Neagley lowered the scope and nodded. "I'd anticipate that. So I'd drive straight across the highway and get back off-road. West of the highway is ten thousand square miles of nothing between Casper and the Wind River Reservation, with only one major road through it. They'd be long gone before somebody whistled up a helicopter and started the search."
"That's a bold plan."
"I'd go for it," Neagley said.
Reacher smiled. "I know you would. Question is, will these guys? I'm wondering if they'll take one look and turn around and forget about it."
"Doesn't matter. We'll take them down while they're looking. We don't need to catch them in the act."
Reacher climbed back into the driver's seat.
"Let's go to work," he said.
The bowl was very shallow. They lost maybe a hundred feet of elevation in the twenty miles they drove before they reached the town. The road was hard-packed dirt, smooth as glass, beautifully scraped and contoured. An annual art, Reacher guessed, performed anew every year when the winter snows melted and the spring rains finished. It was the kind of road Model T Fords rolled down in documentary films. It curved as it approached the town so that the bridge could cross the river at an exact right angle.
The bridge seemed to represent the geographic center of town. There was a general store that offered postal service and a breakfast counter. There was a forge set back behind it that had probably fixed ranch machinery way back in history. There was a feed supplier's office and a hardware store. There was a one-pump gas station with a sign that read: Springs Repaired. There were sidewalks made of wood fronting the buildings. They ran like boat docks, floating on the earth. There was a quiet leathery man loading groceries into a pickup bed.
"They won't come here," Reacher said. "This is the most exposed place I've ever seen."
Neagley shook her head. "They won't know that until they've seen it for themselves. They might be in and out in ten minutes, but ten minutes is all we need."
"Where are we going to stay?"
She pointed. "Over there."
There was a plain-fronted red cedar building with numerous small windows and a sign that read: Clean Rooms.
"Terrific," Reacher said.
"Drive around," Neagley said. "Let's get a feel for the place."
A letter K has only four options for exploration, and they had already covered the northern leg on the way in. Reacher backed up to the bridge and struck out north and east, following the river. That road led past eight houses, four on each side, and then narrowed after another half-mile to a poor stony track. There was a barbed-wire fence lost in the grass on the left, and another on the right.
"Ranch land," Neagley said.
The ranches themselves were clearly miles away. Fragments of the road were visible as it rose and fell over gentle contours into the distance. Reacher turned the truck around and headed back and turned down the short southeast leg. It had more houses and they were closer together, but it was otherwise similar. It narrowed after the same distance and ran on toward nothing visible. There was more barbed wire and an inexplicable wooden shed with no door. Inside the shed was a rusting pickup truck with pale weedy grass growing up all around it. It looked like it had been parked there back when Richard Nixon was Vice President.
"OK, go south," Neagley said. "Let's see the church."
The south leg led seventy miles to Douglas, and they drove the first three miles of it. The town's power and telephone lines came in from that direction, strung on tarred poles, looping on into the distance, following the road. The road passed the church and the graveyard, then the cluster of cedar buildings, then a couple of abandoned cattle barns, then maybe twenty or thirty small houses, and then the town finished and there was just infinite grassland ahead. But it wasn't flat. There were crevices and crevasses worn smooth by ten thousand years of winds and weather. They undulated calmly, up and down to maximum depths of ten or twelve feet, like slow ocean swells. They were all connected in a network. The grass itself was a yard high, brown and dead and brittle. It swayed in waves under the perpetual breeze.
"You could hide an infantry company in there," Neagley said.
Reacher turned the car and headed back toward the church. Pulled over and parked level with the graveyard. The church itself was