you did want to bring me here. Because maybe your moment might just come out here. But it hasn’t, and it didn’t, and it never will. You’re a smart guy and a good shot, Holland, but I’m smarter and better. Believe me. Deep down you’re just a worn-out old country mouse. You can’t compete. Like right now. You’re all zipped up and belted in, and I’m not. I could shoot your eyes out before you even got your hand on your gun. It’s been that way for the last three hours. Not because I really knew yet. But because that’s just the way I am.’
Holland said nothing.
‘But I should have known,’ Reacher said. ‘I should have known thirty-one hours ago. The first time the siren went off. It was staring me in the face. I couldn’t understand how the guy had seen me without me seeing him. And I knew he would have to show up in a car, on the street, from the front. Because of the cold. And he did exactly that. And I saw him. I saw you. A minute after everyone else left, you showed up. Bold as brass, fast and easy, in a car, from the front. You came to kill Janet Salter.’
‘I came to guard her.’
‘I’m afraid not. The riot could have lasted hours. Even days. You said so yourself. But you left your motor running.’
Holland said nothing.
Reacher said, ‘You left your motor running because you planned to be in and out real fast. You figured you could afford to be a little late up at the prison. Like you were tonight, presumably. But I was in the house. You were surprised to see me there. You needed time to think. So you hung around, all conflicted. Mrs Salter and I thought you were conflicted about two competing duties. But really you were trying to decide whether I had one of Mrs Salter’s guns in my belt, and if so, whether you could draw faster than me. You concluded that I did, and you couldn’t. So eventually you left. You decided to try again another day. I’m sure Plato was upset about that. He was probably very impatient. But you did the job for him in the end.’
Holland was quiet for a long time. Then he said, ‘You know why, right?’
Reacher said, ‘Yes.’
‘How?’
‘I finally figured it out. I saw the photograph in your office. She looks just like her mother.’
‘Then you understand.’
‘She wasn’t a prisoner. They made a half-assed attempt at hiding her, but she was there out of choice. That was clear. I guess she liked the lifestyle.’
‘Didn’t make her any less vulnerable.’
‘No excuse. There were other ways of dealing with it.’
Holland said, ‘I know. I’m sorry.’
‘That’s it? Three dead and you’re sorry?’
Holland didn’t answer. He just sat still for a moment longer. Then he took his foot off the floor and stamped down on the gas. The car leapt forward. Dry concrete under the wheels, a big V-8, twin exhausts, plenty of torque, heavy-duty suspension, not much squat, a fast rear axle, good for zero to sixty in eight seconds. Reacher was hurled back against the seat. They were thirty yards from the side of the hut. Ninety feet. That was all. The headlights blazed against it. It filled the windshield. It was coming right at them. The engine roared.
After thirty of the ninety feet Reacher had a Smith & Wesson out of his pocket. After sixty he had its muzzle jammed hard in Holland’s ear. Before they hit he had his left hand hooked over Holland’s seat back, his arm rigid, his shoulder locked. The front end of the car punched straight through the wooden siding. The airbags exploded. The windshield shattered. The front wheels kicked up on the hut floor and the whole car went airborne. The front bumper hit a bed frame and smacked it like a cue ball and drove it into the paraffin stove. The stove tore out from under its pipe connection and clanged away like a barrel and the car fell to earth and ploughed on and hit the bed again and smashed it into the next bed across the aisle. The header rail above the windshield hit the unmoored stovepipe and bent it with a shriek and its raw end scraped the length of the car’s roof and then the car was all the way inside the hut, still moving fast, the chains on the back thrashing and grinding across the wooden floor. Reacher kicked Holland in the knee and forced his foot off the gas. The car crushed beds two deep against the far wall and punched out the other side into the moonlight and landed hard and came to rest nose down half in and half out of the hut in a tangle of bent iron frames and tumbling plywood sheets. Both headlights were out and there was all kinds of grinding and rattling coming from under the hood. There was hissing and wheezing and ticking from stressed components. There was dust and splinters all around and frigid air was pouring in through the shattered front glass like liquid.
The Smith’s muzzle was still hard in Holland’s ear.
Reacher was still upright in his seat, still braced easily against the back of Holland’s chair. The passenger airbag had inflated against his squared shoulder, and then it had collapsed again.
He said, ‘I told you, Holland, you can’t compete.’
Holland didn’t answer.
Reacher said, ‘You damaged the car. How am I going to get back to town?’
Holland asked, ‘What are you going to do with me?’
