A Wanted Man (6 page)

“Speed?”

“Close to eighty, probably. Most Highway Patrols don’t get very excited by anything less than that. Not around here. Unless there’s weather. But it’s pretty clear tonight.”

Maximum effort. Gamble
. Sorenson thought hard for thirty seconds and then got back on her phone and called up two final Hail Mary roadblocks on the Interstate, both to be in place in less than one hour’s time, the first in the west, a quarter of the way back to Denver plus eighty miles, and the second in the east, well into Iowa plus eighty miles. Both were to be on the lookout for two men, unspecified age, average appearance, no distinguishing marks, possible bloodstained clothing, possible possession of a bladed weapon showing signs of recent use.

Chapter 11

Reacher came out of the food shack carrying four cups
of coffee in a pressed cardboard tray. He fully expected three of them to be wasted. He fully expected the car to be gone. But it wasn’t. It had moved off the pump, but it was waiting for him near the air hose and the interior vacuum, with its lights on and its engine running. Alan King was in the front passenger seat and Karen Delfuenso was behind him. Don McQueen was out of the car, standing near the driver’s door, looking cold and tired. Reacher had been right about his height and build. The guy was about six feet and slender, all arms and legs.

Reacher carried the coffee across the two-lane and gave one of the cream-and-sugars to McQueen. Then he tracked around the hood and gave the other to Alan King. Then he opened Delfuenso’s door and held out the third cup. He said, “Black, no sugar.”

Delfuenso hesitated a second, and then she took the cup. She said, “Thank you. That’s how I like it. How on earth did you know?”

Thirteen words. Which was eight more than he had heard from her so far, ever since they had met. He thought:
Everyone knows thin women in their early forties don’t use cream or sugar
. He said, “It was just a lucky guess.”

“Thank you,” she said again.

He stepped over to the trash barrel next to the vacuum and dumped
the cardboard tray. Don McQueen opened the driver’s door for him, like a little ceremony. He slid into the seat and put his coffee in the cup holder. McQueen got in behind him.

Reacher found the lever and racked the seat back for legroom. It hit McQueen in the knees. Reacher looked at Alan King and said, “Why don’t you trade places with Mr. McQueen? We’ve got the two tallest people one behind the other here.”

King said, “I always ride in front.”

“Always?”

“Without exception.”

So Reacher shrugged and adjusted the mirror and fastened his seat belt and got himself comfortable. Then he nudged the lever into Drive, and touched the gas, and eased out onto the two-lane, and drove the hundred feet, and took the ramp, and got back on the highway.

More proof they hadn’t been driving three hours.

No one had used the restroom.

Sheriff Goodman clicked
off his cell and said, “Now Missy Smith has got her phone shut down.”

Sorenson nodded. “It’s late. The civilians are asleep. Do you know where she lives?”

No answer from Goodman. Wariness in his silence.

“Obviously you know where she lives,” Sorenson said. “She’s been here forever. She’s a well known character. We’ll have to go bang on her door, before we go bang on the waitress’s door.”

Goodman said, “We can’t go bang on Missy Smith’s door. Not in the middle of the night.”

Sorenson didn’t answer that. She had taken a small sideways step, leftward from the red Mazda’s driver’s-side flank, and she was looking at an angle through the gap between the cocktail lounge and the cinder block bar. She said, “I can see the gas station from here. Across the street.”

Goodman said, “So?”

“Anyone over there could see me.”

“You thinking about witnesses? We’d be pretty lucky if some long-haul trucker was pumping his gas at the exact minute our guys arrived here and took off again. And was gazing in the right direction, and was paying close attention instead of scratching his butt. And anyway, how would we find him?”

“No, I’m thinking the gas station might have cameras. Maybe wide-angle. Like fisheyes. They might see over here.”

Goodman said nothing.

“Does the gas station have cameras?”

“I don’t know,” Goodman said.

“It might,” Sorenson said. “Some of those big trucks take a hundred gallons. And times are hard right now. Drivers might be tempted to take off before paying. Oil companies wouldn’t like that. They might take defensive measures.”

