The Hard Way

him alive and well and conscious and feeling everything. He’ll tell us about his partner and then he’ll die, long, slow, and hard. Over a week or two. So a gunfight is no good to me. Not because I care about noncombatants, true. But because I don’t want any accidents with Taylor. I would hate to give it to him easy. You can take my word on
that.
”
    “OK,” Reacher said.
    “So where is he?”
    Reacher paused. Thought about Hobart, and Birmingham, Alabama, and Nashville, Tennessee, and kindly white-haired doctors in lab coats holding artificial limbs.
    “He’s in Norfolk,” he said.
    “Where’s that?”
    “It’s a county, north and east of here. About a hundred and twenty miles.”
    “Where in Norfolk?”
    “A place called Grange Farm.”
    “He’s on a farm?”
    “Flat country,” Reacher said. “Like a pool table. With ditches. Easy to defend.”
    “Nearest big city?”
    “It’s about thirty miles south and west of Norwich.”
    “Nearest town?”
    Reacher didn’t reply.
    “Nearest town?” Lane asked again.
    Reacher glanced back at the reception desk.
By statute some documents may not be photocopied.
He watched a Xerox machine at work, a ghostly stripe of green light cycling horizontally back and forth beneath a lid. He glanced at the harassed mother and heard her voice in his head:
Why don’t you draw a picture of something you’re going to see?
He looked at the kid’s doll, missing an arm. Heard Dave Kemp’s voice, in the country store:
It felt like a thin book. Not many pages. A rubber band around it.
Recalled the tiny imperceptible impact of the kid’s tattered bear skidding on the tile and landing against his shoe.
    Lane said, “Reacher?”
    Reacher heard Lauren Pauling’s voice in his mind:
A little is sometimes all you need. Going out, they don’t care as much as when you’re coming in.
    Lane said, “Reacher? Hello? What’s the nearest town?”
    Reacher dragged his focus back from the middle distance, slowly, carefully, painfully, and he looked directly into Lane’s eyes. He said, “The nearest town is called Fenchurch Saint Mary. I’ll show you exactly where it is. Be ready to leave in one hour. I’ll come back for you.”
    Then he stood up and concentrated hard on walking infinitely slowly across the lobby floor. One foot in front of the other. Left, then right. He caught Pauling’s eye. Walked out the door. Down the concrete steps. He made it to the sidewalk.
    Then he ran like hell for the parking garage.

CHAPTER 63
    REACHER HAD PARKED the car, so he still had the keys. He blipped the door from thirty feet away and wrenched it open and threw himself inside. Jammed the key in the ignition and started the motor and shoved the stick in reverse. Stamped on the gas and hurled the tiny car out of the parking space and braked hard and spun the wheel and took off again forward with the front tires howling and smoking. He threw a ten-pound note at the barrier guy and didn’t wait for the change. Just hit the gas as soon as the pole was raised forty-five degrees. He blasted up the ramp and shot straight across two lanes of oncoming traffic and jammed to a stop on the opposite curb because he saw Pauling hurrying toward him. He threw open her door and she slid inside and he took off again and he was twenty yards down the road before she got the door closed behind her.
    “North,” he said. “Which way is north?”
    “North? North is behind us,” she said. “Go around the traffic circle.”
    Hyde Park Corner.
He blew through two red lights and swerved the car like a dodgem from one lane to another. Came all the way around and back onto Park Lane in the other direction doing more than sixty miles an hour. Practically on two wheels.
    “Where now?” he said.
    “What the hell is going on?”
    “Just get me out of town.”
    “I don’t know how.”
    “Use the atlas. There’s a city plan.”
    Reacher dodged buses and taxis. Pauling turned pages, frantically.
    “Go straight,” she said.
    “Is that north?”
    “It’ll get us there.”
    They made it through Marble Arch with the engine screaming. They got green lights all the way past the Marylebone Road. They made it into Maida Vale. Then Reacher slowed a little. Breathed out for what felt like the first time in half an hour.
    “Where next?”
    “Reacher, what happened?”
    “Just give me directions.”
    “Make a right onto St. John’s Wood Road,” Pauling said. “That will take us back to Regent’s Park.