Map reading. The difference between winning and getting wiped out.
Reacher heaved the giant book shut, like closing a heavy door. The girl at the desk told him to leave it right there on the table. Maybe she felt she had done enough bicep curls for one day. He thanked her and stepped out to the sidewalk and headed back west to town, in the right-side gutter, with his left thumb out. He got a ride within a minute, with a friendly wild-haired bearded character, maybe an eccentric professor, but the guy was going only as far as the supermarket, so Reacher got out on the corner of Third Street and started over, walking south like he had the night before. A ratty old pick-up truck stopped before he got to the edge of town, and he climbed in and asked for a spot three miles south of the bottle rocket billboard. The driver looked a little puzzled, as if wondering what the hell was there, but he didn’t ask. He just drove. This is Wyoming. No one enquires into other people’s business. They passed under the highway bridge and Reacher glanced left, across the grassy strip, at the lot in front of his hotel. The black SUV was gone.
FIFTEEN
FORTY MINUTES LATER Reacher was alone on the two-lane’s shoulder, watching the pick-up truck drive away. The mouth of the forest road was overgrown with sagebrush, and it had a heavy chain slung across it, dipping low between two weathered posts. He stepped over it and set out hiking. The altitude was more than eight thousand feet above sea level, and the air was thin. The effort made him breathe hard, and left him light-headed. The forest was mostly fir and pine, dappled with sun, blazing here and there with bright yellow groves of aspen. His normal rule of thumb for walking north through a wood was to look for moss on the tree trunks. Less of it would be facing east, south and west. Regular daylight would see to that. But the mountain air was bone dry and there was no moss at all. So he navigated by the sun. It was mid-morning, so he kept it forty-five degrees behind his right shoulder. He kept his shadow ahead and to the left. He angled west where he could, and felt the ground rise under his feet. An hour or less, he figured, before he got to the back side of the U-shaped ridge. He pictured Billy, watching the wrong horizon. He trudged on, panting.
Nakamura walked the corridor to her lieutenant’s corner suite, and said, ‘Reacher called me last night.’
Her lieutenant said, ‘Who?’
‘Bigfoot,’ she said. ‘The Incredible Hulk.’
‘And?’
‘He asked me to hold off a day before calling the sheriff in Wyoming.’
‘Why would he?’
‘He pointed out there was no specific location mentioned in Scorpio’s voice mail, and therefore he felt a warning wouldn’t mean much to law enforcement out there. He didn’t want to waste anyone’s time.’
‘That’s very scrupulous of him.’
‘I got the impression he wants freedom of action.’
‘Do you think he should have it?’
‘That’s not for me to say. Or him, either.’
‘We work for the people of Rapid City, and no one else. Certainly not a bunch of cowboys out west.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Therefore, on that basis, what helps Rapid City most?’
Nakamura said nothing.
‘Well?’
‘I checked him out,’ Nakamura said. ‘I made some calls. He was an elite MP. He has medals. He’s possibly better prepared than the average person.’
‘Can he help us with Scorpio?’
You could put him in a zoo.
She said, ‘I really don’t see how he could hurt.’
‘OK then,’ the lieutenant said. ‘Wait a day.’
Then he said, ‘No, wait two days.’
Reacher found what had to be the lower back slope of the U-shaped ridge after fifty minutes of hiking. The dirt underfoot was thin and gritty. There were pine cones everywhere, some of them the size of softballs. He climbed slowly, with short choppy steps, kicking his toes into the dirt for grip. He got close to the top and found what might have been a fox trail that led him the rest of the way to the summit. He dropped to his knees and took a look.
He was a couple hundred yards east of where he needed to be. He dropped back to the fox trail and went west, three minutes at a slow pace, arms out for balance.
He took another look.
Now Billy’s place was directly below him, fifty yards away.
It was a log house, stained dull brown, with a log barn, both structures surrounded by beaten-down brush and dusty red dirt. A rutted driveway ran away through the woods, appearing and reappearing in the gaps between the trees. On the right the land fell away and flattened into wide empty plains. The old post office was visible in the far distance, and the firework store, and the two-lane road. There was a grazing herd of pronghorns about a mile away. The dirt road was vivid ochre, neatly scraped, nicely cambered. On the left the land rose into low jagged peaks, like miniature mountain ranges, like premonitions of what would come for real a hundred miles farther west. The air was still and unnaturally clear. The sky was deep blue. There was absolute silence.
Billy’s house had a green metal roof, and small windows with no light inside. Not a trophy cabin. Not a weekend place. But not a mess, either. No junk in the yard. No rusted washing machines. No cars up on blocks. No pit bull on a chain. Just a workaday house.
No people.
Reacher eased down the near slope, slowly, from tree to tree. Forty yards away. Thirty. A pine cone rolled ahead of him and hit a bump and kicked up in the air.
He froze.
No reaction.
He kept on going, stepping sideways for grip, staying where the trees were thickest. Twenty yards away. Ten. He could see Billy’s back door. Footsteps had beaten a path from it to a similar door in the back of the barn.
He stopped five yards inside the tree line. Safe enough. All was quiet. He waited. He figured Billy wouldn’t have taken Scorpio’s voice mail literally. The guy wouldn’t be hiding behind an actual tree with his rifle at his shoulder. He was more likely sitting in a chair on his front porch. With his rifle on the boards beside him. He could see twenty miles. He would figure he would get plenty of early warning.
Reacher moved east through the trees and lined up with the back of the barn. His first port of call. He took a breath and stepped out.
No reaction.
He crossed the open space, controlled, not fast, not slow, with tiny slaps and crunches from his feet on the grit and the gravel.
No reaction.