Running Blind (The Visitor)

yourself, psychologically speaking. A raped woman, random intrusion of a large male person for some explicit penis-based activity. But it happened smoothly enough. He went in, and the door closed, a minute passed, the door opened again, and he came back out. He walked back to the car, looking around some, paying attention. He opened the car door, slid inside, and the scene went back to normal.
    So, no opportunity with the bathroom breaks. His lunch break would be the next chance. No way the guy is going twelve hours without eating. Cops are always eating. That’s your experience. Doughnuts, pastries, coffee, steak and eggs. Always eating.
    HARPER WANTED A view of the city. She was like a tourist. Reacher walked her south through Washington Square Park and all the way down West Broadway to the World Trade Center. It was about a mile and three quarters. They sauntered slowly and spent fifty minutes doing it. The sky was bright and cold and the city was teeming. Harper was enjoying it.
    “We could go up to the restaurant,” Reacher said. “Bureau could buy me lunch.”
    “I just bought you lunch,” Harper said.
    “No, that was a late breakfast.”
    “You’re always eating,” she said.
    “I’m a big guy,” he said. “I need nutrition.”
    They checked their coats in the lobby and rode up to the top of the building. Waited in line at the restaurant desk, with Harper pressed up against the wall of windows, gazing out at the view. She showed her badge and they got a table for two, right at a window facing directly back up West Broadway and Fifth Avenue beyond, from a quarter-mile high.
    "Awesome,” she said.
    It was awesome. The air was crisp and clear and the view extended a hundred miles. The city was khaki far below them in the fall light. Packed, intricate, infinitely busy. The rivers were green and gray. The outer boroughs faded into Westchester and Connecticut and Long Island. In the other direction, New Jersey crowded the bank and curved away in the far distance.
    “Bob’s over there,” she said.
    “Someplace,” Reacher agreed.
    “Who is Bob?”
    “He’s an asshole.”
    She smiled. “Not a very exact description, criminologically speaking.”
    “He’s a storeman,” Reacher said. “A nine-to-five guy, if he’s in the bar every night.”
    “He’s not our guy, right?”
    He’s nobody’s guy , Reacher thought.
    “He’s small-time,” he said. “Selling out of the trunk of his car in the parking lot? No ambition. Not enough at stake to make it worth killing people.”
    “So how can he help us?”
    “He can name names. He’s got suppliers, and he knows who the other players are. One of the other players will name more names, and then another and another. ”
    “They all know each other?”
    Reacher nodded. “They carve it up. They have specialties and territories, same as anybody else.”
    “Could take us a long time.”
    “I like the geography here,” Reacher said.
    “The geography? Why?”
    “It makes sense. You’re in the Army, you want to steal weapons, where do you steal them from? You don’t creep around the barracks at night and pull them out from every footlocker you see. That way, you get yourself about eight hours’ grace until the guys wake up and say hey, where’s my damn Beretta?”
    “So where do you steal them from?”
    “Someplace they won’t be missed, which means storage. Find a stockpile facility where they’re laid up ready for the next war.”
    “And where are those?”
    “Look at an interstate map.”
    “Why interstate?”
    “Why do you think the interstates were built? Not so the Harper family could drive from Aspen to Yellowstone Park on vacation. So the Army could move troops and weapons around, fast and easy.”
    “They were?”
    Reacher nodded. “Sure they were. Eisenhower built them in the fifties, height of the Cold War thing, and Eisenhower was a West Pointer, first and last.”
    “So?”
    “So you look where the interstates all meet. That’s where they put the storage, so the stuff can go any which way, moment’s notice. Mostly just behind the coasts, because old Ike wasn’t too worried about parachutists dropping into Kansas. He was thinking of ships coming in from the sea.”
    “And Jersey is good for that?”
    Reacher nodded again. “Great strategic location. Therefore lots of storage, therefore lots of theft.”
    “Therefore Bob might know something?”
    “He’ll point us in a new direction. That’s about all we can