FORTY

IT WAS DOROTHY COE COMING IN FROM THE EAST, IN HER RATTY OLD pick-up truck. Reacher knew it a second after he saw her lights. He could hear her holed muffler banging away like a motorcycle. Like a Harley Davidson moving away from a stoplight. She came on fast and then she braked hard and stopped dead and stood off just short of the house. She had seen the gold Yukon on the driveway. She had recognized it, presumably. A Cornhusker's car. She probably knew it well. The doctor's wife stepped out to the hallway and undid the locks and the chain and opened the front door and waved. Dorothy Coe didn't move an inch. Twenty-five years of habitual caution. She thought it could be a trick or a decoy. Reacher joined the doctor's wife on the step. He pointed to the Yukon and then to himself. Big gestures, like semaphore. My truck. Dorothy Coe moved on again and turned in. She shut down and got out and walked to the door. She had a wool hat pulled down over her ears and she was wearing a quilted coat open over a grey dress. She asked, 'Did the Cornhuskers come here?'

The doctor's wife said, 'Not yet.'

'What do you think they want?'

'We don't know.'

They all stepped back inside and the doctor closed up after them, locks and chain, and they went back to the dining room, now four of them. Dorothy Coe took off her coat, because of the heat. They sat in a line and watched the window like a movie screen. Dorothy Coe was next to Reacher. He asked her, 'They didn't go to your place?'

She said, 'No. But Mr Vincent saw one, passing the motel. About twenty minutes ago. He was watching out the window.'

Reacher said, 'That was me. I came in that way, in the truck I took. There are only five of them left now.'

'OK. I understand. But that concerns me a little.'

'Why?'

'I would expect at least one of us to have seen at least one of them, roaming around somewhere. But no one has. Which means they aren't all spread out. They're all bunched up. They're hunting in a pack.'

'Looking for me?'

'Possibly.'

'Then I don't want to bring them here. Want me to leave?'

'Maybe,' Dorothy said.

'Yes,' the doctor said.

'No,' his wife said.

Impasse. No decision. They all turned back to the window and watched the road. It stayed dark. The cloud was clearing a little. There was faint moonlight in the sky. It was almost one o'clock in the morning.

The motel was closed down for the night, but Vincent was still in the lounge. He was still watching out the window. He had seen the gold Yukon go by. He had recognized it. He had seen it before, many times. It belonged to a young man called John. A very unpleasant person. A bully, even by Duncan standards. Once he had made Vincent get down on his knees and beg not to be beaten. Beg, like a dog, with limp hands held up, pleading and howling, five whole minutes.

Vincent had called in the Yukon sighting, to the phone tree, and then he had gone back to the window and watched some more. Twenty minutes had gone by without incident. Then he saw the five men everyone was talking about. Their strange little convoy pulled into his lot. The blue Chevrolet, the red Ford, Seth Duncan's black Cadillac. He knew from the phone tree that someone else was using Seth's car. No one knew how or why. But he saw the guy. A small man slid out of the driver's seat, rumpled and unshaven, foreign, like people from the Middle East he had seen on the news. Then the two men who had roughed him up climbed out of the Chevrolet. Then two more got out of the Ford, tall, heavy, dark-skinned. Also foreign. They all stood together in the gloom.

Vincent didn't automatically think the five men were there for him. There could be other reasons. His lot was the only stopping place for miles. Plenty of drivers used it, for all kinds of purposes, passers-by checking their maps, taking off their coats, getting things from the trunk, sometimes just stretching their legs. It was private property, no question, properly deeded, but it was used almost like a public facility, like a regular roadside turnout.

He watched. The five men were talking. His windows were ordinary commercial items, chosen by his parents in 1969. They were screened on the inside and opened outward, with little winding handles. Vincent thought about opening the one he was standing behind. Just a crack. It was almost an obligation. He might hear what the five men were saying. He might get valuable information, for the phone tree. Everyone was expected to contribute. That was how the system worked. So he started to turn the handle, slowly, a little at a time. At first it went easily. But then it went stiff. The casement was stuck to the insulating strip. Paint and grime and long disuse. He used finger and thumb, and tried to ease some steady pressure into it. He wanted to pop it loose gently. He didn't want to make a loud plastic sound. The five men were still talking. Or rather, the man from the Cadillac was talking, and the other four were listening.

