Never Go Back (17 page)

He stepped out to the sidewalk in its wake and jammed his left fist high in the air and fifty yards away Turner jumped to the kerb and stuck out her thumb. Total precision. Like a perfect post-season bang-bang double play, fast and crisp and decisive in the cold night air. The pick-up’s headlight beams washed over Turner’s immobile form like she’d been there all along.

The pick-up didn’t stop.

Shit
, Reacher thought.

The next viable candidate was an elderly Ford Bronco, and it didn’t stop, either. Neither did a middle-aged F150, or a new Dodge Ram. Then the road went quiet again. The clock in Reacher’s head ticked around to ten thirty in the evening. The air grew colder. He had on two T-shirts and his jacket, with its miracle layer. He started to worry about Turner. She had one T-shirt and one regular shirt. And her T-shirt had looked thin from laundering.
I was born in Montana
, she had said.
I’m never cold
. He hoped she was telling the truth.

For five more minutes nothing came in from the east. Then, more headlights, wide-spaced and low, tracking the road’s rise and fall with a rubbery, well-damped motion. A sedan, probably. He leaned out just a fraction, already pessimistic.

Then he ducked back in, fast. It was a sedan, swift and sleek, a Ford Crown Victoria, shiny and dark in colour, with black windows and antennas on the trunk lid. MPs, possibly, or the FBI, or Federal Marshals, or the Virginia state cops. Or not. Maybe another agency altogether, on an unconnected mission. He leaned out again and watched it go. It missed Turner in the shadows and blasted onward into the distance.

He waited. One more minute. Then two. Nothing but darkness.

Then more headlights, way back, maybe still on East Main, before the downtown crossroads, coming on steadily, now on West Main for sure, getting closer. They were yellow and weak. Old-fashioned and faint. Nothing modern. Not halogen. Reacher leaned out from his corner. The headlights kept on coming, slow and steady. They flashed past.

A pick-up truck.

The same double play. His left fist, her thumb.

The pick-up slowed right down.

It stopped.

Turner stepped off the kerb and leaned in at its passenger window and started talking, and Reacher started jogging the fifty yards towards her.

This time Juliet called Romeo, which was unusual. Mostly Romeo had the breaking news. But their labours were divided, and so sometimes Juliet had the new information.

He said, ‘No sign of them, all the way to Winchester.’

Romeo said, ‘Are they sure?’

‘They checked very carefully.’

‘OK, but keep them in the area. That bus line is our best option.’

‘Will do.’

Reacher arrived a little out of breath, and saw the pick-up was an old Chevrolet, plain and basic, built and bought for utility, not show, and the driver looked to be a wily old boy of about seventy, all skin and bone and sparse white hair. Turner introduced him by saying, ‘This gentleman is heading for Mineral County in West Virginia. Near a place called Keyser, not too far from the Maryland line.’

Which all meant nothing to Reacher, except that West Virginia sounded one step better than regular Virginia. He leaned in at the window next to Turner and said, ‘Sir, we’d really appreciate the ride.’

The old guy said, ‘Then hop right in and let’s go.’

There was a bench seat, but the cab was narrow. Turner got in first, and if Reacher pressed hard against the door there was just about room for her between him and the old guy. But the seat was soft and the cab was warm. And the truck motored along OK. It was happy to do sixty. It felt like it could roll down the road for ever.

The old guy asked, ‘So where are you folks headed ultimately?’

‘We’re looking for work,’ Reacher said, thinking of the young couple in Ohio, in the red crew-cab Silverado, with the shedding dog. ‘So pretty much any place will do.’

‘And what kind of work are you looking for?’

And so began a completely typical hitchhiking conversation, with every party spinning yarns based on half truths and inflated experiences. Reacher had been out of the service for a long time, and when he had to he worked whatever job he could get. He had worked the doors in night clubs, and he had dug swimming pools, and stacked lumber, and demolished buildings, and picked apples, and loaded boxes into trucks, and he made it sound like those kinds of things had been his lifelong occupations. Turner talked about waiting tables, and working in offices, and selling kitchenwares door to door, all of which Reacher guessed was based on her evening and weekend experiences through high school and college. The old guy talked about tobacco farming in the Carolinas, and horses in Kentucky, and hauling coal in West Virginia, in eighteen-wheel trucks.

