Nothing to Lose

pressed harder on the gas and the expansion joint thumped under the wheels and the tires set up a harsh roar over Despair’s sharp stones.
    “You come here much?” Reacher asked.
    “Why would I?” Vaughan said.
    There was no traffic ahead. Nothing either coming or going. The road speared straight into the hazy distance, rising and falling. Vaughan was holding the truck at a steady sixty. A mile a minute, probably close to its comfortable maximum.
    Seven minutes inside enemy territory, she started to slow.
    “Watch the left shoulder,” Reacher said. “Four stones, piled up.”
    The weather had settled to a luminous gray light. Not bright, not sunny, but everything was illuminated perfectly. No glare, no shadows. There was some trash on the shoulder. Not much, but enough that Reacher’s small cairn was not going to stand out in glorious isolation like a beacon. There were plastic water bottles, glass beer bottles, soda cans, paper, small unimportant parts of vehicles, all caught on a long ridge of pebbles that had been washed to the side of the road by the passage of tires. Reacher twisted around in his seat. Nobody behind. Nobody ahead. Vaughan slowed some more. Reacher scanned the shoulder. The stones had felt big and obvious in his hands, in the dark. But now in the impersonal daylight they were going to look puny in the vastness.
    “There,” Reacher said.
    He saw his little cairn thirty yards ahead on the left. Three stones butted together, the fourth balanced on top. A speck in the distance, in the middle of nowhere. To the south the land ran all the way to the horizon, flat and essentially featureless, dotted with pale bushes and dark rocks and pitted with wash holes and low ridges.
    “This is the place?” Vaughan asked.
    “Twenty-some yards due south,” Reacher said.
    He checked the road again. Nothing ahead, nothing behind.
    “We’re OK,” he said.
    Vaughan passed the cairn and pulled to the right shoulder and turned a wide circle across both lanes. Came back east and stopped exactly level with the stones. She put the transmission in park and left the engine running.
    “Stay here,” she said.
    “Bullshit,” Reacher said. He got out and stepped over the stones and waited on the shoulder. He felt tiny in the lit-up vastness. In the dark the world had shrunk to an arm’s length around him. Now it felt huge again. Vaughan stepped alongside him and he walked south with her through the scrub, at a right angle to the road, five paces, ten, fifteen. He stopped after twenty paces and confirmed his direction by glancing behind him. Then he stood still and checked all around, first on a close radius, and then wider.
    He saw nothing.
    He stood on tiptoe and craned his neck and searched.
    There was nothing there.

17
    Reacher turned a careful one-eighty and stared back at the road to make sure he hadn’t drifted too far either west or east. He hadn’t. He was right on target. He walked five paces south, turned east, walked five more paces, turned around, walked ten steps west.
    Saw nothing.
    “Well?” Vaughan called.
    “It’s gone,” he said.
    “You were just yanking my chain.”
    “I wasn’t. Why would I?”
    “How accurate could you have been, with the stones? In the dark?”
    “That’s what I’m wondering.”
    Vaughan walked a small quiet circle, all around. Shook her head.
    “It isn’t here,” she said. “If it ever was.”
    Reacher stood still in the emptiness. Nothing to see. Nothing to hear, except Vaughan’s truck idling patiently twenty yards away. He walked ten more yards east and started to trace a wide circle. A quarter of the way through it, he stopped.
    “Look here,” he said.
    He pointed at the ground. At a long line of shallow crumbled oval pits in the sand, each one a yard apart.
    Vaughan said, “Footprints.”
    “My footprints,” Reacher said. “From last night. Heading home.”
    They turned west and backtracked. Followed the trail of his old footprints back toward Despair. Ten yards later they came to the head of a small diamond-shaped clearing. The clearing was empty.
    “Wait,” Reacher said.
    “It’s not here,” Vaughan said.
    “But it was here. This is the spot.”
    The crusted sand was all churned up by multiple disturbances. There were dozens of footprints, facing in all directions. There were scrapes and slides and drag marks. There were small depressions in the scrub, some fairly precise, but most not, because of the way the dry sand had