he could see.
Reacher watched him for a moment, nothing in his face. Then
he took the Heckler & Koch from Neagley and set it to fire a
single round and waited until the guy had pirouetted round
backward and shot him through the throat from the rear. He
tried to put the bullet exactly where Froelich had taken hers.
The spent brass expelled and hit the Tahoe twenty feet away
with a loud clang and the guy pitched forward on his face and
lay still and the snow turned bright red all around him. The
crash of the shot rolled away and absolute silence rolled back to
replace it. Reacher and Neagley stood still and held their breath
and listened hard. Heard nothing except the sound of the snow
falling.
‘How did you know?’ Neagley asked, quietly.
‘It was Froelich’s gun,’ he said. Fhey stole it from her
kitchen. I recognized the scratches and the oil marks. She’d
kept the clips loaded in a drawer for about five years.’
‘It still might have fired,’ Neagley said.
ne whole of life is a gamble,’ Reacher said. ‘From the very
beginning to the very end. Wouldn’t you say?’
The silence closed in tighter. And the cold. They were alone
in a thousand square miles of freezing emptiness, breathing
hard, shivering, a little sick with adrenalin.
‘How long will the church thing last?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know,’ Neagley said. ‘Forty minutes? An hour?’
‘So we don’t need to rush.’
394
He waded over and retrieved his Steyr from where it had
fallen. The snow was already starting to cover the two bodies.
He took wallets and badges from the pockets. Wiped his knife
clean on the Bismarck guy’s twill coat. Opened all four of
the Tahoe’s doors so the snow would drift inside and bury it
quicker. Neagley wiped the garage guy’s pistol on her coat
and dropped it. Then they floundered back to the Yukon and
climbed inside. Took a last look back. The scene was already
rimed with new snow, whitening fast. It would be gone within
forty-eight hours. The icy wind would freeze the whole tableau
inside a long smooth east-west drift until the spring sunshine
released it again.
Neagley drove, slowly. Reacher piled the wallets on his knees
and started with the badges. The truck was lurching gently and
it took effort just to hold them still in front of his eyes long
enough to look at them.
‘County cops from Idaho,’ he said. ‘Some rural place south of
Boise, I think.’
He put both badges into his pocket. Opened the Bismarck
guy’s wallet. It was a brown leather trifold, dry and cracked and
moulded around the contents. There was a milky plastic window
on the inside with a police ID behind it. The guy’s lean face
stared out from the photograph.
‘His name was Richard Wilson,’ he said. ‘Basic grade detective.’
There were two credit cards, and an Idaho driving licence in
the wallet. And scraps of paper, and almost three hundred
dollars in cash. He spilled the paper on his knees and put the
cash in his pocket. Opened the garage guy’s wallet. It was
phony alligator, black, and it had an ID from the same police
department.
‘Peter Wilson,’ he said. He checked the driving licence. ‘A
year younger.’
Peter had three credit cards and nearly two hundred dollars.
Reacher put the cash in his pocket and glanced ahead. The
snow clouds were behind them and the sky was clear in the
east. The sun was out and in their eyes. There was a small black
dot in the air. The church tower was barely visible, almost
twenty miles away. The Yukon bounced its way towards it,
395
relentlessly. The black dot grew larger. There was a grey blur
of rotors above it. It looked motionless in the air. Reacher
steadied himself against the dash and looked up through the
windshield. There was a tinted band across the top of the glass.
The helicopter eased down through it. He could make out its
shape. It was fat and bulbous at the front. Probably a Night
Hawk. It picked up a visual on the church and turned towards it.