17 A Wanted Man

crossed the road. He stepped into the motel’s front lot. The light from the dim bulkhead fixtures reached him.
    The woman said, ‘Stop right there.’
    He stopped right there.
    The gun was a Glock 17. Black, boxy, with a dull polycarbonate sheen. Behind it her head was turned slightly to the side, as if quizzically. A strand of hair was across one eye. She was a lot better looking than Don McQueen. That was for damn sure.
    She said, ‘Get down on the ground.’
    He spread his fingers and held his hands out from his sides, his palms towards her. He said, ‘No need to get all excited. We’re on the same side here.’
    ‘I’ll shoot.’
    ‘No, you won’t.’
    ‘Why wouldn’t I?’
    Reacher looked to his left. Her car was still all lit up under the porte cochère. She hadn’t killed the strobes. They were flashing red and blue from secret little mouse-fur mouldings on the rear parcel shelf. Further down the road there was nothing but darkness. In the other direction there was a new light on the horizon. Very far away. Not moving. Not a vehicle. Just a very faint orange glow, like a distant bonfire.
    He said, ‘You won’t shoot because you don’t want to do the paperwork.’
    She said nothing. ‘And it wouldn’t be righteous. I’m unarmed and I’m not offering an imminent threat. You’d lose your job. You’d go to jail.’
    No response.
    ‘And you want to find Karen Delfuenso. You don’t have descriptions of the two guys. You don’t have the names they’re using. You don’t know the things they let slip. But I do. You need to keep me alive long enough to ask me questions, at least.’
    The gun stayed where it was. But she stepped and shuffled to her left, turning all the way, keeping the front sight hard on him. She backed off twenty feet, until his path to room five’s door was covered but unobstructed. At first he thought she wanted him to go inside, but she said, ‘Sit down, in the lawn chair.’
    He walked forward. The Glock’s muzzle tracked him all the way, from twenty feet. A confident markswoman. McQueen had missed from eight. He stopped next to the left-hand lawn chair. He turned around. He backed up, butt first. He sat down.
    She said, ‘Lean back. Stick your legs out straight. Hang your arms over the sides.’
    He complied, and ended up about as ready for instant action as his granddad’s granddad waking up from an afternoon nap. She was evidently a smart woman. A good improviser. The chair was cold against the backs of his thighs. White plastic, thoroughly chilled.
    She stayed where she was, but she lowered the gun.
    He was not what Sorenson had been expecting. Not exactly. He wasn’t a gorilla and he wasn’t like something out of a slasher movie. But she could see why he had been described that way. He was huge, for a start. He was one of the largest men she had ever seen outside the NFL. He was extremely tall, and extremely broad, and long-armed, and long-legged. The lawn chair was regular size, but it looked tiny under him. It was bent and crushed out of shape. His knuckles were nearly touching the ground. His neck was thick and his hands were the size of dinner plates. His clothes were creased and dirty. His hair was matted. His facial injury was awful. His nose was split and swollen and bruising had spread under his eyes.
    A wild man. But not really. Underneath everything else he seemed strangely civilized. He had moved with a kind of considered grace, calm and contained. He had spoken the same way, thinking ahead whole paragraphs and essays in the split-second pauses between sentences.
You won’t shoot because you don’t want to do the paperwork
. Straight to the heart of the matter. Knowledgeable, and confident. His gaze was both wise and appealing, both friendly and bleak, both frank and utterly cynical. His focus was shifting fractionally in and out, his brows rising and falling a little, the shape of his mouth always changing, as if he was constantly thinking. As if there was a computer behind his eyes, running at full speed.
    She raised her gun again.
    She said, ‘I’m sorry, but I’m under orders to arrest you on sight and take you back to Nebraska.’

THIRTY-FIVE
    SORENSON’S WORDS JUST hung there in the cold night air.
I’m under orders to arrest you on sight and take you back to Nebraska
. The big guy paused a beat, and then he smiled, politely, generously, as if pretending to be amused by a joke he had in fact heard many times before, and he said,