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  “Hundred feet,” he said. He sounded vague and scared. “Real close. One of them is hanging out the window with a gun.”

  Right on cue I heard the distant pop of a handgun over the roar of the engine and the whine of the tires. I picked up the Colt from the seat beside me. Dropped it again. It was empty. I had fired six times already. A radiator, two tires, two guys. And one cop.

  “Glove compartment,” I said.

  “You should stop,” the kid said. “Explain to them. You were helping me. It was a mistake.” He wasn’t looking at me. He was staring out of the back windows.

  “I shot a cop,” I said. I kept my voice completely neutral. “That’s all they know. That’s all they want to know. They aren’t going to care about how or why.”

  The kid said nothing.

  “Glove compartment,” I said again.

  He turned again and fumbled the lid open. There was another Anaconda in there. Identical. Shiny stainless steel, fully loaded. I took it from the kid. Wound my window all the way down. Cold air rushed in like a gale. It carried the sound of a handgun firing right behind us, fast and steady.

  “Shit,” I said.

  The kid said nothing. The shots kept coming, loud and dull and percussive. How were they missing?

  “Get down on the floor,” I said.

  I slid sideways until my left shoulder was jammed hard against the door frame and craned my right arm all the way around until the new gun was out of the window and pointing backward. I fired once and the kid stared at me in horror and then slid forward and crouched down in the space between the front edge of his seat and the dash with his arms wrapped around his head. A second later the rear window ten feet behind where his head had been exploded.

  “Shit,” I said again. Steered for the side of the road to improve my angle. Fired behind us again.

  “I need you to watch,” I said. “Stay down as far as you can.”

  The kid didn’t move.

  “Get up,” I said. “Now. I need you to watch.”

  He raised himself and twisted around until his head was just high enough to see out the back. I saw him register the shattered rear window. Saw him realize that his head had been right in line with it.

  “I’m going to slow down a little,” I said. “Going to pull in so they’ll pull out to pass me.”

  “Don’t do it,” the kid said. “You can still put this right.”

  I ignored him. Dropped the speed to maybe fifty and pulled right and the college car instinctively drifted left to come up on my flank. I fired my last three chambers at it and its windshield shattered and it slewed all the way across the road like maybe the driver was hit or a tire had gone. It plowed nose-first into the opposite shoulder and smashed through a line of planted shrubs and then it was lost to sight. I dropped the empty gun on the seat beside me and wound the window up and accelerated hard. The kid said nothing. Just stared into the rear of the van. The broken window back there was making a weird moaning sound as the air sucked out through it.

  “OK,” I said. I was out of breath. “Now we’re good to go.”

  The kid turned to face me.

  “Are you crazy?” he said.

  “You know what happens to people who shoot cops?” I said back.

  He had no reply to that. We drove on in silence for maybe thirty whole seconds, more than half a mile, blinking and panting and staring straight ahead through the windshield like we were mesmerized. The inside of the van stank of gunpowder.

  “It was an accident,” I said. “I can’t bring him back. So get over it.”

  “Who are you?” he asked.

  “No, who are you?” I asked back.

  He went quiet. He was breathing hard. I checked the mirror. The road was completely empty behind us. Completely empty ahead of us. We were way out in open country. Maybe ten minutes from a highway cloverleaf.

  “I’m a target,” he said. “For abduction.”

  It was an odd word to use.

  “They were trying to kidnap me,” he said.

  “You think?”

  He nodded. “It’s happened before.”

  “Why?”

  “Money,” the kid said. “Why else?”

  “You rich?”

  “My father is.”

  “Who is he?”

  “Just a guy.”

  “But a rich guy,” I said.

  “He’s a rug importer.”

  “Rugs?” I said. “What, like carpets?”

  “Oriental rugs.”

  “You can get rich importing Oriental rugs?”

  “Very,” the kid said.

  “You got a name?”

  “Richard,” he said. “Richard Beck.”

  I checked the mirror again. The road was still empty behind. Still empty ahead. I slowed a little and steadied the van in the center of my lane and tried to drive on like a normal person.

