Nothing to Lose

crumbled and trickled down into the holes.
    Reacher said, “Tell me what you see.”
    “Activity,” Vaughan said. “A mess.”
    “A story,” Reacher said. “It’s telling us what happened.”
    “Whatever happened, we can’t stay here. This was supposed to be in and out, real fast.”
    Reacher stood up straight and scanned the road, west and east.
    Nothing there.
    “Nobody coming,” he said.
    “I should have brought a picnic,” Vaughan said.
    Reacher stepped into the clearing. Crouched down and pointed two-fingered at a pair of neat parallel depressions in the center of the space. Like two coconut shells had been pressed down into the sand, hard, on a north-south axis.
    “The boy’s knees,” he said. “This is where he gave it up. He staggered to a stop and half-turned and fell over.” Then he pointed to a broad messed-up stony area four feet to the east. “This is where I landed after I tripped over him. On these stones. I could show you the bruises, if you like.”
    “Maybe later,” Vaughan said. “We need to get going.”
    Reacher pointed to four sharp impressions in the sand. Each one was a rectangle about two inches by three, at the corners of a larger rectangle about two feet by five.
    “Gurney feet,” he said. “Folks came by and collected him. Maybe four or five of them, judging by all the footprints. Official folks, because who else carries gurneys?” He stood up and checked and pointed north and west, along a broad ragged line of footprints and crushed vegetation. “They came in that way, and carried him back out in the same direction, back to the road. Maybe to a coroner’s wagon, parked a little ways west of my cairn.”
    “So we’re OK,” Vaughan said. “The proper authorities have got him. Problem solved. We should get going.”
    Reacher nodded vaguely and gazed due west. “What should we see over there?”
    “Two sets of incoming footprints,” Vaughan said. “The boy’s and yours, both heading east out of town. Separated by time, but not much separated by direction.”
    “But it looks like there’s more than that.”

    They skirted the clearing and formed up again west of it. They saw four separate lines of footprints, fairly close together.
    “Two incoming, two outgoing,” Reacher said.
    “How do you know?” Vaughan asked.
    “The angles. Most people walk with their toes out.”
    The newer of the incoming tracks showed big dents in the sand a yard or more apart, and deep. The older showed smaller dents, closer together, less regular, and shallower.
    “The kid and me,” Reacher said. “Heading east. Separated in time. I was walking, he was stumbling and staggering.”
    The two outgoing tracks were both brand new. The sand was less crumbled and therefore the indentations were more distinct, and fairly deep, fairly well spaced, and similar.
    “Reasonably big guys,” Reacher said. “Heading back west. Recently. Not separated in time.”
    “What does it mean?”
    “It means they’re tracking the kid. Or me. Or both of us. Finding out where we’d been, where we’d come from.”
    “Why?”
    “They found the body, they were curious.”
    “How did they find the body in the first place?”
    “Buzzards,” Reacher said. “It’s the obvious way, on open ground.”
    Vaughan stood still for a moment. Then she said, “Back to the truck, right now.”
    Reacher didn’t argue. She had beaten him to the obvious conclusion, but only by a heartbeat.

18
    The old Chevy was still idling patiently. The road was still empty. But they ran. They ran and they flung the truck’s doors open and dumped themselves inside. Vaughan slammed the transmission into gear and hit the gas. They didn’t say a word until they thumped back over the Hope town line, eight long minutes later.
    “Now you’re really a citizen with a problem,” Vaughan said. “Aren’t you? The Despair cops might be dumb, but they’re still cops. Buzzards show them a dead guy, they find the dead guy’s tracks, they find a second set of tracks that show some other guy caught up with the dead guy along the way, they find signs of a whole lot of falling down and rolling around, they’re going to want a serious talk with the other guy. You can bet on that.”
    Reacher said, “So why didn’t they follow my tracks forward?”
    “Because they know where you were going. There’s only Hope, or Kansas. They want to know where you started. And what are they going to find?”
    “A massive loop. Buried