Dorothy told him to hush up.
On the other side of the circular room one of the bar stools was lying on its side and a mirrored panel on the bar back had been shattered. Shards of silvered glass had fallen among the bottles like daggers. One of the NASA mugs was broken. Its handle had come right off.
* * *
Angelo Mancini had the doctor's shirt collar bunched in his left hand and he had his right hand bunched into a fist. The doctor's wife was sitting in Roberto Cassano's lap. She had been ordered to, and she had refused. So Mancini had hit her husband, hard, in the face. She had refused again. Mancini had hit her husband again, harder. She had complied. Cassano had his hand on her thigh, his thumb an inch under the hem of her skirt. She was rigid with fear and shuddering with revulsion.
'Talk to me, baby,' Cassano whispered, in her ear. 'Tell me where you told Jack Reacher to hide.'
'I didn't tell him anything.'
'You were with him twenty minutes. Last night. The weirdo at the motel told us so.'
'I didn't tell him anything.'
'So what were you doing there for twenty minutes? Did you have sex with him?'
'No.'
'You want to have sex with me?'
She didn't answer.
'Shy?' Cassano asked. 'Bashful? Cat got your tongue?'
He moved his hand another inch, upward. He licked the woman's ear. She ducked away. Just twisted at the waist and leaned right over, away from him.
He said, 'Come back, baby.'
She didn't move.
He said, 'Come back,' a little louder.
She straightened up. He got the impression she was about to puke. He didn't want that. Not all over his good clothes. But he licked her ear one more time anyway, just to show her who was boss. Mancini hit the doctor one more time, just for fun. Travelling men, roaming around, getting the job done. But wasting their time in Nebraska, that was for sure. No one knew a damn thing. The whole place was as barren as the surface of the moon, with much less to do. Who would stay? This guy Reacher was long gone, obviously, totally in the wind, probably halfway to Omaha by the time the sun came up, rumbling along in the stolen truck, completely unnoticed by the county cops, who clearly sat around all night with their thumbs up their butts, because hadn't they missed every single one of the deliveries roaring through from Canada to Vegas? For months? Hadn't they? Every single one?
Assholes.
Yokels.
Retards.
All of them.
Cassano jerked upright and spilled the doctor's wife off his lap. She sprawled on the floor. Mancini punched the doctor one more time, and then they left, back to the rented Impala parked outside.
Reacher kept the three smudged shapes far to his right and tracked onward. He was used to walking. All soldiers were. Sometimes there was no alternative to a long fast advance on foot, so soldiers trained for it. It had been that way since the Romans, and it was still that way, and it would stay that way for ever. So he kept on going, satisfied with his progress, enjoying the small compensations that fresh air and country smells brought with them.
Then he smelled something else.
Up ahead was a tangle of low bushes, like a miniature grove. Wild raspberries or wild roses, maybe, a remnant, somehow spared by the ploughs, now bare and dormant but still thick and dense with thorns. There was a thin plume of smoke coming from them, from right in the middle, horizontal and almost invisible on the wind. It smelled distinctive. Not a wood fire. Not a cigarette.
Marijuana.
Reacher was familiar with the smell. All cops are, even military cops. Grunts get high like anyone else, off duty. Sometimes even on duty. Reacher guessed what he was smelling was a fine sativa, probably not imported junk from Mexico, probably a good home-grown strain. And why not, in Nebraska? Corn country was ideal for a little clandestine farming. Corn grew as high as an elephant's eye, and dense, and a twenty-foot clearing carved out a hundred yards from the edge of a field was as secret a garden as could be planted anywhere. More profitable than corn, too, even with all the federal subsidies. And these people had their haulage fees to meet. Maybe someone was sampling his recent harvest, judging its quality, setting its price in his mind.
It was a kid. A boy. Maybe fifteen years old, maybe sixteen. Reacher walked on and looked down into the chest-high thicket and found him there. He was quite tall, quite thin, with the kind of long centre-parted hair Reacher hadn't seen on a boy for a long time. He was wearing thick pants and a surplus parka from the old West German army. He was sitting on a spread-out plastic grocery bag, his knees drawn up, his back against a large granite rock that jutted up from the ground. The rock was wedge-shaped, as if it had been broken out of a bigger boulder and rolled into a different position far from its source. And the rock was why the ploughs had spared the thicket. Big tractors with vague steering had given it a wide berth, and nature had taken advantage. Now the boy was taking advantage in turn, hiding from the world, getting through his day. Maybe not a semi-commercial grower after all. Maybe just an amateur enthusiast, with mail-order seeds from Boulder or San Francisco.
'Hello,' Reacher said.
'Dude,' the boy said. He sounded mellow. Not high as a kite. Just cruising gently a couple of feet off the ground. An experienced user, probably, who knew how much was too much and how little was too little. His thought processes were slow, and right there in his face. First: Am I busted? Then: No way.
'Dude,' he said again. 'You're the man. You're the guy the Duncans are looking for.'
Reacher said, 'Am I?'
The kid nodded. 'You're Jack Reacher. Six-five, two-fifty, brown coat. They want you, man. They want you real bad.'
'Do they?'
'We had Cornhuskers at the house this morning. We're supposed to keep our eyes peeled. And here you are, man. You snuck right up on me. I guess your eyes were peeled, not mine. Am I right?' Then he lapsed into a fit of helpless giggles. He was maybe a little higher than Reacher had thought.
Reacher said, 'You got a cell phone?'
'Hell yes. I'm going to text my buddies. I'm going to tell them I've seen the man, large as life, twice as natural. Hey, maybe I could put you on the line with them. That would be a kick, wouldn't it? Would you do that? Would you talk to my buds? So they know I'm not shitting them?'
'No,' Reacher said.
The kid went instantly serious. 'Hey, I'm with you, man. You got to lie low. I can dig that. But dude, don't worry. We're not going to rat you out. Me and my buds, I mean. We're on your side. You're putting it to the Duncans, we're with you all the way.'
Reacher said nothing. The kid concentrated hard and lifted his arm high out of the brambles and held out his joint.
'Share?' he said. 'That would be a kick too. Smoking with the man.'
The joint was fat and well rolled, in yellow paper. It was about half gone.
'No, thanks,' Reacher said.
'Everyone hates them,' the kid said. 'The Duncans, I mean. They've got this whole county by the balls.'
'Show me a county where someone doesn't.'
'Dude, I hear you. The system stinks. No argument from me on that score. But the Duncans are worse than usual. They killed a kid. Did you know that? A little girl. Eight years old. They took her and messed her up real bad and killed her.'
'Did they?'
'Hell yes. Definitely.'
'You sure?'
'No question, my friend.'
'It was twenty-five years ago. You're what, fifteen?'
'It happened.'
'The FBI said different.'
'You believe them?'
'As opposed to who? A stoner who wasn't even born yet?'
'The FBI didn't hear what I hear, man.'
'What do you hear?'
'Her ghost, man. Still here, after twenty-five years. Sometimes I sit out here at night and I hear that poor ghost screaming, man, screaming and wailing and moaning and crying, right here in the dark.'