Never Go Back

away from the fire, staying close to the trees. Smoke drifted and light and shadow danced all around them, pagan and elemental. The fire roared on, fifty yards away, undisturbed. The cabin was a simple one-storey affair, with an outhouse in the back. Both unoccupied. No one there. The barn was wide enough for two vehicles, and it had two vehicles in it, a big red Dodge pick-up truck with huge tyres and acres of bulging chrome, brand new, and a red convertible sports car, a Chevrolet Corvette, waxed and gleaming, with tail pipes as big as Reacher’s fists. Also brand new, or close to it.
    Reacher said, ‘This country boy is doing well.’
    ‘No,’ Turner said. ‘Not so well.’
    She pointed towards the fire.
    The skeleton of the trailer was still visible, twisting and dancing in the flames, and there was burning debris all around it, spilled and fallen, but changing the basic rectangular shape was a flat protrusion on the ground in front of it, like a tongue hanging out of a mouth, something low and rounded and very much on fire, with flames of a different colour and a different intensity. The kind of flames you see if you leave a lamb chop on the grill too long, but a hundred times bigger.
    ‘I guess he tried to save it,’ Reacher said. ‘Which was dumb. Always better to let it burn.’
    ‘What are we going to do?’ Turner said.
    ‘We’re going to make a withdrawal,’ Reacher said. ‘From the ATM. It was a decent-sized lab, and he had a couple of nice cars, so my guess is our credit limit is going to be pretty handsome.’
    ‘We’re going to take a dead man’s money?’
    ‘He doesn’t need it any more. And we have eighty cents.’
    ‘It’s a crime.’
    ‘It was already a crime. The guy was a dope dealer. And if we don’t take it, the cops will. When they get here tomorrow. Or the day after.’
    ‘Where is it?’
    ‘That’s the fun part,’ Reacher said. ‘Finding it.’
    ‘You’ve done this before, haven’t you?’
    ‘Usually while they’re still alive. I was planning to take a walk behind Union Station. Think of it like the IRS. We’re government employees, after all.’
    ‘That’s terrible.’
    ‘You want to sleep in a bed tonight? You want to eat tomorrow?’
    ‘Jesus,’ Turner said.
    But she searched just as hard as Reacher did. They started in the cabin. The air was stale. There was nothing hidden in the kitchen. No false backs in the cupboards, no fake tins of beans, nothing buried in flour canisters, no voids behind the wall boards. There was nothing in the living room. No trapdoors in the floor, no hollowed-out books, nothing in the sofa cushions, nothing up the chimney. There was nothing in the bedroom, either. No slits in the mattress, no locked drawers in the night table, nothing on top of the wardrobe, and no boxes under the bed.
    Turner said, ‘Where next?’
    Reacher said, ‘I should have thought of it before.’
    ‘Where?’
    ‘Where did this guy feel real private?’
    ‘This whole place feels real private. It’s a million miles from anywhere.’
    ‘But where most of all?’
    She got it. She nodded. She said, ‘The outhouse.’
    It was in the outhouse ceiling. There was a false panel right above the toilet, which Reacher unlatched and handed to Turner. Then he put his arm in the void and felt around and found a plastic tub. He hauled it out. It was the kind of thing he had seen in houseware stores. In it was about four thousand dollars in bricked twenties, and spare keys for the Dodge and the Corvette, and a deed for the property, and a birth certificate for a male child named William Robert Claughton, born in the state of West Virginia forty-seven years previously.
    ‘Billy Bob,’ Turner said. ‘Rest in peace.’
    Reacher bounced the keys in his hand and said, ‘The truck or the sports car?’
    ‘We’re going to steal his car as well?’
    ‘They’re already stolen,’ Reacher said. ‘No titles in the box. Probably some tweaker, boosting cars, paying off a debt. And the alternative is walking.’
    Turner was quiet a second more, like it was going to be a bridge too far, but then she shook her head and shrugged and said, ‘The sports car, of course.’
    So they kept the money and the Corvette key and put the rest of the stuff back in the outhouse ceiling. They hiked over to the barn, and dumped the money in the Corvette’s load space. On the edge of the clearing the fire was still going strong. Reacher tossed the car key to Turner and climbed in