“We should go find out.”

“We will,” Sorenson said. “And then we’ll go bang on Missy Smith’s door. Don’t think we won’t. The old gal can sleep a little more, but not forever.”

Reacher was an
adequate driver, but nothing more than that. Physically his body worked only two ways: either extremely slow or extremely fast. Most of the time he rumbled along with typical big-man languor, often appearing quiet and lazy, sometimes appearing positively comatose. Then if necessary he could explode into furious action, for as long as it took, a blur of hands and feet, and then he would lapse back into torpor. He had no middle setting, and a middle setting was what good driving needed. Action and reaction had to be prompt but controlled, alert but measured, rapid but considered, and it was hard for Reacher to identify that kind of middle ground. Typically he found himself either twitching at a danger two hundred yards ahead, or ignoring it completely, on the grounds that it might go away by itself. He had never killed or injured anyone with a car, except deliberately, but he was a realistic man and didn’t kid himself: his driving was much worse than average.

But as promised the Interstate was straight and wide, back up to
three lanes again by that point, and the big soft Chevrolet held its line very well. Nighttime traffic was very light and neither action or reaction was much called for. In fact the biggest challenge was to stay awake, but Reacher was good at that. He could grind along at some basic level of consciousness more or less forever. He kept both hands on the wheel, ten and two, and he checked his mirrors regularly every twenty or so seconds, first the passenger door, then the windshield mirror, then the driver’s door, then the windshield again. Behind his right shoulder Karen Delfuenso sat awake but silent, tense and anxious, and next to her Reacher could hear Don McQueen breathing slow, not quite asleep but not quite awake either. Alan King was awake in the passenger seat, looking mute and morose and a little preoccupied. His head was half turned, so he could see the road ahead and Reacher together, and the speedometer too, Reacher thought.

So Reacher drove on, at an approximately legal speed, with the crystal pendant on the key tapping him on the knee from time to time, as the car rocked and swayed.

It turned out that
the gas station had four cameras, all of them monochrome, none of them color. They fed a hard disk recorder located on a shelf in the booth behind the register, right next to the cigarettes. The four separate feeds were displayed in real time on a quad-split LCD screen to the left of the cash drawer.

Three of the cameras were of no interest to Sorenson. The first and the second were mounted low down at the vehicle entrance and exit, to capture plate numbers. They were zoomed in too tight to show any background. The third camera was mounted in the ceiling of the cashier’s booth itself, high up behind the guy’s right shoulder, to make sure he wasn’t ripping the place off. Standard practice, in a cash business. Trust but verify.

But the fourth camera was better. Marginally. It was a black glass hemisphere mounted high on a bracket halfway up the sign pole. It was dialed back to a wide angle view of the whole property. For insurance purposes, the cashier said. If two semi trucks backed up and got their trailers tangled, it was useful to know which one had moved
first. If someone stole gas or diesel, it was useful to show the court a composite narrative, the plate number entering, the guy pumping, the guy driving away, the plate number leaving.

The field of view from the fourth camera was wide enough to show the county two-lane heading north and south, and the gravel patch beyond its far shoulder, in front of the cinder block bar, and the cinder block bar itself, and part of Missy Smith’s cocktail lounge, and the gap between those two buildings. The way the fishbowl distortion tilted the picture made it look like the camera was peering more or less horizontally into the gap. Bright pools of light were visible on the live feed, right at the edge of the shot, from the deputies’ parked vehicles.

Picture quality was not great. The nighttime world was shown in shades of gray. Lights from passing cars bled and smeared and fluoresced and lagged their sources’ lateral movement.

But it was better than nothing.

Maximum effort. Gamble
.

“OK,” Sorenson said. “Show me how to rewind this thing.”

Chapter 12

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 gray, 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, grays on gray, 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, toward 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 gray, which could have been red in real life.

“OK,” Sorenson said. “They drove north from the crime scene, 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 whiteout. 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 color.

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.