  “So who were those guys?” I asked.

  Richard Beck shook his head. “I have no idea.”

  “They knew where you were going to be. And when.”

  “I was going home for my mother’s birthday. It’s tomorrow.”

  “Who would know that?”

  “I’m not sure. Anybody who knows my family. Anybody in the rug community, I guess. We’re well known.”

  “There’s a community?” I said. “Rugs?”

  “We all compete,” he said. “Same sources, same market. We all know each other.”

  I said nothing. Just drove on, sixty miles an hour.

  “You got a name?” he asked me.

  “No,” I said.

  He nodded, like he understood. Smart boy.

  “What are you going to do?” he asked.

  “I’m going to let you out near the highway,” I said. “You can hitch a ride or call a cab and then you can forget all about me.”

  He went very quiet.

  “I can’t take you to the cops,” I said. “That’s just not possible. You understand that, right? I killed one. Maybe three. You saw me do it.”

  He stayed quiet. Decision time. The highway was six minutes ahead.

  “They’ll throw away the key,” I said. “I screwed up, it was an accident, but they aren’t going to listen. They never do. So don’t ask me to go anywhere near anybody. Not as a witness, not as nothing. I’m out of here like I don’t exist. We absolutely clear on that?”

  He didn’t speak.

  “And don’t give them a description,” I said. “Tell them you don’t remember me. Tell them you were in shock. Or I’ll find you and I’ll kill you.”

  He didn’t answer.

  “I’ll let you out somewhere,” I said. “Like you never saw me.”

  He moved. Turned sideways on his seat and looked straight at me.

  “Take me home,” he said. “All the way. We’ll give you money. Help you out. We’ll hide you, if you want. My folks will be grateful. I mean, I’m grateful. Believe me. You saved my ass. The cop thing, it was an accident, right? Just an accident. You got unlucky. It was a pressure situation. I can understand that. We’ll keep it quiet.”

  “I don’t need your help,” I said. “I just need to get rid of you.”

  “But I need to get home,” he said. “We’d be helping each other.”

  The highway was four minutes ahead.

  “Where’s home?” I asked.

  “Abbot,” he said.

  “Abbot what?”

  “Abbot, Maine. On the coast. Between Kennebunkport and Portland.”

  “We’re heading in the wrong direction.”

  “You can turn north on the highway.”

  “It’s got to be two hundred miles, minimum.”

  “We’ll give you money. We’ll make it worth your while.”

  “I could let you out near Boston,” I said. “Got to be a bus to Portland.”

  He shook his head, violently, like a seizure.

  “No way,” he said. “I can’t take the bus. I can’t be alone. Not now. I need protectio
n. Those guys might still be out there.”

  “Those guys are dead,” I said. “Like the damn cop.”

  “They might have associates.”

  It was another odd word to use. He looked small and thin and scared. There was a pulse jumping in his neck. He used both hands to pull his hair away from his head and turned toward the windshield to let me see his left ear. It wasn’t there. There was just a hard knob of scar tissue. It looked like a small piece of uncooked pasta. Like a raw tortellini floret.

  “They cut it off and mailed it,” he said. “The first time.”

  “When?”

  “I was fifteen.”

  “Your dad didn’t pay up?”

  “Not quickly enough.”

  I said nothing. Richard Beck just sat there, showing me his scar, shocked and scared and breathing like a machine.

  “You OK?” I asked.

  “Take me home,” he said. Like he was pleading. “I can’t be alone now.”

  The highway was two minutes ahead.

  “Please,” he said. “Help me.”

  “Shit,” I said, for the third time.

  “Please. We can help each other. You need to hide out.”

  “We can’t keep this van,” I said. “We have to assume the description is on the air all over the state.”

  He stared at me, full of hope. The highway was one minute ahead.

  “We’ll have to find a car,” I said.

  “Where?”

  “Anywhere. There are cars all over the place.”

