and stepped into the restroom corridor. He heard the front door open and he heard two pairs of shoes on the tile. He heard the hostess take two menus out of a slot. He walked down the corridor and pushed through the door and stepped out to the back lot.
He crossed the gap between buildings and tucked in behind the motel and tracked along its rear wall. He stopped at the only bathroom window with steam on it. He tapped on the glass and waited. The window opened a crack and he heard a hairdryer shut off. Sorenson’s voice said, ‘Reacher?’
He asked, ‘Are you decent?’
She said, ‘Relatively.’
He stepped up and looked in through the crack. She had a towel tucked tight around her. The top edge was up under her arms. The bottom edge was considerably north of her knees. Her hair was wet on one side of her parting, and dry on the other. Her skin was pale pink from the steam.
She looked pretty good.
He said, ‘Your Kansas City pals are in the diner.’
She said, ‘They’re not my pals.’
‘Did your tech people call yet?’
‘No.’
‘What’s keeping them?’
‘It’s probably a complicated procedure.’
‘I hope they’re good enough.’
‘Good enough for what?’
‘To tell me what I want to know.’
‘That will depend on what you want to know, won’t it?’
‘I’ll wait in the car,’ he said. ‘It’s behind a bar, two buildings along.’
She said, ‘OK.’
The window closed and he heard the click of the latch, and the roar of the hairdryer starting up again. He walked on north, through the back lot, past trash bins, past a pile of discarded mattresses, past an empty rotting carton that according to the printing on the outside had once held two thousand foam cups. He crossed the open no-man’s-land and slipped behind the next building, which seemed to be another cocktail lounge. He stepped over an empty bottle of no-name champagne.
And stopped.
Dead ahead of him and thirty yards away was Goodman’s car, behind the bar, exactly where he had left it. But stopped tight behind it in a perfect T was another car. Facing away. A sand-coloured Ford Crown Victoria. A government car for sure, but not FBI. Not the same as Sorenson’s car, or Dawson and Mitchell’s. It had different antennas on the trunk lid, and official U.S. licence plates. Its motor was running. White exhaust was pooling around its pipes.
It was blocking Goodman’s car.
Deliberately or inadvertently, Reacher wasn’t sure.
There was one man in it, behind the wheel. Reacher could see the back of the guy’s head. He had sandy hair, the exact same colour as his car. He was wearing a sweater. He was on the phone.
A sweater meant no shoulder holster. No shoulder holster meant no gun. No gun meant the guy wasn’t a plain clothes marshal or any other kind of an operational agent. Not the Justice Department, or the DEA or the ATF or the DIA or any of the many other three-letter agencies.
Ultimately the sweater meant the guy was no threat at all.
A bureaucrat, probably.
Reacher walked on and stopped right next to the guy’s window and knocked on the glass. The guy startled and peered up and out with watery blue eyes. He fumbled for his button. The window came down.
Reacher said, ‘Move your car, pal. You’re blocking me in.’
The guy took his phone away from his ear and said, ‘Who are you?’
Reacher said, ‘I’m the sheriff.’
‘No you’re not. I met the sheriff last night. And he’s dead, anyway. He died this morning. So they say.’
‘I’m the new sheriff. I got promoted.’
‘What’s your name?’
‘What’s yours?’
The guy looked momentarily taken aback, as if suddenly conscious of a grievous etiquette offence. He said, ‘I’m Lester Lester, with the State Department.’
Reacher said, ‘Your parents were very economical people, weren’t they?’
‘Family tradition.’
‘Anyway, Lester, I need to get going now.’
The guy made no move.
Reacher said, ‘Two choices, Lester. Roll forward or backward.’
The guy did neither thing. Reacher saw the wheels turning in his head. A slow process. But the guy got there in the end. He stared.
‘No point asking me. I have no idea who you’re looking for.’
‘Get in the car.’
‘Why?’
‘I need to take you into custody.’
‘Are you kidding?’
‘You think the security of our nation is a joke?’
‘I think involving people like you in it is.’
Reacher was suddenly aware of the phone, still in the guy’s hand.
Who was he on the phone to?
The diner?
Maybe the guy wasn’t so dumb after all.
FIFTY-TWO
REACHER WRENCHED THE car door open and tore the phone out of the guy’s hand and hurled it high in the air, right over the roof of the bar. Then he grabbed the guy by the scruff of his sweater and hauled him out of his seat and half dragged and half ran him back the way he had come, ten feet, twenty, and then he spun him around like a discus thrower and launched him towards the back wall of the cocktail lounge. Then he sprinted back and jammed himself into the guy’s seat and slammed the lever into gear and stamped on the gas. Gravel sprayed all over the place and the car shot forward and he stamped on the brake and more or less fell out the door and danced around the trunk of Goodman’s car to the driver’s door. He blipped the fob and tore the door open and started up and backed away from the back wall of the bar and swung the wheel hard.
The sand-coloured Crown Vic was still moving. He had left it in gear. He overtook it and turned tight around its hood and its slow roll caught him with a soft low-speed impact, its front end against his rear quarter. He fishtailed free and drove on through the gap between the bar and the next establishment in line. He glanced left and saw the sandy-haired guy limping as fast as he could after something, either Goodman’s car or his own, he wasn’t sure. After that last glimpse he looked away from the guy and focused forward and drove through the front lot and bounced over the camber of the main drag and squeezed through a gap into the back lots on the other side of the road.
Then he slowed down and took a breath and got straightened up and edged forward until he was lined up with the next gap south and had a distant view of the motel and the diner together.
No sign of Sorenson.
