The Hard Way Part 50

Reacher s.h.i.+vered once, a violent uncontrollable spasm. He closed his eyes, and then opened them again. He clicked the Maglite on and lowered the beam to light his way and walked on down the driveway. Toward the road. Toward he knew not where. Perez flipped his night-vision goggles into the up position on his forehead and said, "OK, Reacher's gone. He's out of here."

Edward Lane nodded. Paused a second and then backhanded Jackson across the face with his flashlight, once, twice, three times, ma.s.sive blows, until Jackson fell. Gregory hauled him upright again and Addison tore the tape off his mouth.

Lane said, "Tell me about your diet."

Jackson spat blood. "My what?"

"Your diet. What you eat. What your absent wife feeds you."

"Why?"

"I want to know if you eat potatoes."

"Everybody eats potatoes."

"So I'll find a peeler in the kitchen?"

CHAPTER 74

REACHER KEPT HIS flashlight beam trained down about ten feet in front of him, a narrow bright oval dancing left and right a little and bouncing as he walked. The light showed him the ruts and the dips and the holes in the beaten earth. It made it easier to hurry. He walked through the first curve in the driveway. Then he fixed his eyes on the darkness ahead and started to run toward the road. Lane turned to Perez and said, "Go find the kitchen. Bring me what I need. And find a telephone. Call the Bishop's Arms. Tell the others to get here now."

"We've got the truck," Perez said.

"Tell them to walk," Lane said.

Jackson said, "Reacher will come back, you know." He was the only one who could talk. He was the only one without tape on his mouth.

Lane said, "I know he'll come back. I'm counting on it. Why do you think we didn't chase him? Worst case for us he'll walk six miles east and find nothing and walk back here again. It will take him four hours. You'll be dead by then. He can take your place. He can watch the child die, and then Ms. Pauling, and then I'll kill him. Slowly."

"You're insane. You need help."

"I don't think so," Lane said.

"He'll hitch a lift."

"In the dead of night? Carrying an a.s.sault rifle? I don't think so."

"You're nuts," Jackson said. "You've lost it completely."

"I'm angry," Lane said. "And I think I have a right to be."

Perez left, to find the kitchen. Reacher ran through the second curve in the driveway. Then he slowed a little.

Then he stopped dead.

He killed the flashlight beam and closed his eyes. Stood still in the darkness and breathed hard and concentrated on the after-image of what he had just seen.

The driveway curved twice for no apparent reason. Not practical, not aesthetic. It went left and then right for some other purpose. To avoid unseen softness in the dirt, he had guessed before. To avoid a couple of badly drained sinkhole patches. And he had seen that he had been correct. All the way through the curves the track was soft and damp. Muddy, even though it hadn't rained for days.

And the mud showed tire tracks.

Three sets.

First, Tony Jackson's old Land Rover. The farm truck. Blocky mud-and-snow treads. Chunky, worn, in and out many hundreds of times. The Land Rover's tracks were all over the place. Old, faded, eroded, new, clear, recent. Everywhere. Like background noise.

Second, the Mini Cooper's tires. A very different look. Narrow, crisp, new, aggressive treads built for good adhesion and fast cornering on pavement. Just one set. Reacher had turned in the day before, slow and wide and deliberate, second gear, a small car at a moderate speed, unthreatening. He had driven through the curves and parked the car outside the house. And he had left it there. It was still there. It hadn't moved. It hadn't driven out again. It probably never would. It would leave on a flatbed truck.

Hence, one set of tire tracks only.

The third set was also a single set. One pa.s.s, one way. Wider tires. A large heavy vehicle, open treads, new and crisp. The kind of semi-serious off-road tires a prestige SUV would wear.

The kind of tires a rented Toyota Land Cruiser would wear.

One set only.

One way.

The Toyota was a very capable off-road vehicle. Reacher knew that. It was one of the best in the world. But it was inconceivable that it had entered the farm overland. Not in a million years. The farm was bounded by ditches ten feet across and six feet deep. Steep sides. Impossible approach and exit angles. A Humvee couldn't do it. A Bradley couldn't do it. An Abrams couldn't do it. The Grange Farm ditches were better than tank traps. So the Toyota hadn't come in overland. It had driven in across the little flat bridge and up the length of the driveway. No other way.

And it hadn't driven out again.

One set of tire tracks.

One way.

Lane was still on the property. Lane hit Jackson in the head with the flashlight one more time, hard. The lens smashed and Jackson went down again.