* * *

Mahmeini's man was saying, 'I let my partner out a mile back. He's going to work behind the lines. He's more use to me that way. Pincer movements are always best.'

Roberto Cassano said, 'Is he going to coordinate with the rest of us?'

'Of course he is. What else would he do? We're a team, aren't we?'

'You should have kept him around. We need to make a plan first.'

'For this? We don't need to make a plan. It's just flushing a guy out. How hard can it be? You said it yourself, the locals will help.'

'They're all asleep.'

'We'll wake them up. With a bit of luck we'll get it done before morning.'

'And then what?'

'Then we'll spend the day leaning on the Duncans. We all need that delivery, and since we all had to drag ourselves up here, we might as well all spend our time on what's important.'

'So where do we start?'

'You tell me. You've spent time here.'

'The doctor,' Cassano said. 'He's the weakest link.'

Mahmeini's man said, 'So where's the doctor?'

'South and west of here.'

'OK, go talk to him. I'll go somewhere else.'

'Why?'

'Because if you know he's the weakest link, then so does Reacher. Dollars to doughnuts, he ain't there. So you go waste your time, and I'll go do some work.'

Vincent gave up on cracking the window. He could tell there was no way it would open without a ripping sound, and drawing attention right then would not be a good idea. And the impromptu conference in his lot was breaking up anyway. The small rumpled man slid back into Seth Duncan's Cadillac and the big black car crunched through a wide arc over the gravel. Its headlight beams swept across Vincent's window. He ducked just in time. Then the Cadillac turned left on the two-lane and took off south.

The other four men stayed right where they were. They watched until the Cadillac's tail lights were lost to sight, and then they turned back and started talking again, face to face in pairs, each one of them with his right hand in his right-hand coat pocket, for some strange reason, all four of them symmetrical, like a formal tableau.

Roberto Cassano watched the Cadillac go and said, 'He doesn't have a partner. There's nobody working behind the lines. What lines, anyway? It's all bullshit.'

Safir's main man said, 'Of course he has a partner. We all saw him, right there in your room.'

'He's gone. He ran out. He took whatever car they rented. That guy is on his own now. He stole that Cadillac from the lot. We saw it there earlier.'

No reply.

Cassano said, 'Unless one of you had a hand in it. Or both of you.'

'What are you saying?'

'We're all grown-ups here,' Cassano said. 'We know how the world works. So let's not pretend we don't. Mahmeini told his guys to take the rest of us out, and Safir told you guys to take the rest of us out, and Rossi sure as hell told us to take the rest of you out. I'm being honest here. Mahmeini and Safir and Rossi are all the same. They all want the whole pie. We all know that.'

Safir's guy said, 'We didn't do anything. We figured you did. We were talking about it all the way up here. It was obvious that Cadillac isn't a rental.'

'We didn't do anything to the guy. We were going to wait for later.'

'Us too.'

'You sure?'

'Yes.'

'Swear?'

'You swear first.'

Cassano said, 'On my mother's grave.'

Safir's guy said, 'On mine too. So what happened?'

'He ran out. Must have. Maybe chicken. Or short on discipline. Maybe Mahmeini isn't what we think he is. Which raises possibilities.'

Nobody spoke.

Cassano said, 'We have a vote here, don't you think? The four of us? We could take out Mahmeini's other boy, and leave each other alone. That way Rossi and Safir end up with fifty per cent more pie each. They could live with that. And we sure as hell could.'

'Like a truce?'

'Truces are temporary. Call it an alliance. That's permanent.' Nobody spoke. Safir's guys glanced at each other. Not a difficult decision. A two-front war, or a one-front war? History was positively littered with examples of smart people choosing the latter over the former.

Vincent was still watching out the window. He saw quiet conversation, low tones, some major tension there, then some easing, the body language relaxing, some speculative looks, some tentative smiles. Then all four men took their hands out of their pockets and shook, four separate ways, wrists crossing, some pats on the back, some slaps on the shoulder. Four new friends, all suddenly getting along just great.

