Текст книги "A Wanted Man"

Автор книги: Lee Child

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Текущая страница: 4 (всего у книги 27 страниц)

TWELVE

THE GAS STATION night cashier was a willing kid, pretty smart, and certainly young enough to be right at home with technology. He hit a button and made the fourth camera’s feed go full screen on the LCD monitor. He hit another button and brought up plus and minus signs next to the time code. He showed Sorenson which arrow on the keyboard matched which sign. He told her to hold the arrows down to make the recording jump backward or forward in fifteen-minute segments, or to tap them once to make it run backward or forward at normal speed.

Sorenson started by jumping the recording all the way back to just before midnight. Then she let it run. She and Goodman crowded shoulder to shoulder in front of the screen, and tried to make sense of what they were seeing at the edge of the shot. The picture was vague and soupy, like cheap night vision, but grey, not green. Headlights flared and burned. The cinder block bar had no cars parked outside, but Missy Smith’s lounge had at least three.

There was nothing visible through the gap between the buildings.

‘Does this thing have fast forward?’ Sorenson asked.

‘Hold down the shift key,’ the kid said.

Sorenson sped through the next five minutes. The time code hit thirty seconds before midnight. She tapped the arrow for normal speed and watched. Nothing happened at the cinder block bar. But customers started coming out of the cocktail lounge, vague human shapes, greys on grey, smeared by the oily motion of the digital video. They climbed into cars, lights blazed, cars reversed, cars swooped forward. Most of them went south. Last thing out through the lounge’s front door was a stout shape that looked female. It climbed into what Sorenson took to be a Cadillac, and disappeared.

Two minutes past midnight.

‘That was Missy Smith,’ Goodman said.

The neon in the windows clicked off behind her.

The edge of the screen stayed quiet for sixteen more minutes.

Then at eighteen minutes past midnight there was a moving flare of light in the gap between the lounge and the bar. Headlight beams on bright, almost certainly, projecting forward from a car approaching over rough ground, from the left of the screen, from the south, over the crushed stone behind the buildings. The beams slowed, and then paused, and then turned tight through ninety degrees, towards the patient camera, whiting out briefly as they hit the lens head on, and then they continued their lateral sweep and came to rest out of sight behind the lounge.

‘That’s them,’ Goodman said. ‘Has to be.’

Sorenson used two fingers and toggled between the forward and backward buttons and isolated the brief sequence where part of the car was visible in the gap. There wasn’t much to see. Just the bright lights, and a blur of a three-quarter view of what must have been the car’s hood behind them, and then the flash as the lights hit the camera directly, and then a blur of what must have been the car’s driver’s-side flank, and then nothing, as the car parked out of sight and killed its headlights.

The car had looked a light, luminous grey, which could have been red in real life.

‘OK,’ Sorenson said. ‘They drove north from the scene of the crime, and they pulled into the back lots at the south end of the strip, and they drove all the way up behind the buildings, and they parked at the lounge’s back door, and they switched vehicles. We need to know what kind of car was waiting there. So we really need to talk to that waitress.’

‘Too early,’ Goodman said. ‘The waitress didn’t get off for another twelve minutes. They must have been long gone by then.’

‘You never worked in a bar, did you? We established that, right? The owner had already gone home. The cat was away, so the mice could play. The staff is paid for thirty extra minutes, but they don’t necessarily work for thirty extra minutes. They get through as fast as they can and then they get the hell out of there. She could have been leaving right at that moment. And even if she wasn’t, she could have been in and out the back with trash or empty bottles.’

‘OK,’ Goodman said.

Sorenson said, ‘Let’s see how long our window is, before they leave again.’

She tapped the forward arrow and the time code started spooling onward again. She counted in her head, five seconds for them to get out of the Mazda, five seconds to unlock the new vehicle, five seconds to get in, five seconds to get settled, five seconds to start it up.

She leaned closer to the screen and studied the angled view into the gap, ready to see the new vehicle crawl left to right across the empty space as it prepared to loop north behind the cinder block bar on its way back to the road. Its lights would be tangential to the camera’s fishbowl field of view. There would be no flare. No white out. There would be at least one frame where most of the vehicle’s front-to-back length would be clearly captured. It might be possible to determine make and model. It might even be possible to guess at colour.

