Wright to Edgerton. Both roads were shown on the map as
secondaries. They had driven part of 387 already and knew it to
be a pretty decent strip of blacktop. The left-hand edge of the
square was 1-25 which came down from Montana in the north
and ran straight past Edgerton and all the way down to Casper.
The bottom of the square was also 1-25, where it came out of
Casper and dog-legged east to Douglas before turning south
again and heading for Cheyenne. The whole eighty-mile square
was split into two more or less equal vertical rectangles by the
dirt road that ran north to south through Grace. That road
showed up on the map as a thin dotted grey line. The key in the
margin called it an unpaved minor track.
‘What do you think?’ Neagley asked.
Reacher traced the square with his finger. Widened his
radius and traced a hundred miles east, and north, and west,
and south. ‘I think that in the whole history of the western
United States no person has ever just passed through Grace,
Wyoming. It’s inconceivable. Why would anybody? Any
coherent journey south to north or east to west would miss it
altogether. Casper to Wright, say. Bottom left to top right.
You’d use 1-25 east to Douglas and Route 59 north out of
Douglas to Wright. Coming through Grace makes no sense at
all. It saves no miles. It just slows you down, because it’s a dirt
track. And would you even notice the track? Remember what
it looked like at the north end? I thought it was going nowhere.’
‘And we’ve got a hiker’s map,’ Neagley said. ‘Maybe it’s not
even on a regular road map.’
‘So that truck passed throughfor a reason,’ Reacher said.
‘Not by accident, not for the fun of it.’
I’hose were the guys,’ Neagley said.
372
Reacher nodded, q’hey were on their reconnaissance run.’
‘I agree,’ Neagley said. ‘But did they like what they saw?’
Reacher closed his eyes. What did they see? They saw a tiny
town with no safe hiding places. A helicopter landing site just
fifty yards from the church. And a black SUV that looked a little
like an official Secret Service vehicle already parked on the
road, big and obvious. With Colorado plates, and Denver was
probably the nearest Secret Service field office.
‘I don’t think they were turning cartwheels,’ he said.
‘So will they abort? Or will they come back?’
‘Only one way to find out,’ Reacher said. ‘We wait and see.’
They waited. The sun fell away into afternoon and the temperature
dropped like a stone. The clock ticked 3600 times every
hour. Neagley went out for a walk and came back with a bag
from the grocery store. They ate an improvised lunch. Then
they developed a new look-out pattern based on the fact that
no vehicle could get all the way through either field of view
in less than about eight minutes. So they sat comfortably
and every five minutes by Neagley’s watch they knelt up and
shuffled over to their louvres and scanned the length of the
road. Each time there was a small thrill of anticipation, and each
time it was disappointed. But the regular physical movement
helped against the cold. They started stretching in place, to
keep loose. They did press-ups, to keep warm. The spare
rounds in their pockets jingled ,loudly. Battle rattle, Neagley
called it. From time to time Reacher pressed his face against
the louvres and stared out at the snowfall in the west. The
clouds were still low and black, held back by an invisible wall
about fifty miles away.
q’hey won’t come back,’ Neagley said. qhey’d have to be
insane to try anything here.’
‘I think they are insane,’ Reacher said.
He watched and waited, and listened to the clock. He had had
enough just before four o’clock. He used the blade of his knife
to cut through the accumulation of old white, paint and lifted
one of the louvres out of the frame. It was a simple length of
wood, maybe three feet long, maybe four inches wide, maybe
an inch thick. He held it out in front of him like a spear and