The Hard Way

CHAPTER 74

REACHER KEPT HIS flashlight beam trained down about ten feet in front of him, a narrow bright oval dancing left and right a little and bouncing as he walked. The light showed him the ruts and the dips and the holes in the beaten earth. It made it easier to hurry. He walked through the first curve in the driveway. Then he fixed his eyes on the darkness ahead and started to run toward the road.

Lane turned to Perez and said, “Go find the kitchen. Bring me what I need. And find a telephone. Call the Bishop’s Arms. Tell the others to get here now.”

“We’ve got the truck,” Perez said.

“Tell them to walk,” Lane said.

Jackson said, “Reacher will come back, you know.” He was the only one who could talk. He was the only one without tape on his mouth.

Lane said, “I know he’ll come back. I’m counting on it. Why do you think we didn’t chase him? Worst case for us he’ll walk six miles east and find nothing and walk back here again. It will take him four hours. You’ll be dead by then. He can take your place. He can watch the child die, and then Ms. Pauling, and then I’ll kill him. Slowly.”

“You’re insane. You need help.”

“I don’t think so,” Lane said.

“He’ll hitch a lift.”

“In the dead of night? Carrying an assault rifle? I don’t think so.”

“You’re nuts,” Jackson said. “You’ve lost it completely.”

“I’m angry,” Lane said. “And I think I have a right to be.”

Perez left, to find the kitchen.

Reacher ran through the second curve in the driveway. Then he slowed a little.

Then he stopped dead.

He killed the flashlight beam and closed his eyes. Stood still in the darkness and breathed hard and concentrated on the after-image of what he had just seen.

The driveway curved twice for no apparent reason. Not practical, not aesthetic. It went left and then right for some other purpose. To avoid unseen softness in the dirt, he had guessed before. To avoid a couple of badly drained sinkhole patches. And he had seen that he had been correct. All the way through the curves the track was soft and damp. Muddy, even though it hadn’t rained for days.

And the mud showed tire tracks.

Three sets.

First, Tony Jackson’s old Land Rover. The farm truck. Blocky mud-and-snow treads. Chunky, worn, in and out many hundreds of times. The Land Rover’s tracks were all over the place. Old, faded, eroded, new, clear, recent. Everywhere. Like background noise.

Second, the Mini Cooper’s tires. A very different look. Narrow, crisp, new, aggressive treads built for good adhesion and fast cornering on pavement. Just one set. Reacher had turned in the day before, slow and wide and deliberate, second gear, a small car at a moderate speed, unthreatening. He had driven through the curves and parked the car outside the house. And he had left it there. It was still there. It hadn’t moved. It hadn’t driven out again. It probably never would. It would leave on a flatbed truck.

Hence, one set of tire tracks only.

The third set was also a single set. One pass, one way. Wider tires. A large heavy vehicle, open treads, new and crisp. The kind of semi-serious off-road tires a prestige SUV would wear.

The kind of tires a rented Toyota Land Cruiser would wear.

One set only.

One way.

The Toyota was a very capable off-road vehicle. Reacher knew that. It was one of the best in the world. But it was inconceivable that it had entered the farm overland. Not in a million years. The farm was bounded by ditches ten feet across and six feet deep. Steep sides. Impossible approach and exit angles. A Humvee couldn’t do it. A Bradley couldn’t do it. An Abrams couldn’t do it. The Grange Farm ditches were better than tank traps. So the Toyota hadn’t come in overland. It had driven in across the little flat bridge and up the length of the driveway. No other way.

And it hadn’t driven out again.

One set of tire tracks.

One way.

Lane was still on the property.

Lane hit Jackson in the head with the flashlight one more time, hard. The lens smashed and Jackson went down again.

“I need a new flashlight,” Lane said. “This one seems to be broken.”

Addison smiled and took a new one out of a box. Lauren Pauling stared at the door. Her mouth was taped and her hands were bound behind her. The door was still closed. But it was going to open any minute. Through it would come either Perez or Reacher. Bad news or good.

Let it be Reacher, she thought. Please. Bugs on windshields, no scruples. Please let it be Reacher.

Lane took the new flashlight from Addison and stepped up close to Kate. Face-to-face, six inches from her. Eye to eye. They were about the same height. He lit up the flashlight beam and held it just under her chin, shining it directly upward, turning her exquisite face into a ghastly Halloween mask.

“Till death us do part,” he said. “That’s a phrase I take seriously.”

Kate turned her head away. Gasped behind the tape. Lane clamped her chin in his free hand and turned her head back.

“Forsaking all others,” he said. “I took that part seriously, too. I’m so sorry that you didn’t.”

Kate closed her eyes.

Reacher kept on walking south. To the end of the driveway, over the bridge, east on the road, away from the farm, his flashlight on all the way. In case he was being watched. He figured he needed to let them see him go. Because the human mind loves continuity. To see a small spectral night-vision figure strolling south, and south, and then east, and east, and east sets up an irresistible temptation to believe that it’s going to go east forever. It’s gone, you say. It’s out of here. And then you forget all about it, because you know where it’s going, and you don’t see it coming back because you’re not watching it anymore.

He walked east for two hundred yards and clicked off the Maglite beam. Then he walked east for another two hundred yards in the dark. Then he stopped. Turned ninety degrees and hiked north across the shoulder and slid down the boundary ditch’s nearside slope. Floundered through the thick black mud in the bottom and clawed his way up the far side with his rifle held one-handed high in the air. Then he ran, fast, straight north, stretching his stride long to hit the top of every plowed furrow.

Two minutes later he was a quarter-mile in, level with the cluster of barns, three hundred yards behind them to the east, and out of breath. He paused in the lee of a stand of trees to recover. Thumbed his fire selector to single shots. Then he put the stock against his shoulder and walked forward. West. Toward the barns.

Reacher, alone in the dark. Armed and dangerous. Coming back.

Edward Lane was still face-to-face with Kate. He said, “I’m assuming you’ve been sleeping with him for years.”

Kate said nothing.

Lane said, “I hope you’ve been using condoms. You could catch a disease from a guy like that.”

Then he smiled. A new thought. A joke, to him.

“Or you could get pregnant,” he said.

Something in her terrified eyes.

He paused.

“What?” he said. “What are you telling me?”

She shook her head.

“You’re pregnant,” he said. “You’re pregnant, aren’t you? You are. I know it. You look different. I can tell.”

He put the flat of his hand on her belly. She pulled away, backward, hard against the pole she was tied to. He shuffled forward half a step. “Oh man, this is unbelievable. You’re going to die with another man’s child inside you.”

Then he spun away. Stopped, and turned back. Shook his head.

“Can’t allow that,” he said. “Wouldn’t be right. We’ll have to abort it first. I should have told Perez to find a coat hanger. But I didn’t. So we’ll find something else instead. There’s got to be something here. This is a farm after all.”