Lee Child - 61 Hours

He stepped back in. Nobody was waiting out there for a target of opportunity. Impossible. After a minute you would be shaking too hard to see, let alone shoot. After an hour you would be in a coma. After two, you would be dead.

Which thoughts clarified things a little. There would be no long stealthy approach on foot through the snow. The danger would come from the front. The guy would have to drive up, jump out, and move fast. So after the percolator finished gulping and hissing Reacher poured two mugs and carried them back to the parlour, where he told Janet Salter they would alternate spells at the window, ten minutes on, ten minutes off, all through the next hour.

The next hour passed slowly. No one approached the house. The world outside was dead. Deep frozen. Nothing was moving, except the wind. It was blowing steadily out of the west. It was scouring powder into small stunted drifts and exposing ridges of ice that glittered blue in the moonlight. A spectral, elemental scene. Janet Salter did something with a dial on a wall and turned the heat up. Not good, in Reacher’s opinion. Warmth made people sleepy. But he didn’t want her to freeze. He had read about old folks, dead in their homes, overcome by hypothermia.

She asked, ‘Have you ever been here in winter before?’

He said, ‘I’ve never been here in any season.’

‘North Dakota, perhaps?’

‘I’ve been in the Dakota Building in New York City.’

‘Which was named for here,’ she said. ‘At the time it was built, the city didn’t extend much past 34th Street. It seemed lunatic to build fancy apartments all the way up on 72nd Street, and on the West Side, too. People said, you might as well put them in the Dakota Territory. The name stuck. The man who built it owned part of the Singer Sewing Machine Company, which brings us full circle, really, doesn’t it, back to that can of oil.’

She was talking for the sake of talking. Reacher let her. He kept his eye on the street and filtered most of it out. She got into a long disquisition on the state’s history. Explorers and traders, Lewis and Clark, the Sioux Nation, Fort Pierre, sodbusters and pioneers, the gold rush, Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, Custer, the Black Hills, Wounded Knee, the Dust Bowl, some guy called Brokaw she claimed had been on network TV.

Five to eleven in the evening.

Twenty-nine hours to go.

Reacher completed his eighth circuit of the interior perimeter. He saw nothing to get concerned about. Nothing to see from any window except frozen moonlit emptiness. Nothing to hear except the rush of water in the heating pipes and a faint creaking as the ice outside got colder. It was clamping down. The earth was in its grip. He thought back to the sodbusters and the pioneers that Janet Salter had talked about. Why the hell had they stayed?

He was on his way back down the stairs when she called out.

She said, ‘Someone’s coming.’

She spoke loud and clear. But she added no information. No numbers, no location, no direction, no description. He stepped into the parlour and eased past her to the window. Saw a guy approaching on foot in the middle of the road, from the left. He was small, but swaddled in an enormous coat with a hood. He had a ski mask on. Plus a muffler, plus gloves, plus boots. Nothing in his hands. His hands were held out to the sides, for balance, and they were empty.

The guy moved on, slowly, tentatively, unsure of his footing. He stopped directly opposite the end of Janet Salter’s driveway. Just stood there.

Reacher asked, ‘Do you know who he is?’

She said, ‘Wait.’

The guy turned around, a stiff and ungainly half-circle, and faced the other way. A dog trotted up to him. A big white thing. Lots of fur. The guy turned around again, and man and dog walked on.

Janet Salter said, ‘A neighbour. A she, actually. Mrs Lowell. But it was hard to be sure, the way she was dressed.’

Reacher breathed out and said, ‘Is she the cop’s wife?’

‘Ex-wife. Officer Lowell moved out a year ago. There was some kind of unpleasantness.’

‘What kind?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘I saw Lowell today. Peterson called him an odd duck. Said he read books.’

‘He does. He comes over and borrows some of mine from time to time. My family and his go way back.’

‘Do you know his partner?’

‘Officer Kapler? I’ve met him, certainly.’

‘And?’

‘He moved here from Florida. Which struck me as odd.’

‘Me too,’ Reacher said. He stayed at the window and watched Mrs Lowell and her dog round a curve and move out of sight.

They didn’t speak again for thirty minutes. The clock in Reacher’s head ticked on towards midnight. He asked, ‘Are you tired?’

Janet Salter said, ‘I haven’t really thought about it.’

‘You could go to bed, if you like. I can take care of things down here.’

‘Would you take care of things standing up? So if you fell asleep I would hear you fall down?’

Reacher smiled. ‘I won’t fall asleep.’

‘And I won’t go to bed. This is my responsibility. I shouldn’t be involving you at all.’

‘A problem shared is a problem halved.’

‘You could be killed.’

‘Unlikely.’

She asked, ‘Are you married?’

Reacher kept his eyes on the window and said, ‘No.’

‘Were you ever?’

‘No.’

‘Were you an only child?’

‘I had a brother two years older. He worked for the Treasury Department. He was killed in the line of duty.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Not your fault.’

‘Do you always deflect sympathy that way?’

‘Usually.’

‘So you’re the last of your family’s line.’

‘I suppose so. But it wasn’t much of a line in the first place.’

‘Just like me. Scoundrels, all of them.’

‘Where were your gold mines?’

‘The Black Hills. Why?’

‘Peterson thinks the army place west of here could be mostly underground. I was wondering if there were old workings they could have used.’

‘No mines here. Just prairie topsoil and rock.’

‘Were your parents alive when you went off to college?’

‘Why?’

‘Because if they were, they probably wrote you with all the local news. Maybe rumour and gossip, too. They must have told you something about that place. Maybe not exact enough for your scholarly mind to pass on as fact, but you must have heard some little thing.’

‘Nothing worth repeating.’

‘Try me.’

‘All I know is that it was built and never used. Apparently because its purpose was too revolting. There was a minor scandal about it.’

‘What was its purpose?’

‘I don’t know. No one spoke of it to me.’

Five minutes to midnight.

Twenty-eight hours to go.

Nobody came.

A thousand miles away down in Texas two fast cars covered the fifty miles south from Hood in less than forty minutes. Six men in the cars, all warrant officers working for the 110th Special Unit, all currently W3s, all wanting to be W4s, all well aware that this kind of assignment could get them their promotions. They pulled off the main drag south and wheeled through the centre of Georgetown and found the bus depot. It was middle-of-the-night quiet. Cool air, trash, the stink of spilled diesel. Nothing coming in, nothing going out. They parked their cars a block farther on next to pawn shops and bail bond offices and hustled back the way they had come. They counted the motels. The first was a brick place behind a parking lot that was covered with broken blacktop. The second was right next to it, set end-on to the street, made of red wood, twelve rooms, a sign on a pole advertising free cable and free breakfast and no vacancies.

An office, first door on the left.