The two guys walked on, closer still.
They looked left. They looked right. They sniffed the air.
They stopped.
Shiny shoes, wool coats. City boys. They didn't want to be wading through pigshit and chicken feathers and turning over piles of old crap. They looked at each other and then the one on the right turned back to the house and called out, 'Hey, old lady, get your fat ass out here right now.'
Forty yards away, Dorothy stepped out the door. She paused a beat and then walked towards the two guys, slow and hesitant. The two guys walked back towards her, just as slow. They all met near the pick-up truck. The guy on the left stood still. The guy on the right caught Dorothy by the upper arm with one hand and used the other to take a pistol out from under his coat. A shoulder holster. The gun was some kind of a nickel-plated semi-automatic. Or stainless steel. Reacher was too far away to make out the brand. Maybe a Colt. Or maybe a copy. The guy raised it across his body and laid its muzzle against Dorothy's temple. He held the gun flat, like a punk in a movie. His thumb and three fingers were wrapped tight around the grip. The fourth finger was on the trigger. Dorothy flinched away. The guy hauled on her arm and pulled her back.
He called out, 'Reacher? Is that your name? You there? You hiding somewhere? You listening to me? I'm going to count to three. Then you come on out. If you don't, I'm going to shoot the old cow. I've got a gun to her head. Tell him, grandma.'
Dorothy said, 'There's no one here.'
The yard went quiet. Three people, all alone in a thousand acres.
Reacher stood still, right where he was, on his own in the dark.
He saw Dorothy close her eyes.
The guy with the gun said, 'One.'
Reacher stood still.
The guy said, 'Two.'
Reacher stood still.
The guy said, 'Three.'
EIGHTEEN
REACHER STOOD STILL AND WATCHED THROUGH THE CRACK. There was a long second's pause. Then the guy who had been counting dropped his hand and stuffed the gun back under his coat. He let go of the woman's arm. She staggered away a step. The two guys looked left, looked right, looked at each other. They shrugged. A test, passed. A precaution, properly explored. They turned and headed away around the side of the house and disappeared from sight. A minute later Reacher heard doors slam and an engine start and the crunch and whine of a car backing down the track. He heard it make the blacktop, he heard it change gear, he heard it drive away.
The world went quiet again.
Reacher stayed right where he was, on his own in the dark. He wasn't dumb. Easiest thing in the world for one of the guys to be hiding behind the corner of the house, while his buddy drove away like a big loud decoy. Reacher knew all the tricks. He had used most of them. He had invented some of them himself.
Dorothy stood in the yard with one hand on the side of her truck, steadying herself. Reacher watched her. He guessed she was about thirty seconds away from gathering her wits and taking a breath and shouting that the guys were gone and he could come out now. Then he saw twenty-five years of habitual caution get the better of her. She pushed off the truck and walked the same path the two guys had taken. She was gone a whole minute. Then she came back, around the other side of the house. A full circle. Flat land all around. Wintertime. No place to hide.
She called, 'They're gone.'
He picked up the stack of plates and shouldered his way out between the barn's warped doors. He blinked in the light and shivered in the cold. He walked on and met her near the pick-up truck. She took the plates from him. He said, 'You OK?'
She said, 'I was a little worried there for a minute.'
'The safety catch was on. The guy never moved his thumb. I was watching. It was a bluff.'
'Suppose it hadn't been a bluff? Would you have come out?'
'Probably,' Reacher said.
'You did good with these plates. I suddenly remembered them, and thought I was a goner for sure. Those guys looked like they wouldn't miss much.'
'What else did they look like?'
'Rough,' she said. 'Menacing. They said they were here representing the Duncans. Representing them, not working for them. That's something new. The Duncans never used outsiders before.'
'Where will they go next?'
'I don't know. I don't think they know, either. Nowhere to hide is pretty much the same as nowhere to look, isn't it?'
'The doctor's, maybe?'
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'They might. The Duncans know you had contact.'
'Maybe I should head over there.'
'And maybe I should get back to the motel. I think they hurt Mr Vincent. He didn't sound too good on the phone.'
'There's an old barn and an old shed south of the motel. Off the road, to the west. Made of wood. All alone in a field. Whose are they?'
'They're nobody's. They were on one of the farms that got sold for the development that never happened. Fifty years ago.'
'I have a truck in there. I took it from the football players last night. Give me a ride?'
'No,' she said. 'I'm not driving you past the Duncan place again.'
'They don't have X-ray vision.'
'They do. They have a hundred pairs of eyes.'
'So you want me to walk past their place?'
'You don't have to. Head west across the fields until you see a cell tower. One of my neighbours leases half an acre to the phone company. That's how he pays his haulage. Turn north there and skirt the Duncan place on the blind side and then you'll see the barns.'
'How far is it?'
'It's a morning's walk.'
'I'll burn up all that breakfast.'
'That's what breakfast is for. Make sure you turn north, OK? South takes you near Seth Duncan's house, and you really don't want to go there. You know the difference between north and south?'
'I walk south, I get warmer. North, I get colder. I should be able to figure it out.'
'I'm serious.'
'What was your daughter's name?'
'Margaret,' the woman said. 'Her name was Margaret.'
So Reacher walked around the back of the barns and the sheds and the coops and the sties and struck out across the fields. The sun was nothing more than a bright patch of luminescence in the high grey sky, but it was enough to navigate by. After ten o'clock in the morning in Nebraska in the wintertime, and it was solidly east of south, behind his left shoulder. He kept it there for forty minutes, and then he saw a cell phone tower looming insubstantial in the mist. It was tall and skeletal, with a microwave receptor the shape of a bass drum, and cell antennas the shape of fungo bats. It had a tangle of dead brown weeds at its base, and it was surrounded by a token barbed wire fence. In the far distance beyond it was a farmhouse similar to Dorothy's. The neighbour's, presumably. The ground underfoot was hard and lumpy, all softball-sized clods and clarts of frozen earth, the wreckage from the last year's harvest. They rolled away either left or right or crushed under his heels as he walked.
He turned north at the tower. The sun had moved on. Now it was high and almost behind him, an hour before the season's drab version of noon. There was no warmth in it. Just light, a little brighter than the rest of the day. Far ahead, to the right, he could see a smudge on the horizon. The three Duncan houses, he guessed, grouped together at the end of their long shared driveway. He couldn't make out any detail. Certainly nothing man-sized. Which meant no one there could make out any man-sized detail either, in reverse. Same number of miles east to west as west to east, same grey gloom, same mist. But even so, he tracked left a little, following a curve, maintaining his distance, making sure.
Dorothy the housekeeper sat Mr Vincent down in a red velvet chair and sponged the blood off his face. He had a split lip and a cut brow and a lump the size of an egg under his eye. He had apologized for being so slow with his warning call. He had passed out, he said, and had scrambled for the phone as soon as he came around.