Nothing to Lose

around.”
    “Felt?”
    “Touch,” Reacher said. “It’s one of the five senses we rely on.”
    “So who was this guy?”
    “Caucasian, by the feel of his hair. Maybe five-eight, one-forty. Young. No ID. I don’t know if he was dark or fair.”
    “This is unbelievable.”
    “It happened.”
    “Where exactly?”
    “Maybe four miles out of town, eight miles short of the line.”
    “Definitely in Despair, then.”
    “No question.”
    “You should call the Despair PD.”
    “I wouldn’t piss on the Despair PD if it was on fire.”
    “Well, I can’t help you. It’s not my jurisdiction.”
    The waitress came over. The day-shift woman, the witness to the coffee marathon. She was busy and harassed. The diner was filling up fast. Small-town America, at breakfast time. Reacher ordered coffee and eggs. Vaughan ordered coffee, too. Reacher took that as a good sign. He waited until the waitress had bustled away and said, “You can help me.”
    Vaughan said, “How?”
    “I want to go back and take a look, right now, in the daylight. You can drive me. We could be in and out, real fast.”
    “It’s not my town.”
    “Unofficial. Off duty. Like a tourist. You’re a citizen. You’re entitled to drive on their road.”
    “Would you be able to find the place again?”
    “I left a pile of stones on the shoulder.”
    “I can’t do it,” Vaughan said. “I can’t poke around over there. And I sure as hell can’t take you there. You’ve been excluded. It would be unbelievably provocative.”
    “Nobody would know.”
    “You think? They’ve got one road in and one road out and two cars.”
    “Right now they’re eating doughnuts in their restaurant.”
    “You sure you didn’t dream this?”
    “No dreaming involved,” Reacher said. “The kid had eyeballs like marbles and the inside of his mouth was parched like shoe leather. He’d been wandering for days.”
    The waitress came back with the coffee and the eggs. The eggs had a sprig of fresh parsley arrayed across them. Reacher picked it off and laid it on the side of the plate.
    Vaughan said, “I can’t drive a Hope police cruiser in Despair.”
    “So what else have you got?”
    She was quiet for a long moment. She sipped her coffee. Then she said, “I have an old truck.”

    She made him wait on the First Street sidewalk near the hardware store. Clearly she wasn’t about to take him home while she changed her clothes and her vehicle. A wise precaution, he thought. Look at yourself, she had said. What do you see? He was getting accustomed to negative answers to that question. The hardware store was still closed. The window was full of tools and small consumer items. The aisle behind the door was piled high with the stuff that would be put out on the sidewalk later. For many years Reacher had wondered why hardware stores favored sidewalk displays. There was a lot of work involved. Repetitive physical labor, twice a day. But maybe consumer psychology dictated that large utilitarian items sold better when associated with the rugged outdoors. Or maybe it was just a question of space. He thought for a moment and came to no firm conclusion and moved away and leaned on a pole that supported a crosswalk sign. The morning had come in cold and gray. Thin cloud started at ground level. The Rockies weren’t visible at all, neither near nor far.
    Close to twenty minutes later an old Chevrolet pick-up truck pulled up on the opposite curb. Not a bulbous old classic from the forties or a swooping space-age design from the fifties or a muscley El Camino from the sixties. Just a plain secondhand American vehicle about fifteen years old, worn navy blue paint, steel rims, small tires. Vaughan was at the wheel. She was wearing a red Windbreaker zipped to the chin and a khaki ball cap pulled low. A good disguise. Reacher wouldn’t have recognized her if he hadn’t been expecting her. He used the crosswalk and climbed in next to her, onto a small vinyl seat with an upright back. The cab smelled of leaked gasoline and cold exhaust. There were rubber floor mats under his feet, covered with desert dust, worn and papery with age. He slammed the door and Vaughan took off again. The truck had a wheezy four-cylinder motor. In and out real fast, he had said. But clearly fast was going to be a relative concept.
    They covered Hope’s five miles of road in seven minutes. A hundred yards short of the line Vaughan said, “We see anybody at all, you duck down.” Then she