The girl nodded, and rubbed her forearm, subconsciously. Or nervously. Reacher glanced down.
It wasn’t a birthmark.
It was changing shape. And changing colour.
It was a bruise.
He said, ‘Did they do that?’
The girl nodded.
‘The big one,’ she said.
‘With the shaved head and the small ears?’
‘Yes,’ the girl said. ‘He squeezed my arm.’
‘Why?’
‘He wanted to know where else you could be. And I couldn’t tell him.’
It was a big mark. From a big hand. More than six inches across.
The girl said, ‘He really scared me. He has cruel eyes.’
Reacher asked, ‘When were they here?’
‘About ten minutes ago.’
‘Where did they go?’
‘I don’t know. I couldn’t tell them where to look.’
‘No bars, no hamburger joints?’
‘That’s exactly what he asked. But there’s nothing like that here.’
The girl was close to tears.
Reacher said, ‘They won’t be coming back.’
It was all he could think of to say.
They left the girl standing there, rubbing her arm, and they used the cross street they hadn’t used before. It was a similar thoroughfare, narrow, unlit, raggedy at first, and then firming up on the second block, with the motel’s fence on the right. They took the corner cautiously, and scanned ahead before moving out.
The motel lot was empty.
The car with the dented doors was gone.
TWENTY-SIX
THREE HUNDRED YARDS later Reacher and Turner hit Berryville’s city limit, and West Main became plain old State Route 7. Turner said, ‘If those guys could figure out where we went, we have to assume the army could too. The FBI as well, even.’
Which made hitchhiking a nightmare. It was pitch dark. A winter night, in the middle of nowhere. A long straight road. Oncoming headlights would be visible a mile away, but there would be no way of knowing what lay behind those headlights. Who was at the wheel. Civilian or not? Friend or foe?
Too big of a risk to take a gamble.
So they compromised, in a win-some, lose-some kind of way that Reacher felt came out about equal in terms of drawbacks and benefits. They retraced their steps, and Turner waited on the shoulder about fifty yards ahead of the last lit-up town block, and Reacher kept on going, to where he could lean on the corner of a building, half in and half out of a cross-street alley, where there was some light spill on the blacktop. A bad idea, in the sense that any car turning west beyond them was a lost opportunity in terms of a potential ride, but a good idea in the sense that Reacher could make a quick and dirty evaluation of the through-town drivers, as and when they appeared. They agreed he should err on the side of caution, but if he felt it was OK, he would step out and signal to Turner, who would then step up to the kerb and jam her thumb out.
Which overall, he thought at the beginning, was maybe more win-some than lose-some. Because by accident their improvised system would imitate a very old hitchhiking trick. A pretty girl sticks out her thumb, a driver stops, full of enthusiasm, and then the big ugly boyfriend jogs up and gets in too.
But thirty minutes later Reacher was seeing it as more lose-some than win-some. Traffic was light, and he was getting no time at all to make a judgement. He would see headlights coming, he would wait, then the car would flash past in a split second, and his brain would process,
So he switched to a pre-screening approach. He decided to reject all sedans, and all SUVs younger than five years, and to approve all pick-up trucks, and all older SUVs. He had never known the army to hunt in pick-up trucks, and he guessed all army road vehicles would be swapped out before they got to be five years old. Same for the FBI, surely. The remaining risk was off-duty local deputies, joining in the fun in their POVs. But some risk had to be taken, otherwise they would be there all night long, which would end up the same as sleeping in a D.C. park. They would get busted at first light tomorrow, instead of last light today.
He waited. For a minute he saw nothing, and then he saw headlights, coming in from the east, not real fast, just a good, safe city speed. He leaned out from his corner. He waited. He saw a shape flash past.
A sedan.
Reject.
He settled back against the building.
