A Wanted Man

vehicle fire on the edge of his land.’

‘Where?’

‘About five miles south of you.’

‘What vehicle?’

‘He can’t tell. It’s some distance away. He’s got a big farm. A regular car, he thinks.’

‘Who is responding?’

‘Nobody. The nearest fire department is fifty miles away. They’ll let it burn out. I mean, it’s wintertime in Iowa. What could it set fire to?’

She clicked off. She looked at the big guy and said, ‘Vehicle fire, five miles south of here.’

The big guy stood up, one fast fluid movement. He crossed the motel’s lot and stepped out to the middle of the road. He said, ‘I can see it. I saw it before.’

She kept her gun in her hand. She joined him on the blacktop. She saw a light on the horizon. Miles away. A faint orange glow, like a distant bonfire.

He said, ‘Not good.’

She said, ‘You think it’s the Impala?’

‘It would be a coincidence if it wasn’t.’

‘We’re screwed if they switched vehicles again.’

He nodded.

‘It would be a setback,’ he said.

She said, ‘Are you telling me the truth?’

‘About what?’

‘Your name, for instance.’

‘Jack-none-Reacher,’ he said. ‘I’m very pleased to meet you.’

‘You got ID?’

‘I have an old passport.’

‘Under what name?’

‘Jack-none-Reacher.’

‘Does the photograph look like you?’

‘Younger and dumber.’

‘Get in the car.’

‘Front or back?’

‘Front,’ she said. ‘For now.’

The Crown Vic was transportation, nothing more. Not a mobile office, not a command centre. Reacher got in the front seat and saw no laptop computers, no powerful radios, no array of holstered weapons. Just a phone cradle bolted to the dash, and a single extra mismatched switch. For the strobes, presumably.

Sorenson slid in alongside him and rattled the selector into gear and took off, out from under the porte cochere, counterclockwise back to the road, the same way Alan King had driven, but slower. The car bounced and yawed and settled, and then Sorenson accelerated hard. The road was dead straight. The fire was dead ahead. They were heading straight for it. It looked bright and hot. Reacher remembered a line from an old song: Set the controls for the heart of the sun.

Halfway there it was obvious that gasoline was involved. There was blue in the orange, and a kind of raging fierceness at the centre of the fire. There would be black smoke above it, but the sky was still black in the south, so it didn’t show up. In the east there were the first faint streaks of dawn, low down on the horizon. Reacher thought briefly about Chicago, and the Greyhound depot on West Harrison, and the early buses, and then he dismissed them from his mind. Another time, another place. He watched Sorenson drive. She had her foot hard on the gas. Slim muscles in her right thigh were standing out.

She asked, ‘How long were you in the army?’

He said, ‘Thirteen years.’

‘Rank?’

‘I was terminal at major.’

‘Does your nose hurt?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘You should see the other guy.’

‘Were you a good cop in the army?’

‘I was good enough.’

‘How good was that?’

‘I was like old Moose Skowron, I guess. Most years I hit over 300. When it mattered I could step it up to 375.’

‘Did you get medals?’

‘We all got medals.’

‘Why don’t you live anywhere?’

‘Do you have a house?’

‘Of course.’

‘Is it a pure unalloyed pleasure?’

‘Not entirely.’

‘So there’s your answer.’

‘How do we find these guys if they switched cars again?’

‘Lots of ways,’ Reacher said.

A mile out the fire took on a shape, wide at the base, narrow above. Half a mile out Reacher saw strange jets and fans and lobes of flame, pale blue and roaring and almost invisible. He figured the fuel line was failing, maybe at the seams or where the metal was stressed by folds and turns. He figured the tank itself was holding, but vapour was cooking off and boiling out through tiny cracks and fissures, sideways, upward, downward, like random and violent blowtorches, the tongues of flame as strong and straight as metal bars, some of them twenty or thirty feet long. Inside the fireball the car itself was a vague cherry-red shape, jerking and wriggling and dancing in the boiling air. Reacher buzzed his window down and heard the distant noise. He put his hand in the freezing slipstream and felt faint warmth on his palm.

‘Don’t get too close,’ he said.

Sorenson eased up and slowed down. She said, ‘Do you think the tank will blow?’

‘Probably not. The gas is boiling and bleeding off. There’s no big pressure build-up. Combustion is too vigorous to let any kind of blowback happen. So far, anyway.’

‘How much gas do you think is left?’

‘Now? I’m not sure. The tank was full less than forty miles ago.’

‘So what do we do?’

‘We wait. Until it either blows up or calms down enough for us to recognize what kind of car it was.’

Sorenson stopped three hundred yards from the fire, and like good cops everywhere she pulled off the road and on to the shoulder, at least a yard, and then she backed up and parallel-parked herself another whole foot into the weeds. A cautious woman. There was no chance of getting rear-ended, because there was no traffic. Reacher faced front and watched and waited. He expected a fast decision. The gas couldn’t last long. On the road the car had used plenty. And that was to produce just a few puny horsepower. A hundred at most, to haul a mid-size sedan down a completely flat highway. Now the same tank was feeding a fire as intense as a phosphorus bomb. A thousand times more powerful. Like a jet engine, literally.

He asked, ‘Where did they jack the car, right back at the beginning? At a light?’

Beside him Sorenson shook her head. ‘Behind the cocktail lounge where Delfuenso works. I think they tried to steal the car first. She came out, either because of the alarm, or she was leaving anyway.’

‘She had her bag,’ Reacher said.

‘Then she was leaving anyway. They stopped and bought shirts, and then they hit the road.’

‘And water.’

‘How did you know that?’