Reacher said, ‘Let’s take a walk. Keep your hands where I can see them.’
I’ll have plenty of time to read, Janet Salter had said, after all this fuss is over.
You reap what you sow.
They climbed out of the wrecked car into the cold and the wind and stepped away into the narrow lane that separated the first row of huts from the second. Holland walked ahead and Reacher followed ten feet behind with the old.38 six-shooter held low and easy. It was the one Janet Salter had cradled through so many hours.
Reacher said, ‘Tell me about Plato.’
Holland stopped and turned around and said, ‘I never met him. It was all on the phone, or through the bikers.’
‘Is he as bad as he sounds?’
‘Worse.’
‘What’s supposed to happen tonight?’
‘Like you figured. He’s going to take the jewellery out and steal back some of the meth.’
‘And you were supposed to help?’
‘I was supposed to be here, yes. I have some equipment for him, and the key to the door.’
‘OK,’ Reacher said. Then he raised the.38 and pulled the trigger and shot Holland between the eyes. The gun kicked gently in his hand and the sound was the same as a 158-grain.38 always was outdoors in quiet cold air, a fractured spitting crack that rolled away across the flat land and faded fast, because it had nothing to bounce back from. Holland went down with a loud rustle of heavy nylon and the stiffness of his coat pitched him half sideways and left him lying on one shoulder with his face turned up to the moon. Thirty-eight hundredths of an inch was mathematically a little larger than nine millimetres, so the third eye in his forehead was a little larger than Janet Salter’s had been, but his face was a little larger too, so overall the effect was proportional.
Chief Thomas Holland, RIP.
His body settled and his blood leaked out and his cell phone started ringing in his pocket.
FORTY-TWO
REACHER GOT TO THE PHONE BY THE THIRD RING. IT WAS IN Holland’s parka, in a chest pocket. It was faintly warm. Reacher hit the green button and raised it to his ear and said, ‘Yes?’
‘Holland?’ Practically a yell. A bad connection, very loud background noise, a Spanish accent, nasal and not deep.
A small man.
Plato.
Reacher didn’t answer.
‘Holland?’
Reacher said, ‘Yes.’
‘We’re fifteen minutes out. We need the landing lights.’
Then the phone went dead.
We? How many? Landing lights? What landing lights? Reacher stood still for a second. He had seen no electricity supply out to the runway. No humped glass lenses along its length. It was just a flat slab of concrete. It was possible the Crown Vic’s headlights were supposed to do the job, in which case Plato was shit out of luck, because the Crown Vic’s headlights were both busted. But then, headlights couldn’t stretch two miles. Not even halogen, not even on bright.
Fifteen minutes.
Now fourteen and change.
Reacher put the phone in his own pocket and then checked through the rest of Holland’s pockets. Found the T-shaped key to the stone building’s door, and a scuffed old Glock 17. The throw-down pistol. There were fourteen rounds in the magazine and one in the chamber.
His round.
He put the key and the Glock in his pocket and took another Glock out of Holland’s holster. His official piece. It was newer. Fully loaded. He put his gloves back on and bunched Holland’s shirt collar and jacket collar and parka collar all together in his fist and dragged the body to the nearest hut and all the way inside. Left it dumped in the centre of the floor. Then he hustled back to the car.
Thirteen minutes and change.
The car was canted down at the front, half in and half out of the hut. He squeezed along its flank and in through the hole in the shattered wall and stood where the stove had been and opened the trunk.
All kinds of stuff in there. But three basic categories: normal car stuff where the Ford Motor Company had planned it to be, regular cop gear neatly stowed in plastic trays, and then other things thrown in on top of everything else. In the first category: a spare tyre and a scissor jack. In the second category: a fluorescent traffic jacket, four red road flares, three nested traffic cones, a first-aid kit, a green tackle box for small items, two tarps, three rolls of crime scene tape, a bag of white rags, a lockbox for a handgun. In the third category: a long coil of greasy rope, an engine hoist with pulleys and tripod legs, unopened boxes of big heavy-duty garbage bags.
Nothing even remotely resembling a landing light.
Twelve minutes and change.
He pictured the scene from a pilot’s point of view. An airliner, a Boeing 737, descending, on approach, dim blue-grey moonlit tundra ahead and below. Visible to some degree, but uniform, and featureless. The guy would have GPS navigation, but he would need help from the ground. That was clear. But he wouldn’t be expecting any kind of mainstream FAA-approved bullshit. That was clear, too. Nothing was going to be done by the book.
What would he need?
Something improvised, obviously.