  There was a big sprawling out-of-town shopping mall nestled south and west of the highway interchange. I could already see it in the distance. There were giant tan buildings with no windows and bright neon signs. There were giant parking lots about half-filled with cars. I pulled in and drove once around the whole place. It was as big as a town. There were people everywhere. They made me nervous. I came around again and headed in past a line of trash containers to the rear of a big department store.

  “Where are we going?” Richard asked.

  “Staff parking,” I said. “Customers are in and out all day long. Unpredictable. But store people are in there for the duration. Safer.”

  He looked at me like he didn’t understand. I headed for a line of eight cars parked head-on against a blank wall. There was an empty slot next to a dull-colored Nissan Maxima about three years old. It would do. It was a pretty anonymous vehicle. The lot was a backwater, quiet and private. I pulled beyond the empty slot and backed up into it. Put the van’s rear doors tight against the wall.

  “Got to hide the busted window,” I said.

  The kid said nothing. I put both empty Colts into my coat pockets and slid out. Tried the Maxima’s doors.

  “Find me some wire,” I said. “Like heavy electrical cable or a coat hanger.”

  “You’re going to steal this car?”

  I nodded. Said nothing.

  “Is that smart?”

  “You’d think so if it was you who’d accidentally shot a cop.”

  The kid looked blank for a second and then came to and scouted around. I emptied the Anacondas and tossed the twelve spent shell cases into a garbage container. The kid came back with a three-foot length of electrical wire from a trash pile. I stripped the insulation with my teeth and made a little hook in the end and shoved it past the rubber sealing strip around the Maxima’s window.

  “You’re the lookout,” I said.

  He stepped away and scanned the lot and I fed the wire down inside the car and jiggled it around and jiggled the door handle until it popped open. I tossed the wire back in the trash and bent down under the steering column and pulled off the plastic shroud. Sorted through the wires in there until I found the two I needed and touched them together. The starter motor whined and the engine turned over and caught and ran steadily. The kid looked suitably impressed.

  “Misspent youth,” I said.

  “Is this smart?” he asked again.

  I nodded. “Smart as we can get. It won’t be missed until six tonight, maybe eight. Whenever the store closes. You’ll be home long before then.”

  He paused with his hand on the passenger door and then kind of shook himself and ducked inside. I racked the driver’s seat back and adjusted the mirror and backed out of the slot. Took it easy through the mall lot. There was a cop car crawling around about a hundred yards away. I parked again in the first place I saw and sat there with the engine running until the cop moved away. Then I hustled for the exit and around the cloverleaf and two minutes later we were heading north on a wide smooth highway at a respectable sixty miles an hour. The car smelled strongly of perfume and there were two boxes of tissues in it. There was some kind of furry bear stuck on the rear window with clear plastic suckers where its paws should have been. There was a Little League glove on the back seat and I could hear an aluminum bat rattling around in the trunk.

  “Mom’s taxi,” I said.

  The kid didn’t answer.

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “She’s probably insured. Probably a solid citizen.”

  “Don’t you feel bad?” he said. “About the cop?”

  I glanced at him. He was thin and pale and crunched up again as far from me as he could get. His hand was resting against the door. His long fingers made him look a little like a musician. I think he wanted to like me, but I didn’t need him to.

  “Shit happens,” I said. “No need to get all worked up about it.”

  “What the hell kind of answer is that?”

  “The only kind. It was minor collateral damage. Means nothing unless it comes back to bite us. Bottom line, we can’t change it, so we move on.”

  He said nothing.

  “Anyway, it was your dad’s fault,” I said.

  “For being rich and having a son?”

  “For hiring lousy bodyguards.”

  He looked away. Said nothing.

  “They were bodyguards, right?”

  He nodded. Said nothing.

  “So don’t you feel bad?” I asked. “About them?”

  “A little,” he said. “I guess. I didn’t know them well.”

  “They were useless,” I said.

  “It happened so fast.”

  “The bad guys were waiting right there,” I said. “A ratty old pickup like that just hanging around in a prissy little college town? What kind of bodyguards don’t notice a thing like that? They never heard of threat assessment?”

  “You saying you noticed?”

  “I noticed.”

