Running Blind (The Visitor)

out straight and endless in front of him. He remembered peeling crumpled dollar bills off his roll at lonely motel desks, the feel of old brass keys, the musty smell of cheap rooms, the creak of springs as he dropped down on anonymous beds. Cheerful curious waitresses in old diners. Ten-minute conversations with drivers who stopped to pick him up, tiny random slices of contact between two of the planet’s teeming billions. The drifter’s life. Its charm was a big part of him, and he missed it when he was stuck in Garrison or holed up in the city with Jodie. He missed it bad. Real bad. About as bad as he was missing her right now.
    “Making progress?” Harper asked him.
    “What?” he said.
    “You were thinking hard. Going all misty on me.”
    “Was I?”
    “So what were you thinking about?”
    He shrugged. “Rocks and hard places.”
    She stared at him. “Well, that’s not going to get us anywhere. So think about something else, OK?”
    “OK,” he said.
    He looked away and tried to put Jodie out of his mind. Tried to think about something else.
    “Surveillance,” he said suddenly.
    “What about surveillance?”
    “We’re assuming the guy watches the houses first, aren’t we? At least a full day? He might have already been hiding out somewhere, right when we were there.”
    She shivered. “Creepy. But so what?”
    “So you should check motel registers, canvass the neighborhood. Follow up. That’s how you’re going to do this, by working. Not by trying to do magic five floors underground in Virginia.”
    “There was no neighborhood. You saw the place. We’ve got nothing to work on. I keep on telling you that.”
    “And I keep on telling you there’s always something to work on.”
    “Yeah, yeah, he’s very smart, the paint, the geography, the quiet scenes.”
    “Exactly. I’m not kidding. Those four things will lead you to him, sure as anything. Did Blake go to Spokane?”
    She nodded. “We’re meeting him at the scene.”
    “So he’s going to have to do what I tell him, or I’m not sticking around.”
    “Don’t push it, Reacher. You’re Army liaison, not an investigator. And he’s pretty desperate. He can make you stick around.”
    “He’s fresh out of threats.”
    She made a face. “Don’t count on it. Deerfield and Cozo are working on getting those Chinese boys to implicate you. They’ll ask INS to check for illegals, whereupon they’ll find about a thousand in the restaurant kitchens alone. Whereupon they’ll start talking about deportations, but they’ll also mention that a little cooperation could make the problem go away, whereupon the big guys in the tongs will tell those kids to spill whatever beans we want them to spill. Greatest good for the greatest number, right?”
    Reacher made no reply.
    “Bureau always gets what it wants,” Harper said.
    BUT THE PROBLEM with sitting there rerunning it like a video over and over again is that little doubts start to creep in. You go over it and over it and you can’t remember if you really did all the things you should have done. You sit there all alone, thinking, thinking, thinking, and it all goes a little blurry and the more you question it, the less sure you get. One tiny little detail. Did you do it? Did you say it? You know you did at the Callan house. You know that for sure. And at Caroline Cooke’s place. Yes, definitely. You know that for sure, too. And at Lorraine Stanley’s place in San Diego. But what about Alison Lamarr’s place? Did you do it? Or did you make her do it? Did you say it? Did you?
    You’re completely sure you did, but maybe that’s just in the rerun. Maybe that’s the pattern kicking in and making you assume something happened because it always happened before. Maybe this time you forgot. You become terribly afraid about it. You become sure you forgot. You think hard. And the more you think about it, the more you’re sure you didn’t do it yourself. Not this time. That’s OK, as long as you told her to do it for you. But did you? Did you tell her? Did you say the words? Maybe you didn’t. What then?
    You shake yourself and tell yourself to calm down. A person of your superhuman talent, unsure and confused? Ridiculous. Absurd! So you put it out of your mind. But it won’t go away. It nags at you. It gets bigger and bigger, louder and louder. You end up sitting all alone, cold and sweating, absolutely sure you’ve made your first small mistake.
    THE BUREAU’S OWN Learjet had ferried