A Wanted Man (8 page)

Sorenson thanked him and told him he was free to go back to bed. The guy said he hoped he had been helpful. Sorenson said he had been. The guy said if she wanted to know more, she should go talk to the other neighbor. They were closer. Friends, really. They did things for each other. For instance, Mrs. Delfuenso’s kid slept over there, while Mrs. Delfuenso was working.

Sorenson said, “Karen has a child?”

“A daughter,” the guy said. “Ten years old. Same as the neighbor’s girl. The kids sleep over there and then Mrs. Delfuenso takes over and gives them breakfast and drives them to the school bus in the morning.”

Chapter 16

Reacher had never been hypnotized, but in his opinion
driving empty highways at night came close. Basal and cognitive demands were so low they could be met by the smallest sliver of the brain. The rest coasted. The front half had nothing to do, and the back half had nothing to fight. The very definition of relaxation. Time and distance seemed suspended. The Dodge’s tail lights would be forever distant. Reacher felt he could drive a thousand hours and never catch them.

Normally numbers would fill the void in his head. Not that he was a particularly competent mathematician. But numbers called to him, twisting and turning and revealing their hidden facets. Perhaps he would glance down and see that he was doing 76 miles an hour, and he would see that 76 squared was 5,776, which ended in 76, where it started, which made 76 an automorphic number, one of only two below 100, the other being 25, whose square was 625, whose square was 390,625, which was interesting.

Or perhaps he would take advantage of the fact that all the cops for miles around were on roadblock duty behind him, and let his speed creep up to 81, and muse about how one divided by 81 expressed as a decimal came out as .0123456789, which then recurred literally forever, 0123456789 over and over and over again, until
the end of time, longer even than it would take to catch up to the Dodge.

But that night words came to him first.

Specifically four words, spoken by Alan King:
Plus whatever Karen wants
. The coffee order. Two with cream and sugar,
Plus whatever Karen wants
. Which attacked Reacher’s impression of them as a team. Team members knew each other’s coffee orders by heart. They had stood on line together a hundred times, in rest areas, in airports, at Starbucks, at shabby no-name shacks. They had ordered together in diners and in restaurants. They had fetched and carried for each other.

But King had not known how Karen liked her coffee.

Therefore Karen was not a team member, or not a regular team member, or perhaps she was a new team member. A recent addition to the roster. Which might explain why she wasn’t talking. Perhaps she felt unsure of her place. Perhaps she simply didn’t like her new associates. Perhaps they didn’t like her. Certainly Alan King had spoken impatiently and even contemptuously about her, right in her presence. Like she wasn’t there. He had said,
Karen doesn’t drive
. After she hadn’t ordered coffee, he had said,
Nothing for Karen, then
.

They were not a trio. King and McQueen were a duo, barely tolerating an interloper.

Sorenson met Goodman
back on Karen Delfuenso’s empty oil-stained driveway, and she told him about Delfuenso’s kid.

“Jesus,” Goodman said. He glanced at the other neighbor’s house. “And the kid is in there now?”

“Unless she sleepwalks. And she’s expecting to see her mommy in the morning.”

“We shouldn’t tell her. Not yet. Not until we’re sure.”

“We’re not going to tell her. Not now. But we have to talk to the neighbor. It’s still possible this whole thing is nothing. Something innocent might have come up, and Karen might have left a message.”

“You think?”

“No, not really. But we have to check.”

So they cut across the other lawn together and Sorenson tried to weight her knock so that a sleeping adult might hear it, but sleeping children wouldn’t. Hard to do. Her first attempt woke nobody. Her second might have woken everybody. Certainly it brought a tired woman of about thirty to the door.

There had been no message from Karen Delfuenso.

Chapter 17

The next words into Reacher’s empty mind had been
spoken by the grizzled old State Police sergeant:
Not you
. Eventually they led to numbers, first six, then three, then one. Six because they contained six letters, and three because each word had three letters, and taken together they had three vowels and three consonants. Reacher had no patience for people who claimed that y was a vowel.

