Nothing to Lose

It was unmistakable. A Crown Vic, white and gold, black push bars on the front, a light bar on the roof, antennas on the trunk lid. It nosed out and paused a beat and turned left.

West.

Straight toward Reacher.

Reacher checked his speed. He was doing fifty, which was all that was comfortable. He had no idea of the local limit. He dropped to forty-five, and cruised on. The cop was less than a mile away, coming on fast. Closing speed, more than a hundred miles an hour. Time to contact, approximately thirty-five seconds.

Reacher cruised on.

The sun was behind him, and therefore in the cop’s eyes, which was a good thing. The old Chevy truck had a plain untinted windshield, which was a bad thing. Ten seconds before contact Reacher took his left hand off the wheel and put it against his forehead, like he was massaging his temple against a headache. He kept his speed steady and stared straight ahead.

The cop car blew past.

Reacher put his hand back on the wheel and checked his mirror.

The cop was braking hard.

Reacher kept one eye on the mirror and ran a fast calculation. He had maybe fifteen miles to go before the Hope town line and the arthritic old Chevy would top out at about seventy, max, which gave him a thirteen-minute trip. The Crown Vic was not a fantastically powerful car but the Police Interceptor option pack gave it a low axle ratio for fast acceleration and twin exhausts for better breathing. It would do ninety, comfortably. Therefore it would overhaul him within three minutes, just about level with the abandoned motor court, at the start of twelve whole miles of empty road.

Not good.

Behind him the Crown Vic was pulling through a fast U-turn.

Why?

Despair was a company town but its road had to be a public thoroughfare. Any Hope resident would use it to head home off the Interstate. Some Kansas residents would do the same. Unfamiliar vehicles in Despair could not possibly be rarities.

Reacher checked the mirror again. The Crown Vic was accelerating after him. Nose high, tail squatting low.

Maybe the security guy in the counterclockwise Tahoe had called it in. Maybe he had seen Reacher’s face and recognized it. Maybe the deputies from the family restaurant took turns as the security drivers.

Reacher drove on. He hit the first downtown block.

Ten blocks ahead, a second Crown Vic pulled out.

And stopped, dead across the road.

Reacher braked hard and hauled on the wheel and pulled a fast right into the checkerboard of downtown streets. A desperation move. He was the worst guy in the world to win a car chase. He wasn’t a great driver. He had taken the evasive-driving course at Fort Rucker during the MP Officers’ Basic School and had impressed nobody. He had scraped a passing grade, mostly out of charity. A year later the school had moved to Fort Leonard Wood and the obstacle course had gotten harder and he knew he would have failed it. Time and chance. Sometimes it helps a person.

Sometimes it leaves a person unprepared.

He hit three four-way stops in succession and turned left, right, left without pausing or thinking. The streets were boxed in tight by dour brick buildings but his sense of direction was better than his driving and he knew he was heading east again. Downtown traffic was light. He got held up by a woman driving slow in an old Pontiac but the blocks were short and he solved his problem by turning right and left again and bypassing her one block over.

The chase car didn’t show behind him. Statistics were on his side. He figured the downtown area was about twelve blocks square, which meant there were about 288 distinct lengths of road between opportunities to turn off, which meant that if he kept moving, the chances of direct confrontation were pretty low.

But the chances of ever getting out of the maze were pretty low, too. As long as the second cop was blocking Main Street at its eastern end, then Hope was unavailable as a destination. And presumably the metal plant Tahoes were on duty to the west. And presumably Despair was full of helpful citizens with four-wheel-drive SUVs that would be a lot quicker over open ground than Vaughan’s ancient Chevy. They could get up a regular posse.

Reacher turned a random left, just to keep moving. The chase car flashed through the intersection, dead ahead. It moved left to right and disappeared. Reacher turned left on the same street and saw it in his mirror, moving away from him. Now he was heading west. His gas tank was more than a quarter full. He turned right at the next four-way and headed north two blocks to Main Street. He turned east there and took a look ahead.