Without Fail

lose.”
    Neagley said nothing.
    “You’ve got a license, right?” Reacher said. “To be in the business you’re in? And you’ve got an office and a job and a home and a fixed location. I’m going to disappear after this. You can’t do that.”
    “Think we’re going to get caught?”
    “I can afford to take the risk. You can’t.”
    “There’s no risk if we don’t get caught.”
    Now Reacher said nothing.
    “It’s like you told Bannon,” she said. “I’m lying there lined up on these guys, I’m going to get an itch in my spine. I need you to watch my back.”
    “This isn’t your fight.”
    “Why is it yours? Because some woman your brother once dumped got herself killed doing her job? That’s tenuous.”
    Reacher said nothing.
    “OK, it’s your fight,” Neagley said. “I know that. But whatever thing you’ve got in your head that makes it your fight makes it my fight too. Because I’ve got the same thing in my head. And even if we didn’t think the same, if I had a problem, wouldn’t you help me out?”
    “I would if you asked.”
    “So we’re even.”
    “Except I’m not asking.”
    “Not right now. But you will be. You’re two thousand miles from Wyoming and you don’t have a credit card to buy a plane ticket with, and I do. You’re armed with a folding knife with a three-inch blade and I know a guy in Denver who will give us any weapons we want, no questions asked, and you don’t. I can rent a car in Denver to get us the rest of the way, and you can’t.”
    They walked on, twenty yards, thirty.
    “OK,” Reacher said. “I’m asking.”
    “We’ll get the clothes in Denver,” she said. “I know some good places.”

    They made it to Denver before three in the afternoon Mountain Time. The high plains lay all around them, tan and dormant. The air was thin and bitter cold. There was no snow yet, but it was coming. The runway plows were lined up and ready. The snowdrift fences were prepared. The car rental companies had shipped their sedans south and brought in plenty of new four-wheel-drives. Neagley signed for a GMC Yukon at the Avis counter. They shuttled to the lot and picked it up. It was black and shiny and looked a lot like Froelich’s Suburban except it was two feet shorter.
    They drove it into the city. It was a long, long way. Space seemed infinitely available even after D.C., which wasn’t the most crowded place in the East. They parked in a downtown garage and walked three blocks and Neagley found the store she was looking for. It was an all-purpose outdoor equipment place. It had everything from boots and compasses to zinc stuff designed to stop you getting sunburn on your nose. They bought a bird-watcher’s spotting scope and a hiker’s large-scale map of central Wyoming and then they moved to the clothing racks. They were full of the kind of stuff you could use halfway up the Rockies and then wear around town without looking like a complete idiot. Neagley went for a walker’s heavy-duty outfit in greens and browns. Reacher duplicated his Atlantic City purchases at twice the price and twice the quality. This time he added a hat, and a pair of gloves. He dressed in the changing cubicle. Left Joe’s last surviving suit stuffed in the garbage can.
    Neagley found a pay phone on the street and stopped in the cold long enough to make a short call. Then they went back to the truck and she drove it out of the garage and through the city center toward the dubious part of town. There was a strong smell of dog food in the air.
    “There’s a factory here,” she said.
    Reacher nodded. “No kidding.”
    She came off a narrow street into some kind of an industrial park and nosed through a tangle of low-built metal structures. There were linoleum dealers and brake shops and places where you could get four snow tires for ninety-nine bucks and other places where you could get your steering realigned for twenty. On one corner there was a long low workshop standing on its own in the center of a quarter-acre of cracked blacktop. The building had a closed roll-up door and a hand-painted sign that read: Eddie Brown Engineering .
    “This is your guy?” Reacher asked.
    Neagley nodded. “What do we want?”
    Reacher shrugged. “No point planning it to death. Something short and something long, one of each, plus some ammunition, I guess. That should do it.”
    She stopped in front of the roll-up door and hit the horn. A guy came out of a personnel entrance and got