the time came. If necessary. Worst case. Burke agreed. Then Reacher insisted he feel free to take off without him. Immediately, no warning, at any time at all, for any reason or none, whatever his gut or his instincts told him.
“Don’t second-guess it,” Reacher said. “Don’t overthink it. Don’t wait even half a second.”
Burke didn’t answer.
“I mean it,” Reacher said. “If they come for you, it means they got past me. In which case you really don’t want to meet them.”
Burke agreed.
Reacher got out of the car. He closed the door. He swung his legs over the fence. He set out walking. The weather was the same. The smells were the same. The heavy ripe fruit, the hot dry grass. He heard the same buzz of the same insects. Overhead was a hawk, on the thermals. Two more, in the far distance, widely separated. Too far away to tell what kind. Stan would have said it was typical raptor behavior. Each one claimed an exclusive slice of the action. My street corner, your street corner. No trespassing. Like tough guys everywhere.
Reacher walked on, looking straight ahead. Refusing to glance left, at the top of the rise, where they might be waiting and watching. Refusing to give them the satisfaction. Let them come to him. He walked on. He got halfway across the orchard. Where he had knocked the kid down. There was no sign. No evidence. Maybe a little scuffed grass, from tensed-up footsteps. Maybe in a TV show they would make something out of it. But not in the real world. He walked on.
He made it all the way to the second fence. Undisturbed. All around was peace and quiet and silence. Nothing was moving. Straight ahead the leaves were darker, and the smell was ranker. The sunless shadows looked colder. He glanced back. Nothing doing.
He climbed over the fence.
Ryantown, New Hampshire.
He walked down Main Street, like the day before, stepping between swaying pipe-thin trees, stumbling now and then on tipped-up stones, passing the low remains of the church, and the school. He picked his way onward, to the four-flats. To the right-hand foundation. To the remains of the kitchen, in the far back corner. The fragment of tile. He pictured his grandfather, like a clean-shaven Blackbeard, yelling and screaming and throwing punches and knocking people down. Probably drinking. He pictured his grandmother, hard and cold and sour. Never smiling. Never saying a nice thing. Always looking cross. Angrily sewing the kind of bedsheets she would never get to use.
He pictured his father, crawling around on the floor. Or not. Maybe sitting quietly in a corner, staring out the window. At a teeming patch of sky.
Your dad joined the Marines at seventeen, Carter Carrington had said. Got to be a reason.
He stood there for a long moment more, and then he said his goodbyes to the place. He turned and retraced his steps. Out the kitchen, through the hallway, past the trees, through the lobby, out the street door.
No one there. Nothing but peace and quiet and silence, all over again. He walked back up Main Street. He stopped at the school. Up ahead the street bent around to meet the church. Without sixty years of trees the vista would have been wide open. A person would have seen a big patch of sky. Maybe right there was their birdwatching spot. Where they saw the hawk. Maybe the binoculars belonged to the school. A grant from the county. Communally owned. Not to be taken away. Or maybe a kindly teacher had found them in a junk shop, and laid out a couple of bucks.
He walked on. He passed the church. He got back to the fence. Ryantown’s city limit. Ahead of him was the orchard. Where the road used to be. A straight shot, a hundred yards, to the parked Subaru. Which was still there. It was clearly visible in the distance. Between it and him were only two points of interest. The more distant was Burke himself. He was standing in the space between the back of his car and the safe side of the fence, and he was hopping from foot to foot, and jumping up and down, and waving his arm.
The second point of interest was fifty yards closer. Halfway across the orchard, strung out across the width of the stolen road, was a line of five men.
Overhead the hawk circled slowly.
Reacher climbed the fence. He left the mossy tangle of unchecked nature behind