There was a little more talk after that, all of it fast and breezy, like simple obvious steps were being planned and confirmed, and then there were more pats on the back and slaps on the shoulder, all shuffling mobile catch you later kind of stuff, and then the two big dark-skinned men climbed back into their red Ford. They closed their doors and got set to go and then the Italian who had done all the talking suddenly remembered something and turned back and tapped on the driver's glass.

The window came down.

The Italian had a gun in his hand.

The Italian leaned in and there were two bright flashes, one hard after the other, like orange camera strobes right there inside the car, behind the glass, all six windows lighting up, and two loud explosions, then a pause, then two more, two more bright flashes, two more loud explosions, evenly spaced, carefully placed.

Then the Italian stepped away and Vincent saw the two dark-skinned men all slumped down in their seats, somehow suddenly much smaller, deflated, diminished, smeared with dark matter, their heads lolling down on their chests, their heads altered and misshapen, parts of their heads actually missing.

Vincent fell to the floor under the inside sill of his window and vomited in his throat. Then he ran for the phone.

Angelo Mancini opened the red Ford's trunk and found two nylon roll-aboard suitcases, which more or less confirmed a personal theory of his. Real men carried their bags. They didn't wheel them around like women. He unzipped one of the bags and rooted around and came up with a bunch of shirts on wire hangers, all folded together concertina-style. He took one and tore it off the hanger and crushed the hanger flat and opened the Ford's filler neck and used the hanger to poke the shirt down into the tube, one sleeve in, the body all bunched up, the other sleeve trailing out. He lit the trailing cuff with a paper match from a book he had taken from the diner near the Marriott. Then he walked away and got in the blue Chevrolet's passenger seat and Roberto Cassano drove him away.

The road beyond the post-and-rail fence outside the dining room window stayed dark. The doctor got up and left the room and came back with four mugs of fresh coffee on a plastic tray. His wife sat quiet. Next to her Dorothy Coe sat quiet. The sisterhood, enduring, waiting it out. Just one long night out of more than nine thousand in the last twenty-five years, most of them tranquil, presumably, but some of them not. Nine thousand separate sunsets, each one of them heralding who knew what.

Reacher was waiting it out, too. He knew that Dorothy wanted to ask what he had found in the county archive. But she was taking her time getting around to it, and that was OK with him. He wasn't about to bring it up unannounced. He had dealt with his fair share of other people's tragedy, all of it bad, none of it easy, but he figured there was nothing worse than the Coe family story. Nothing at all. So he waited, ten silent minutes, then fifteen, and finally she asked, 'Did they still have the files?'

He answered, 'Yes, they did.'

'Did you see them?'

'Yes, I did.'

'Did you see her photograph?'

'She was very beautiful.'

'Wasn't she?' Dorothy said, smiling, not with pride, because the kid's beauty was not her achievement, but with simple wonderment. She said, 'I still miss her. Which I think is strange, really, because the things I miss are the things I actually had, and they would be gone now anyway. The things I didn't get to see would have happened afterwards. She would be thirty-three now. All grown up. And I don't miss those things, because I don't have a clear picture of what they might have been. I don't know what she might have become. I don't know if she would have been a mother herself, and stayed around here, or if she would have been a career girl, maybe a lawyer or a scientist, living far away in a big city.'

'Did she do well in school?'

'Very well.'

'Any favourite subjects?'

'All of them.'

'Where was she going that day?'

'She loved flowers. I like to think she was going searching for some.'

'Did she roam around often?'

'Most days, when she wasn't in school. Sundays especially. She loved her bike. She was always going somewhere. Those were innocent times. She did the same things I did, when I was eight.'

Reacher paused a beat and said, 'I was a cop of sorts for a long time. So may I ask you a serious question?'

She said, 'Yes.'

'Do you really want to know what happened to her?'

'Can't be worse than what I imagine.'

Reacher said, 'I'm afraid it can. And it sometimes is. That's why I asked. Sometimes it's better not to know.'

She didn't speak for a long moment.

Then she said, 'My neighbour's son hears her ghost screaming.'

'I met him,' Reacher said. 'He smokes a lot of weed.'

