Nothing to Lose

flank. Then he hung a left and a right and a left again until he was sure he was clear.
    Then he drove on, endlessly. He concluded that his random turns weren’t helping him. He was as likely to turn into trouble as away from it. So mostly he stayed straight, until he ran out of street. Then he would turn. He ended up driving in wide concentric circles, slow enough to be safe, fast enough that he could kick the speed up if necessary without the weak old motor bogging down.
    He passed the church and the bar and the grocery and the faded old hotel for the third time each. Then the rooming house. Its door slid behind his shoulder and opened. In the corner of his eye he saw a guy step out.
    A young guy.
    A big guy.
    Tall, and blond, and heavy. An athlete. Blue eyes and a buzz cut and a dark tan. Jeans and a white T-shirt under a gray V-neck sweater.
    Reacher stamped on the brake and turned his head. But the guy was gone, moving fast, around the corner. Reacher shoved the stick into Reverse and backed up. A horn blared and an old SUV swerved. Reacher didn’t stop. He entered the four-way going backward and stared down the side street.
    No guy. Just empty sidewalk. In his mirror Reacher saw the chase car three blocks west. He shoved the stick back into Drive and took off forward. Turned left, turned right, drove more wide aimless circles.
    He didn’t see the young man again.
    But he saw the cop twice more. The guy was nosing around through distant intersections like he had all the time in the world. Which he did. Two-thirty in the afternoon, half the population hard at work at the plant, the other half baking pies or slumped in armchairs watching daytime TV, the lone road bottlenecked at both ends of town. The cop was just amusing himself. He had Reacher trapped, and he knew it.
    And Reacher knew it, too.
    No way out.
    Time to stand and fight.

23
    Some jerk instructor at the Fort Rucker MP School had once trotted out the tired old cliché to assume makes an ass out of you and me. He had demonstrated at the classroom chalkboard, dividing the word into ass, u, and me. On the whole Reacher had agreed with him, even if the guy was a jerk. But sometimes assumptions just had to be made, and right then Reacher chose to assume that however half-baked the Despair cops might be, they wouldn’t risk shooting with bystanders in the line of fire. So he pulled to the curb outside the family restaurant and got out of Vaughan’s truck and took up a position leaning on one of the restaurant’s floor-to-ceiling plate glass windows.
    Behind him, the same waitress was on duty. She had nine customers eating late lunches. A trio, a couple, four singletons, equally distributed around the room.
    Collateral damage, just waiting to happen.
    The window glass was cold on Reacher’s shoulders. He could feel it through his shirt. The sun was still out but it was low in the sky and the streets were in shadow. There was a breeze. Small eddies of grit blew here and there on the sidewalk. Reacher unbuttoned his cuffs and folded them up on his forearms. He arched his back against the cramp he had gotten from sitting in the Chevy’s undersized cab for so long. He flexed his hands and rolled his head in small circles to loosen his neck.
    Then he waited.
    The cop showed up two minutes and forty seconds later. The Crown Vic came in from the west and stopped two intersections away and paused, like the guy was having trouble processing the information visible right in front of him. The truck, parked. The suspect, just standing there. Then the car leapt forward and came through the four-ways and pulled in tight behind the Chevy, its front fender eight feet from where Reacher was waiting. The cop left the engine running and opened his door and slid out into the roadway. Déjà vu all over again. Big guy, white, maybe forty, black hair, wide neck. Tan jacket, brown pants, the groove in his forehead from his hat. He took his Glock off his belt and held it straight out two-handed and put his spread thighs against the opposite fender and stared at Reacher across the width of the hood.
    Sound tactics, except for the innocents behind the glass.
    The cop called out, “Freeze.”
    “I’m not going anywhere,” Reacher said. “Yet.”
    “Get in the car.”
    “Make me.”
    “I’ll shoot.”
    “You won’t.”
    The guy went blank for a beat and then shifted his focus beyond Reacher’s face to the scene inside the restaurant. Reacher was absolutely certain