THIRTY-TWO

NOBODY KNOWS HOW LONG IT TAKES FOR THOUGHTS TO FORM. People talk about electrical impulses racing through nerves at a substantial fraction of the speed of light, but that’s mere transmission. That’s mail delivery. The letter is written in the brain, sparked to life by some sudden damp chemical reaction, two compounds arcing across synapses and reacting like lead and acid in an automobile battery, but instead of sending twelve dumb volts to a turn signal the brain floods the body with all kinds of subtle adjustments all at once, because thoughts don’t necessarily happen one at a time. They come in starbursts and waterfalls and explosions and they race away on parallel tracks, jostling, competing, fighting for supremacy.

Reacher saw the dark blue Chevrolet and instantly linked it through Vincent’s testimony back at the motel to the two men he had seen from Dorothy Coe’s barn, while simultaneously critiquing the connection, in that Chevrolets were very common cars and dark blue was a very common colour, while simultaneously recalling the two matched Iranians and the two matched Arabs he had seen, and asking himself whether the rendezvous of two separate pairs of strange men in winter in a Nebraska hotel could be just a coincidence, and if indeed it wasn’t, whether it might then reasonably imply the presence of a third pair of men, which might or might not be the two tough guys from Dorothy’s farm, however inexplicable those six men’s association might be, however mysterious their purpose, while simultaneously watching the man in front of him dropping his car key, and moving his arm, and putting his hand in his coat pocket, while simultaneously realizing that the guys he had seen on Dorothy’s farm had not been staying at Vincent’s motel, and that there was nowhere else to stay except right there, sixty miles south at the Marriott, which meant that the Chevrolet was likely theirs, at least within the bounds of reasonable possibility, which meant that the Iranian with the moving arm was likely connected with them in some way, which made the guy an enemy, although Reacher had no idea how or why, while simultaneously knowing that likely didn’t mean shit in terms of civilian jurisprudence, while simultaneously recalling years of hard-won experience that told him men like this Iranian went for their pockets in dark parking lots for one of only four reasons, either to pull out a cell phone to call for help, or to pull out a wallet or a passport or an ID to prove their innocence or their authority, or to pull out a knife, or to pull out a gun. Reacher knew all that, while also knowing that violent reaction ahead of the first two reasons would be inexcusable, but that violent reaction ahead of the latter two reasons would be the only way to save his life.

Starbursts and waterfalls and explosions of thoughts, all jostling and competing and fighting for supremacy.

Better safe than sorry.

Reacher reacted.

He twisted from the waist in a violent spasm and started a low sidearm punch aimed at the centre of the Iranian’s chest. Chemical reaction in his brain, instantaneous transmission of the impulse, chemical reaction in every muscle system from his left foot to his right fist, total elapsed time a small fraction of a second, total distance to target less than a yard, total time to target another small fraction of a second, which was good to know right then, because the guy’s hand was all the way in his pocket by that point, his own nervous system reacting just as fast as Reacher’s, his elbow jerking up and back and trying to free whatever the hell it was he wanted, be it a knife, or a gun, or a phone, or a driver’s licence, or a passport, or a government ID, or a perfectly innocent letter from the University of Tehran proving he was a world expert on plant genetics and an honoured guest in Nebraska just days away from increasing local profits a hundredfold and eliminating world hunger at one fell swoop. But right or wrong Reacher’s fist was homing in regardless and the guy’s eyes were going wide and panicked in the gloom and his arm was jerking harder and the brown skin and the black hair on the back of his moving hand was showing above the hem of his pocket, and then came his knuckles, all five of them bunched and knotted because his fingers were clamping hard around something big and black.

Then Reacher’s blow landed.

Two hundred and fifty pounds of moving mass, a huge fist, a huge impact, the zipper of the guy’s coat driving backward into his breastbone, his breastbone driving backward into his chest cavity, the natural elasticity of his ribcage letting it yield whole inches, the resulting violent compression driving the air from his lungs, the hydrostatic shock driving blood back into his heart, his head snapping forward like a crash test dummy, his shoulders driving backward, his weight coming up off the ground, his head whipping backward again and hitting a plate glass window behind him with a dull boom like a kettle drum, his arms and legs and torso all going down like a rag doll, his body falling, sprawling, the hard polycarbonate click and clatter of something black skittering away on the ground, Reacher tracking it all the way in the corner of his eye, not a wallet, not a phone, not a knife, but a Glock 17 semi-automatic pistol, all dark and boxy and wicked. It ended up six or eight feet away from the guy, completely out of his reach, safe, not retrievable, partly because of the distance itself and partly because the guy was down and he wasn’t moving at all.

In fact he was looking like he might never move again.

Something Reacher had heard about, but never actually seen.

