A Wanted Man (7 page)

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
.

Chapter 13

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 tires, 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 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, toward 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 as many as nine times, and once as many as thirteen straight flutters of her eyelids.

Reacher stared in surprise.

Then the semi 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 maneuvers. And some kind of Midwestern goodwill or common sense was in play. There was plenty of
after you, neighbor
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.

Chapter 14

Nine minutes, Reacher thought. Not ten. He had
overestimated 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 length he traveled. 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 nighttime 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 they 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 toward 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.

Chapter 15

The address Missy Smith had given to Sheriff Goodman
turned out to be what is left when a family farm gets sold to a home-building 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, gray roofs, front lawns, short straight driveways, and mailboxes at the curb, 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 neighbor’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 pajamas. He was middle-aged and gray. She asked him if he had seen his neighbor come home that night.

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

She asked him if his neighbor lived alone.

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

She asked him if his neighbor 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 neighbor always drove to work.

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

She asked him if his neighbor’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 neighbor 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 neighbor 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 neighbor and the guy hoped nothing bad had happened to her.