17 A Wanted Man

the mirror and saw the blue Bureau car jam backward and turn and come after him.
    ‘Hold on,’ he said. ‘I’m a lousy driver.’
    ‘Now you tell me,’ Sorenson said. She scrabbled around and clipped her seat belt and pulled it tight around her. Reacher kept his foot down hard. A big V-8, police spec, plenty of power and torque. Not bad at all. Except that Dawson and Mitchell had the exact same car. Same V-8, same spec, same power and torque. And maybe less weight, without the light bar on the roof and the push bars front and rear. Better aerodynamics, certainly.
    Reacher knew the Interstate was fifty miles ahead, and he knew there wasn’t much of anything else before that. There were some turns left and right, and there were some small stands of trees here and there, and there were occasional old wooden farm buildings standing all rotted and abandoned and unexplained in the fields. Apart from that there was just winter dirt, and it was all very flat. No dips, no valleys. No hills, no ridges.
    Places to run.
    No place to hide.
    The road surface was bad, and the road bed had been heaved up and down by years of winter frosts and summer droughts. Acceptable at normal speeds, but dangerous going fast. Goodman’s cruiser was riding like a yacht on an ocean swell. The engine was howling and the wheel was writhing in Reacher’s hands. Dawson and Mitchell were maybe four hundred yards back, but they were gaining. Reacher jammed his foot down harder.
Pedal to the metal
. A hundred miles an hour.
    Places to run.
    No place to hide.
    Puller
, he thought.
    He said, ‘Do you know how to work the radio?’
    Sorenson said, ‘I could try.’
    ‘Find out where Puller is with his radar gun. Tell him he’s got a speeder heading north. A dark blue sedan.’
    Reacher drove on. No steering involved. The road was dead straight. The car went weightless over dips and hollows. Never airborne, but not far from it. Sorenson took the microphone out of its clip and fiddled with switches. She cleared her throat and said, ‘Deputy Puller, what is your location?’
    Puller’s voice came back over static: ‘Who is that?’
    ‘This is Agent Sorenson with the FBI. Where are you now?’
    ‘A mile shy of the county line, ma’am.’
    ‘North, south, east or west?’
    ‘North.’
    ‘OK, good. You have a speeder coming north towards you. A dark blue Ford Crown Victoria. Please stop the driver and caution him against his reckless and unsafe behaviour.’
    ‘Will do, ma’am.’
    ‘Out,’ Sorenson said. She hung up the microphone. She said, ‘How do you stop a car doing a hundred miles an hour? We’ll probably get Puller killed.’
    ‘In which case we’ll be helping the gene pool.’ Reacher hurtled onward. Dawson and Mitchell were now three hundred yards back. About six seconds, at a hundred miles an hour. But they were still gaining. Reacher scanned far ahead. Straight road, flat dirt, low horizon. No sign of Puller.
    He asked, ‘Did your tech team call?’
    Sorenson said, ‘Not yet. What’s on your mind?’
    ‘Motive,’ Reacher said. ‘Who snatches a dead woman’s kid? Especially a kid who saw nothing and knows nothing?’
    ‘How can the autopsy answer
that
question?’
    ‘It might not,’ Reacher said. ‘That’s what’s on my mind.’ His foot was hard on the boards. It was crushing the pedal. But the car was tapped out. It wouldn’t go any faster. A hundred was as good as it got. They passed a turn to the left. Another, on the right. Paved, but not much more than tracks between fields.
    ‘There,’ Sorenson said.
    Reacher saw a dot on the horizon. A tiny smudge, vaguely black and white and gold against the brown. Puller’s cruiser, waiting on the shoulder. Maybe a mile away. Thirty-six seconds. No more turns before it. Far away to the right was a copse of trees. Faraway to the left was an old barn, swaybacked and grey with age.
    Thirty seconds.
    Twenty seconds.
    ‘Hold tight,’ Reacher said.
    Fifteen seconds.
    He clamped the wheel tight in his hands and came off the gas and stamped on the brakes. The front end dipped radically and he and Sorenson were thrown forward and he fought to keep the car straight. Dawson and Mitchell didn’t slow down. They kept on coming. Puller’s car was a hundred yards ahead. Then fifty. Then thirty. Then Reacher swung the wheel hard and drove off the road into the dirt on the right and Dawson and Mitchell were launched ahead of him like a slingshot. Reacher hugged a tight