Sorenson watched.

And saw nothing.

No vehicle slid north through the gap. Not in the first minute, or the second, or the third, or the fourth or the fifth. She hit fast forward and raced onward. Nothing happened. The picture stayed immobile, a tableau, a still life, absolutely no activity at all, uninterrupted for almost fifteen whole minutes, until a random pick-up truck drove by on the two-lane, heading south, and crossed with a random sedan driving north. After that brief blur of excitement the screen lapsed back to stillness.

Sorenson said, ‘So where the hell did they go? South? Behind the buildings, all the way back to the other end of the strip?’

Goodman said, ‘South makes no sense at all.’

‘I sincerely hope you’re right,’ Sorenson said. She pictured in her mind her Hail Mary roadblocks on the Interstate, hundreds of miles apart, each one of them complicated and expensive and disruptive, each one of them a potential case-breaker or career-breaker, depending on results, or lack of them.

Gamble.

THIRTEEN

THE INTERSTATE THROUGH Iowa stayed flat and ruler straight for mile after mile. Traffic was light but consistent. Allegedly a million Americans were on the move at any one time, night and day, and clearly Iowa was getting its share of that million, but a minority share, probably proportional to its population. Reacher held the Chevy a little under eighty, just rolling along through the empty vastness, relaxed, at ease, surfing on the subdued growl of the motor and the rush of the air and the whine of the tyres, sometimes overtaking, sometimes being overtaken, always counting off each mile and each minute in his head, always picturing the Greyhound depot in Chicago in his mind. He had been there before, many times, on West Harrison on the near South Side, a decent place full of heavy diesel clatter and constant departures. Or maybe he could try a train from Union Station. He had once ridden the train eighteen hours from Chicago to New York. It had been a pleasant trip. And there were bound to be routes that continued onward to D.C., which was pretty close to where he ultimately wanted to be.

He drove on, fingers and toes.

Then all over again brake lights flared red up ahead, like a solid wall, and in the distance beyond them there were flashing blue and red lights from a big bunch of cop cars. Beside him Alan King groaned in disgust and closed his eyes. Karen Delfuenso had no audible reaction. Don McQueen slumbered on. Reacher lifted off the gas and the car slowed. He got over into the right-hand lane well ahead of the jockeying. He braked hard and came to a stop behind a white Dodge pick-up truck. Its big blank tailgate loomed up like a cliff. It had a bumper sticker that read: Don’t Like My Driving? Call 1-800-BITE-ME. Reacher looked in the mirror and saw a semi truck ease to a stop behind him. He could feel the beat of its idling engine. Alongside him the middle lane slowed and then jammed solid. Beyond it and a second later the left-hand lane jammed up in turn.

The Chevy’s lights against the Dodge’s white tailgate threw brightness backward into the car. Alan King turned his face away from it, towards his window, and tucked his chin down into his shoulder. Reacher heard Don McQueen cough and snore and move. He looked in the mirror again and saw the guy had thrown his forearm up over his eyes.

Karen Delfuenso was still wide awake and upright. Her face was drawn and pale. Her eyes were on his, in the mirror.

And she was blinking.

She was blinking rapidly, and deliberately, over and over again, and then she was jerking her head sideways, sometimes left, sometimes right, and then she was starting up with the blinking again, sometimes once, or twice, or three times, or more, once nine times, and once as many as thirteen straight flutters of her eyelids.

Reacher stared in surprise.

Then the semi truck sounded its horn long and loud and Reacher glanced forward again to find the Dodge had moved on. He touched the gas and crept after it. Evidently the Iowa cops had arranged the obstacle the same way the Nebraska cops had. Everyone was cramming over into the right-hand lane. A mess, potentially, except that the cops had two officers out and about on foot, with red-shrouded flashlights. They were regulating the manoeuvres. And some kind of Midwestern goodwill or commonsense was in play. There was plenty of after you, neighbour stuff going on. Reacher figured the delay might amount to ten minutes. That was all. No big deal.

He glanced in the mirror.

Karen Delfuenso started blinking again.

