Never Go Back

He waited again. Five minutes. Then seven. Then eight. Then: more headlights. He leaned out. He saw a pick-up truck.

He stepped out to the sidewalk in its wake and jammed his left fist high in the air and fifty yards away Turner jumped to the kerb and stuck out her thumb. Total precision. Like a perfect post-season bang-bang double play, fast and crisp and decisive in the cold night air. The pick-up’s headlight beams washed over Turner’s immobile form like she’d been there all along.

The pick-up didn’t stop.

Shit, Reacher thought.

The next viable candidate was an elderly Ford Bronco, and it didn’t stop, either. Neither did a middle-aged F150, or a new Dodge Ram. Then the road went quiet again. The clock in Reacher’s head ticked around to ten thirty in the evening. The air grew colder. He had on two T-shirts and his jacket, with its miracle layer. He started to worry about Turner. She had one T-shirt and one regular shirt. And her T-shirt had looked thin from laundering. I was born in Montana, she had said. I’m never cold. He hoped she was telling the truth.

For five more minutes nothing came in from the east. Then, more headlights, wide-spaced and low, tracking the road’s rise and fall with a rubbery, well-damped motion. A sedan, probably. He leaned out just a fraction, already pessimistic.

Then he ducked back in, fast. It was a sedan, swift and sleek, a Ford Crown Victoria, shiny and dark in colour, with black windows and antennas on the trunk lid. MPs, possibly, or the FBI, or Federal Marshals, or the Virginia state cops. Or not. Maybe another agency altogether, on an unconnected mission. He leaned out again and watched it go. It missed Turner in the shadows and blasted onward into the distance.

He waited. One more minute. Then two. Nothing but darkness.

Then more headlights, way back, maybe still on East Main, before the downtown crossroads, coming on steadily, now on West Main for sure, getting closer. They were yellow and weak. Old-fashioned and faint. Nothing modern. Not halogen. Reacher leaned out from his corner. The headlights kept on coming, slow and steady. They flashed past.

A pick-up truck.

The same double play. His left fist, her thumb.

The pick-up slowed right down.

It stopped.

Turner stepped off the kerb and leaned in at its passenger window and started talking, and Reacher started jogging the fifty yards towards her.

This time Juliet called Romeo, which was unusual. Mostly Romeo had the breaking news. But their labours were divided, and so sometimes Juliet had the new information.

He said, ‘No sign of them, all the way to Winchester.’

Romeo said, ‘Are they sure?’

‘They checked very carefully.’

‘OK, but keep them in the area. That bus line is our best option.’

‘Will do.’

Reacher arrived a little out of breath, and saw the pick-up was an old Chevrolet, plain and basic, built and bought for utility, not show, and the driver looked to be a wily old boy of about seventy, all skin and bone and sparse white hair. Turner introduced him by saying, ‘This gentleman is heading for Mineral County in West Virginia. Near a place called Keyser, not too far from the Maryland line.’

Which all meant nothing to Reacher, except that West Virginia sounded one step better than regular Virginia. He leaned in at the window next to Turner and said, ‘Sir, we’d really appreciate the ride.’

The old guy said, ‘Then hop right in and let’s go.’

There was a bench seat, but the cab was narrow. Turner got in first, and if Reacher pressed hard against the door there was just about room for her between him and the old guy. But the seat was soft and the cab was warm. And the truck motored along OK. It was happy to do sixty. It felt like it could roll down the road for ever.

The old guy asked, ‘So where are you folks headed ultimately?’

‘We’re looking for work,’ Reacher said, thinking of the young couple in Ohio, in the red crew-cab Silverado, with the shedding dog. ‘So pretty much any place will do.’

‘And what kind of work are you looking for?’

And so began a completely typical hitchhiking conversation, with every party spinning yarns based on half truths and inflated experiences. Reacher had been out of the service for a long time, and when he had to he worked whatever job he could get. He had worked the doors in night clubs, and he had dug swimming pools, and stacked lumber, and demolished buildings, and picked apples, and loaded boxes into trucks, and he made it sound like those kinds of things had been his lifelong occupations. Turner talked about waiting tables, and working in offices, and selling kitchenwares door to door, all of which Reacher guessed was based on her evening and weekend experiences through high school and college. The old guy talked about tobacco farming in the Carolinas, and horses in Kentucky, and hauling coal in West Virginia, in eighteen-wheel trucks.

They drove through Winchester, crossing I-81 twice, and then onward towards the state line, into Appalachian country, on the last northern foothills of Shenandoah Mountain, the road rising and twisting towards Georges Peak, the motor straining, the weak yellow headlights jerking from side to side on the sharp turns. Then at midnight they were in West Virginia, still elevated in wild country, rolling through wooded passes towards the Alleghenies in the far distance.

Then Reacher saw a fire, far ahead in the west, on a wooded hillside a little south of the road. A yellow and orange glow, against the black sky, like a bonfire or a warning beacon. They rolled through a sleeping town called Capon Bridge, and the fire got closer. A mile or more away, but then suddenly less, because the road turned