Without Fail

“So how are you going to find them?”

Reacher shook his head. “We can’t find them. Not now. Not in time. They’ll have to find us. In Wyoming. At the memorial service.”

“I’m going there too. With minimal cover.”

“So just hope it’s all over before you arrive.”

“Should I tell Stuyvesant?” Armstrong asked again.

“Your choice,” Reacher said again.

“I can’t cancel the appearance. That wouldn’t be right.”

“No,” Reacher said. “I guess it wouldn’t.”

“I can’t tell Stuyvesant now.”

“No,” Reacher said. “I guess you can’t.”

Armstrong said nothing. Reacher stood up to leave, and Neagley did the same.

“One last thing,” Reacher said. “We think these guys grew up to be cops.”

Armstrong sat still. He started to shake his head, but then he stopped and looked down at the desk. His face clouded, like he was hearing a faint thirty-year-old echo.

“Something during the beating,” he said. “I only half-heard it, and I’m sure I discounted it at the time. But I think at one point they claimed their dad was a cop. They said he could get us in big trouble.”

Reacher said nothing.

The protection agents showed them out. They walked the length of the canvas tent and stepped off the curb into the street. Turned east and got back on the sidewalk and settled in for the trek to the subway. It was late morning and the air was clear and cold. The neighborhood was deserted. Nobody was out walking. Neagley opened the envelope Stuyvesant had given her. It contained a check for five thousand dollars. The memo line was written up as professional consultation. Reacher’s envelope contained two checks. One was for the same five-grand fee and the other was for his audit expenses, repaid to the exact pe

“We should go shopping,” Neagley said. “We can’t go hunting in Wyoming dressed like this.”

“I don’t want you to come with me,” Reacher said.

17

They had the argument right there on the street as they walked through Georgetown.

“Worried about my safety?” Neagley asked. “Because you shouldn’t be. Nothing’s going to happen to me. I can look after myself. And I can make my own decisions.”

“I’m not worried about your safety,” Reacher said.

“What then? My performance? I’m way better than you.”

“I know you are.”

“So what’s your problem?”

“Your license. You’ve got something to lose.”

Neagley said nothing.

“You’ve got a license, right?” Reacher said. “To be in the business you’re in? And you’ve got an office and a job and a home and a fixed location. I’m going to disappear after this. You can’t do that.”

“Think we’re going to get caught?”

“I can afford to take the risk. You can’t.”

“There’s no risk if we don’t get caught.”

Now Reacher said nothing.

“It’s like you told Ba

“This isn’t your fight.”

“Why is it yours? Because some woman your brother once dumped got herself killed doing her job? That’s tenuous.”

Reacher said nothing.

“OK, it’s your fight,” Neagley said. “I know that. But whatever thing you’ve got in your head that makes it your fight makes it my fight too. Because I’ve got the same thing in my head. And even if we didn’t think the same, if I had a problem, wouldn’t you help me out?”

“I would if you asked.”

“So we’re even.”

“Except I’m not asking.”

“Not right now. But you will be. You’re two thousand miles from Wyoming and you don’t have a credit card to buy a plane ticket with, and I do. You’re armed with a folding knife with a three-inch blade and I know a guy in Denver who will give us any weapons we want, no questions asked, and you don’t. I can rent a car in Denver to get us the rest of the way, and you can’t.”

They walked on, twenty yards, thirty.

“OK,” Reacher said. “I’m asking.”

“We’ll get the clothes in Denver,” she said. “I know some good places.”

They made it to Denver before three in the afternoon Mountain Time. The high plains lay all around them, tan and dormant. The air was thin and bitter cold. There was no snow yet, but it was coming. The runway plows were lined up and ready. The snowdrift fences were prepared. The car rental companies had shipped their sedans south and brought in plenty of new four-wheel-drives. Neagley signed for a GMC Yukon at the Avis counter. They shuttled to the lot and picked it up. It was black and shiny and looked a lot like Froelich’s Suburban except it was two feet shorter.

They drove it into the city. It was a long, long way. Space seemed infinitely available even after D.C., which wasn’t the most crowded place in the East. They parked in a downtown garage and walked three blocks and Neagley found the store she was looking for. It was an all-purpose outdoor equipment place. It had everything from boots and compasses to zinc stuff designed to stop you getting sunburn on your nose. They bought a bird-watcher’s spotting scope and a hiker’s large-scale map of central Wyoming and then they moved to the clothing racks. They were full of the kind of stuff you could use halfway up the Rockies and then wear around town without looking like a complete idiot. Neagley went for a walker’s heavy-duty outfit in greens and browns. Reacher duplicated his Atlantic City purchases at twice the price and twice the quality. This time he added a hat, and a pair of gloves. He dressed in the changing cubicle. Left Joe’s last surviving suit stuffed in the garbage can.

Neagley found a pay phone on the street and stopped in the cold long enough to make a short call. Then they went back to the truck and she drove it out of the garage and through the city center toward the dubious part of town. There was a strong smell of dog food in the air.

“There’s a factory here,” she said.

Reacher nodded. “No kidding.”

She came off a narrow street into some kind of an industrial park and nosed through a tangle of low-built metal structures. There were linoleum dealers and brake shops and places where you could get four snow tires for ninety-nine bucks and other places where you could get your steering realigned for twenty. On one corner there was a long low workshop standing on its own in the center of a quarter-acre of cracked blacktop. The building had a closed roll-up door and a hand-painted sign that read: Eddie Brown Engineering.

“This is your guy?” Reacher asked.

Neagley nodded. “What do we want?”

Reacher shrugged. “No point pla

She stopped in front of the roll-up door and hit the horn. A guy came out of a perso

On the inside the building was about half the size it should have been, but apart from that it looked convincing. The floor was grease-stained concrete and there were metalworkers’ lathes here and there, and drilling machines and stacks of raw sheet metal and bundles of steel rods. But the back wall was ten feet closer on the inside than the exterior proportions dictated. Clearly there was a handsome-sized room concealed behind it.

“This is Eddie Brown,” Neagley said.

“Not my real name,” the big guy said.

He accessed the concealed room by pulling on a big pile of scrap metal. It was all welded together and welded in turn to a steel panel hidden behind it. The whole thing swung open on silent oiled hinges like a giant three-dimensional door. The guy calling himself Eddie Brown led them through it into a whole different situation.