Three, and six.

Good numbers.

A circle could be drawn through any three points not on a straight line.

Take any three consecutive numbers, the largest divisible by three, and add them up, and then add the digits of the result, again and again if necessary, until just a single number is left.

That number will be six.

But eventually the words
Not you
led past the number six, and then past the number three, and then all the way down to the number one, simply because of their content. Reacher had asked:
Who are you looking for, sergeant?
The sergeant had answered:
Not you
. Not:
Not you guys
or
not you people
.

Not you
.

They were looking for a lone individual.

Which was consistent with what had happened at the earlier roadblock.
Reacher had gotten a better view back there, and he had seen men driving alone getting extra scrutiny.

But:
Not you
.

Which meant that the cops had at least a rough description of the guy they were looking for, and that Reacher categorically wasn’t that guy. Why not? There could be a million reasons. Right off the bat Reacher was tall, white, old, and heavy. And so on, and so forth. Therefore the target might be short, black, young, and skinny. And so on, and so forth.

But the sergeant had paused first, and thought, and smiled. The
Not you
had been emphatic, and a little wry. Maybe even a little rueful. As if the difference between Reacher and the description had been a total contrast. Or completely drastic. But it wasn’t possible to be drastically tall, unless they were looking for a dwarf or a midget, in which case the merest glance into the car would have sufficed. It wasn’t possible to be drastically white. White or black was an everyday difference. No one thought of degrees of blackness or whiteness. Not anymore. Reacher wasn’t drastically old either, unless their target was a fetus. And Reacher wasn’t outstandingly heavy, unless their target was practically skeletal.

Not you
. Said right after Reacher’s deliberate mistake about the guy’s rank, which would have been understood as a pro-forma compliment, just one regular guy to another, probably one veteran to another. Common ground.

Not you
. Emphatic, wry, rueful, and good natured. Just one regular guy to another, one vet to another, right back, equally. Still surfing on the earlier stuff about the busted nose. Referring back to it, in a way. A continuation of the banter. Common ground, established and repeated.

Therefore the guy they were looking for didn’t have a busted nose.

But then, most people didn’t have a busted nose.

Which meant the sergeant had been generalizing. As if to say:
I’m pretty sure our description would have included that nose of yours, for instance
.

Which meant they had been told their target didn’t have anything especially noticeable about him. No first-glance singularities. Nothing
obvious. No scars, no tattoos, no missing ears, no glass eyes, no yard-long beard, no weird haircut.

Reacher had been a cop for thirteen years, and he remembered the rote expression very well:
No distinguishing marks
.

Sorenson and Goodman
stepped over the muddy gutter again and climbed back into Goodman’s car and Sorenson said, “You should check in with your dispatcher. You should see if anyone reported a lone woman wandering about, maybe confused or disoriented. From now on our working hypothesis is that the two guys stole Delfuenso’s car. And they might have hit her over the head to get it.”

“They might have killed her.”

“We have to hope for the best. So you should get your deputies to check the area behind the lounge, too. Very carefully. She could be unconscious in the shadows somewhere.”

“By now she’d be halfway frozen to death.”

“So you should do it quickly.”

So Goodman got on the radio, and Sorenson got on her cell, to check in with the distant troopers in two separate states. They were both negative on a pair of men traveling together, with average appearance and no distinguishing marks, and they were negative on bloodstained clothing, and they were negative on bladed weapons. Sorenson did the math in her head. The two guys were almost certainly already through. Time and space said so. But she asked the troopers to stay in place for another hour. The two guys could have had a flat tire. Or some other kind of unexpected delay. She didn’t want to have the roadblocks dismantled only for the guys to roll through the vacated space five minutes later.

Then she clicked off her call and Goodman told her his dispatcher hadn’t heard a thing, and that all his deputies were searching hard, behind the Sin City lounge and all over town.

