Die Trying

"OK, asshole, real quick," Loder said. "Before I change my mind."

Reacher looped his chain into his hand. Ducked down and picked Holly up, under her knees and shoulders. They heard the truck start up. It slewed backward into the entrance. Jammed to a stop. Reacher ran Holly to the truck. Laid her down inside. Climbed in after her. Loder slammed the doors and shut them into darkness.

"NOW I GUESS I owe you." Reacher said quietly.

Holly just waved it away. An embarrassed little gesture. Reacher stared at her. He liked her. Liked her face. He gazed at it. Recalled it white and disgusted as the driver taunted her. Saw the smooth swell of her breasts under his filthy drooling gaze. Then the picture changed to Stevie smiling and shooting at him, chained to the wall. Then he heard Loder say: the situation has changed.

Everything had changed. He had changed. He lay and felt the old anger inside him grinding like gears. Cold, implacable anger. Uncontrollable. They had made a mistake. They had changed him from a spectator into an enemy. A bad mistake to make. They had pushed open the forbidden door, not knowing what would come bursting back out at them. He lay there and felt like a ticking bomb they were carrying deep into the heart of their territory. He felt the flood of anger, and thrilled with it, and savored it, and stored it up.

NOW THERE WAS only one mattress inside the truck. It was only three feet wide. And Stevie was a very erratic driver. Reacher and Holly were lying down, pressed tight together. Reacher’s left wrist still had the cuff and the chain locked onto it. His right arm was around Holly’s shoulders. He was holding her tight. Tighter than he really needed to.

"How much farther?" she asked.

"We’ll be there before nightfall," he said, quietly. "They didn’t bring your chain. No more overnight stops."

She was silent for a moment.

"I don’t know if I’m glad or not," she said. "I hate this truck, but I don’t know if I want to actually arrive anywhere."

Reacher nodded.

"It reduces our chances," he said. "Rule of thumb is escape while you’re on the move. It gets much harder after that."

The motion of the truck indicated they were on a highway. But either the terrain was different, or Stevie couldn’t handle the truck, or both, because they were swaying violently. The guy was swinging late into turns and jamming the vehicle from side to side, like he was having a struggle staying between the lane markers. Holly was getting thrown against Reacher’s side. He pulled her closer and held her tighter. She snuggled in close, instinctively. He felt her hesitate, like she realized she’d acted without thinking, then he felt her decide not to pull away again.

"You feel OK?" she asked him. "You killed a man."

He was quiet for a long moment.

"He wasn’t the first," he said. "And I just decided he won’t be the last."

She turned her head to speak at the same time he did. The truck swayed violently to the left. Their lips were an inch apart. The truck swayed again. They kissed. At first it was light and tentative. Reacher felt the new soft lips on his, and the unfamiliar new taste and smell and feel. Then they kissed harder. Then the truck started hammering through a series of sharp curves, and they forgot all about kissing and just held on tight, trying not to be thrown right off the mattress onto the ridged metal floor.

Chapter Twenty

BROGAN WAS THE guy who made the breakthrough in Chicago. He was the third guy that morning to walk past the can of white paint out there on the abandoned industrial lot, but he was the first to realize its significance.

"The truck they stole was white," Brogan said. "Some kind of ID on the side. They painted over it. Got to be that way. The can was right there, with a brush, about ten feet from the Lexus. Stands to reason they would park the Lexus right next to the truck, right? Therefore the paint can was next to where the truck had been."

"What sort of paint?" McGrath asked.

"Ordinary household paint," Brogan said. "A quart can. Two-inch brush. Price tag still on it, from a hardware store. And there are fingerprints in the splashes on the handle."

McGrath nodded and smiled.

"OK," he said. "Go to work."

BROGAN TOOK THE computer-aided mug shots with him to the hardware store named on the paintbrush handle. It was a cramped, family-owned place, two hundred yards from the abandoned lot. The counter was attended by a stout old woman with a mind like a steel trap. Straightaway she identified the picture of the guy the video had caught at the wheel of the Lexus. She said the paint and the brush had been purchased by him about ten o’clock Monday morning. To prove it, she rattled open an ancient drawer and pulled out Monday’s register roll. Seven-ninety-eight for the paint, five-ninety-eight for the brush, plus tax, right there on the roll.

"He paid cash," she said.

"You got a video system in here?" Brogan asked her.

"No," she said.

"Doesn’t your insurance company say you got to?" he asked.

The stout old woman just smiled.

"We’re not insured," she said.

Then she leaned under the counter and came up with a shotgun.

"Not by no insurance company, anyway," she said.

Brogan looked at the weapon. He was pretty sure the barrel was way too short for the piece to be legal. But he wasn’t about to start worrying over such a thing. Not right then.

"OK," he said. "You take care now."

MORE THAN SEVEN million people in the Chicago area, something like ten million road vehicles, but only one white truck had been reported stolen in the twenty-four-hour period between Sunday and Monday. It was a white Ford Econoline. Owned and operated by a South Side electrician. His insurance company made him empty the truck at night, and store his stock and tools inside his shop. Anything left inside the truck was not covered. That was the rule. It was an irksome rule, but on Monday morning when the guy came out to load up and the truck was gone, it started to look like a rule which made a whole lot of sense. He had reported the theft to the insurance broker and the police, and he was not expecting to hear much more about it. So he was duly impressed when two FBI agents turned up, forty-eight hours later, asking all kinds of urgent questions.

"OK," MCGRATH SAID. "We know what we’re looking for. White Econoline, new paint on the sides. We’ve got the plates. Now we need to know where to look. Ideas?"

"Coming up on forty-eight hours," Brogan said. "Assume an average speed of fifty-five? That would make the max range somewhere more than twenty-six hundred miles. That’s effectively anywhere on the North American continent, for God’s sake."

"Too pessimistic," Milosevic said. "They probably stopped nights. Call it six hours’ driving time on Monday, maybe ten on Tuesday, maybe four so far today, total of twenty hours, that’s a maximum range of eleven hundred miles."

"Needle in a haystack," Brogan said.

McGrath shrugged.

"So let’s find the haystack," he said. "Then we’ll go look for the needle. Call it fifteen hundred maximum. What does that look like?"

Brogan pulled a road atlas from the stack of reference material on the table. He opened it up to the early section where the whole country was shown all at once, all the states splattered over one page in a colorful mosaic. He checked the scale and traced his fingernail in a circle.

"That’s anywhere shy of California," he said. "Half of Washington State, half of Oregon, none of California and absolutely all of everywhere else. Somewhere around a zillion square miles."