the world behind her upside down.
Then the ground began to shake.
As before, just faintly at first, the same mild constant tremor, like the beginning of a distant earthquake. The stones in the rail bed next to us started to scratch and click. The rails themselves started to sing, humming and keening and whispering. The ties jumped and shuddered. The ballast stones crunched and hopped. The ground under my hands and knees danced with big bass shudders. I looked up and gasped and blinked and squinted and saw the distant headlight. Twenty yards south of us the old water tower started to shake and its elephant's trunk started to sway. The ground beat on us from below. The rails screamed and howled. The train whistle blew, long and loud and forlorn. The warning bells at the crossing forty yards away started to ring. The train kept on coming, unstoppable, still distant, still distant, then right next to us, then right on top of us, just as insanely massive as before, and just as impossibly loud.
Like the end of the world.
The ground shook hard under us and we bounced and bucketed whole inches in the air. A bow wave of air battered us. Then the locomotive flashed past, its giant wheels five feet from our faces, followed by the endless sequence of cars, all of them hammering, juddering, strobing in the moonlight. We clung together, the whole long minute, sixty long seconds, deafened by the squealing metal, beaten numb by the throbbing ground, scoured by dust from the slipstream. Deveraux threw her head back under me and screamed soundlessly and jammed her head from side to side and beat on my back with her fists.
Then the train was gone.
I turned my head and saw the cars rolling away from me into the distance at a steady sixty miles an hour. The wind dropped, and the earthquake quieted down, first to gentle tremors again, and then to nothing at all, and the bells stopped dead, and the rails stopped hissing, and the nighttime silence came back. We rolled apart and lay on our backs in the weeds, panting, sweating, spent, deaf, completely overwhelmed by sensations internal and external. My jacket had gotten balled up and crumpled under us. My knees and hands were torn and scraped. I imagined Deveraux was in an even worse state. I turned my head to check and saw she had my Beretta in her hand.
75
The Marine Corps never liked the Beretta as much as the army did, so Deveraux was handling mine with proficiency but less than total enthusiasm. She dumped the magazine, ejected an unfired round, checked the chamber, racked the slide, and then put the whole thing back together again. She said, "I'm sorry. It was in your jacket pocket. I wondered what it was. It was digging into my ass. I'm going to have a bruise."
"In which case it's me that's sorry," I said. "Your ass deserves nothing but the best. It's a national treasure. Or a regional attraction, at the very least."
She smiled at me and stood up, unsteady, and went in search of her pants. Her shirt tail hung down, but not far enough. No bruise yet. She asked, "Why did you bring a gun?"
"Habit," I said.
"Were you expecting trouble?"
"Anything's possible."
"I left mine in the car."
"So did lots of dead people."
"It's just the two of us here."
"As far as we know."
"You're paranoid."
"But alive," I said. "And you haven't arrested anyone yet."
"The army can't prove a negative," she said. "Therefore they must know who it was. They should tell me."
I said nothing in reply to that. I followed her lead and staggered to my feet and picked up my pants. We got dressed, hopping from foot to foot together, and then we perched side by side on the Caprice's rear bumper and laced our shoes. Getting back to the road was no real problem. Deveraux did it in reverse, backing up onto the track like parallel parking, then backing all the way to the crossing, and then turning the wheel and taking off forward. We were in my hotel room five minutes later. In bed. She went straight to sleep. I didn't. I lay in the dark and stared at the ceiling and thought.
Mostly I thought about my last conversation with Leon Garber. My commanding officer. An honest man, and my friend, as far as I knew. But cryptic. It's the truth, he had said. She was a Marine, Reacher. Sixteen years in. She knew all about cutting throats. She knew how to do it, and she knew how to pretend she didn't. Then he had gotten a little impatient. A man with your instincts, he had said, about me. Later I had pushed the issue. You could order me not to go back to Mississippi, I had said. I could, he had said. But I won't. Not you. I trust you to do the right thing.
The conversation replayed endlessly in my head.
The truth.
Instincts.
The right thing.
In the end I fell asleep very late and completely unsure whether Garber had been telling me something, or asking me something.
My long-held belief that there is no better time than the second time was put to a severe test when we woke up, because the fifth time was also pretty terrific. We were both a little stiff and sore after our outdoor extravaganza, so we took it gently, long and slow, and the warmth and the comfort of the bed helped a lot. Plus neither one of us knew whether there would ever be a sixth time, which added a little poignancy to the occasion. Afterward we lay quiet for a while, and then she asked me when I was leaving, and I said I didn't know.