The Affair: A Reacher Novel

came down off the right-hand rail she hit the gas and the pulse of acceleration popped the front left-hand tire up over the left-hand rail. The whole car squirmed for a second, and she kept her foot light on the pedal, and the other wheels followed suit, two, three, four, with separate squelching sounds, sidewall rubber against steel, and then she stopped again and parked in the dirt very close to and exactly parallel with the track. The first of the ballast stones were about five feet from my window.
    She said, “I love this spot. No other way to get to it, because of the ditch. But it’s worth the trouble. I come here quite often.”
    “At midnight?” I asked.
    “Always,” she said.
    I turned and looked out the back window. I could see the road. More than forty yards away, less than fifty. At first there was nothing happening. No traffic. Then a car flashed past east to west, left to right, away from Kelham, toward town, moving fast. A big car, with lights on its roof and a shield on its door.
    “Pellegrino,” she said. She was watching too now. Right at my side. She said, “He was probably holed up a hundred yards away, and assoon as that last straggler passed him he counted to ten and hightailed it for home.”
    I said, “Butler was parked right at Kelham’s gate.”
    “Yes, Butler is the one with a race on his hands. And our fate
in
his hands. As soon as he passes us, I guarantee we’re alone in the world. This is a small town, Reacher, and I know where everyone is.”
    The clock in my head said eleven forty-nine. Butler’s plight involved a complex calculation. He was three miles away and wouldn’t hesitate to drive at sixty, which meant he could be home in three minutes. But he couldn’t start that three-minute dash until the last straggler got at least within headlight range of Kelham. And that last straggler might be driving pretty slow at that point, having had a skinful of beer and having seen Pellegrino parked menacingly on the side of the road. My guess was Butler would be through in eleven minutes, which would be midnight exactly, and I said so.
    “No, he’ll have jumped the gun,” Deveraux said. “The last ten minutes have been fairly quiet. He’ll have moved off the gate five minutes ago. That’s my guess. He might not be far behind Pellegrino.”
    We watched the road.
    All quiet.
    I opened my door and got out of the car. I stepped right on the edge of the rail bed. The left-hand rail was no more than a yard away. It was gleaming in the moonlight. I figured the train was ten miles south of us. Passing through Marietta, maybe, right at that moment.
    Deveraux got out on her side and we met behind the Caprice’s trunk. Eleven fifty-one. Nine minutes to go. We watched the road.
    All quiet.
    Deveraux stepped back around and opened a rear door. She checked the back seat. She said, “Just in case. We might as well be ready.”
    “Too cramped,” I said.
    “You don’t like doing it in cars?”
    “They don’t make them wide enough.”
    She checked her watch.
    She said, “We won’t make it back to Toussaint’s in time.”
    I said, “Let’s do it right here. On the ground.”
    She smiled.
    Then wider.
    “Sounds good to me,” she said. “Like Janice Chapman.”
    “If she did,” I said. I took off my BDU jacket and spread it out on the weeds, as long and wide as it would go.
    We watched the road.
    All quiet.
    She took off her gun belt and stowed it on the rear seat of the car. Eleven fifty-four. Six minutes. I knelt down and put my ear on the rail. I heard a faint metallic whisper. Almost not there at all. The train, six miles south.
    We watched the road.
    We saw a hint of a glow in the east.
    Headlights.
    Deveraux said, “Good old Butler.”
    The glow grew brighter, and we heard rushing tires and a straining engine in the silence of the night. Then the glow changed to delineated beams and the noise grew louder and a second later Butler’s car flashed left-to-right in front of us and
thwacked
over the crossing without slowing down at all. He went airborne on the lee side and crashed back to earth with a yelp of rubber and a cloud of dust. Then he was gone.
    Four minutes to go.
    We were neither refined nor elegant. We wrenched our shoes off and pulled our pants down and abandoned all adult sophistication in favor of pure animal instinct. Deveraux hit the deck and got comfortable on my jacket and I went down right on top of her and propped myself up on my palms and watched