Nothing to Lose

Reacher closed his eyes. Saw the barroom again, the dim light, the tense silent people, the air thick with raised dust and the smell of fear and conflict.He stepped in and jabbed hard and caught the guy low down in the side, below the ribs, above the waist, two hundred and fifty pounds of weight punched through the blunt end of a chair leg into nothing but soft tissue. He opened his eyes again and said, “All the more reason to get him checked out properly.”

Thurman nodded. “I’ll have him taken to the hospital in Halfway tomorrow. If that’s what it takes, so that you can move on with a clear conscience.”

“My conscience is already clear,” Reacher said. “If people leave me alone, I leave them alone. If they don’t, what comes at them is their problem.”

“Even if you overreact?”

“Compared to what? There were six of them. What were they going to do to me? Pat me on the cheek and send me on my way?”

“I don’t know what their intentions were.”

“You do,” Reacher said. “Their intentions were your intentions. They were acting on your instructions.”

“And I was acting on the instructions of a higher authority.”

“I guess I’ll have to take your word for that.”

“You should join us. Come the Rapture, you don’t want to be left behind.”

“The Rapture?”

“People like me ascend to heaven. People like you stay here without us.”

“Works for me,” Reacher said. “Bring it on.”

Thurman didn’t answer that. Reacher took a last look at the guy in the bed and then stepped away and walked out the door, down the steps, back to the blazing arena. The foreman and the guy with the wrench stood where they had been before. They hadn’t moved at all. Reacher heard Thurman close the infirmary door and clatter down the steps behind him. He moved on and felt Thurman follow him toward the gate. The guy with the wrench was looking beyond Reacher’s shoulder, at Thurman, waiting for a sign, maybe hoping for a sign, slapping the free end of the wrench against his palm.

Reacher changed direction.

Headed straight for the guy.

He stopped a yard away and stood directly face-to-face and looked him in the eye and said, “You’re in my way.”

The guy glanced in Thurman’s direction and waited. Reacher said, “Have a little self-respect. You don’t owe that old fool anything.”

The guy said, “I don’t?”

“Not a thing,” Reacher said. “None of you does. He owes you. You all should wise up and take over. Organize. Have a revolution. You could lead it.”

The guy said, “I don’t think so.”

Thurman called out, “Are you leaving now, Mr. Reacher?”

“Yes,” Reacher said.

“Are you ever coming back?”

“No,” Reacher lied. “I’m done here.”

“Do I have your word?”

“You heard me.”

The giant glanced beyond Reacher’s shoulder again, hope in his eyes. But Thurman must have shaken his head or given some other kind of a negative instruction, because the guy just paused a beat and then stepped aside, one long sideways pace. Reacher walked on, back to the sick deputy’s truck. It was where he had left it, with all its windows intact.

47

From the plant to the Hope town line was fifteen miles by road, but Reacher made it into a twenty-mile excursion by looping around to the north, through the scrub. He figured that the townsfolk would have reorganized fairly fast, and there was no obvious way of winning the consequent twin confrontations at both ends of Main Street. So he avoided them altogether. He hammered the deputy’s old truck across the rough ground and navigated by the glow of the fire to his right. It looked to be going strong. In his experience brick buildings always burned well. The contents went first, and then the floors and the ceilings, and then the roof, with the outer walls holding up and forming a tall chimney to enhance the air flow. And when the walls finally went, the collapse blasted sparks and embers all over the place, to start new fires. Sometimes a whole city block could be taken out by one cigarette and one book of matches.

He skirted the town on a radius he judged to be about four miles and then he shadowed the road back east a hundred yards out in the dirt. When the clock in his head hit midnight he figured he was less than a mile short of the line. He veered right and bounced up onto the tarred pebbles and finished the trip like a normal driver. He thumped over the line and Hope’s thick blacktop made the ride go suddenly quiet.

Vaughan was waiting a hundred yards ahead.