They drove through Winchester, crossing I-81 twice, and then onward towards the state line, into Appalachian country, on the last northern foothills of Shenandoah Mountain, the road rising and twisting towards Georges Peak, the motor straining, the weak yellow headlights jerking from side to side on the sharp turns. Then at midnight they were in West Virginia, still elevated in wild country, rolling through wooded passes towards the Alleghenies in the far distance.

Then Reacher saw a fire, far ahead in the west, on a wooded hillside a little south of the road. A yellow and orange glow, against the black sky, like a bonfire or a warning beacon. They rolled through a sleeping town called Capon Bridge, and the fire got closer. A mile or more away, but then suddenly less, because the road turned towards it.

Reacher said, ‘Sir, you could let us out here, if you wouldn’t mind.’

The old guy said, ‘Here?’

‘It’s a good spot.’

‘For what?’

‘I think it will meet our needs.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘We’d appreciate it very much.’

The old guy grumbled something, dubious, not understanding at all, but he took his foot off the gas and the truck slowed down. Turner wasn’t understanding, either. She was looking at Reacher like he was crazy. The truck came to a halt, on a random stretch of mountain blacktop, woods to the left, woods to the right, nothing ahead, and nothing behind. Reacher opened his door, and unfolded himself out, and Turner slid out beside him, and they thanked the old man very much and waved him away. Then they stood together in the pitch dark and the dead quiet and the cold night air, and Turner said, ‘You want to tell me exactly why we just got out of a warm truck in the middle of nowhere?’

Reacher pointed, ahead and to the left, at the fire.

‘See that?’ he said. ‘That’s an ATM.’

TWENTY-SEVEN

THEY WALKED ON
, following the curve of the road, west and a little south, getting closer to the fire all the time, until it was level with them, about two hundred yards into the hilly woods. Ten yards later, on the left shoulder, there was the mouth of a stony track. A driveway, of sorts. It ran uphill, between the trees. Turner wrapped Reacher’s shirt tight around her and said, ‘That’s just some kind of random brush fire.’

‘Wrong season,’ Reacher said. ‘Wrong place. They don’t get brush fires here.’

‘So what is it?’

‘Where are we?’

‘West Virginia.’

‘Correct. Miles from anywhere, in backwoods country. That fire is what we’ve been waiting for. But be quiet as you can. There could be someone up there.’

‘Firefighters, probably.’

‘That’s one thing there won’t be,’ Reacher said. ‘I can guarantee that.’

They started up the stony path. It was loose and noisy underfoot. Hard going. Better driven than walked. On both sides the trees crowded in, some of them pines, some of them deciduous and bare. The track snaked right, and then left again, rising all the way, with a final wide curve up ahead, with the fire waiting for them beyond it. They could already feel heat in the air, and they could hear a vague roar, with loud cracks and bangs mixed in.

‘Real quiet now,’ Reacher said.

They rounded the final curve, and found a clearing hacked out of the woods. Dead ahead was a tumbledown old barn-like structure, and to their left was a tumbledown old cabin, both buildings made of wooden boards alternately baked and rotted by a century of weather. To their far right was the fire, raging in and around and above a wide, low rectangular structure with wheels. Yellow and blue and orange flames blazed up and out, and the trees burned and smouldered near them. Thick grey smoke boiled and swirled and eddied, and then caught the up-draught and whipped away into the darkness above.

‘What is it?’ Turner asked again, in a whisper.

‘Like that old joke,’ Reacher whispered back. ‘How is a fire in a meth lab the same as a redneck divorce?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Someone’s gonna lose a trailer.’

‘This is a meth lab?’

‘Was,’ Reacher said.

‘Hence no firefighters,’ Turner said. ‘Illegal operation. They couldn’t call it in.’

‘Firefighters wouldn’t come anyway,’ Reacher said. ‘If they came to every meth lab that caught on fire, they wouldn’t have time for anything else. Meth labs are accidents waiting to happen.’

‘Where are the people?’

‘Probably just one person. Somewhere around.’

They moved into the clearing, towards the cabin, away from the fire, staying close to the trees. Smoke drifted and light and shadow danced all around them, pagan and elemental. The fire roared on, fifty yards away, undisturbed. The cabin was a simple one-storey affair, with an outhouse in the back. Both unoccupied. No one there. The barn was wide enough for two vehicles, and it had two vehicles in it, a big red Dodge pick-up truck with huge tyres and acres of bulging chrome, brand new, and a red convertible sports car, a Chevrolet Corvette, waxed and gleaming, with tail pipes as big as Reacher’s fists. Also brand new, or close to it.

