Die Trying by Lee Child

The stout old woman just smiled.

“We’re not insured,” she said.

Then she leaned under the counter and came up with a shotgun.

“Not by no insurance company, anyway,” she said.

Brogan looked at the weapon. He was pretty sure the barrel was way too

short for the piece to be legal. But he wasn’t about to start worrying

over such a thing. Not right then.

“OK,” he said. “You take care now.”

More than seven million people in the Chicago area, something like ten

million road vehicles, but only one white truck had been reported

stolen in the twenty-four-hour period between Sunday and Monday. It

was a white Ford Econoline. Owned and operated by a South Side

electrician. His insurance company made him empty the truck at night,

and store his stock and tools inside his shop. Anything left inside

the truck was not covered. That was the rule. It was an irksome rule,

but on Monday morning when the guy came out to load up and the truck

was gone, it started to look like a rule which made a whole lot of

sense. He had reported the theft to the insurance broker and the

police, and he was not expecting to hear much more about it. So he was

duly impressed when two FBI agents turned up, forty-eight hours later,

asking all kinds of urgent questions.

“OK,” McGrath said. “We know what we’re looking for. White Econoline,

new paint on the sides. We’ve got the plates. Now we need to know

where to look. Ideas?”

“Coming up on forty-eight hours,” Brogan said. “Assume an average

speed of fifty-five? That would make the max range somewhere more than

twenty-six hundred miles. That’s effectively anywhere on the North

American continent, for God’s sake.”

Too pessimistic,” Milosevic said. They probably stopped nights. Call

it six hours’ driving time on Monday, maybe ten on Tuesday, maybe four

so far today, total of twenty hours, that’s a maximum range of eleven

hundred miles.”

“Needle in a haystack,” Brogan said.

McGrath shrugged.

“So let’s find the haystack,” he said. Then we’ll go look for the

needle. Call it fifteen hundred maximum. What does that look like?”

Brogan pulled a road atlas from the stack of reference material on the

table. He opened it up to the early section where the whole country

was shown all at once, all the states splattered over one page in a

colorful mosaic. He checked the scale and traced his fingernail in a

circle.

That’s anywhere shy of California,” he said. “Half of Washington

State, half of Oregon, none of California and absolutely all of

everywhere else. Somewhere around a zillion square miles.”

There was a depressed silence in the room.

“Mountains between here and Washington State, right?” McGrath said.

“So let’s assume they’re not in Washington State yet. Or Oregon. Or

California. Or Alaska or Hawaii. So we’ve cut it down already. Only

forty-five states to call, right? Let’s go to work.”

They might have gone to Canada,” Brogan said. “Or Mexico, or a boat or

a plane.”

Milosevic shrugged and took the atlas from him.

“You’re too pessimistic,” he said again.

“Needle in a damn haystack,” Brogan said back.

Three floors above them the Bureau fingerprint technicians were looking

at the paintbrush Brogan had brought in. It had been used once only,

by a fairly clumsy guy. The paint was matted up in the bristles, and

had run onto the mild steel ferrule which bound the bristles into the

wooden handle. The guy had used an action which had put his thumb on

the back of the ferrule, and his first two fingers on the front. It

was suggestive of a medium-height guy reaching up and brushing paint

onto a flat surface, level with his head, maybe a little higher, the

paintbrush handle pointing downward. A Ford

Econoline was just a fraction less than eighty-one inches tall. Any

sign writing would be about seventy inches off the ground. The

computer could not calculate this guy’s height, because it had only

seen him sitting down inside the Lexus, but the way the brush had been

used, he must have been five-eight, five-nine, reaching up and brushing

just a little above his eye-level. Brushing hard, with some lateral