17 A Wanted Man

know,’ Goodman said.
    ‘It might,’ Sorenson said. ‘Some of those big trucks take a hundred gallons. And times are hard right now. Drivers might be tempted to take off before paying. Oil companies wouldn’t like that. They might take defensive measures.’
    ‘We should go find out.’
    ‘We will,’ Sorenson said. ‘And then we’ll go bang on Missy Smith’s door. Don’t think we won’t. The old gal can sleep a little more, but not for ever.’
    Reacher was an adequate driver, but nothing more than that. Physically his body worked only two ways: either extremely slow or extremely fast. Most of the time he rumbled along with typical big-man languor, often appearing quiet and lazy, sometimes appearing positively comatose. Then if necessary he could explode into furious action, for as long as it took, a blur of hands and feet, and then he would lapse back into torpor. He had no middle setting, and a middle setting was what good driving needed. Action and reaction had to be prompt but controlled, alert but measured, rapid but considered, and it was hard for Reacher to identify that kind of middle ground. Typically he found himself either twitching at a danger two hundred yards ahead, or ignoring it completely, on the grounds that it might go away by itself. He had never killed or injured anyone with a car, except deliberately, but he was a realistic man and didn’t kid himself: his driving was much worse than average.
    But as promised the Interstate was straight and wide, back up to three lanes again by that point, and the big soft Chevrolet held its line very well. Night-time traffic was very light and neither action nor reaction was much called for. In fact the biggest challenge was to stay awake, but Reacher was good at that. He could grind along at some basic level of consciousness more or less for ever. He kept both hands on the wheel, ten and two, and he checked his mirrors regularly every twenty or so seconds, first the passenger door, then the windshield mirror, then the driver’s door, then the windshield again. Behind his right shoulder Karen Delfuenso sat awake but silent, tense and anxious, and next to her Reacher could hear Don McQueen breathing slow, not quite asleep but not quite awake either. Alan King was awake in the passenger seat, looking mute and morose and a little preoccupied. His head was half turned, so he could see the road ahead and Reacher together, and the speedometer too, Reacher thought.
    So Reacher drove on, at an approximately legal speed, with the crystal pendant on the key tapping him on the knee from time to time, as the car rocked and swayed.
    It turned out that the gas station had four cameras, all of them monochrome, none of them colour. They fed a hard disk recorder located on a shelf in the booth behind the register, right next to the cigarettes. The four separate feeds were displayed in real time on a quad-split LCD screen to the left of the cash drawer.
    Three of the cameras were of no interest to Sorenson. The first and the second were mounted low down at the vehicle entrance and exit, to capture plate numbers. They were zoomed in too tight to show any background. The third camera was mounted in the ceiling of the cashier’s booth itself, high up behind the guy’s right shoulder, to make sure he wasn’t ripping the place off. Standard practice, in a cash business. Trust but verify.
    But the fourth camera was better. Marginally. It was a black glass hemisphere mounted high on a bracket halfway up the sign pole. It was dialled back to a wide-angle view of the whole property. For insurance purposes, the cashier said. If two semi-trucks backed up and got their trailers tangled, it was useful to know which one had moved first. If someone stole gas or diesel, it was useful to show the court a composite narrative, the plate number entering, the guy pumping, the guy driving away, the plate number leaving.
    The field of view from the fourth camera was wide enough to show the county two-lane heading north and south, and the gravel patch beyond its far shoulder in front of the cinder block bar, and the cinder block bar itself, and part of Missy Smith’s cocktail lounge, and the gap between those two buildings. The way the fishbowl distortion tilted the picture made it look like the camera was peering more or less horizontally into the gap. Bright pools of light were visible on the live feed, right at the edge of the shot, from the deputies’ parked vehicles.
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