Never Go Back

he wasn’t. Maybe the half-ton had a loose transmission. Maybe it had sagged forward six inches when the guy shut it down before he got out. But whatever, there was new tension in the chain. It was rigid. It was practically humming. And the vertical truck was teetering right on the point of balance, an inch away from falling forward like a tree. A breath of wind would have done it.
    And then a breath of wind went right ahead and did it.
    The branches all around sighed and moved gently, just once, and the vertical truck’s tailgate scraped over small stones trapped beneath it, and the chain went slack, and the truck started to topple forward, almost imperceptibly, one degree at a time, and then it hit the point of no return, and then it was falling faster, and faster, and then it was a giant sledgehammer smashing down into the half-ton’s load bed, the weight of its iron engine block striking a mighty blow on the corrugated floor, breaking the axle below it, the half-ton’s wheels suddenly canting out at the bottom and in at the top, like knock knees, or puppy feet, the smaller truck’s wheels folding the other way, on broken steering rods. The chain rattled to the ground, and competing suspensions settled, and the smaller truck came to rest, up at an angle, partly on top of the larger truck, both of them spent and inert and still.
    ‘Looks like they were having sex,’ Reacher said. ‘Doesn’t it?’
    No one answered. The small guy was still on the floor, and the other two were staring at a whole new problem. Neither vehicle was going anywhere soon, not without a big crane and a flatbed truck. Reacher climbed down into the Corvette. The wreckage was blocking the road, from ditch to ditch, so Turner had no choice. She backed up and threaded between the two burning flares, and she headed back the way they had come.

THIRTY
    TURNER SAID , ‘ THOSE guys will drop a dime, as soon as they hear about us. They’ll be on the phone immediately. To their probation officers. They’ll be cutting all kinds of deals. They’ll use us as a get-out-of-jail card, for their next ten misdemeanours.’
    Reacher nodded. The road couldn’t stay blocked for ever. Sooner or later some other passer-by would call it in. Or the Claughton cousins would call it in themselves, having exhausted all other alternatives. And then the cops would show up, and their inevitable questions would lead to exculpatory answers, and deals, and trades, and promises, and exchanges.
    ‘Try the next road south,’ Reacher said. ‘There’s nothing else we can do.’
    ‘Still enjoying yourself?’
    ‘Never better.’
    They made the turn on to the quiet two-lane road they had quit twenty minutes earlier. It was deserted. Trees to the left, trees to the right, nothing ahead, nothing behind. They crossed a river on a bridge. The river was the Potomac, at that location narrow and unremarkable, flowing north, downhill from its distant source, before hooking east and then broadening into the lazy current it was known as at its mouth. There was no traffic on the road. Nothing going their way, nothing going the other way. No lights and no sounds, except their own.
    Reacher said, ‘If this was a movie, right about now the cowboy would scratch his cheek and say it’s too quiet.’
    ‘Not funny,’ Turner said. ‘They could have sealed this road. There could be state police around the next bend.’
    But there weren’t. Not around the next bend, or the next. But the bends kept on coming. One after the other, like separate tense questions.
    Turner said, ‘How do they know how you live?’
    ‘Who?’
    ‘The senior staff officers.’
    ‘That’s a very good question.’
    ‘Do they know how you live?’
    They couldn’t find you before. They won’t find you now. The army doesn’t use skip tracers. And no skip tracer could find you anyway .
    ‘They seem to know I didn’t buy a split-level ranch somewhere in the suburbs. They seem to know I don’t coach Little League and grow my own vegetables. They seem to know I didn’t develop a second career.’
    ‘But how do they know?’
    ‘No idea.’
    ‘I read your file. There was a lot of good stuff in it.’
    ‘A lot of bad stuff, too.’
    ‘But maybe bad is good. In the sense of being interesting to someone. In terms of personality. They were tracking you since you were six years old. You exhibited unique characteristics.’
    ‘Not unique.’
    ‘Rare, then. In terms of an aggressive response to