“She’s from San Diego.”
“Only technically.”
“Technicalities matter, Reacher.”
“She took up residency.”
“With one change of underwear?”
“What’s the worst thing that can happen?”
“Despair could ask us for reciprocity.”
“They already grabbed it. Their deputies came by last night.”
“Two wrongs don’t make a right.”
“Says who?”
“Are you bullying me?”
“You’re the one with the gun.”
Vaughan started to say something, then shook her head and sighed and said, “Shit.” Then she jammed her foot on the gas and the Crown Vic shot forward. The tires had traction on Hope’s blacktop but lost it on Despair’s loose gravel. The rear wheels spun and howled and the car stumbled for a second and then accelerated west in a cloud of blue smoke.
They drove eleven miles into the setting sun with nothing to show for it except eyestrain. The twelfth mile was different. Way ahead in the glare Reacher saw the familiar distant sights, all in sharp silhouette and shortened perspective. Vague smudges, on the horizon. The vacant lot, on the left. The abandoned motor court, low and forlorn. The gas station, on the right. Farther on, the dry goods store in the first brick building.
Plus something else.
From a mile away it looked like a shadow. Like a lone cloud was blocking the sun and casting a random shape on the ground. He craned his neck and looked up at the sky. Nothing there. The sky was clear. Just the gray-blue of approaching evening.
Vaughan drove on.
Three-quarters of a mile out the shape grew width, and depth, and height. The sun blazed behind it and winked around its edges. It looked like a low wide pile of something dark. Like a gigantic truck had strewn earth or asphalt right across the road, shoulder to shoulder, and beyond.
The pile looked to be fifty feet wide, maybe twenty deep, maybe six high.
From a half-mile out, it looked to be moving.
From a quarter-mile out, it was identifiable.
It was a crowd of people.
Vaughan slowed, instinctively. The crowd was two or three hundred strong. Men, women, and children. They were formed up in a rough triangle, facing east. Maybe six people at the front. Behind the six, twenty more. Behind the twenty, sixty more. Behind the sixty, a vast milling pool of people. The whole width of the road was blocked. The shoulders were blocked. The rearguard spilled thirty feet out into the scrub on both sides.
Vaughan stopped, fifty yards out.
The crowd compressed. People pushed inward from the sides. They made a human wedge. A solid mass. Two or three hundred people. They held together, but they didn’t link arms.
They didn’t link arms because they had weapons in their hands.
Baseball bats, pool cues, ax handles, broom handles, split firewood, carpenters’ hammers. Two or three hundred people, pressed tight together, and moving. Moving as one. They were rocking in place from foot to foot and jabbing their weapons up and down in the air. Nothing wild. Their movements were small and rhythmic and controlled.
They were chanting.
At first Reacher heard only a primitive guttural shout, repeated over and over. Then he dropped his window an inch and heard the wordsOut! Out! Out! He hit the switch again and the glass thumped back up.
Vaughan was pale.
“Unbelievable,” she said.
“Is this some weird Colorado tradition?” Reacher asked.
“I never saw it before.”
“So Judge Gardner went and did it. He deputized the whole population.”
“They don’t look drafted. They look like true believers. What are we going to do?”
Out! Out! Out!
Reacher watched for a moment and said, “Drive on and see what happens.”
“Are you serious?”
“Try it.”
Vaughan took her foot off the brake and the car crept forward.
The crowd surged forward to meet it, short steps, crouched, weapons moving.
Vaughan stopped again, forty yards out.
Out! Out! Out!
Reacher said, “Use your siren. Scare them.”
“Scarethem? They’re doing a pretty good job scaring me.”
The crowd had quit rocking from side to side. Now people were rocking back and forth instead, one foot to the other, jabbing their clubs and sticks forward, whipping them back, jabbing them forward again. They were dressed in work shirts and faded sundresses and jean jackets, but collectively in terms of their actions they looked entirely primitive. Like a weird Stone Age tribe, threatened and defensive.
“Siren,” Reacher said.
Vaughan lit it up. It was a modern synthesized unit, shatteringly loud in the emptiness, sequencing randomly from a basicwhoop-whoop-whoop to a manicpock-pock-pock to a hysterical digital cackling.
It had no effect.
No effect at all.
The crowd didn’t flinch, didn’t move, didn’t miss a beat.
Reacher said, “Can you get around them?”
Vaughan shook her head. “This car is no good on the scrub. We’d bog down and they’d be all over us.”
“So fake them out. Drift left, then sneak past on the right real fast.”
“You think?”
“Try it.”
She took her foot off the brake again and crept forward. She turned the wheel and headed for the wrong side of the road and the crowd in front of her tracked the move, slow and infinitely fluid. Two or three hundred people, moving as one, like a pool of gray mercury, changing shape like an ameba. Like a disciplined herd. Vaughan reached the left shoulder.
“Can’t do it,” she said. “There’s too many of them.”
She stopped again, ten feet from the front rank.
She killed the siren.
The chanting grew louder.
Out! Out! Out!
Then the note dropped lower and the rhythm changed down. As one, the people started banging their clubs and sticks on the ground and shouting only every other beat.
Out!
Crash!
Out!
Crash!
They were close enough now to see clearly. Their faces jerked forward with every shouted word, gray and pink and contorted with hate and rage and fear and anger. Reacher didn’t like crowds. He enjoyed solitude and was a mild agoraphobic, which didn’t mean he was afraid of wide-open spaces. That was a common misconception. He liked wide-open spaces. Instead he was mildly unsettled by theagora, which was an ancient Greek word for a crowded public marketplace. Random crowds were bad enough. He had seen footage of stampedes and stadium disasters. Organized crowds were worse. He had seen footage of riots and revolutions. A crowd two hundred strong was the largest animal on the face of the earth. The heaviest, the hardest to control, the hardest to stop. The hardest to kill. Big targets, but after-action reports always showed that crowds took much less than one casualty per round fired.
Crowds had nine lives.
“What now?” Vaughan asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. He especially didn’t care for angry organized crowds. He had been in Somalia and Bosnia and the Middle East, and he had seen what angry crowds could do. He had seen the herd instinct at work, the anonymity, the removal of inhibition, the implied permissions of collective action. He had seen that an angry crowd was the most dangerous animal on the face of the earth.
Out!
Crash!
Out!
Crash!
He said, quietly, “Put the shifter in Reverse.”
Vaughan moved the lever. The car settled back on its haunches, like prey ready to flee.
He said, “Back up a little.”
Vaughan backed up and steered and got straight on the center line and stopped again, thirty yards out. Ninety feet. The distance from home plate to first base.
“What now?” she asked.
The crowd had tracked the move. It had changed shape again, back to what it had been at the beginning. A dense triangle, with a blunt vanguard of six men, and a wide base that petered out thirty feet into the scrub on both sides of the thoroughfare.