of the NASA mugs was broken. Its handle had come right off.
* * *
Angelo Mancini had the doctor's shirt collar bunched in his left hand and he had his right hand bunched into a fist. The doctor's wife was sitting in Roberto Cassano's lap. She had been ordered to, and she had refused. So Mancini had hit her husband, hard, in the face. She had refused again. Mancini had hit her husband again, harder. She had complied. Cassano had his hand on her thigh, his thumb an inch under the hem of her skirt. She was rigid with fear and shuddering with revulsion.
'Talk to me, baby,' Cassano whispered, in her ear. 'Tell me where you told Jack Reacher to hide.'
'I didn't tell him anything.'
'You were with him twenty minutes. Last night. The weirdo at the motel told us so.'
'I didn't tell him anything.'
'So what were you doing there for twenty minutes? Did you have sex with him?'
'No.'
'You want to have sex with me?'
She didn't answer.
'Shy?' Cassano asked. 'Bashful? Cat got your tongue?'
He moved his hand another inch, upward. He licked the woman's ear. She ducked away. Just twisted at the waist and leaned right over, away from him.
He said, 'Come back, baby.'
She didn't move.
He said, 'Come back,' a little louder.
She straightened up. He got the impression she was about to puke. He didn't want that. Not all over his good clothes. But he licked her ear one more time anyway, just to show her who was boss. Mancini hit the doctor one more time, just for fun. Travelling men, roaming around, getting the job done. But wasting their time in Nebraska, that was for sure. No one knew a damn thing. The whole place was as barren as the surface of the moon, with much less to do. Who would stay? This guy Reacher was long gone, obviously, totally in the wind, probably halfway to Omaha by the time the sun came up, rumbling along in the stolen truck, completely unnoticed by the county cops, who clearly sat around all night with their thumbs up their butts, because hadn't they missed every single one of the deliveries roaring through from Canada to Vegas? For months? Hadn't they? Every single one?
Assholes.
Yokels.
Retards.
All of them.
Cassano jerked upright and spilled the doctor's wife off his lap. She sprawled on the floor. Mancini punched the doctor one more time, and then they left, back to the rented Impala parked outside.
Reacher kept the three smudged shapes far to his right and tracked onward. He was used to walking. All soldiers were. Sometimes there was no alternative to a long fast advance on foot, so soldiers trained for it. It had been that way since the Romans, and it was still that way, and it would stay that way for ever. So he kept on going, satisfied with his progress, enjoying the small compensations that fresh air and country smells brought with them.
Then he smelled something else.
Up ahead was a tangle of low bushes, like a miniature grove. Wild raspberries or wild roses, maybe, a remnant, somehow spared by the ploughs, now bare and dormant but still thick and dense with thorns. There was a thin plume of smoke coming from them, from right in the middle, horizontal and almost invisible on the wind. It smelled distinctive. Not a wood fire. Not a cigarette.
Marijuana.
Reacher was familiar with the smell. All cops are, even military cops. Grunts get high like anyone else, off duty. Sometimes even on duty. Reacher guessed what he was smelling was a fine sativa, probably not imported junk from Mexico, probably a good home-grown strain. And why not, in Nebraska? Corn country was ideal for a little clandestine farming. Corn grew as high as an elephant's eye, and dense, and a twenty-foot clearing carved out a hundred yards from the edge of a field was as secret a garden as could be planted anywhere. More profitable than corn, too, even with all the federal subsidies. And these people had their haulage fees to meet. Maybe someone was sampling his recent harvest, judging its quality, setting its price in his mind.
It was a kid. A boy. Maybe fifteen years old, maybe sixteen. Reacher walked on and looked down into the chest-high thicket and found him there. He was quite tall, quite thin, with the kind of long centre-parted hair Reacher hadn't seen on a boy for a long time. He was wearing thick pants and a surplus parka from the old West German army. He