Sorenson replayed the critical quarter-hour window two more times, once backward and once forward, both at high speed. As before she saw the Mazda arrive, and as before she then saw nothing at all until the random traffic blew by on the two-lane fifteen minutes later, the pick-up truck heading south and the sedan heading north.

Gamble.

‘South still makes no sense?’ she asked.

‘No sense at all,’ Goodman said.

‘Are you sure?’

‘There’s nothing there.’

‘Bet your pension?’

‘And my house.’

‘Shirt off your back?’

‘My firstborn grandchild, if you like.’

‘OK,’ Sorenson said. ‘They went north. And you know what? We saw them do it.’

‘Where?’

‘Right here,’ Sorenson said, and she froze the picture on the random traffic, as the northbound sedan passed in front of the southbound pick-up truck. She said, ‘That’s them, in the sedan. Has to be. It’s the only vehicle going north. They spent fifteen minutes doing something else, and then they got back on the road by looping around south of the lounge, not north of it. It’s the only logical explanation.’

‘Fifteen minutes doing what?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Fifteen minutes is a long time to delay a getaway for no reason.’

‘Then obviously there was a reason.’

The kid behind the register said, ‘I heard a car alarm at about twenty past midnight.’

Sorenson stared at him.

She said, ‘And you didn’t think to mention that before?’

‘Why would I? You didn’t ask me. You didn’t explain yourselves. You still haven’t. And I only just remembered anyway.’

‘Twenty past midnight?’

‘About.’

‘Definitely a car alarm?’

‘No question. Pretty loud, too. The highlight of my night so far. Until you guys showed up.’

‘Where was it?’

The kid waved his hand.

‘Over there,’ he said. ‘Could have been behind Missy Smith’s lounge, for sure.’

‘OK,’ Sorenson said. ‘Thank you.’

Goodman asked her, ‘So what are we saying? They spent fifteen minutes stealing a getaway car?’

‘Maybe they did, and maybe they didn’t. But whatever, a car alarm going off is another good reason why the waitress might have stuck her head out the back. She would have been worried about her own car, if nothing else. We have to find her, right now. It’s time to go bang on some doors.’

Goodman checked his watch.

‘We better hurry,’ he said. ‘Those guys will be hitting the roadblocks about now. You should have put them a hundred miles out, not eighty.’

Sorenson didn’t reply.

FOURTEEN

NINE MINUTES, REACHER thought. Not ten. He had over-estimated the likely delay, but only slightly. The cops on foot had done a fine job of corralling the approaching flow, and the cops at the roadblock itself were evidently fast and efficient. Traffic was moving through at a reasonable clip. Reacher couldn’t see the search procedure in detail, because of the Dodge pick-up’s bulk right in front of him, but clearly the protocol was nothing more than quick and dirty. He rolled on, and paused, and rolled on, and paused, with the red-blue glare ahead of him getting brighter and fiercer with every car’s length he travelled. Next to him Alan King seemed to have gone to sleep, still with his face turned away and his chin ducked down. Don McQueen still had his arm over his eyes. Karen Delfuenso was still awake, but she had stopped blinking.

A hundred yards to go, Reacher thought. Three hundred feet. Maybe fifteen vehicles in the queue ahead. Eight minutes. Maybe seven.

Missy Smith lived in what is left when a family farm gets sold to an agricultural corporation. A driveway, a house, a car barn, a small square yard in front and a small square yard in back, all enclosed by a new rail fence, with ten thousand flat acres of someone else’s soybeans beyond. Sheriff Goodman drove up the driveway and parked twenty feet from the house. He lit up his roof lights. The first thing people did after a night-time knock on the door was to look out their bedroom window. Quicker to let the lights make the explanations, rather than get all tangled up in a whole lot of yelling and hollering.

Sorenson stayed in the car and let Goodman go make the inquiry. His county, his population, his job. She saw him knock, and she saw some upstairs curtains twitch, and she saw the front door open four minutes later, and she saw the old gal standing in the hallway, in a robe. Her hair was neatly brushed. Hence the four minutes.

Sorenson saw Goodman bow and scrape, and she saw him ask the question, and she saw Missy Smith answer it. She saw Goodman write something down, and she saw him read it back for confirmation, and she saw the old gal nod. She saw the front door close, and she saw the hallway light go off, and she saw Goodman trot back to the car.

