Running Blind

He fell silent. He was picturing Rita Scimeca in his mind, and imagining her standing shoulder to shoulder with Alison Lamarr. Two fine women, as good as any the Army would ever get.

“So here’s another puzzle,” he said. “How is the guy controlling them?”

“Controlling?” Harper repeated.

Reacher nodded. “Think about it. He gets into their houses, and thirty minutes later they’re dead in the tub, naked, not a mark on them. No disturbance, no mess. How is he doing that?”

“Points a gun, I guess.”

Reacher shook his head. “Two things wrong with that. If he’s coming in by plane, he doesn’t have a gun. You can’t bring a gun on a plane. You know that, right? You didn’t bring yours.”

“If he’s coming in by plane. That’s only a guess right now.”

“OK, but I was just thinking about Rita Scimeca. She was a real tough cookie. She was raped, which is how she got on this guy’s list, I guess, because three men went to prison and got canned for it. But five guys came to get her that night. Only three of them got as far as raping her, because one guy got a broken pelvis and another guy got two broken arms. In other words, she fought like hell.”

“So?”

“So wouldn’t Alison Lamarr have done the same thing? Even if the guy did have a gun, would Alison Lamarr have been meek and passive for thirty straight minutes?”

“I don’t know,” Harper said.

“You saw her. She was no kind of a wallflower. She was Army. She had infantry training. Either she’d have gotten mad and started a fight, or she’d have bided her time and tried to nail the guy somewhere along the way. But she didn’t, apparently. Why not?”

“I don’t know,” Harper said again.

“Neither do I,” Reacher said back.

“We have to find this guy.”

Reacher shook his head. “You’re not going to.”

“Why not?”

“Because you’re all so blinded by this profiling shit you’re wrong about the motive, is why not.”

Harper turned away and stared out of the window at the blackness speeding past.

“You want to amplify that?” she said.

“Not until I get Blake and Lamarr sitting still and paying attention. I’m only going to say it once.”

THEY STOPPED FOR gas just after they crossed the Columbia River outside of Richland. Reacher filled the tank and Harper went inside to the bathroom. Then she came out again and got into the car on the driver’s side, ready for her three hours at the wheel. She slid her seat forward while he slid his backward. Raked her hair behind her shoulders and adjusted the mirror. Twisted the key and fired it up. Took off again south and eased her way up to a cruise.

They crossed the Columbia again after it looped away west and then they were in Oregon. I-84 followed the river, right on the state line. It was a fast, empty highway. Up ahead, the vastness of the Cascade Range loomed unseen in the blackness. The stars burned cold and tiny in the sky. Reacher lay back in his seat and watched them through the curve of the side glass, where it met the roof. It was nearly midnight.

“You need to talk to me,” Harper said. “Or I’ll fall asleep at the wheel.”

“You’re as bad as Lamarr,” Reacher said.

Harper grinned in the dark. “Not quite.”

“No, not quite, I guess,” Reacher said.

“But talk to me anyway. Why did you leave the Army?”

“That’s what you want to talk about?”

“It’s a topic, I guess.”

“Why does everybody ask me that?”

She shrugged. “People are curious.”

“Why? Why shouldn’t I leave the Army?”

“Because I think you enjoyed it. Like I enjoy the FBI.”

“A lot of it was very irritating.”

She nodded. “Sure. The Bureau’s very irritating too. Like a husband, I guess. Good points and bad points, but they’re my points, you know what I mean? You don’t get a divorce because of a little irritation.”

“They downsized me out of there,” he said.

“No, they didn’t. We read your record. They downsized numbers, but they didn’t target you. You volunteered to go.”

He was quiet for a mile or two. Then he nodded.

“I got scared,” he said.

She glanced at him. “Of what?”

“I liked it the way it was. I didn’t want it to change.”

“Into what?”

“Something smaller, I guess. It was a huge, huge thing. You’ve got no idea. It stretched all around the world. They were going to make it smaller. I’d have gotten promotion, so I would have been higher up in a smaller organization.”

“What’s wrong with that? Big fish in a small pond, right?”

“I didn’t want to be a big fish,” he said. “I liked being a small fish.”

“You weren’t a small fish,” she said. “A major isn’t small.”

He nodded. “OK, I liked being a medium-sized fish. It was comfortable. Kind of anonymous.”

She shook her head. “That’s not enough reason to quit.”

He looked up at the stars. They were stationary in the sky, a billion miles above him.

“A big fish in a small pond has no place to swim,” he said. “I’d have been in one place, years at a time. Some big desk someplace, then five years on, another bigger desk some other place. Guy like me, no political skills, no social graces, I’d have made full colonel and no farther. I’d have served out my time stuck there. Could have been fifteen or twenty years.”

“But?”

“But I wanted to keep moving. All my life, I’ve been moving, literally. I was scared to stop. I didn’t know what being stuck somewhere would feel like, but my guess was I’d hate it.”

“And?”

He shrugged. “And now I am stuck someplace.”

“And?” she said again.

He shrugged again and said nothing. It was warm in the car. Warm, and comfortable.

“Say the words, Reacher,” she said. “Get it out. You’re stuck someplace, and?”

“And nothing.”

“Bullshit, nothing. And?”

He took a deep breath. “And I’m having a problem with it.”

The car went quiet. She nodded, like she understood. “Jodie doesn’t want to keep moving around, I guess.”

“Well, would you?”

“I don’t know.”

He nodded. “Problem is, she does know. She and I grew up the same, always moving, base to base to base, all around the world, a month here, six months there. So she lives the life she lives because she went out there and created it for herself, because it’s exactly what she wants. She knows it’s exactly what she wants because she knows exactly what the alternative is.”

“She could move around a little. She’s a lawyer. She could change jobs, time to time.”

He shook his head. “Doesn’t work that way. It’s about career. She’ll make partner sometime real soon, the way she’s going, and then she’ll probably work at the same firm her whole life. And anyway, I’m not talking about a couple of years here, three years there, buy a house, sell a house. I’m talking about if I wake up in Oregon tomorrow and I feel like going to Oklahoma or Texas or somewhere, I just go. With no idea about where I’m going