'I hear it too, sometimes. Or I think I do. It makes me wonder.'

'I don't believe in ghosts.'

'Neither do I, really. I mean, look at me.'

Reacher did. A solid, capable woman, about sixty years old, blunt and square, worn down by work, worn down by hardship, fading slowly to grey.

She said, 'Yes, I really want to know what happened to her.'

Reacher said, 'OK.'

Two minutes later the phone rang. An old-fashioned instrument. The slow peal of a mechanical bell, a low sonorous sound, doleful and not at all urgent. The doctor's wife jumped up and ran out to the hallway to answer. She said hello, but nothing more. She just listened. The phone tree again. The others heard the thin distorted crackle of a loud panicked voice from the earpiece, and they sensed a gasping shuffle out there in the hallway. Some kind of surprising news. Dorothy Coe fidgeted in her chair. The doctor got to his feet. Reacher watched the window. The road stayed dark.

The doctor's wife came back in, more puzzled than worried, more amazed than frightened. She said, 'Mr Vincent just saw the Italians shoot the men from the red car. With a gun. They're dead. Then they set the car on fire. Right outside his window. In the motel lot.'

Nobody spoke, until Reacher said, 'Well, that changes things a little.'

'How?'

'I thought maybe we had six guys working for the same organization, with some kind of a two-way relationship, them and the Duncans. But we don't. They're three pairs. Three separate organizations, plus the Duncans make four. Which makes it a food chain. The Duncans owe somebody something, and that somebody owes somebody else, and so on, all the way up the line. They're all invested, and they're all here to safeguard their investment. And as long as they're all here, they're all trying to cut each other out. They're all trying to shorten the chain.'

'So we're caught in the middle of a gang war?'

'Look on the bright side. Six guys showed up this afternoon, and now there are only three of them left. Fifty per cent attrition. That works for me.'

The doctor said, 'We should call the police.'

His wife said, 'No, the police are sixty miles away. And the Cornhuskers are right here, right now. That's what we need to worry about tonight. We need to know what they're doing.'

Reacher asked, 'How do they normally communicate?'

'Cell phone.'

'I've got one,' Reacher said. 'In the truck I took. Maybe we could listen in. Then we'd know for sure what they're doing.'

The doctor undid the locks and unlatched the chain and they all crowded out to the driveway. Reacher opened the Yukon's passenger door and rooted around in the foot well and came out with the cell phone, slim and black, like a candy bar. He stood in the angle of the door and flipped it open and said, 'They'll use conference calls, right? This thing will ring and all five of them will be on?'

'More likely vibrate, not ring,' the doctor said. 'Check the settings and the call register and the address book. You should be able to find an access number.'

'You check,' Reacher said. 'I'm not familiar with cell phones.' He tracked around the back of the truck and handed the phone to the doctor. Then he looked to his left and saw light in the mist to the east. A high hemispherical glow, trembling, bouncing, weakening and strengthening and weakening, very white, almost blue.

A car, coming west towards them, pretty fast.

It was about half a mile away. Just like before, the misty glow resolved itself to a fierce source low down above the surface of the road, then to twin fierce sources, spaced just feet apart, oval in shape, low to the ground, blue-white and intense. And just like before, the ovals kept on coming, getting closer, flickering and jittering because of firm suspension and fast steering. They looked small at first, because of the distance, and they stayed small because they were small, because the car was a Mazda Miata, low and tiny and red. Reacher recognized it about two hundred feet out.

Eleanor Duncan.

The sisterhood, clustering together.

A hundred feet out the Mazda slowed a little. Its top was up this time, like a tight little hat. Cold weather, no further need for instant identification. No more sentries to distract.

Fifty feet out, it braked hard, ready for the turn in, and red light flared in the mist behind it.

Twenty feet out, it swung wide and started to turn.

Ten feet out, Reacher remembered three things.

First, Eleanor Duncan was not on the phone tree.

Second, his gun was in his coat.

Third, his coat was in the kitchen.

The Mazda swung in fast and crunched over the gravel and jammed to a stop right behind Dorothy Coe's pick-up. The door opened wide and Seth Duncan unfolded his lanky frame and stepped out.

He was holding a shotgun.