“O.K., back to the courthouse,” he said. “Something I want from there.”
She said nothing. Just turned the car and headed east. Parked in the lot behind the building. They walked around and tried the street door. It was locked up tight.
“So what now?” she asked.
It was hot on the sidewalk. Still up there around ninety degrees, and damp. The breeze had died again. There were clouds filling the sky.
“I’m going to kick it in,” he said.
“There’s probably an alarm.”
“There’s definitely an alarm. I checked.”
“So?”
“So I’m going to set it off.”
“Then the cops will come.”
“I’m counting on it.”
“You want to get us arrested?”
“They won’t come right away. We’ve got three or four minutes, maybe.”
He took two paces back and launched forward and smashed the flat of his sole above the handle. The wood splintered and sagged open a half inch, but held. He kicked again and the door crashed back and bounced off the corridor wall. A blue strobe high up outside started flashing and an urgent electric bell started ringing. It was about as loud as he had expected.
“Go get the car,” he said. “Get it started and wait for me in the alley.”
He ran up the stairs two at a time and kicked in the outer office door without breaking stride. Jinked through the secretarial pen like a running back and steadied himself and kicked in Walker’s door. It smashed back and the Venetian blind jerked sideways and the glass pane behind it shattered and the shards rained down like ice in winter. He went straight for the bank of filing cabinets. The lights were off and the office was hot and dark and he had to peer close to read the labels. It was an odd filing system. It was arranged partly in date order and partly by the alphabet. That was going to be a minor problem. He found a cabinet marked B and jammed the tip of the screwdriver into the keyhole and hammered it in with the heel of his hand. Turned it sharp and hard and broke the lock. Pulled the drawer and raked through the files with his fingers.
The files all had tiny labels encased in plastic tabs arranged so they made a neat diagonal from left to right. The labels were all typed with words starting with B. But the contents of the files were way too recent. Nothing more than four years old. He stepped two paces sideways and skipped the next B drawer and went to the next-but-one. The air was hot and still and the bell was ringing loud and the glare of the flashing blue strobe pulsed in through the windows. It was just about keeping time with his heartbeat.
He broke the lock and slid the drawer. Checked the labels. No good. Everything was either six or seven years old. He had been inside the building two minutes and thirty seconds. He could hear a distant siren under the noise of the bell. He stepped sideways again and attacked the next B drawer. He checked the dates on the tabs and walked his ringers backward. Two minutes and fifty seconds. The bell seemed louder and the strobe seemed brighter. The siren was closer. He found what he was looking for three quarters of the way back through the drawer. It was a two-inch-thick collection of paperwork in a heavy paper sling. He lifted the whole thing out and tucked it under his arm. Left the drawer all the way open and kicked all the others shut. Ran through the secretarial pen and down the stairs. Checked the street from the lobby and when he was certain it was clear he ducked around into the alley and straight into the VW.
“Go,” he said.
He was a little breathless, and that surprised him.
“Where?” Alice asked.
“South,” he said. “To the Red House.”
“Why? What’s there?”
“Everything,” he said.
She took off fast and fifty yards later Reacher saw red lights pulsing in the distance behind them. The Pecos Police Department, arriving at the courthouse just a minute too late. He smiled in the dark and turned his head in time to catch a split-second glimpse of a big sedan nosing left two hundred yards ahead of them into the road that led down to Alice’s place. It flashed through the yellow wash of a streetlight and disappeared. It looked like a police-spec Crown Victoria, plain steel wheels and four VHP antennas on the back. He stared into the darkness that had swallowed it and turned his head as they passed.