Nothing to Lose

the free end of the wrench against his palm.
    Reacher changed direction.
    Headed straight for the guy.
    He stopped a yard away and stood directly face-to-face and looked him in the eye and said, “You’re in my way.”
    The guy glanced in Thurman’s direction and waited. Reacher said, “Have a little self-respect. You don’t owe that old fool anything.”
    The guy said, “I don’t?”
    “Not a thing,” Reacher said. “None of you does. He owes you. You all should wise up and take over. Organize. Have a revolution. You could lead it.”
    The guy said, “I don’t think so.”
    Thurman called out, “Are you leaving now, Mr. Reacher?”
    “Yes,” Reacher said.
    “Are you ever coming back?”
    “No,” Reacher lied. “I’m done here.”
    “Do I have your word?”
    “You heard me.”
    The giant glanced beyond Reacher’s shoulder again, hope in his eyes. But Thurman must have shaken his head or given some other kind of a negative instruction, because the guy just paused a beat and then stepped aside, one long sideways pace. Reacher walked on, back to the sick deputy’s truck. It was where he had left it, with all its windows intact.

47
    From the plant to the Hope town line was fifteen miles by road, but Reacher made it into a twenty-mile excursion by looping around to the north, through the scrub. He figured that the townsfolk would have reorganized fairly fast, and there was no obvious way of winning the consequent twin confrontations at both ends of Main Street. So he avoided them altogether. He hammered the deputy’s old truck across the rough ground and navigated by the glow of the fire to his right. It looked to be going strong. In his experience brick buildings always burned well. The contents went first, and then the floors and the ceilings, and then the roof, with the outer walls holding up and forming a tall chimney to enhance the air flow. And when the walls finally went, the collapse blasted sparks and embers all over the place, to start new fires. Sometimes a whole city block could be taken out by one cigarette and one book of matches.
    He skirted the town on a radius he judged to be about four miles and then he shadowed the road back east a hundred yards out in the dirt. When the clock in his head hit midnight he figured he was less than a mile short of the line. He veered right and bounced up onto the tarred pebbles and finished the trip like a normal driver. He thumped over the line and Hope’s thick blacktop made the ride go suddenly quiet.
    Vaughan was waiting a hundred yards ahead.
    She was parked on the left shoulder with her lights off. He slowed and held his arm out his window in a reassuring wave. She put her arm out her own window, hand extended, fingers spread, an answering gesture. Or a traffic signal. He coasted and feathered the brakes and the steering and came to a stop with his fingertips touching hers. To him the contact felt one-third like a mission-accomplished high-five, one-third like an expression of relief to be out of the lions’ den again, and one-third just plain good. He didn’t know what it felt like to her. She gave no indication. But she left her hand there a second longer than she needed to.
    “Whose truck?” she asked.
    “The senior deputy’s,” Reacher said. “His name is Underwood. He’s very sick.”
    “With what?”
    “He said I did it to him.”
    “Did you?”
    “I gave a sick man a couple of contusions, which I don’t feel great about. But I didn’t give him diarrhea or blisters or sores and I didn’t make his hair fall out.”
    “So is it TCE?”
    “Thurman said not.”
    “You believe him?”
    “Not necessarily.”
    Vaughan held up a plastic bottle of water.
    Reacher said, “I’m not thirsty.”
    “Good,” Vaughan said. “This is a sample. Tap water, from my kitchen. I called a friend of a friend of David’s. He knows a guy who works at the state lab in Colorado Springs. He told me to take this in for testing. And to find out how much TCE Thurman actually uses.”
    “The tank holds five thousand gallons.”
    “But how often does it get used up and refilled?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “How can we find out?”
    “There’s a purchasing office, probably full of paperwork.”
    “Can we get in there?”
    “Maybe.”
    Vaughan said, “Go dump that truck back over the line. I’ll drive you to town. We’ll take a doughnut break.”
    So Reacher steered the truck backward into the sand and left it there, keys in. Way