Chapter 18

Reacher drove on, with Alan King fast asleep next to him
and Don McQueen fast asleep behind him. Karen Delfuenso was still awake, still upright and tense. Reacher could feel her gaze on his face in the mirror. He glanced up and made eye contact. She was staring at him. Staring hard, as if mutely willing him to understand something.

Understand what? Then numbers came back to him, this time specifically thirteen, and two, and three, and one, and nine. Delfuenso had blinked out those numbers, in five separate sequences, between emphatic shakes of her head.

Why?

Communication of some kind?

A simple alphabetical code? The thirteenth letter of the alphabet was
M
. The second was
B
. The third was
C
. The first was
A
. The ninth was
I
.

MBCAI
.

Not a word. Not a Roman numeral. A corporation? An organization? An acronym, like SNAFU or FUBAR?

Reacher looked way ahead into the darkness and fixed the upcoming mile in his mind, all four dimensions, and then he met Delfuenso’s eyes in the mirror again and silently mouthed the letters, all lips and teeth and tongue and exaggerated enunciation:
M, B, C, A, I?

Delfuenso glared back at him, eyes bright, half ecstatic that he was trying, half furious that he wasn’t getting it, like a thirsty woman who sees an offered drink snatched away.

She shook her head.
No
. She jerked her chin once to the left, and then once to the right. She stared hard at him, eyes wide, as if to say,
See?

Reacher didn’t see. Not immediately. Except to grasp that maybe the jerk to the left signified one thing, and the jerk to the right signified another thing. Two different categories. Perhaps the blinks preceded by the jerks to the left were letters, and the blinks preceded by the jerks to the right were numbers. Or vice-versa.

M-2-C-A-1?

13-B-3-1-I?

Then Alan King stirred and woke up and moved in his seat, and Reacher saw Delfuenso turn her face away and stare out her window.

King looked at Reacher and asked, “You OK?”

Reacher nodded but said nothing.

King said, “You need another aspirin?”

Reacher shook his head, no.

King said, “Karen, give this guy another aspirin.”

No answer from Delfuenso.

King said, “Karen?”

Reacher said, “I don’t need another aspirin.”

“You look like you do. Karen, give him a couple.”

“Maybe Karen needs her aspirins for herself.”

“She can share.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“But you look zoned out.”

“I’m just concentrating on the road ahead.”

“No, you look like you’re thinking about something.”

“I’m always thinking about something.”

“Like what?”

“Right now, a challenge,” Reacher said.

“What kind?”

“Can you talk coherently and at normal speed for a whole minute?”

“What?”

“You heard.”

King paused.

“Yes,” he said. “Of course I can.”

“Can you talk coherently and at normal speed for a whole minute without using a word that contains the letter
A
?”

“That would be tougher,” King said. “Impossible, probably. Lots of words contain the letter
A
.”

Reacher nodded. “You just used three of them. Total of eighteen since you woke up ten seconds ago.”

“So it’s a stupid challenge.”

“No, it’s an easy challenge,” Reacher said.

“How?”

“I’ll tell you later,” Reacher said. “Go back to sleep.”

“No, tell me now.”

“I’ll tell you later,” Reacher said again. “Think of it as something to look forward to.”

So King shrugged and then stared into space for a minute, distracted, maybe a little disgruntled, maybe even a little angry, but then he turned away and closed his eyes again.

Reacher drove on, and started thinking about the twin roadblocks they had passed through. Eight cars and eight officers in each location, with flashlights and plenty of time for close scrutiny. He imagined himself a wanted man of average appearance, traveling alone, suddenly at risk and vulnerable, perhaps anticipating those roadblocks up ahead. What could such a man do to prepare?

He could disguise one or other of those fatal tells, that’s what he could do.

He could alter his average appearance, with makeup or putty or wigs or fake piercings or fake tattoos or fake scars.

But that would not be easy, without skills and practice. And that would not be easy at short notice, either.