  “Not bad for a van driver.”

  “I was in the army. I was a military cop. I understand bodyguarding. And I understand collateral damage.”

  The kid nodded, uncertainly.

  “You got a name yet?” he asked.

  “Depends,” I said. “I need to understand your point of view. I could be in all kinds of trouble. At least one cop is dead and now I just stole a car.”

  He went quiet again. I matched him, mile for mile. Gave him time to think. We were almost out of Massachusetts.

  “My family appreciates loyalty,” he said. “You did their son a service. And you did them a service. Saved them some money, at least. They’ll show their gratitude. I’m sure the last thing they’ll do is rat you out.”

  “You need to call them?”

  He shook his head. “They’re expecting me. As long as I show up there’s no need to call them.”

  “The cops will call them. They think you’re in big trouble.”

  “They don’t have the number. Nobody does.”

  “The college must have your address. They can find your number.”

  He shook his head again. “The college doesn’t have the address. Nobody does. We’re very careful about stuff like that.”

  I shrugged and kept quiet and drove another mile.

  “So what about you?” I said. “You going to rat me out?”

  I saw him touch his right ear. The one that was still there. It was clearly a completely subcon
scious gesture.

  “You saved my ass,” he said. “I’m not going to rat you out.”

  “OK,” I said. “My name is Reacher.”

  We spent a few minutes cutting across a tiny corner of Vermont and then struck out north and east across New Hampshire. Settled in for the long, long drive. The adrenaline drained away and the kid got over his state of shock and we both ended up a little down and sleepy. I cracked the window to get some air in and some perfume out. It made the car noisy but it kept me awake. We talked a little. Richard Beck told me he was twenty years old. He was in his junior year. He was majoring in some kind of contemporary art expression thing that sounded a lot like finger painting to me. He wasn’t good at relationships. He was an only child. There was a lot of ambivalence about his family. They were clearly some kind of tight close-knit clan and half of him wanted out and the other half needed to be in. He was clearly very traumatized by the previous kidnap. It made me wonder whether something had been done to him, apart from the ear thing. Maybe something much worse.

  I told him about the army. I laid it on pretty thick about my bodyguarding qualifications. I wanted him to feel he was in good hands, at least temporarily. I drove fast and steady. The Maxima had just been filled. We didn’t need to stop for gas. He didn’t want lunch. I stopped once to use a men’s room. Left the engine running so I wouldn’t have to fiddle with the ignition wires again. Came back to the car and found him inert inside it. We got back on the road and passed by Concord in New Hampshire and headed toward Portland in Maine. Time passed. He got more relaxed, the closer we got to home. But he got quieter, too. Ambivalence.

  We crossed the state line and then about twenty miles short of Portland he squirmed around and checked the view out of the back very carefully and told me to take the next exit. We turned onto a narrow road heading due east toward the Atlantic. It passed under I-95 and then ran more than fifteen miles across granite headlands to the sea. It was the kind of landscape that would have looked great in summer. But it was still cold and raw. There were trees stunted by salt winds and exposed rock outcrops where gales and storm tides had scoured the dirt away. The road twisted and turned like it was trying to fight its way as far east as it could get. I glimpsed the ocean ahead. It was as gray as iron. The road pushed on past inlets to the left and right. I saw small beaches made of gritty sand. Then the road curved left and immediately right and rose up onto a headland shaped like the palm of a hand. The palm narrowed abruptly into a single finger jutting directly out to sea. It was a rock peninsula maybe a hundred yards wide and half a mile long. I could feel the wind buffeting the car. I drove out onto the peninsula and saw a line of bent and stunted evergreen trees that were trying to hide a high granite wall but weren’t quite tall enough or thick enough to succeed. The wall was maybe eight feet tall. It was topped with big coils of razor wire. It had security lights mounted at intervals. It ran laterally all the way across the hundred-yard width of the finger. It canted down suddenly at the ends and ran all the way into the sea, where its massive foundations were built on huge stone blocks. The blocks were mossy with seaweed. There was an iron gate set in the wall, dead-center. It was closed.