Without Fail

“You want to bet your life on a little slush?” the Bismarck guy asked.

“Do you?” Reacher said. “The breech will blow, take your ugly face off. Then I’ll take the barrel and shove it up your ass. I’ll pretend it was a baseball bat.”

The guy’s face darkened. But he didn’t pull the trigger.

“Step away from the car,” he said, like the cop he was. Reacher took a long pace away from the Yukon, up and down in the snow, like wading.

“And another.”

Reacher moved again. He was six feet from the car. Six feet from his M16. Thirty feet from his nine-millimeter, far away in the snow. He glanced around. The Bismarck brother held the rifle in his left hand and put his right under his coat and came out with a handgun. It was a Glock. Black and square and ugly. Probably police department issue. He released the safety and leveled it one-handed at Reacher’s face.

“Not that one either,” Reacher said.

Keep him talking. Keep him moving.

“Why not?”

“That’s your work gun. Chances are you’ve used it before. So there are records. They find my body, the ballistics will come right back at you.”

The guy stood still for a long moment. Didn’t speak. Nothing in his face. But he put the Glock away again. Raised the rifle. Shuffled backward through the snow toward the Tahoe. The rifle traversed and stayed level with Reacher’s chest. Reacher thought: Just pull the damn trigger. Let’s all have a laugh. The guy fumbled behind him and opened the Tahoe’s rear door, driver’s side. Dropped the rifle in the snow and came out with a handgun, all in one move. It was an old M9 Beretta, scratched and stained with dried oil. The guy tracked forward again through the drift. Stopped six feet away from Reacher. Raised his arm. Unlatched the safety with his thumb and leveled the weapon straight at the center of Reacher’s face.

“Throw-down gun,” he said. “No records on this one.”

Reacher said nothing.

“Say goodnight now,” the guy whispered.

Nobody moved.

“On the click,” Reacher said.

He stared straight ahead at the gun. Saw Neagley’s face in the corner of his eye. Saw that she didn’t understand what he meant, but saw her nod anyway. It was just a fractional movement of her eyelids. Like half a blink. The Bismarck guy smiled. Tightened his finger. His knuckle shone white. He squeezed the trigger.

There was a dull click.

Reacher came out with his ceramic knife already open and brushed it sideways across the guy’s forehead. Then he caught the Beretta’s barrel in his left hand and jerked it up and jerked it down full force across his knee and shattered the guy’s forearm. Pushed him away and spun around. Neagley had hardly moved. But the guy from the garage video was inert in the snow by her feet. He was bleeding from both ears. She was holding her Heckler amp; Koch in one hand and the guy’s handgun in the other.

“Yes?” she said.

He nodded. She stepped a pace away so her clothes wouldn’t get splashed and pointed the handgun at the ground and shot the garage guy three times. Bang bang… bang. A double-tap to the head, and then an insurance round in the chest. The sound of the shots clapped and rolled like thunder. They both turned away. The Bismarck guy was stumbling around in the snow, completely blind. His forehead was sliced to the bone and blood was pouring out of the wound in sheets and ru

Reacher watched him for a moment, nothing in his face. Then he took the Heckler amp; Koch from Neagley and set it to fire a single round and waited until the guy had pirouetted around backward and shot him through the throat from the rear. He tried to put the bullet exactly where Froelich had taken hers. The spent brass expelled and hit the Tahoe twenty feet away with a loud clang and the guy pitched forward on his face and lay still and the snow turned bright red all around him. The crash of the shot rolled away and absolute silence rolled back to replace it. Reacher and Neagley stood still and held their breath and listened hard. Heard nothing except the sound of the snow falling.

“How did you know?” Neagley asked, quietly.

“It was Froelich’s gun,” he said. “They stole it from her kitchen. I recognized the scratches and the oil marks. She’d kept the clips loaded in a drawer for about five years.”

“It still might have fired,” Neagley said.

“The whole of life is a gamble,” Reacher said. “From the very begi

The silence closed in tighter. And the cold. They were alone in a thousand square miles of freezing emptiness, breathing hard, shivering, a little sick with adrenaline.

“How long will the church thing last?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” Neagley said. “Forty minutes? An hour?”

“So we don’t need to rush.”

He waded over and retrieved his Steyr from where it had fallen. The snow was already starting to cover the two bodies. He took wallets and badges from the pockets. Wiped his knife clean on the Bismarck guy’s twill coat. Opened all four of the Tahoe’s doors so the snow would drift inside and bury it quicker. Neagley wiped the garage guy’s pistol on her coat and dropped it. Then they floundered back to the Yukon and climbed inside. Took a last look back. The scene was already rimed with new snow, whitening fast. It would be gone within forty-eight hours. The icy wind would freeze the whole tableau inside a long smooth east-west drift until the spring sunshine released it again.

Neagley drove, slowly. Reacher piled the wallets on his knees and started with the badges. The truck was lurching gently and it took effort just to hold them still in front of his eyes long enough to look at them.

“County cops from Idaho,” he said. “Some rural place south of Boise, I think.”

He put both badges into his pocket. Opened the Bismarck guy’s wallet. It was a brown leather trifold, dry and cracked and molded around the contents. There was a milky plastic window on the inside with a police ID behind it. The guy’s lean face stared out from the photograph.

“His name was Richard Wilson,” he said. “Basic grade detective.”

There were two credit cards and an Idaho driver’s license in the wallet. And scraps of paper, and almost three hundred dollars in cash. He spilled the paper on his knees and put the cash in his pocket. Opened the garage guy’s wallet. It was phony alligator, black, and it had an ID from the same police department.

“Peter Wilson,” he said. He checked the driver’s license. “A year younger.”

Peter had three credit cards and nearly two hundred dollars. Reacher put the cash in his pocket and glanced ahead. The snow clouds were behind them and the sky was clear in the east. The sun was out and in their eyes. There was a small black dot in the air. The church tower was barely visible, almost twenty miles away. The Yukon bounced its way toward it, relentlessly. The black dot grew larger. There was a gray blur of rotors above it. It looked motionless in the air. Reacher steadied himself against the dash and looked up through the windshield. There was a tinted band across the top of the glass. The helicopter eased down through it. He could make out its shape. It was fat and bulbous at the front. Probably a Night Hawk. It picked up a visual on the church and turned toward it. It drifted in like a fat insect. The Yukon bounced gently over washboard depressions. The wallets slid off Reacher’s knees and the paper scraps scattered. The helicopter was hovering. Then it was swinging in the air, turning its main door toward the church.

“Golf clubs,” Reacher said. “Not tool samples.”