the next day.”
“A wanderer.”
“It’s important to me.”
“How important, though?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know, exactly.”
“How are you going to find out?”
“Problem is, I
“So what are you going to do?”
He was quiet for another mile.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“You might get used to it.”
“I might,” he said. “But I might not. It feels awful deep in my blood. Like right now, middle of the night, heading down the road someplace I’ve never been, I feel real good. I just can’t explain how good I feel.”
She smiled. “Maybe it’s the company.”
He smiled back. “Maybe it is.”
“So will you tell me something else?”
“Like what?”
“Why are we wrong about this guy’s motive?”
He shook his head. “Wait until we see what we find in Portland.”
“What are we going to find in Portland?”
“My guess is a carton full of paint cans, with absolutely no clue as to where they came from or who sent them there.”
“So?”
“So then we put two and two together and make four. The way you guys have got it, you ain’t making four. You’re making some big inexplicable number that’s a long, long way from four.”
REACHER RACKED HIS seat back a little more and dozed through most of Harper’s final hour at the wheel. The second-to-last leg of the trip took them up the northern flank of Mount Hood on Route 35. The Buick changed down to third gear to cope with the gradient, and the jerk from the transmission woke him again. He watched through the windshield as the road looped around behind the peak. Then Harper found Route 26 and swung west for the final approach, down the mountainside, toward the city of Portland.
The nighttime view was spectacular. There was broken cloud high in the sky, and a bright moon, and starlight. There was snow piled in the gullies. The world was like a jagged sculpture in gray steel, glowing below them.
“I can see the attraction of wandering,” Harper said. “Sight like this.”
Reacher nodded. “It’s a big, big planet.”
They passed through a sleeping town called Rhododendron and saw a sign pointing ahead to Rita Scimeca’s village, five miles farther down the slope. When they got there, it was nearly three in the morning. There was a gas station and a general store on the through road. Both of them were closed up tight. There was a cross street running north into the lower slope of the mountain. Harper nosed up it. The cross street had cross streets of its own. Scimeca’s was the third of them. It ran east up the slope.
Her house was easy to spot. It was the only one on the street with lights in the windows. And the only one with a Bureau sedan parked outside. Harper stopped behind the sedan and turned off her lights and the motor died with a little shudder and silence enveloped them. The rear window of the Bureau car was misted with breath and there was a single head silhouetted in it. The head moved and the sedan door opened and a young man in a dark suit stepped out. Reacher and Harper stretched and unclipped their belts and opened their doors. Slid out and stood in the chill air with their breath clouding around them.
“She’s in there, safe and sound,” the local guy said to them. “I was told to wait out here for you.”
Harper nodded. “And then what?”
“Then I stay out here,” the guy said. “You do all the talking. I’m security detail until the local cops take over, eight in the morning.”
“The cops going to cover twenty-four hours a day?” Reacher asked.
The guy shook his head, miserably.
“Twelve,” he said. “I do the nights.”
Reacher nodded.
“She awake?” Harper asked.
The local guy nodded. 'She’s in there waiting for you.”
17
A WALKWAY CAME off the driveway on the left and looped through the dark around some rockery plantings to a set of wide wooden steps in the center of the front porch. Harper skipped up them but Reacher’s weight made them creak in the night silence and before the echo of the sound came back from the hills the front door was open and Rita Scimeca was standing there watching them. She had one hand on the inside doorknob and a blank look on her face.
“Hello, Reacher,” she said.
“Scimeca,” he said back. “How are you?”
She used her free hand to push her hair off her brow.
“Reasonable,” she said. “Considering it’s three o’clock in the morning and the FBI has only just gotten around to telling me I’m on some kind of hit list with ten of my sisters, four of whom are already dead.”
“Your tax dollars at work,” Reacher said.
“So why the hell are you hanging with them?”
He shrugged. “Circumstances didn’t leave me a whole lot of choice.”
She gazed at him, deciding. It was cold on the porch. The night dew was beading on the painted boards. There was a thin low fog in the air. Behind Scimeca’s shoulder the lights inside her house burned warm and yellow. She looked at him a moment longer.
“Circumstances?” she repeated.
He nodded. “Didn’t leave me a whole lot of choice.”
She nodded back. “Well, whatever, it’s kind of good to see you, I guess.”
“Good to see you, too.”
She was a tall woman. Shorter than Harper, but then most women were. She was muscular, not the compact way Alison Lamarr had been, but the lean, marathon-runner kind of way. She was dressed in clean jeans and a shapeless sweater. Substantial shoes on her feet. She had medium-length brown hair, worn in long bangs above bright brown eyes. She had heavy frown lines all around her mouth. It was nearly four years since he had last seen her, and she looked the whole four years older.
'This is Special Agent Lisa Harper,” he said.
Scimeca nodded once, warily. Reacher watched her eyes. A male agent, she’d have thrown him off the porch.
“Hi,” Harper said.
“Well, come on in, I guess,” Scimeca said.
She still had hold of the doorknob. She was standing on the threshold, leaning forward, unwilling to step out. Harper stepped in and Reacher filed after her. The door closed behind them. They were in the hallway of a decent little house, newly painted, nicely furnished. Very clean, obsessively tidy. It looked like a home. Warm and cozy. A
