Make Me

He closed the hatch and stepped back.

“Thank you,” Reacher said. “I hope you all have a great day.”

He opened the passenger door and slid into the seat. Beside him Chang slid behind the wheel. They closed their doors as one and Chang fired up the engine. She backed out of her slot, and turned the wheel, and took off forward, out into the plaza, and then north past the diner and the store, to the old wagon train trail, where she turned left and headed west, with the road running straight on ahead of her, forever, until it disappeared in the golden haze on the horizon, at that point as narrow as a needle.

She said, “Are we coming back?”

Reacher took his hand off his gun, for the first time since leaving the motel room.

He said, “I expect we’ll have to come back.”

Chapter 22

They drove three hours, and then stopped for gas and food. Still no cell signal. They figured they might not find one until they were all the way over near the I-25 corridor, deep into Colorado. Another four hours, maybe. In which case they might as well head straight for Colorado Springs, which was where the Ford had been rented, and where planes to LA took off on a regular basis. They agreed LA was next. The telephone was a wonderful invention, but sometimes inadequate. Which meant airport security was in their future, so they stripped the Smiths and dumped their constituent parts in separate trash cans all around the rest stop. Easy come, easy go.

Then Reacher drove the next spell, unlicensed and illegal, but in two hours they saw only two vehicles, neither of which was a cop car. Then Chang took over again, and they drove on, until the golden horizon darkened to gray, which meant civilization was on its way. They talked about what to do with Keever’s valise. Reacher, unsentimental about possessions, was in favor of trashing it. But Chang saw it as a talisman. Like a beacon of hope. She wanted to keep it with them. In the end they compromised. They stopped at a FedEx in a strip mall on the edge of Colorado Springs, and shipped the valise back to the yellow house on the dead-end street, in the faded development north of Oklahoma City. Chang filled out the form with the address, and then after a long hesitation she checked the box for no signature required.

That afternoon eight men met at the counter inside the Mother’s Rest dry goods store. The store owner was already there, with his two shirts and his unkempt hair, and the first to join him was the spare-parts guy from the irrigation store, who was followed by the Cadillac driver, and the one-eyed clerk from the motel, and the hog farmer, and the counterman from the diner, and the Moynahan who had gotten kicked in the balls and had his gun taken.

The eighth man at the meeting came in five minutes later. He was a solid guy, red in the face, fresh from a shower, wearing ironed blue jeans and a dress shirt. He was older than Moynahan and the spare-parts guy and the Cadillac driver, and younger than the motel clerk and the store owner, and about the same age as the hog farmer and the counterman. He had blow-dried hair like a news anchor on TV. The other seven guys stiffened and straightened as he walked in, and fell silent, and waited for him to speak first.

He got straight to the point.

He said, “Are they coming back?”

No one answered. Seven blank looks.

The eighth guy said, “Give me both sides of the argument.”

There was some silence and squirming and shuffling, and then the spare-parts guy said, “They won’t come back because we did our jobs. They got nothing here. No evidence, no witnesses. Why would they come back to a dry hole?”

The Cadillac driver said, “They will come back because this was Keever’s last known location. They’ll come back as many times as it takes. Where else can they start over, when they’re getting nowhere?”

The eighth guy said, “Are we sure they got nothing here?”

The counterman said, “No one talked to them. Not a word.”

The store owner said, “They only used the pay phone once. They tried three numbers, and got no reply from any of them, and then they went away again. That’s not what people do, with red-hot information.”

“So the consensus is they learned nothing?”

“The what?”

“What you all think.”

The Cadillac driver said, “What we all think is they learned less than nothing. They finished up in my store, chasing some non-existent guy named Maloney. They were nowhere. But they’ll still come back. They know Keever was here.”

“So they did learn something.”

The store went quiet.

The one-eyed guy said, “We agreed. It was supposed to look like he wandered off somewhere. We were never going to deny he was here.”

The eighth man said, “What was their attitude as they left?”

The hog farmer said, “The guy was throwing his weight around. Some kind of consolation, I figured. Making himself feel better. Playing the tough guy because he knew he was beat. I think the gal was kind of embarrassed by it.”

“Are they coming back?”

“I vote no.”

“Who votes yes?”