17 A Wanted Man

significance, including five separate accommodation blocks, and the main building, and the pool, and a mini golf installation way in one far corner. There were raised flowerbeds everywhere, edged with lower versions of the low stucco wall. In the gaps and the angles between the buildings and the walls and the flowerbeds there was crushed stone. A simpler network of concrete roadways connected the gate to the turning circle near the office, and then onward to five separate five-space parking lots near each of the accommodation blocks, and to a delivery bay behind the main building.
    Four rooms were lit up inside. Two of them were near the two parked cars, and two of them weren’t. The parked cars were Ford Crown Victorias, police spec, with needle antennas on their trunk lids. Reacher checked their dark interiors through their windows, and saw empty cell phone cradles on their dashboards, just like Sorenson’s.
    He stood for a minute in the dark and listened hard. He heard nothing. Total silence. No traffic. No airplanes. Just vast night-time emptiness all around. Common sense and dead reckoning told him he was in Kansas, somewhere on the axis between Topeka and Wichita, probably halfway between the two, or maybe slightly nearer Topeka, possibly someplace near the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve. But as far as physical evidence was concerned he could have been on the dark side of the moon. The sky felt heavy and cloud-covered and there was no world beyond the dense mesh fence.
    He turned and strolled back the way he had come, past one of the lit-up windows, and then he more or less bumped into a guy coming out of a room marked
14
. The guy was a lean, hardscrabble type, of medium height, not young but not yet ancient, with a lined and seamed face like he spent all his time outside in the weather.
    A farm worker, about fifty
.
    The guy smiled like he had a shared secret and said, ‘Hi.’
    Reacher said, ‘You’re the eyewitness.’
    The guy said, ‘The what?’
    Not the sharpest knife in the drawer
.
    Reacher said, ‘You saw the red car.’
    ‘Maybe I did, and maybe I didn’t. But we’re not allowed to talk about any of that. Not even to each other. Didn’t they tell you?’
    The guy was wearing new blue jeans, and a new blue button-down shirt under a new blue cotton sweater. Exactly like the clothes on Reacher’s bed, but smaller. His hair was clean and brushed. He had a fresh shave. He looked like a guy on vacation.
    Reacher asked him, ‘When did you get here?’
    The guy said, ‘Early this morning.’
    ‘With Dawson and Mitchell, or with someone else?’
    ‘I didn’t get their names. And we’re not allowed to talk about it, anyway. Didn’t they tell you?’
    ‘Who’s supposed to tell me?’
    ‘Didn’t you get a visit?’
    ‘Not yet.’
    ‘When did you get here?’
    ‘Just now. A few minutes ago.’
    ‘They’ll come pretty soon, then. They’ll come to your room and they’ll tell you the rules.’ The guy shuffled in place on the path. Like he was impatient about something. Like he had somewhere else to be.
    Reacher asked him, ‘Where are you going now?’
    The guy said, ‘To the dining room, man. Where else? They got beer there. A whole bunch of different brands. Long neck bottles, good and cold. I mean, no work all day and free food and free beer? Does it get any better than that?’
    Reacher said nothing.
    The guy said, ‘You coming?’
    ‘Later, maybe.’
    ‘No rush,’ the guy said. ‘I’m planning to snag a few, but they got plenty. They ain’t going to run out any time soon. You can trust me on that.’ And then he hustled onward along the winding path, at first all lit up from the waist down by the fingerpost spotlights, and then eventually out of sight.
    Reacher stayed where he was. Room fourteen. One of the two lit-up rooms without a Bureau car parked nearby. The other was room five. He turned around and backtracked, all the way past the six-through-ten block, around a flowerbed, across the gap to the next block, to the first door in line. Room five. He was planning to knock, but he didn’t need to. When he was still six feet away the door burst open and a girl ran out, all arms and legs and energy. A thin kid, dark-haired and pale, maybe ten years old, all jacked up on excitement, and smiling wide. Then she saw Reacher’s giant bulk in the gloom on the walkway and she froze in place and her smile changed to puzzlement and her hands came up over her mouth, so that Reacher