‘Miles from here,’ he said. ‘As luck would have it.’

He turned the car around and headed back to the road.

The white Dodge pick-up truck got through the roadblock with no trouble at all. Cops peered into it from every angle and checked the load bed and then waved it onward. Reacher buzzed his window down and put his elbow on the door and squinted against the bright red-blue strobes and rolled the Chevy forward. A grizzled old trooper with stripes on his arm stepped up. He bent at the waist and scanned the car’s interior.

Looking for something.

But not finding it.

So the guy started to straighten up again, already dismissing the Chevy, already thinking about the next car in line, but his eyes came to rest on Reacher’s face, and his own eyes widened a little, as if in sympathy or wonder or appreciation, and he said, ‘Ouch.’

‘My nose?’ Reacher said.

‘That must have stung.’

‘You should see the other guy.’

‘Where is he now?’

‘Not in your state.’

‘That’s good to know,’ the trooper said. ‘You drive safe tonight, sir.’

Reacher asked, ‘Who are you looking for, captain?’

‘That’s very kind of you, sir, but I’m only a sergeant.’

‘OK, who are you looking for, sergeant?’

The guy paused.

Then he smiled.

‘Not you,’ he said. ‘That’s for sure. Not you.’

And then he moved a foot towards the rear of the car, ready to greet the next in line, and Reacher buzzed his window up and threaded through the improvised chicane, and then he got settled in his seat and took off again, accelerating through forty, fifty, sixty, seventy miles an hour, with nothing at all in front of him except darkness and the white Dodge’s tail lights already half a mile ahead.

FIFTEEN

THE ADDRESS MISSY Smith had given to Sheriff Goodman turned out to be what is left when a family farm gets sold to a homebuilding corporation. The farmland itself had been added to some giant remote holding, but a shallow acre had been retained alongside the road and a row of four small ranch houses had been built on it. They were maybe twenty years old. In the moonlight they all looked bravely maintained and in reasonable shape. They were all identical. They all had white siding, grey roofs, front lawns, short straight driveways, and mailboxes at the kerb, on stout wooden posts.

But there was one clear difference between them.

Three of the houses had cars on their driveways.

The fourth didn’t.

And the fourth was the address Missy Smith had given to Sheriff Goodman.

‘Not good,’ Sorenson said.

‘No,’ Goodman said.

All four houses were dark, as was to be expected in the middle of the night. But somehow the house with no car looked darker than the other three. It looked quiet, and undisturbed, and empty.

Sorenson climbed out of the car. The road was nothing more than an old farm track, blacktopped over. It was badly drained. Rain and run-off from the fields had left mud in the gutters. Sorenson stepped over it and waited at the mouth of the empty driveway. Goodman stepped over the mud and joined her there. Sorenson checked the mailbox. Reflex habit. It was empty, as was to be expected for an evening worker. An evening worker picks up her mail before going to work, not after.

The mailbox was white, like all the others. It had a name on it, spelled out in small stick-on letters. The name was Delfuenso.

‘What’s her first name?’ Sorenson asked.

Goodman said, ‘Karen.’

Sorenson said, ‘Go knock on the door, just to be sure.’

Goodman went.

He knocked.

No response.

He knocked again, long and loud.

No response.

Sorenson cut across the lawn to the neighbour’s door. She rang the bell, once, twice, three times. She took out her ID, and held it ready. She waited. Two minutes later the door opened and she saw a guy in pyjamas. He was middle-aged and grey. She asked him if he had seen his neighbour come home that night.

The guy in pyjamas said no, he hadn’t.

She asked him if his neighbour lived alone.

The guy said yes, she did. She was divorced.

She asked him if his neighbour owned a car.

The guy said yes, she did. A pretty decent one, too. Not more than a few years old. Bought with money from the divorce. Just saying.

She asked him if his neighbour always drove to work.

The guy said yes, she did. It was that or walk.

She asked him if his neighbour’s car was usually parked on the driveway.