"I need a new flashlight," Lane said. "This one seems to be broken."

Addison smiled and took a new one out of a box. Lauren Pauling stared at the door. Her mouth was taped and her hands were bound behind her. The door was still closed. But it was going to open any minute. Through it would come either Perez or Reacher. Bad news or good.

Let it be Reacher, she thought. Please. Bugs on winds.h.i.+elds, no scruples. Please let it be Reacher.

Lane took the new flashlight from Addison and stepped up close to Kate. Face-to-face, six inches from her. Eye to eye. They were about the same height. He lit up the flashlight beam and held it just under her chin, s.h.i.+ning it directly upward, turning her exquisite face into a ghastly Halloween mask.

"Till death us do part," he said. "That's a phrase I take seriously."

Kate turned her head away. Gasped behind the tape. Lane clamped her chin in his free hand and turned her head back.

"Forsaking all others," he said. "I took that part seriously, too. I'm so sorry that you didn't."

Kate closed her eyes. Reacher kept on walking south. To the end of the driveway, over the bridge, east on the road, away from the farm, his flashlight on all the way. In case he was being watched. He figured he needed to let them see him go. Because the human mind loves continuity. To see a small spectral night-vision figure strolling south, and south, and then east, and east, and east sets up an irresistible temptation to believe that it's going to go east forever. It's gone, you say. It's out of here. And then you forget all about it, because you know where it's going, and you don't see it coming back because you're not watching it anymore.

He walked east for two hundred yards and clicked off the Maglite beam. Then he walked east for another two hundred yards in the dark. Then he stopped. Turned ninety degrees and hiked north across the shoulder and slid down the boundary ditch's nearside slope. Floundered through the thick black mud in the bottom and clawed his way up the far side with his rifle held one-handed high in the air. Then he ran, fast, straight north, stretching his stride long to hit the top of every ploughed furrow.

Two minutes later he was a quarter-mile in, level with the cl.u.s.ter of barns, three hundred yards behind them to the east, and out of breath. He paused in the lee of a stand of trees to recover. Thumbed his fire selector to single shots. Then he put the stock against his shoulder and walked forward. West. Toward the barns.

Reacher, alone in the dark. Armed and dangerous. Coming back. Edward Lane was still face-to-face with Kate. He said, "I'm a.s.suming you've been sleeping with him for years."

Kate said nothing.

Lane said, "I hope you've been using condoms. You could catch a disease from a guy like that."

Then he smiled. A new thought. A joke, to him.

"Or you could get pregnant," he said.

Something in her terrified eyes.

He paused.

"What?" he said. "What are you telling me?"

She shook her head.

"You're pregnant," he said. "You're pregnant, aren't you? You are. I know it. You look different. I can tell."

He put the flat of his hand on her belly. She pulled away, backward, hard against the pole she was tied to. He shuffled forward half a step. "Oh man, this is unbelievable. You're going to die with another man's child inside you."

Then he spun away. Stopped, and turned back. Shook his head.

"Can't allow that," he said. "Wouldn't be right. Well have to abort it first. I should have told Perez to find a coat hanger. But I didn't. So we'll find something else instead. There's got to be something here. This is a farm after all."

Kate closed her eyes.

"You're going to die anyway," Lane said, like the most reasonable man in the world. Reacher knew they were in a barn. They had to be. That was clear. Where else could they hide their truck? He knew there were five barns in total. He had seen them in the daylight, vaguely, in the distance. Three stood around a beaten earth yard, and two stood alone. All of them had vehicle ruts heading for big doors. Storage, he had guessed, for the backhoe, and tractors, and trailers, and balers, and all kinds of other farm machinery. Now in the dark the dirt under his feet felt dry and dusty, hard and stony. It wouldn't show tire marks. No point in risking a flash of the Maglite beam.

So which barn?

He started with the nearest, hoping to get lucky. But he didn't get lucky. The nearest barn was one of the two that stood alone. It was a wide wooden structure made of weathered boards. The whole thing had been blown slightly off-kilter by two hundred years of relentless winds. It leaned to the west, beaten down. Reacher put his ear on a crack between two boards and listened hard. Heard nothing inside. He put his eye on the crack and saw nothing. Just darkness. There was a smell of cold air and damp earth and decayed burlap.

He moved on fifty yards to the second barn, hoping to get lucky. But he didn't get lucky. The second barn was just as dark and quiet as the first. Musty and cold, nothing moving inside. A sharp nitrogen smell.

