He had a gun in his hand.
From the locker in the camper shell.
The gun was an old Colt .45, worn steel, rock steady. Maybe nine feet away. Eight, if Stackley braced forward for the shot. Hard to miss from there. The downside of being a big guy. A sudden evolutionary disadvantage. Too much centre mass.
Reacher watched Stackley’s eyes. The guy was still thinking hard. Cost, benefit, advantages, disadvantages. All the reels were coming up cherries. In the short term he could solve his immediate this-minute problem. In the long term he could impress Arthur Scorpio as a reliable guy who got things done. All by pulling the trigger. Right there, right then. Just once. The only negative was location. Couldn’t leave a corpse in the mouth of the driveway. It would need to be moved a mile into the woods. But he had the cowboys for that. They would trade labour for a free patch. For two, they would carry a corpse to Nebraska.
Reacher said, ‘Don’t point the gun at me.’
Stackley said, ‘Why the hell not?’
‘It would be a serious mistake.’
‘How would it, man?’
Stackley raised the Colt.
Two-handed.
He pointed it at the centre of Reacher’s chest.
Like aiming at a barn door.
He said, ‘How exactly is this a mistake?’
‘Wait and see,’ Reacher said. ‘Nothing personal.’
Stackley’s head exploded.
There was a wet thump like a watermelon rolling off a table, and then immediately the flat crack of a supersonic NATO round in the air, and the antique bark of an M14 firing. Stackley’s head came apart in an instant cloud of red mist, and fragments of it followed his body down, vertically, like a disappearing trick, into a puddle of clothes and limbs and lifeless flesh. Reacher looked back at the house, and saw Rose Sanderson at her window, checking downrange, assessing her aim. Which was pretty damn good, he thought. From a hundred yards out she had put a round through the gap between himself and the cowboys, and she had hit Stackley right above the ear. All with a rifle dumped by the army twenty years before she was born.
Impressive.
She came out of the house and walked down towards them, hood forward, carrying the rifle one-handed. From the right Bramall came hurrying in, and from the left came Mackenzie, who had the most trouble with what she found. Theoretically she might have been happy with what turned out, in pragmatic terms, and maybe even moral terms, but a human head shattered by a high-velocity rifle bullet was far from theoretical. It was a purple mess, steaming slightly in the cold mountain air. She turned and looked at her sister. She was prepared to kill people, and I wasn’t. One thing to talk about it. A whole different thing to watch it happen.
Reacher said, ‘Thank you, major.’
Rose said, ‘How much did he have?’
The thing that mattered most.
‘Not much,’ he said.
‘Shit.’
She stepped around Stackley and looked in the back of the truck. She twitched the blanket aside and poked around. Her shoulders slumped. Not exactly surprise, but certainly disappointment. No plan survives first contact with the enemy. She looked back at Reacher, as if to say, this one went south pretty damn quick, didn’t it?
She said, ‘Where does he go to get more?’
He said, ‘The conversation didn’t get that far.’
‘Arthur Scorpio’s place, right?’
‘No,’ Reacher said. ‘There’s no traffic at Scorpio’s place. No loading or unloading. Whatever Scorpio does, he does it by remote control.’
‘What exactly did Stackley tell you?’
‘He said there’s a warehouse, where they drive in and line up and wait until midnight.’
‘Where?’
‘He said he gets a text message on a burner phone. He said the phone is in there.’
He heard the click of catches and the muted thump of compartment doors being opened and shut. Maybe twelve of them. The camper shell had lockers all over it. Like living on a boat.
‘There’s no phone in here,’ she said.
‘There never was,’ he said. ‘It was a decoy. It was a way to get to his gun.’
‘So how do we know where to go?’
‘We don’t.’
She just stood there. Tiny, slumped, defeated. She was a drug addict. She had just shot and killed her dealer. Catastrophe. Like jumping off a building. Right then she was in mid-air, falling fast, the hiss of terror loud in her ears.
She was going to panic.
Reacher said, ‘Forget the phone. The phone was a trick. He invented it. They couldn’t possibly work it that way. A warehouse big enough to drive in and line up can’t be a moveable feast. It can’t be a last-minute arrangement. It must be a permanent location. Fixed and secure. Hidden away somewhere.’
Rose said, ‘But where?’
Bramall said, ‘Where is his regular phone?’
He ducked down, a small meticulous figure amid the gore. He dug through Stackley’s crumpled pockets. He came out with a Samsung smartphone about the size of a paperback book. It had a cracked screen. No password. Bramall dabbed and swiped.
‘He replaced Billy three days ago,’ he said. ‘Obviously he would have had to pick up supplies.’
There were no text messages from three days before. No emails. But there was a voice mail. Bramall played it, and listened, and narrated as he went.
He said, ‘There’s a service road leading to a covered garage. The covered garage is for snowploughs and other winter equipment. There’s plenty of space and they have it all to themselves. There will be a guard at the door.’
Reacher said, ‘Where?’
‘It doesn’t say.’
‘It must. Stackley was new.’
‘It doesn’t. Maybe it’s somewhere he was already familiar with. Maybe they already told him the general area.’
‘Who left the message?’
‘Sounds like a transportation captain. He’s all about the details.’
‘Is there an area code?’
‘Blocked number.’
‘Terrific.’
Rose Sanderson went back to the camper shell. She leaned in and came out with the three wrapped patches. She gave one each to the cowboys. For old times’ sake, Reacher figured. A parting gift. And like a good officer. Always make sure your men are OK. She kept one patch for herself. She took another from her pocket. The last of yesterday’s purchase. She butted them together, and then fanned them out, like a tiny hand of cards. She counted them. One, two. Then again, in case something had magically changed. One, two. Then again, obsessively. Same result.
She said, ‘This is not good.’
Reacher said, ‘How long?’
‘I’ll be getting sick by tonight.’
‘Where would we find snowploughs?’
‘Are you kidding? Everywhere. Billy had a snowplough.’
‘At his house. I mean big machines stored in a covered garage.’
‘An airport?’ Bramall said. ‘Denver, maybe.’
Reacher said nothing.
Then he said, ‘Three days ago.’
He stepped over the leaking body and leaned in the pick-up’s cab. Sandwich wrappers. Gas receipts. He threw the wrappers on the driver’s seat and piled the gas receipts on the passenger seat. He checked the floor and emptied the door cubbies.