Running Blind (The Visitor)

matter you came up with.”
    Silence inside the vehicle.
    “Shit,” Reacher said. “One of the other women got a delivery, right?”
    Blake shook his head.
    “Wrong,” he said. “All seven of them got a delivery.”

16
    "SO YOU’RE GOING to Portland, Oregon,” Blake said. “You and Harper.”
    “Why?” Reacher asked.
    “So you can visit with your old friend Rita Scimeca. The lady lieutenant you told us about? Got raped down in Georgia? She lives near Portland. Small village, east of the city. She’s one of the eleven on your list. You can get down there and check out her basement. She says there’s a brand-new washing machine in there. In a box.”
    “Did she open it?” Reacher asked.
    Blake shook his head. “No, Portland agents checked with her on the telephone. They told her not to touch it. Somebody’s on the way over right now.”
    “If the guy’s still in the area, Portland could be his next call. It’s close enough.”
    “Correct,” Blake said. “That’s why there’s somebody on the way over.”
    Reacher nodded. “So now you’re guarding them? What’s that thing about barn doors and horses bolting? ”
    Blake shrugged. “Hey, only seven left alive, makes the manpower much more feasible.”
    It was a cop’s sick humor in a car full of cops of one kind or another, but still it fell a little flat. Blake colored slightly and looked away.
    “Losing Alison gets to me, much as anybody,” he said. “Like family, right?”
    “Especially to her sister, I guess,” Reacher said.
    “Tell me about it,” Blake said. “She was burned as hell when the news came in. Practically hyperventilating. Never seen her so agitated.”
    “You should take her off the case.”
    Blake shook his head. “I need her.”
    “You need something, that’s for damn sure.”
    “Tell me about it.”
    SPOKANE TO THE small village east of Portland measured about three hundred and sixty miles on the map Blake showed them. They took the car the local agent had used to bring them in from the airport. It still had Alison Lamarr’s address handwritten on the top sheet of the pad attached to the windshield. Reacher stared at it for a second. Then he tore it off and balled it up and tossed it into the rear footwell. Found a pen in the glove box and wrote directions on the next sheet: 90W- 395S-84W-35S-26W . He wrote them big enough to see them in the dark when they were tired. Underneath the big figures, he could still see Alison Lamarr’s address, printed through by the pressure of the local guy’s ballpoint.
    “Call it six hours,” Harper said. “You drive three and I’ll drive three.”
    Reacher nodded. It was completely dark when he started the engine. He turned around in the road, shoulder to shoulder, spinning the wheel, exactly like he was sure the guy had done, but two days later and two hundred yards south. Rolled through the narrow downhill curves to Route 90 and turned right. Once the lights of the city were behind them the traffic density fell away and he settled to a fast cruise west. The car was a new Buick, smaller and plainer than Lamarr’s boat, but maybe a little faster because of it. That year must have been the Bureau’s GM year. The Army had done the same thing. Staff car purchasing rotated strictly between GM, Ford, and Chrysler, so none of the domestic manufacturers could get pissed at the government.
    The road ran straight southwest through hilly terrain. He put the headlights on bright and eased the speed upward. Harper sprawled to his right, her seat reclined, her head tilted toward him. Her hair spilled down and glowed red and gold in the lights from the dash. He kept one hand on the wheel, the other resting down in his lap. He could see lights in his mirror. Halogen headlights, on bright, swinging and bouncing a mile behind him. They were closing, fast. He accelerated to more than seventy.
    “The Army teach you to drive this fast?” Harper asked.
    He made no reply. They passed a town called Sprague and the road straightened. Blake’s map had shown it dead straight all the way to a town called Ritzville, twenty-something miles ahead. Reacher eased up toward eighty miles an hour, but the headlights behind were still closing fast. A long moment later a car blasted past them, a long low sedan, a wide maneuver, turbulent slip-stream, a full quarter-mile in the opposite lane. Then it eased back right and pulled on ahead like the FBI’s Buick was crawling through a parking lot.
    “