Without Fail

fire a single round and waited until the guy had pirouetted around backward and shot him through the throat from the rear. He tried to put the bullet exactly where Froelich had taken hers. The spent brass expelled and hit the Tahoe twenty feet away with a loud clang and the guy pitched forward on his face and lay still and the snow turned bright red all around him. The crash of the shot rolled away and absolute silence rolled back to replace it. Reacher and Neagley stood still and held their breath and listened hard. Heard nothing except the sound of the snow falling.
    “How did you know?” Neagley asked, quietly.
    “It was Froelich’s gun,” he said. “They stole it from her kitchen. I recognized the scratches and the oil marks. She’d kept the clips loaded in a drawer for about five years.”
    “It still might have fired,” Neagley said.
    “The whole of life is a gamble,” Reacher said. “From the very beginning to the very end. Wouldn’t you say?”
    The silence closed in tighter. And the cold. They were alone in a thousand square miles of freezing emptiness, breathing hard, shivering, a little sick with adrenaline.
    “How long will the church thing last?” he asked.
    “I don’t know,” Neagley said. “Forty minutes? An hour?”
    “So we don’t need to rush.”
    He waded over and retrieved his Steyr from where it had fallen. The snow was already starting to cover the two bodies. He took wallets and badges from the pockets. Wiped his knife clean on the Bismarck guy’s twill coat. Opened all four of the Tahoe’s doors so the snow would drift inside and bury it quicker. Neagley wiped the garage guy’s pistol on her coat and dropped it. Then they floundered back to the Yukon and climbed inside. Took a last look back. The scene was already rimed with new snow, whitening fast. It would be gone within forty-eight hours. The icy wind would freeze the whole tableau inside a long smooth east-west drift until the spring sunshine released it again.
    Neagley drove, slowly. Reacher piled the wallets on his knees and started with the badges. The truck was lurching gently and it took effort just to hold them still in front of his eyes long enough to look at them.
    “County cops from Idaho,” he said. “Some rural place south of Boise, I think.”
    He put both badges into his pocket. Opened the Bismarck guy’s wallet. It was a brown leather trifold, dry and cracked and molded around the contents. There was a milky plastic window on the inside with a police ID behind it. The guy’s lean face stared out from the photograph.
    “His name was Richard Wilson,” he said. “Basic grade detective.”
    There were two credit cards and an Idaho driver’s license in the wallet. And scraps of paper, and almost three hundred dollars in cash. He spilled the paper on his knees and put the cash in his pocket. Opened the garage guy’s wallet. It was phony alligator, black, and it had an ID from the same police department.
    “Peter Wilson,” he said. He checked the driver’s license. “A year younger.”
    Peter had three credit cards and nearly two hundred dollars. Reacher put the cash in his pocket and glanced ahead. The snow clouds were behind them and the sky was clear in the east. The sun was out and in their eyes. There was a small black dot in the air. The church tower was barely visible, almost twenty miles away. The Yukon bounced its way toward it, relentlessly. The black dot grew larger. There was a gray blur of rotors above it. It looked motionless in the air. Reacher steadied himself against the dash and looked up through the windshield. There was a tinted band across the top of the glass. The helicopter eased down through it. He could make out its shape. It was fat and bulbous at the front. Probably a Night Hawk. It picked up a visual on the church and turned toward it. It drifted in like a fat insect. The Yukon bounced gently over washboard depressions. The wallets slid off Reacher’s knees and the paper scraps scattered. The helicopter was hovering. Then it was swinging in the air, turning its main door toward the church.
    “Golf clubs,” Reacher said. “Not tool samples.”
    “What?”
    He held up a scrap of paper. “A UPS receipt. Next-day air. From Minneapolis. Addressed to Richard Wilson, arriving guest, at a D.C. motel. A carton, a foot square, forty-eight inches long. Contents, one bag of golf clubs.”
    Then he went quiet. Stared at another scrap of paper.
    “Something else,” he