61 Hours

up. She was accustomed to taking walks, to the grocery, to the drugstore, to the restaurant, sometimes just for the fun of it. She had already been a prisoner in her own home for close to a week. She was taking her civic responsibilities seriously, but with responsibilities came rights, and stepping out like a free woman was one of them.
    ‘She’s crazy,’ Reacher said. ‘It’s freezing cold.’
    ‘She’s a native,’ Peterson said. ‘This is nothing to her.’
    ‘It must be twenty degrees below zero.’
    Peterson smiled, like an insider against an outsider. He said, ‘The coldest day we ever had was minus fifty-eight. Back in February of 1936. Then less than five months later in July we had the hottest day we ever had, a hundred and twenty exactly.’
    ‘Whatever, she’s still crazy.’
    ‘You want to try to talk her out of it?’
    Reacher tried. He drove over there with Peterson. Janet Salter was in her kitchen with the two day watch cops. Her percolator was all fired up. Reacher could smell fresh coffee and hot aluminum. She poured him a mug and said, ‘The officers tell me you told Mr Peterson that the bikers are preparing to leave.’
    Reacher nodded. ‘That’s how it looked to me.’
    ‘Therefore it should be safe enough to take a little stroll.’
    ‘The guy with the gun is not a biker. Never was.’
    ‘But whoever he is, he won’t be waiting outside. You said so yourself, last night. It’s too cold.’
    ‘It’s also too cold to go for a walk.’
    ‘Nonsense. If we keep up a brisk pace, we’ll enjoy it.’
    ‘We?’
    ‘I certainly hope you’ll accompany me.’
    Five to eleven in the morning.
    Seventeen hours to go.
    Peterson improvised a plan that looked a lot like the Secret Service taking the president for a walk. He deployed the three stake-out cars to the town’s southern, western, and eastern approaches, and told them to stand by to move like a rolling cordon if necessary. He and the two day watch women would be on foot, boxing in Mrs Salter at an appropriate tactical distance. Reacher would walk with her, always keeping himself between her and any passing traffic. A human shield, although Peterson didn’t put it that way.
    They all wrapped up in all the clothes they had and stepped through the door. The wind was steady out of the west. All the way from Wyoming. It was bitter. Reacher had been in Wyoming in the winter, and survived. He made a mental note never to riskit again. Peterson ranged ahead and one of the day watch women trailed behind and the other kept pace on the opposite sidewalk. Reacher stayed at Janet Salter’s shoulder. She had a scarf wrapped around the lower portion of her face. Reacher didn’t. As long as the wind was on his back, the situation was tolerable. But when they turned and headed north to town, his nose and cheeks and chin went numb and his eyes started to water. He pulled his hood forward and shielded his face as much as was prudent. He felt he needed some kind of peripheral vision. The sidewalk was humped and ridged with glazed snow. Walking on it was difficult.
    Janet Salter asked him, ‘What are you thinking about?’
    Her voice was muffled, literally. Her words came out thick and soft and then froze and whipped away on the wind.
    ‘I’m thinking about February of 1936,’ Reacher said. ‘Minus fifty-eight degrees, the height of the Depression, dust storms, droughts, blizzards, why the hell didn’t you all move to California?’
    ‘Lots of folks did. The others had no choice but to stay. And that year had a warm summer, anyway.’
    ‘Peterson told me. A hundred-seventy-eight-degree swing.’
    ‘Did he tell you about the chinooks?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Chinooks are hot winds out of the Black Hills. One day in January of 1943 it was minus four degrees, and then literally two minutes later it was plus forty-five. A forty-nine-degree swing in a hundred and twenty seconds. The most dramatic ever recorded in America. Everyone had broken windows from the thermal shock.’
    ‘Wartime,’ Reacher said.
    ‘The hinge of fate,’ Janet Salter said. ‘That exact day the Germans lost control of the airfields at Stalingrad, many thousands of miles away. It was the beginning of the end for them. Maybe the wind knew.’
    They trudged onward. Peterson stayed well ahead, one of the women cops stayed well behind, the other kept pace directly across the street. They got level with the restaurant parkinglot. It was full of people heading in and out. Most