Reacher said, ‘This country boy is doing well.’

‘No,’ Turner said. ‘Not so well.’

She pointed towards the fire.

The skeleton of the trailer was still visible, twisting and dancing in the flames, and there was burning debris all around it, spilled and fallen, but changing the basic rectangular shape was a flat protrusion on the ground in front of it, like a tongue hanging out of a mouth, something low and rounded and very much on fire, with flames of a different colour and a different intensity. The kind of flames you see if you leave a lamb chop on the grill too long, but a hundred times bigger.

‘I guess he tried to save it,’ Reacher said. ‘Which was dumb. Always better to let it burn.’

‘What are we going to do?’ Turner said.

‘We’re going to make a withdrawal,’ Reacher said. ‘From the ATM. It was a decent-sized lab, and he had a couple of nice cars, so my guess is our credit limit is going to be pretty handsome.’

‘We’re going to take a dead man’s money?’

‘He doesn’t need it any more. And we have eighty cents.’

‘It’s a crime.’

‘It was already a crime. The guy was a dope dealer. And if we don’t take it, the cops will. When they get here tomorrow. Or the day after.’

‘Where is it?’

‘That’s the fun part,’ Reacher said. ‘Finding it.’

‘You’ve done this before, haven’t you?’

‘Usually while they’re still alive. I was planning to take a walk behind Union Station. Think of it like the IRS. We’re government employees, after all.’

‘That’s terrible.’

‘You want to sleep in a bed tonight? You want to eat tomorrow?’

‘Jesus,’ Turner said.

But she searched just as hard as Reacher did. They started in the cabin. The air was stale. There was nothing hidden in the kitchen. No false backs in the cupboards, no fake tins of beans, nothing buried in flour canisters, no voids behind the wall boards. There was nothing in the living room. No trapdoors in the floor, no hollowed-out books, nothing in the sofa cushions, nothing up the chimney. There was nothing in the bedroom, either. No slits in the mattress, no locked drawers in the night table, nothing on top of the wardrobe, and no boxes under the bed.

Turner said, ‘Where next?’

Reacher said, ‘I should have thought of it before.’

‘Where?’

‘Where did this guy feel real private?’

‘This whole place feels real private. It’s a million miles from anywhere.’

‘But where most of all?’

She got it. She nodded. She said, ‘The outhouse.’

It was in the outhouse ceiling. There was a false panel right above the toilet, which Reacher unlatched and handed to Turner. Then he put his arm in the void and felt around and found a plastic tub. He hauled it out. It was the kind of thing he had seen in houseware stores. In it was about four thousand dollars in bricked twenties, and spare keys for the Dodge and the Corvette, and a deed for the property, and a birth certificate for a male child named William Robert Claughton, born in the state of West Virginia forty-seven years previously.

‘Billy Bob,’ Turner said. ‘Rest in peace.’

Reacher bounced the keys in his hand and said, ‘The truck or the sports car?’

‘We’re going to steal his car as well?’

‘They’re already stolen,’ Reacher said. ‘No titles in the box. Probably some tweaker, boosting cars, paying off a debt. And the alternative is walking.’

Turner was quiet a second more, like it was going to be a bridge too far, but then she shook her head and shrugged and said, ‘The sports car, of course.’

So they kept the money and the Corvette key and put the rest of the stuff back in the outhouse ceiling. They hiked over to the barn, and dumped the money in the Corvette’s load space. On the edge of the clearing the fire was still going strong. Reacher tossed the car key to Turner and climbed in the passenger seat. Turner started the engine, and found the headlight switch, and clipped her belt low and tight.

And a minute later they were back on the road, heading west in the dead of night, fast, warm, comfortable, and rich.

TWENTY-EIGHT

TURNER TOOK A
mile to get settled in and then she upped her speed and found a perfect rhythm through the curves. The car felt big and low and hard and brutal. It threw long super-white headlight beams far ahead, and trailed loud V8 burble far behind. She said, ‘We should turn off soon. We can’t stay on this road much longer. One of those cars that came through Berryville was FBI, I think. Did you see it?’