driveway, but it wasn’t a Buick Roadmaster. It was a two-door coupe, imported, sunfaded red, fairly old, and even smaller than the MP’s white compact. Therefore not big enough for two people to sleep in. Not even close. The house itself was an old one-storey, extended upward, with a groundfloor window on the left, and a groundfloor window on the right, and a new attic window punched out directly above a blue front door.
And coming out the blue front door was a girl.
She could have been fourteen years old. Or fifteen. She was blonde.
And she was tall.
FIFTY-ONE
TURNER SAID, ‘DON’T stop,’ but Reacher braked anyway. He couldn’t help it. The girl looped around the parked coupe and stepped out to the sidewalk. She was wearing a yellow T-shirt and a blue denim jean jacket, and big black baggy pants, and yellow tennis shoes on her feet, with no socks, and no laces. She was slender and long-limbed, all knees and elbows, and her hair was the colour of summer straw. It was parted in the centre, and wavy, and it came halfway down her back. Her face was unformed, like teenagers’ faces are, but she had blue eyes, and cheekbones, and her mouth was set in a quizzical half-smile, as if her life was full of petty annoyances best tolerated with patience and goodwill.
She set off walking, west, away from them.
Turner said, ‘Eyes front, Reacher. Hit the gas and pass her and do not stop. Drive to the end of the road, right now. That’s an order. If it’s her, we’ll confirm later, and we’ll deal with it.’
So Reacher speeded up again, from walking pace to jogging, and they passed the girl just as she was passing the MP’s white compact. She didn’t seem to react to it in any way. Didn’t seem to know it was there for her. She hadn’t been told, presumably. Because what could they say?
Reacher kept one eye on the mirror and watched her grow smaller. Then he paused at the T, and turned left, and looked at her one more time, and then he drove away, and she was lost to sight.
No one came after them. They pulled over a hundred yards later, but the street behind them stayed empty. Which theoretically was a minor disappointment. Not that Reacher really registered it as such. In his mind right then the two surviving guys from the dented car were on the backest of all back burners, on a stovetop about ten miles deep.
He said, ‘They told me she was living in a car.’
‘Maybe her mom got a new job. Or a new boyfriend.’
‘Did you see any surveillance opportunities?’
‘Nothing obvious.’
‘Maybe we should join the crowd and park on the street. We’d be OK as long as we never got out of the car.’
‘We can do better than that,’ Turner said. She checked her map, and looked out through the Range Rover’s windows, all around, craning her neck, searching for high ground or elevated vantage points. Of which there were plenty to the south, where the Hollywood Hills rose up in the smog, but they were too distant, and in any case the front of the house would be invisible from the south. In the end she pointed a little north of west, at an off-ramp in the tangle where the 134 met the 101. It was raised up high, and its curve seemed to cradle the whole neighbourhood as it swooped around from one freeway to the next. She said, ‘We could fake a breakdown, if that ramp has a shoulder. Overheating, or something. This car certainly looks the part. We could stay there for hours. The FBI doesn’t do roadside assistance. If the LAPD stops for us, we’ll say sure, we’re about cooled down now, and we’ll get on our way.’
‘Warrant Officer Espin will have seen it,’ Reacher said. ‘He’ll have scoped out the terrain, surely. If he sees any kind of a parked vehicle up there, he’ll investigate.’
‘OK, if anything other than a marked LAPD cruiser stops for us, we’ll take off immediately, and if it’s Espin we’ll duke it out in the wilds of Burbank.’
‘We’ll lose him well before Burbank. I bet they gave him a four-cylinder rental.’
They wanted a pawn shop next, because they needed a quality item for a short spell of time, and fast, and unmemorably, and they were going to pay for it with a stolen credit card, so overall second-hand was the better market. They used surface streets to West Hollywood, and picked one of many establishments, and Reacher said to the guy, ‘Let me see your best binoculars.’
Of which there were many, mostly old. Which made sense. Reacher figured that back in his father’s day binoculars were bought simply because binoculars were bought. Every family had a pair. And an encyclopedia. No one used either. Or the clockwork eight-millimetre camera, if the family was a colonel’s or better. But they had to be provided. Part of a family man’s sacred duty. But now all those family men were dead, and their adult children’s houses were of finite capacity. So their stuff found itself stacked between the acoustic guitars and the college rings, still in the velvet-lined leather buckets it came in, and tagged with prices halfway between low and very.
They found a pair they liked, powerful but not too heavy, and adjustable enough to fit both their faces, and Baldacci paid, and they walked back to the car.
Turner said, ‘I think we should wait for dusk. Nothing will happen before then, anyway. Not if her mom has a new job. And we have a black car. Espin won’t even see it in the dark. But the street itself should be lit up enough for binoculars.’
‘OK,’ Reacher said. ‘We should eat first, I guess. This could take hours. How long are you prepared to stay up there?’
‘As long as it takes. As many times as it takes.’
‘Thank you.’
‘In all of my dating history, I don’t know if this is the smartest thing I’ve ever done, or the dumbest.’
They ate in West Hollywood, well and slowly and expensively, on Peter Paul Lozano’s dime, and they let late afternoon turn into early evening, and as soon as the street lights were brighter than the sky they got back in the
