Nothing to Lose

It was a real sick bay. White walls, white linoleum floor, the smell of antiseptic, soft nightlights burning. There were sinks with lever taps, and medicine cabinets, and blood pressure cuffs, and sharp disposal cans on the walls. There was a rolling cart with a kidney-shaped steel dish on it. A stethoscope was curled in the dish.

There were four hospital cots. Three were empty, one was occupied, by the big deputy. He looked pretty bad. Pale, inert, listless. He looked smaller than before. His hair looked thi

Thurman said, “A trained paramedic.”

“Is that enough?”

“Usually.”

“For this guy?”

“We’re doing the best we can.”

Reacher stepped alongside the bed and looked down. The guy’s skin was yellow. Jaundice, or the nightlight reflected off the walls. Reacher asked him, “Can you talk?”

Thurman said, “He’s not very coherent. But we’re hoping he’ll get better.”

The big deputy rolled his head from one side to the other. Tried to speak, but got hung up with a dry tongue in a dry mouth. He smacked his lips and breathed hard and started again. He looked straight up at Reacher and his eyes focused and glittered and he said, “The…” And then he paused for breath and blinked and started over, apparently with a new thought. A new subject. He said, haltingly, “You did this to me.”

“Not entirely,” Reacher said.

The guy rolled his head again, away and back, and gasped once, and said, “No, the…” And then he stopped again, fighting for breath, his voice reduced to a meaningless rasp. Thurman grabbed Reacher’s elbow and pulled him back and said, “We need to leave now. We’re tiring him.”

Reacher said, “He needs to be in a proper hospital.”

“That’s the paramedic’s decision. I trust my people. I hire the best talent I can find.”

“Did this guy work with TCE?”

Thurman paused a beat. “What do you know about TCE?”

“A little. It’s a poison.”

“No, it’s a degreaser. It’s a standard industrial product.”

“Whatever. Did this guy work with it?”

“No. And those that do are well protected.”

“So what’s wrong with him?”

“You should know. Like he said, you did this to him.”

“You don’t get symptoms like these from a fistfight.”

“I heard it was more than a fistfight. Do you ever stop to reflect on the damage you cause? Maybe you ruptured something inside of him. His spleen, perhaps.”

Reacher closed his eyes. Saw the barroom again, the dim light, the tense silent people, the air thick with raised dust and the smell of fear and conflict.He stepped in and jabbed hard and caught the guy low down in the side, below the ribs, above the waist, two hundred and fifty pounds of weight punched through the blunt end of a chair leg into nothing but soft tissue. He opened his eyes again and said, “All the more reason to get him checked out properly.”

Thurman nodded. “I’ll have him taken to the hospital in Halfway tomorrow. If that’s what it takes, so that you can move on with a clear conscience.”

“My conscience is already clear,” Reacher said. “If people leave me alone, I leave them alone. If they don’t, what comes at them is their problem.”

“Even if you overreact?”

“Compared to what? There were six of them. What were they going to do to me? Pat me on the cheek and send me on my way?”

“I don’t know what their intentions were.”

“You do,” Reacher said. “Their intentions were your intentions. They were acting on your instructions.”

“And I was acting on the instructions of a higher authority.”

“I guess I’ll have to take your word for that.”

“You should join us. Come the Rapture, you don’t want to be left behind.”

“The Rapture?”

“People like me ascend to heaven. People like you stay here without us.”

“Works for me,” Reacher said. “Bring it on.”

Thurman didn’t answer that. Reacher took a last look at the guy in the bed and then stepped away and walked out the door, down the steps, back to the blazing arena. The foreman and the guy with the wrench stood where they had been before. They hadn’t moved at all. Reacher heard Thurman close the infirmary door and clatter down the steps behind him. He moved on and felt Thurman follow him toward the gate. The guy with the wrench was looking beyond Reacher’s shoulder, at Thurman, waiting for a sign, maybe hoping for a sign, slapping the free end of the wrench against his palm.

Reacher changed direction.

Headed straight for the guy.

He stopped a yard away and stood directly face-to-face and looked him in the eye and said, “You’re in my way.”

The guy glanced in Thurman’s direction and waited. Reacher said, “Have a little self-respect. You don’t owe that old fool anything.”

The guy said, “I don’t?”

“Not a thing,” Reacher said. “None of you does. He owes you. You all should wise up and take over. Organize. Have a revolution. You could lead it.”

The guy said, “I don’t think so.”

Thurman called out, “Are you leaving now, Mr. Reacher?”

“Yes,” Reacher said.

“Are you ever coming back?”

“No,” Reacher lied. “I’m done here.”

“Do I have your word?”

“You heard me.”

The giant glanced beyond Reacher’s shoulder again, hope in his eyes. But Thurman must have shaken his head or given some other kind of a negative instruction, because the guy just paused a beat and then stepped aside, one long sideways pace. Reacher walked on, back to the sick deputy’s truck. It was where he had left it, with all its windows intact.

47

From the plant to the Hope town line was fifteen miles by road, but Reacher made it into a twenty-mile excursion by looping around to the north, through the scrub. He figured that the townsfolk would have reorganized fairly fast, and there was no obvious way of wi

He skirted the town on a radius he judged to be about four miles and then he shadowed the road back east a hundred yards out in the dirt. When the clock in his head hit midnight he figured he was less than a mile short of the line. He veered right and bounced up onto the tarred pebbles and finished the trip like a normal driver. He thumped over the line and Hope’s thick blacktop made the ride go suddenly quiet.

Vaughan was waiting a hundred yards ahead.

She was parked on the left shoulder with her lights off. He slowed and held his arm out his window in a reassuring wave. She put her arm out her own window, hand extended, fingers spread, an answering gesture. Or a traffic signal. He coasted and feathered the brakes and the steering and came to a stop with his fingertips touching hers. To him the contact felt one-third like a mission-accomplished high-five, one-third like an expression of relief to be out of the lions’ den again, and one-third just plain good. He didn’t know what it felt like to her. She gave no indication. But she left her hand there a second longer than she needed to.