17 A Wanted Man

of raging fierceness at the centre of the fire. There would be black smoke above it, but the sky was still black in the south, so it didn’t show up. In the east there were the first faint streaks of dawn, low down on the horizon. Reacher thought briefly about Chicago, and the Greyhound depot on West Harrison, and the early buses, and then he dismissed them from his mind.
Another time, another place
. He watched Sorenson drive. She had her foot hard on the gas. Slim muscles in her right thigh were standing out.
    She asked, ‘How long were you in the army?’
    He said, ‘Thirteen years.’
    ‘Rank?’
    ‘I was terminal at major.’
    ‘Does your nose hurt?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘I’m sorry.’
    ‘You should see the other guy.’
    ‘Were you a good cop in the army?’
    ‘I was good enough.’
    ‘How good was that?’
    ‘I was like old Moose Skowron, I guess. Most years I hit over 300. When it mattered I could step it up to 375.’
    ‘Did you get medals?’
    ‘We all got medals.’
    ‘Why don’t you live anywhere?’
    ‘Do you have a house?’
    ‘Of course.’
    ‘Is it a pure unalloyed pleasure?’
    ‘Not entirely.’
    ‘So there’s your answer.’
    ‘How do we find these guys if they switched cars again?’
    ‘Lots of ways,’ Reacher said.
    A mile out the fire took on a shape, wide at the base, narrow above. Half a mile out Reacher saw strange jets and fans and lobes of flame, pale blue and roaring and almost invisible. He figured the fuel line was failing, maybe at the seams or where the metal was stressed by folds and turns. He figured the tank itself was holding, but vapour was cooking off and boiling out through tiny cracks and fissures, sideways, upward, downward, like random and violent blowtorches, the tongues of flame as strong and straight as metal bars, some of them twenty or thirty feet long. Inside the fireball the car itself was a vague cherry-red shape, jerking and wriggling and dancing in the boiling air. Reacher buzzed his window down and heard the distant noise. He put his hand in the freezing slipstream and felt faint warmth on his palm.
    ‘Don’t get too close,’ he said.
    Sorenson eased up and slowed down. She said, ‘Do you think the tank will blow?’
    ‘Probably not. The gas is boiling and bleeding off. There’s no big pressure build-up. Combustion is too vigorous to let any kind of blowback happen. So far, anyway.’
    ‘How much gas do you think is left?’
    ‘Now? I’m not sure. The tank was full less than forty miles ago.’
    ‘So what do we do?’
    ‘We wait. Until it either blows up or calms down enough for us to recognize what kind of car it was.’
    Sorenson stopped three hundred yards from the fire, and like good cops everywhere she pulled off the road and on to the shoulder, at least a yard, and then she backed up and parallel-parked herself another whole foot into the weeds. A cautious woman. There was no chance of getting rear-ended, because there was no traffic. Reacher faced front and watched and waited. He expected a fast decision. The gas couldn’t last long. On the road the car had used plenty. And that was to produce just a few puny horsepower. A hundred at most, to haul a mid-size sedan down a completely flat highway. Now the same tank was feeding a fire as intense as a phosphorus bomb. A thousand times more powerful. Like a jet engine, literally.
    He asked, ‘Where did they jack the car, right back at the beginning? At a light?’
    Beside him Sorenson shook her head. ‘Behind the cocktail lounge where Delfuenso works. I think they tried to steal the car first. She came out, either because of the alarm, or she was leaving anyway.’
    ‘She had her bag,’ Reacher said.
    ‘Then she was leaving anyway. They stopped and bought shirts, and then they hit the road.’
    ‘And water.’
    ‘How did you know that?’
    ‘I drank some of it. It was still cold. What were they running from?’
    ‘They stabbed a guy to death.’
    ‘In the cocktail lounge?’
    ‘No, in an abandoned pumping station three miles away. Some kind of strange rendezvous.’
    ‘So how did they get three miles to the cocktail lounge? Did they walk?’
    ‘They used the victim’s car.’
    ‘Why didn’t they keep it?’
    ‘It was bright red and foreign. There was an eyewitness.’
    ‘To the stabbing itself?’
    ‘More or less. To the getaway, certainly.’
    ‘Who was the eyewitness?’
    ‘A farm worker, about fifty.’
    ‘Was he any good to you?’
    ‘No worse than