“C 1”
So? “So then we put two and two together and make four. The way you guys
ifo/t/u/w (filing 193
have got it, you ain’t making four. You’re making some big inexplicable number that’s a long, long way from four.”
‘feat^l racked his seat back a little more and dozed through most of Harper’s final hour at the wheel. The second-to-last leg of the trip took them up the northern flank of Mount Hood on Route 35. The Buick changed down to third gear to cope with the gradient, and the jerk from the transmission woke him again. He watched through the windshield as the road looped around behind the peak. Then Harper found Route 26 and swung west for the final approach, down the mountainside, toward the city of Portland.
The nighttime view was spectacular. There was broken cloud high in the sky, and a bright moon, and starlight. There was snow piled in the gullies. The world was like a jagged sculpture in gray steel, glowing below them.
“I can see the attraction of wandering,” Harper said. “Sight like this.”
Reacher nodded. “It’s a big, big planet.”
They passed through a sleeping town called Rhododendron and saw a sign pointing ahead to Rita Scimeca’s village, five miles farther down the slope. When they got there, it was nearly three in the morning. There was a gas station and a general store on the through road. Both of them were closed up tight. There was a cross street running north into the lower slope of the mountain. Harper nosed up it. The cross street had cross streets of its own. Scimeca’s was the third of them. It ran east up the slope.
Her house was easy to spot. It was the only one on the street with lights in the windows. And the only one with a Bureau sedan parked outside. Harper stopped behind the sedan and turned off her lights and the motor died with a little shudder and silence enveloped them. The rear window of the Bureau car was misted with breath and there was a single head silhouetted in it. The head moved and the sedan door opened and a young man in a dark suit stepped out. Reacher and Harper stretched and undipped their belts and opened their doors. Slid out and stood in the chill air with their breath clouding around them.
“She’s in there, safe and sound,” the local guy said to them. “I was told to wait out here for you.”
Harper nodded. “And then what?”
“Then I stay out here,” the guy said. “You do all the talking. I’m security detail until the local cops take over, eight in the morning.”
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“The cops going to cover twenty-four hours a day?” Reacher asked.
The guy shook his head, miserably.
“Twelve,” he said. “I do the nights.”
Reacher nodded. Good enough, he thought. The house was a big square clapboard structure, built side-on to the street so the front faced the view to the west. There was a generous front porch with gingerbread railings. The slope of the street made room for a garage under the house at the front. The garage door faced sideways, under the end of the porch. There was a short driveway. Then the land sloped upward, so that the rest of the basement would be dug into the hillside. The lot was small, surrounded with tall hurricane fencing marching up the rise. The yard was cultivated, with flowers everywhere, the color taken out of them by the silver moonlight.
“She awake?” Harper asked.
The local guy nodded. “She’s in there waiting for you.”
JeA/etvwetv
I
[ 9 walkway came off the driveway on the left and looped through the dark around some rockery plantings to a set of wide wooden steps in the center of the front porch. Harper skipped up them but Reacher s weight made them creak in the night silence and before the echo of the sound came back from the hills the front door was open and Rita Scimeca was standing there watching them. She had one hand on the inside doorknob and a blank look on her face.
“Hello, Reacher,” she said.