The guy said yes it was, all day long before work, and all night long after work. It was parked right there on top of the oily patch they could see if they stepped over and looked real close, because of how a leaky transmission was the car’s only fault. The neighbour should have had it seen to long ago, on account of it being liable to seize up otherwise, but some folks plain ignore stuff like that. Just saying.

Sorenson asked him if his neighbour ever spent the night away from home.

The guy said no, she didn’t. She worked at the lounge and came home every night at ten past midnight, regular as clockwork, except for when she had the clean-up overtime, when it was maybe twelve thirty-five or so. Mrs Delfuenso was a nice woman and a good neighbour and the guy hoped nothing bad had happened to her.

Sorenson thanked him and told him he was free to go back to bed. The guy said he hoped he had been helpful. Sorenson said he had been. The guy said if she wanted to know more, she should go talk to the other neighbour. They were closer. Friends, really. They did things for each other. For instance, Mrs Delfuenso’s kid slept over there, while Mrs Delfuenso was working.

Sorenson said, ‘Karen has a child?’

‘A daughter,’ the guy said. ‘Ten years old. Same as the neighbour’s kid. They sleep over there and then Mrs Delfuenso takes over and gives them breakfast and drives them to the school bus in the morning.’

SIXTEEN

REACHER HAD NEVER been hypnotized, but in his opinion driving empty highways at night came close. Basal and cognitive demands were so low they could be met by the smallest sliver of the brain. The rest coasted. The front half had nothing to do, and the back half had nothing to fight. The very definition of relaxation. Time and distance seemed suspended. The Dodge’s tail lights would be for ever distant. Reacher felt he could drive a thousand hours and never catch them.

Normally numbers would fill the void in his head. Not that he was a particularly competent mathematician. But numbers called to him, twisting and turning and revealing their hidden facets. Perhaps he would glance down and see that he was doing 76 miles an hour, and he would see that 76 squared was 5,776, which ended in 76, where it started, which made 76 an automorphic number, one of only two below 100, the other being 25, whose square was 625, whose square was 390,625, which was interesting.

Or perhaps he would take advantage of the fact that all the cops for miles around were on roadblock duty behind him, and let his speed creep up to 81, and muse about how one divided by eighty-one expressed as a decimal came out as .012345679, which then recurred literally for ever, 012345679 over and over and over again, until the end of time, longer even than it would take to catch up to the Dodge.

But that night words came to him first.

Specifically four words, spoken by Alan King: plus whatever Karen wants. The coffee order. Two with cream and sugar, plus whatever Karen wants. Which attacked Reacher’s impression of them as a team. Team members knew each other’s coffee orders by heart. They had stood on line together a hundred times, in rest areas, in airports, at Starbucks, at shabby no-name shacks. They had ordered together in diners and in restaurants. They had fetched and carried for each other.

But King had not known how Karen liked her coffee.

Therefore Karen was not a team member, or not a regular team member, or perhaps she was a new team member. A recent addition to the roster. Which might explain why she wasn’t talking. Perhaps she felt unsure of her place. Perhaps she simply didn’t like her new associates. Perhaps they didn’t like her. Certainly Alan King had spoken impatiently and even contemptuously about her, right in her presence. Like she wasn’t there. He had said, Karen doesn’t drive. After she hadn’t ordered coffee, he had said, Nothing for Karen, then.

They were not a trio. King and McQueen were a duo, barely tolerating an interloper.

Sorenson met Goodman back on Karen Delfuenso’s empty oil-stained driveway, and she told him about Delfuenso’s kid.

‘Jesus,’ Goodman said. He glanced at the other neighbour’s house. ‘And the kid is in there now?’

‘Unless she sleepwalks. And she’s expecting to see her mommy in the morning.’

‘We shouldn’t tell her. Not yet. Not until we’re sure.’

‘We’re not going to tell her. Not now. But we have to talk to the neighbour. It’s still possible this whole thing is nothing. Something innocent might have come up, and Karen might have left a message.’

‘You think?’

‘No, not really. But we have to check.’

So they cut across the other lawn together and Sorenson tried to weight her knock so that a sleeping adult might hear it, but sleeping children wouldn’t. Hard to do. Her first attempt woke nobody. Her second might have woken everybody. Certainly it brought a tired woman of about thirty to the door.

There had been no message from Karen Delfuenso.