Nothing to Lose

and spices and brown sugar and white wine. For dessert, they went back to bed. At midnight, they showered together. Then they dressed, Reacher in his pants and shirt, Vaughan in black jeans and a black sweater and black sneakers and a slim black leather belt.
    Nothing else.
    “No gun?” Reacher asked.
    “I don’t carry my gun off duty,” she said.
    “OK,” he said.
    At one o’clock, they went out.

53
    Vaughan drove. She insisted on it. It was her watch commander’s car. Reacher was happy to let her. She was a better driver than him. Much better. Her panic one-eighty had impressed him. Backward to forward, at full speed. He doubted if he could have done it. He figured if he had been driving the mob would have caught them and torn them apart.
    “Won’t they be there again?” Vaughan asked.
    “Possible,” he said. “But I doubt it. It’s late, on the second night. And I told Thurman I wouldn’t be back. I don’t think it will be like yesterday.”
    “Why would Thurman believe you?”
    “He’s religious. He’s accustomed to believing things that comfort him.”
    “We should have planned to take the long way around.”
    “I’m glad we didn’t. It would have taken four hours. It wouldn’t have left time for dinner.”
    She smiled and they took off, north to First Street, west toward Despair. There was thick cloud in the sky. No moon. No stars. Pitch black. Perfect. They thumped over the line and a mile before the top of the rise Reacher said, “It’s time to go stealthy. Turn all the lights off.”
    Vaughan clicked the headlights off and the world went dark and she braked hard.
    “I can’t see anything,” she said.
    “Use the video camera,” he said. “Use the night vision.”
    “What?”
    “Like a video game,” he said. “Watch the computer screen, not the windshield.”
    “Will that work?”
    “It’s how tank drivers do it.”
    She tapped keys and the laptop screen lit up and then stabilized into a pale green picture of the landscape ahead. Green scrub on either side, vivid boulders, a bright ribbon of road spearing into the distance. She took her foot off the brake and crawled forward, her head turned, staring at the thermal image, not the reality. At first she steered uncertainly, her hand-eye coordination disrupted. She drifted left and right and overcorrected. Then she settled in and got the hang of the new technique. She did a quarter-mile perfectly straight, and then she sped up and did the next quarter a little faster, somewhere between twenty and thirty.
    “It’s killing me not to glance ahead,” she said. “It’s so automatic.”
    “This is good,” Reacher said. “Stay slow.” He figured that at twenty or thirty there would be almost no engine noise. Just a low purr, and a soft burble from the pipes. There would be surface noise at any speed, from the tires on the grit, but that would get better closer to town. He leaned left and put his head on her shoulder and watched the screen. The landscape reeled itself in, silent and green and ghostly. The camera had no human reactions. It was just a dumb unblinking eye. It didn’t glance left or right or up or down or change focus. They came over the rise and the screen filled with blank cold sky for a second and then the nose of the car dipped down again and they saw the next nine miles laid out in front of them. Green scrub, scattered rocks glowing lighter, the ribbon of road, a tiny flare of heat on the horizon where the embers of the police station were still warm.
    Reacher glanced ahead through the windshield a couple of times, but without headlights there was nothing to see. Nothing at all. Just darkness. Which meant that anyone waiting far ahead in the distance wasn’t seeing anything either. Not yet anyway. He recalled walking back to Hope, stepping over the line, not seeing Vaughan’s cruiser at all. And that was a newer car, shinier, with white doors and polished reflectors in the light bar on the roof. He hadn’t seen it. But she had seen him. I saw you half a mile away, she had said. A little green speck. He had seen himself on the screen afterward, a luminous sliver in the dark, getting bigger, coming closer.
    Very fancy, he had said.
    Homeland Security money, she had replied. Got to spend it on something.
    He stared at the screen, watching for little green specks. The car prowled onward, slow and steady, like a black submarine loose in deep water. Two miles. Four. Still nothing ahead. Six miles. Eight.