His army medic friends had called it commotio cordis, their name for low-energy trauma to the chest wall. Low energy only in the sense that the damage wasn’t done by a car wreck or a shotgun blast, but by a line drive in baseball or a football collision or a punch in a fight or a bad fall on to a blunt object. Gruesome research on laboratory animals proved it was all about luck and timing. Electrocardiograms showed waveforms associated with the beating of the heart, one of which was called the T-wave, and the experiments showed that if the blow landed when the T-wave was between fifteen and thirty milliseconds short of its peak, then lethal cardiac dysrhythmia could occur, stopping the heart just like a regular heart attack. And in a high-stress environment like a confrontation in a parking lot, a guy’s heart was pounding away much harder than normal and therefore it was bringing those T-wave peaks around much faster than usual, as many as two or possibly three times a second, thereby dramatically increasing the odds that the luck and the timing would be bad, not good.

The Iranian lay completely still.

Not breathing.

No visible pulse.

No signs of life.

The standard first-aid remedies taught by the army medics were artificial respiration and external chest compressions, eighty beats a minute, as long as it took, but Reacher’s personal rule of thumb was never to revive a guy who had just pulled a gun on him. He was fairly inflexible on the matter. So he let nature take its course for a minute, and then he helped it along a little with heavy pressure from his finger and thumb on the big arteries in the guy’s neck. Four minutes without oxygen to the brain was reckoned to be the practical limit. Reacher gave it five, just to be certain, squatting there, looking around, listening hard. No one reacted. No one came. The Iranian died, the slack tensions of deep unconsciousness fading away, the absolute soft limpness of recent death replacing them. Reacher stood up and found the car key and picked up the Glock. The key was marked with the Chevrolet stove bolt logo, but it wasn’t for the blue car. Reacher stabbed the unlock button and nothing happened. The Glock was close to new and fully loaded, seventeen bright nine-millimetre Parabellums in the magazine and one in the chamber. Reacher put it in his pocket with his screwdrivers.

He walked back to the front lot and tried again with the key. A yellow Chevy Malibu answered him. It flashed all four of its turn signals and unlocked all four of its doors. It was new and plain and clean. An obvious rental. He got in and pushed the seat back and started it up. The tank was close to full. There were rental papers in the door pocket, dated that day and made out to a Las Vegas corporation under a name that communicated nothing. There were bottles of water in the cup holders, one part-used, one unopened. Reacher backed out of the slot and drove around to the back of the H and stopped with the dead guy between the wall and the car. He found the remote button and popped the trunk. He got out and checked the space. It was not a very big opening and not a very big trunk, but then, the Iranian was not a very big guy.

Reacher bent down and went through the Iranian’s pockets. He found a phone and a knife and a wallet and a handkerchief and about a dollar in coins. He left the coins and stripped the battery out of the phone and put the battery back in one of the dead guy’s pockets and the rest of the phone in another. The knife was a switchblade with a pearl handle. Heavy, solid, and sharp. A decent implement. He put it in his own pocket, with his adjustable wrench. He checked the wallet. It held close to four hundred bucks in cash, plus three credit cards, plus a driver’s licence from the state of Nevada made out to a guy named Asghar Arad Sepehr at a Las Vegas address. The photograph was plausible. The credit cards were in the same name. The cash was mostly twenties, crisp and fresh and fragrant, straight from an ATM. Reacher kept the cash and wiped the wallet with the handkerchief and put it back in the dead guy’s pocket. Then he hoisted him up, two hands, collar and belt, and turned and made ready to fold him into the yellow Malibu’s trunk.

Then he stopped.

He got a better idea.

He carried the guy over to Seth Duncan’s Cadillac and laid him gently on the ground. He found the Cadillac key in his pocket and opened the trunk and picked the guy up again and put him inside. An old-fashioned turnpike cruiser. A big trunk. Plenty of space. He closed the lid on the guy. He opened the driver’s door and used the handkerchief to wipe everything he had touched that day, the wheel, the gearshift, the mirror, the radio knobs, the door handles inside and out. Then he blipped the remote and locked up again and walked away, back to the Malibu. It was yellow, but apart from that it was fairly anonymous. Domestic brand, local plates, conventional shape. Probably less conspicuous out on the open road than the Cadillac, despite the garish colour. And probably less likely to be reported stolen. Out-of-state guys with guns and knives in their pockets generally kept a lot quieter than outraged local citizens.

He checked left, checked right, checked behind, checked ahead. All quiet. Just cold air and silence and stillness and a night mist falling. He got back in the Malibu and kept the headlights off and turned around and nosed slowly out of the lot. He drove the length of McNally Street and paused. To the left was I-80, sixty miles south, a fast six-lane highway, a straight shot east all the way to Virginia. To the right were the forty farms, and the Duncans, and the Apollo Inn, and Eleanor, and the doctor and his wife, and Dorothy Coe, all of them sixty miles north.

Decision time.

Left or right? South or north?

He flicked the headlights on and turned right and headed back north.