He could feel the scratch of her eyelashes against the skin on the side
of his chest as she blinked. The truck roared on, faster than it
wanted to go. He could feel the driver pushing it against its natural
cruising speed.
“So I’m getting a little worried,” she said.
“You look out for me,” he said. “And I’ll look out for you.”
“I’m not asking you to do that,” she said.
“I know you’re not,” he said.
“Well, I can’t let you do that,” she said.
“You can’t stop me,” he said. “This is about me now, too. They made
it that way. They were going to shoot me down. I’ve got a rule,
Holly: people mess with me at their own risk. I try to be patient
about it. I had a teacher once, grade school somewhere. Philippines,
I think, because she always wore a big white hat. So it was somewhere
hot. I was always twice the size of the other kids, and she used to
say to me: count to ten before you get mad, Reacher. And I’ve counted
way past ten on this one. Way past. So you may as well face it, win
or lose, now we do it together.”
They went quiet. The truck roared on.
“Reacher?” Holly said.
“What?” he said.
“Hold me,” she said.
“I am holding you,” he said.
He squeezed her gently, both arms, to make his point. She pressed
closer.
“Reacher?” she said again.
“Yes?” he said.
“You want to kiss me again?” she said. “Makes me feel better.”
He turned his head and smiled at her in the dark.
“Doesn’t do me a whole lot of harm, either,” he said.
Eight hours at maybe sixty-five or seventy miles an hour.
Somewhere between five hundred and five hundred and fifty miles. That’s
what they’d done. That was Reacher’s estimation. And it was beginning
to give him a clue about where they were.
“We’re somewhere where they abolished the speed limit,” he said.
Holly stirred and yawned.
“What?” she said.
“We’ve been going fast,” he said. “Up to seventy miles an hour,
probably, for hours. Loder is pretty thorough. He wouldn’t let Stevie
drive this fast if there was any danger of getting pulled over for it.
So we’re somewhere where they raised the limit, or abolished it
altogether. Which states did that?”
She shrugged.
“I’m not sure,” she said. “Mainly the western states, I think.”
Reacher nodded. Traced an arc on the map in his head.
“We didn’t go east,” he said. “We figured that already. So I figure
we’re in Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, or Montana. Maybe as
far as Idaho, Utah, Nevada or Arizona. Not in California yet.”
The truck slowed slightly, and they heard the engine note harden up.
Then they heard the crunch as the driver came down out of fifth gear
into fourth.
“Mountains,” Holly said.
It was more than a hill. More than an up-grade. It was a smooth,
relentless climb. A highway through the mountains. Clearly engineered
to help out the laboring traffic, but they were adding hundreds of
feet, every mile they drove. Reacher felt the lurch as the truck
pulled out to pass slower vehicles. Not many, but a few. It stayed in
fourth gear, the guy’s foot hard down, hammering uphill, then relaxing,
changing up to fifth, then down again, charging upwards.
“We could run out of gas,” Holly said.
“It’s diesel, not gas,” Reacher said. “We used these things in the
army. Thirty-five gallon tank. Diesel will do maybe twenty-five to
the gallon, highway mileage. Best part of nine hundred miles, before
they run out.”
That could get us all the way out of the States,” she said.
They cruised on. The truck roared through the mountains for hours,
then it left the highway. Night had fallen. The bright holes in the
roof had dimmed. Then they had disappeared. They had turned darker
than the roof itself. Positive and negative. They felt the lurch as
the truck pulled to the right, off the highway, and they felt the tires
grabbing at the pavement as the truck hauled around a tight right. Then
there was a confusing blur of turns and stops and starts. Bumpy