And you’re not dumb enough to take a direct route, either. You wind your way through the mountains and leave your car on a gravel turnout a half-mile from your spot. The car is safe enough there. The only reason they built the turnout in the first place is that ass-holes are always leaving their cars there while they go watching eagles or scrambling over rocks or hiking up and down. A rental car parked neatly on the gravel is as invisible as the ski bags on the airport carousel. Just part of the scenery.
You climb away from the road up a small hill maybe a hundred feet high. There are scrawny trees all over the place, a little more than shoulder high. They have no leaves, but the terrain keeps you concealed. You’re in a kind of wide trench. You step left and right to pass tumbled boulders. At the top of the hill you follow the ridge to the left. You duck low as the ground starts to fall away on the other side. You drop to your knees and shuffle forward to where two giant rocks rest on each other, giving a wonderful random view of the valley through the triangle they make between them. You lean your right shoulder on the right-hand rock and Lieutenant Rita Scimeca’s house slides into the exact center of your field of view, just a little more than two hundred yards away.
The house is slightly north and west of your position, so you’re getting a full-frontal of the street side. It’s maybe three hundred feet down the mountain, so the whole thing is laid out like a plan. The Bureau car is right there, parked outside. A clean Buick, dark blue. One agent in it. You use your field glasses. The guy is still awake. His head is upright. He’s not looking around much. Just staring forward, bored out of his skull. You can’t blame him. Twelve hours through the night, in a place where the last big excitement was somebody’s Christmas bake sale.
It’s cold in the hills. The rock is sucking heat out of your shoulder. There’s no sun. Just sullen clouds stacked up over the giant peaks. You turn away for a moment and pull on your gloves. Pull your muffler up over the lower half of your face. Partly for the warmth, partly to break up the clouds of steam your breathing is creating in the air. You turn back. Move your feet and squirm around. Get comfortable. You raise the glasses again.
The house has a wire fence all the way around the perimeter of the yard. There’s an opening onto a driveway. The driveway is short. A single garage door stands at the end of it, under the end of the front porch. There’s a path off the driveway that loops around through some neat rockery planting to the front door. The Bureau car is parked at the sidewalk right across the driveway opening, just slightly up the hill from dead center. Facing down the rise. That puts the driver’s line of vision directly in line with the mouth of the path. Intelligent positioning. If you walk up the hill to the house, he sees you coming all the way. You come on him from behind, he maybe spots you in his mirror, and he sees you for certain as soon as you pass him by. Then he gets a clear back view all the way as you walk up the looping path. Intelligent positioning, but that’s the Bureau for you.
You see movement a half-mile to the west and two hundred feet farther down the mountain. A black-and-white Crown Victoria, nosing through a right-angle turn. Prowling, slow. It snuffles through the turns and enters her road. A cloud of white vapor trails from the tailpipe. The engine is cold. The car has been parked up all night behind a quiet station house. It comes up the street and slows and stops flank to flank with the Buick. The cars are a foot apart. You don’t see it for sure but you know the windows are buzzing down. Greetings are being exchanged. Information is being passed on. It’s all quiet, the Bureau guy is saying. Have a nice day, he’s adding. The local cop is grunting. Pretending to be bored, while secretly he’s thrilled to have an important mission. Maybe the first he’s ever had. See you later, the Bureau guy is saying.
The black-and-white moves up the hill and turns in the road. The Buick’s engine starts and the car lurches as the agent slams it into drive. The black-and-white noses in behind it. The Buick moves away down the hill. The black-and-white rolls forward and stops. Exactly where the Buick was, inch for inch. It bounces twice on its springs and settles. The motor stops. The white vapor drifts and disappears. The cop turns his head to the right and gets exactly the same view of the path the Bureau guy had gotten. Maybe not such a dumb-ass, after all.
HARPER DROVE THE Maxima into a commercial parking garage on West Ninth Street, right after Reacher told her the grid pattern was about to finish and the street layout was about to get messy. They walked back east and south and found a bistro with a view of Washington Square Park. The waitress had a copy of a digest-sized philosophy journal to lean her order pad on. A student from NYU, making ends meet. The air was cold, but the sun was out. The sky was blue.
“I like it here,” Harper said. “Great city.”
“I told Jodie I’m selling the house,” Reacher said.
She looked across at him. “She OK with that?”
He shrugged. “She’s worried. I don’t see why. It makes me a happier person, how can that worry her?”
“Because it makes you a footloose person.”
“It won’t change anything.”
“So why do it?”
“That’s what she said.”
Harper nodded. “She would. People do things for a reason, right? So she’s thinking, what’s the reason here?”
“Reason is I don’t want to own a house.”
“But reasons have layers. That’s only the top layer. She’s asking herself, OK, why doesn’t he want to own a house?”
“Because I don’t want the hassle. She knows that. I told her.”
“Bureaucratic type of hassle?”
He nodded. “It’s a big pain in the ass.”
“Yes, it is. A real big pain in the ass. But she’s thinking bureaucratic hassle is just a kind of symbol for something else.”
“Like what?”
“Like wanting to be footloose.”
“You’re just going around in a circle.”
“I’m just telling you how she’s thinking.”
The philosophy student brought coffee and Danish. Left a check written out in a neat, academic hand. Harper picked it up.
“I’ll take care of it,” she said.
“OK,” Reacher said.
“You need to convince her,” Harper said. “You know, make her believe you’re going to stick around, even though you’re selling the house.”
“I told her I’m selling my car too,” he said.
She nodded. “That might help. Sounds like a stick-around thing to do.”
He paused for a beat.
“I told her I might travel a little,” he said.
She stared at him. “Christ, Reacher, that’s not very reassuring, is it?”
“She travels. She’s been to London twice this year. I didn’t make a big fuss about it?”
“How much do you plan to travel?”
He shrugged again. “I don’t know. A little, I guess. I like getting around. I really do. I told you that.”
Harper was quiet for a second.
“You know what?” she said. “Before you convince her you’re going to stick around, maybe you should convince yourself.”
“I am convinced.”
“Are you? Or do you figure you’ll be in and out, as and when?”
“In and out a little, I guess.”
“You’ll drift apart.”
“That’s what she said.”
Harper nodded. “Well, I’m not surprised.”
He said nothing. Just drank his coffee and ate his Danish.
“It’s make-your-mind-up time,” Harper said. “On the road or off the road, you can’t do both together.”
HIS LUNCH BREAK will be the first big test. That’s your preliminary conclusion. At first you wondered about bathroom arrangements, but he just went inside and used hers. He got out of the car after about ninety minutes, after his morning coffee had worked its way through. He stood stretching on the sidewalk. Then he walked up the looping path and rang the doorbell. You adjusted the focus on the field glasses and got a pretty good side view. You didn’t see her. She stayed in the house. You saw his body language, a little awkward, a little embarrassed. He didn’t speak. He didn’t ask. Just presented himself at the door. So the arrangement had been set up ahead of time. Tough on Scimeca, you think to yourself, psychologically speaking. A raped woman, random intrusion of a large male person for some explicit penis-based activity. But it happened smoothly enough. He went in, and the door closed, a minute passed, the door opened again, and he came back out. He walked back to the car, looking around some, paying attention. He opened the car door, slid inside, and the scene went back to normal.