Old fertilizer. He moved on through the blackness, slow and stealthy, toward the three barns grouped around the yard. They were a hundred yards away. He got a quarter of the way there.

Then he stopped dead.

Because in the corner of his eye he saw light to his left and behind him. Light and movement, in the house. The kitchen window. A flashlight beam, in the room. Fast shadows jumping and leaping across the inside of the gla.s.s.

Lane turned to Gregory and said, "Find some baling wire."

"Before we do the kid?" Gregory asked.

"Why not? It can be like a preview for her. She's going to get the same thing anyway as soon as Perez gets back with the potato peeler. I told her mother years ago what would happen if she cheated on me. And I always try to keep my word."

"A man ought to," Gregory said.

"We need an operating table," Lane said. "Find something flat. And turn the truck's lights on. I need to be able to see what I'm doing."

"You're sick," Jackson said. "You need help.'

"Help?" Lane said. "No, I don't think so. It was always a one-person procedure, as I understand. Old women, usually, in back alleys, I believe." Reacher moved fast and quiet to the back door of the house. Pressed himself tight against the wall on the far side. Waited. He could feel the rough stones against his back. He could hear a voice through the door. Very faintly, one side of a two-way conversation. A slight Hispanic accent. Perez, on the phone. Reacher reversed his rifle in his hands. Gripped the forestock in front of the carrying handle and took a practice swing. Then he waited. Alone in the dark.

Gregory found an old door, rustic, made from lapped boards and Z-braced on the back. He pulled it out from a stack of discarded lumber and stood it upright.

"That's perfect," Lane called to him.

Perez stepped out into the night and turned to close the door behind him and Reacher swung, arms extended, hips twisting, driving forward off the back foot, wrists snapping. No good. Late. A foul ball for sure, left field, upper deck, off the facade, maybe out into the street. But Perez's head was not a baseball. And the G-36 was not a bat. It was an eight-pound yard of steel. The sight block caught Perez in the temple and punched a shard of bone sideways through his left eye socket and on through the bridge of his nose and halfway through his right eye socket. Then it stopped when the top edge of the stock crushed his ear flat against the side of his skull. So, not a perfect swing. A millisecond earlier and two inches farther back a blow like that would have taken the top of the guy's head off like opening a soft-boiled egg. Late as it was, it just ploughed a deep messy lateral trench between his cheeks and his forehead.

Messy, but effective. Perez was dead long before he hit the ground. He was too small to go down like a tree. He just melted into the beaten earth like he was a part of it. Lane turned to Addison and said, "Go find out what the h.e.l.l Perez is up to. He should have been back by now. I'm getting bored. n.o.body's bleeding yet."

"I'm bleeding," Jackson said.

"You don't count."

"Taylor's bleeding. Perez shot him."

"Wrong," Lane said. "Taylor's stopped bleeding. For the moment."

"Reacher's out there," Jackson said.

"I don't think so."

Jackson nodded. "He is. That's why Perez isn't back. Reacher got him."

Lane smiled. "So what should I do? Go out and search? With my two men? Leaving you people all alone in here to organize a pathetic escape attempt behind my back? Is that what you're trying to achieve? Not going to happen. Because right about now Reacher is walking past the Bishops Pargeter church. Or are you just trying to give your comrades a little hope in their hour of need? Is this British pluck? The famous stiff upper lip?'

Jackson said, "He's out there. I know it." He was crouching outside the kitchen door, sorting through all the things that Perez had dropped. An MP5K with a thirty-round magazine and a ballistic nylon shoulder sling. A flashlight, now broken. Two black-handled kitchen knives, one long, one short, one serrated, one plain. A souvenir corkscrew from a car ferry operator.

And a potato peeler.

Its handle was a plain wooden peg. Once red, now faded. Tightly bound to it with thick wrapped string was a simple pressed-metal blade. Slightly pointed, with a raised f.l.a.n.g.e and a slot. An old-fas.h.i.+oned design. Plain, utilitarian, well used.

Reacher stared at it for a moment. Then he put it in his pocket. He buried the longer knife to its hilt in Perez's chest. Tucked the shorter knife in his own shoe. Kicked the corkscrew and the broken flashlight into the shadows. Used his thumb to clean Perez's blood and frontal lobe off of the G-36's monocular lens. Picked up the MP5 submachine gun and slung it over his left shoulder.

Then he headed back north and east toward the barns.

Reacher, alone in the dark. Doing it the hard way.