17 A Wanted Man

sideways, sometimes left, sometimes right, and then she was starting up with the blinking again, sometimes once, or twice, or three times, or more, once nine times, and once as many as thirteen straight flutters of her eyelids.
    Reacher stared in surprise.
    Then the semi truck sounded its horn long and loud and Reacher glanced forward again to find the Dodge had moved on. He touched the gas and crept after it. Evidently the Iowa cops had arranged the obstacle the same way the Nebraska cops had. Everyone was cramming over into the right-hand lane. A mess, potentially, except that the cops had two officers out and about on foot, with red-shrouded flashlights. They were regulating the manoeuvres. And some kind of Midwestern goodwill or commonsense was in play. There was plenty of
after you, neighbour
stuff going on. Reacher figured the delay might amount to ten minutes. That was all. No big deal.
    He glanced in the mirror.
    Karen Delfuenso started blinking again.
    Sorenson replayed the critical quarter-hour window two more times, once backward and once forward, both at high speed. As before she saw the Mazda arrive, and as before she then saw nothing at all until the random traffic blew by on the two-lane fifteen minutes later, the pick-up truck heading south and the sedan heading north.
    Gamble
.
    ‘South still makes no sense?’ she asked.
    ‘No sense at all,’ Goodman said.
    ‘Are you sure?’
    ‘There’s nothing there.’
    ‘Bet your pension?’
    ‘And my house.’
    ‘Shirt off your back?’
    ‘My firstborn grandchild, if you like.’
    ‘OK,’ Sorenson said. ‘They went north. And you know what? We saw them do it.’
    ‘Where?’
    ‘Right here,’ Sorenson said, and she froze the picture on the random traffic, as the northbound sedan passed in front of the southbound pick-up truck. She said, ‘That’s them, in the sedan. Has to be. It’s the only vehicle going north. They spent fifteen minutes doing something else, and then they got back on the road by looping around south of the lounge, not north of it. It’s the only logical explanation.’
    ‘Fifteen minutes doing what?’
    ‘I don’t know.’
    ‘Fifteen minutes is a long time to delay a getaway for no reason.’
    ‘Then obviously there was a reason.’
    The kid behind the register said, ‘I heard a car alarm at about twenty past midnight.’
    Sorenson stared at him.
    She said, ‘And you didn’t think to mention that before?’
    ‘Why would I? You didn’t ask me. You didn’t explain yourselves. You still haven’t. And I only just remembered anyway.’
    ‘Twenty past midnight?’
    ‘About.’
    ‘Definitely a car alarm?’
    ‘No question. Pretty loud, too. The highlight of my night so far. Until you guys showed up.’
    ‘Where was it?’
    The kid waved his hand.
    ‘Over there,’ he said. ‘Could have been behind Missy Smith’s lounge, for sure.’
    ‘OK,’ Sorenson said. ‘Thank you.’
    Goodman asked her, ‘So what are we saying? They spent fifteen minutes stealing a getaway car?’
    ‘Maybe they did, and maybe they didn’t. But whatever, a car alarm going off is another good reason why the waitress might have stuck her head out the back. She would have been worried about her own car, if nothing else. We have to find her, right now. It’s time to go bang on some doors.’
    Goodman checked his watch.
    ‘We better hurry,’ he said. ‘Those guys will be hitting the roadblocks about now. You should have put them a hundred miles out, not eighty.’
    Sorenson didn’t reply.

FOURTEEN
    NINE MINUTES, REACHER thought. Not ten. He had over-estimated the likely delay, but only slightly. The cops on foot had done a fine job of corralling the approaching flow, and the cops at the roadblock itself were evidently fast and efficient. Traffic was moving through at a reasonable clip. Reacher couldn’t see the search procedure in detail, because of the Dodge pick-up’s bulk right in front of him, but clearly the protocol was nothing more than quick and dirty. He rolled on, and paused, and rolled on, and paused, with the red-blue glare ahead of him getting brighter and fiercer with every car’s length he travelled. Next to him Alan King seemed to have gone to sleep, still with his face turned away and his chin ducked down. Don McQueen still had his arm over his eyes. Karen Delfuenso was still awake, but she had stopped blinking.
    A hundred yards to go, Reacher thought. Three hundred feet. Maybe fifteen vehicles in the queue ahead.