Bad Luck and Trouble

Lamaison’s seat up front and pressed his forehead to the window the same way Lamaison had. Dixon and O’Donnell took side windows in back. Between them they covered a one-eighty panorama. Maybe more. For safety’s sake Reacher had the pilot turn wide circles once in a while, in case what they wanted was way behind them.
    They saw nothing.
    Nothing at all, except vast featureless blackness and occasional pinpoints of orange light. Gas stations maybe, or tiny parking lots outside small grocery stores. They saw occasional cars on lonely roads, but none of them was Neagley’s Civic. Yellow headlight beams, not blue. Reacher tried his phone again. No service.
    “Fuel’s really low,” the pilot said.
    “Highway on the left,” Dixon called.
    Reacher looked down. Not much of a highway. There were five cars on it within a linear mile, two heading south and three heading north. He closed his eyes and pictured the maps he had looked at.
    “We shouldn’t be seeing a north-south highway,” he said. “We’re too far west.”
    The Bell tilted and swung away east on a long fast curve and came level again.
    The pilot said, “I’m going to have to set down soon.”
    “You’ll set down when I tell you,” Reacher said.
    North of the mountains the air was better. Some dust, some heat shimmer, but basically it was clear to the horizon. Way far ahead in the distance a tiny grid of lights winked and twinkled. Palmdale, presumably. A nice place, Reacher had heard. Expanding. Desirable. Therefore expensive. Therefore a guy looking for acres and isolation and maximum bang for the buck would stay well away from it.
    “Turn south,” he said. “And climb.”
    “Climbing eats fuel,” the pilot said.
    “We need a better angle.”
    The Bell climbed, slowly, a couple of hundred feet. The pilot dropped the nose and turned a wide circle, like he was hosing the horizon with an imaginary searchlight.
    They saw nothing.
    There was no cell coverage.
    “Higher,” Reacher said.
    “Can’t do it,” the pilot said. “Look at the dial.”
    Reacher found the fuel gauge. The needle was riding the end stop. Officially the tanks were empty. He closed his eyes again and pictured the map. Berenson had said Dean had complained about the commute from hell. To Highland Park he had only two choices. Either Route 138 on the east flank of Mount San Antonio, or Route 2, to the west, past the Mount Wilson Observatory. Route 2 was probably smaller and twistier. And it joined the 210 at Glendale. Which probably made it more hellish than the eastern approach. No reason to choose it unless it was a total no-brainer. Which meant Dean was starting from somewhere due south of Palmdale, not east of south. Reacher looked straight ahead and waited until the distant grid of lights slid back into view.
    “Now pull a one-eighty and head back,” he said.
    “We’re out of fuel.”
    “Just do it.”
    The craft turned in its own length. Dipped its nose and clattered onward.
    Sixty seconds later they found Neagley.

    A mile in front and four hundred feet down they saw a cone of blue light turning and pulsing like a beacon. It looked like Neagley had the Civic on maximum lock and was driving a thirty-foot circle and flashing between dipped and brights as she went. The effect was spectacular. The beams swept and leapt and threw moving shadows and cleared a couple of hundred feet where there were no obstructions. Like a lighthouse on a rocky shore. There were small buttes and mesas and gullies, thrown into dramatic relief. To the north, low buildings. Power lines to the east. To the west the fractured land fell away into a shallow arroyo maybe forty feet wide and twenty deep.
    “Land there,” Reacher said. “In the ditch. And keep the wheels up.”
    The pilot said, “Why?”
    “Because that’s the way I want it.”
    The pilot drifted west a little and dropped a couple of hundred feet and turned to line up with the arroyo. Then he took the Bell down like an elevator. A siren went off to warn that he was landing with the undercarriage up. He ignored it and kept on going. He slowed twenty feet off the ground and eased on down and pancaked gently on the arroyo’s rocky bed. Stones crunched and metal grated and the floor tipped a foot from horizontal. Out the windows Reacher could see Neagley’s lights coming toward them through a sandstorm kicked up by the rotor wash.
    Then the fuel ran out.
    The engines died and the rotor shuddered to a stop.
    The cabin