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1

The sun was only half as hot as he had known sun to be, but it was hot enough to keep him confused and dizzy He was very weak He had not eaten for seventy-two hours, or taken water for forty-eight

Not weak He was dying, and he knew it

The iht in a river current, straining against a rotted rope, pulling, tugging, breaking free His viewpoint was that of a s back helplessly at the bank as the dock grew smaller

Or an airship swinging gently on a breeze, so up and away, slowly, the boy inside seeing tiny urgent figures on the ground, waving, staring, their faces tilted upward in concern

Then the ies faded, because noords seemed more important than pictures, which was absurd, because he had never been interested in words before But before he died he wanted to knohich words were his Which applied to him? Was he a man or a boy? He had been described both ways Be a man, some had said Others had been insistent: The boy’s not to blah to vote and kill and die, whichto drink, even beer, which made him a boy Was he brave, or a coward? He had been called both things He had been called unhinged, disturbed, deranged, unbalanced, delusional, traumatized, all of which he understood and accepted, except unhinged Was he supposed to be hinged? Like a door? Maybe people were doors Maybe things passed through theed in the wind He considered the question for a long moment and then he batted the air in frustration He was babbling like a teenager in love eed

Which is exactly all he had been, a year and a half before

He fell to his knees The sand was only half as hot as he had known sand to be, but it was hot enough to ease his chill He fell facedown, exhausted, finally spent He knew as certainly as he had ever known anything that if he closed his eyes he would never open theain

But he was very tired

So very, very tired

More tired than a man or a boy had ever been

He closed his eyes

2

The line between Hope and Despair was exactly that: a line, in the road, formed where one town’s blacktop finished and the other’s started Hope’s highway department had used thick dark asphalt rolled set That was clear They had top-dressed a luravel on it Where the two surfaces met there was an inch-wide trench of no-man’s-land filled with a black rubbery compound An expansion joint A boundary A line Jack Reacher stepped over itHe paid it no attention at all

But he rereat detail

Hope and Despair were both in Colorado Reacher was in Colorado because two days previously he had been in Kansas, and Colorado was next to Kansas He washis est and south He had been in Calais, Maine, and had taken it into his head to cross the continent diagonally, all the way to San Diego in California Calais was the last o was the last major place in the Southwest One extreme to the other The Atlantic to the Pacific, cool and damp to hot and dry He took buses where there were any and hitched rides where there weren’t Where he couldn’t find rides, he walked He had arrived in Hope in the front passenger seat of a bottle-green Mercury Grand Marquis driven by a retired button salesman He was on his way out of Hope on foot because thatwest toward Despair

He remembered that fact later, too And wondered why he hadn’t wondered why

In terhtly off course Ideally he should have been angling directly southwest into New Mexico But he wasn’t a stickler for plans, and the Grand Marquis had been a couy had been fixed on Hope because he had three grandchildren to see there, before heading onward to Denver to see four uy’s faured that a saw-tooth itinerary first west and then south was entirely acceptable Maybe two sides of a triangle would bethan one And then in Hope he had looked at a map and seen Despair seventeen miles farther west and had been unable to resist the detour Once or twice in his life he had ured he should ht there in front of him

He remembered that whim later, too

The road between the tas a straight two-lane It rose very gently as it headed west Nothing dramatic The part of eastern Colorado that Reacher was in was pretty flat Like Kansas But the Rockies were visible up ahead, blue and massive and hazy They looked very close Then suddenly they didn’t Reacher breasted a slight rise and stopped dead and understood why one toas called Hope and the other Despair Settlers and ho west a hundred and fifty years before him would have stopped over in what careat obstacle see distance Then after a day’s or a week’s or a ain and breasted the saht rise and seen that the Rockies’ apparent proxiraphy An optical illusion A trick of the light Froain remote, even unreachably distant, across hundreds more h that too was an illusion Reacher figured that in truth the first significant peaks were about two hundredon foot and inoccasional decades-old wheel ruts Maybe six weeks’ hard trekking, in the wrong season In context, not a disaster, but certainly a bitter disappointh to drive the anxious and the ilance at the horizon and the next

Reacher stepped off Despair’s gritty road and walked through crusted sandy earth to a table rock the size of a car He levered himself up and lay doith his hands behind his head and stared up at the sky It was pale blue and laced with long high feathery clouds that ht once have been vapor trails froht have lit a cigarette to pass the ti at least a pack and a book of s he didn’t need There was nothing in his pockets except paper ether toothbrush There was nothing waiting for hie unit in a distant city, nothing stashed with friends He owned the things in his pockets and the clothes on his back and the shoes on his feet That was all, and that was enough Everything he needed, and nothing he didn’t

He got to his feet and stood on tiptoe, high on the rock Behind him to the east was a shallol hly in its center, eight or nine s and an outlying clutter of houses and farated e in the haze Ahead of him to the ere tens of thousands of flat square miles, completely empty except for ribbons of distant roads and the town of Despair about eight or nine miles ahead Despair was harder to see than Hope The haze was thicker in the west The place looked larger than Hope had been, and teardrop-shaped, with a conventional plains donand then a wider zone of activity beyond it,Despair looked less pleasant than Hope Cold, wh

ere Hope had looked war For a briefout south fro back on course, but he disht even before it had fully for back He liked to press on, dead ahead, whatever Everyone’s life needed an organizing principle, and relentless forward motion was Reacher’s

He was angry at hi so inflexible

He climbed off the rock and rejoined the road twenty yards west of where he had left it He stepped up onto the left-hand edge and continued walking, long strides, an easy pace, a little faster than threetraffic, the safest way But there was no onco traffic No traffic in either direction The road was deserted No vehicles were using it No cars, no trucks Nothing No chance of a ride Reacher was a little puzzled, but mostly unconcerned Many times in his life he had walked a lot more than seventeen miles at a stretch He raked the hair off his forehead and pulled his shirt loose on his shoulders and kept on going, tohatever lay ahead

3

Despair’s don area began with a vacant lot where so had been planned maybe twenty years before but never built Then came an old motor court, shuttered, maybe permanently abandoned Across the street and fifty yards as a gas station Two puht rural antiques Reacher had seen in Edward Hopper’s paintings, but still a couple of generations off the pace There was a srimyfull of quarts of oil arrayed in a pyramid Reacher crossed the apron and stuck his head in the door It was dark inside the hut and the air suy behind a counter, in worn blue overalls stained black with dirt He was about thirty, and lean

“Got coffee?” Reacher asked him

“This is a gas station,” the guy said

“Gas stations sell coffee,” Reacher said “And water, and soda”

“Not this one,” the guy said “We sell gas”

“And oil”

“If you want it”

“Is there a coffee shop in town?”

“There’s a restaurant”

“Just one?”

“One is all we need”

Reacher ducked back out to the daylight and kept on walking A hundred yards farther west the road grew sidewalks and according to a sign on a pole changed its name to Main Street Thirty feet later came the first developed block It was occupied by a dour brick cube, three stories high, on the left side of the street, to the south It oods emporium It was still some kind of a retail enterprise Reacher could see three custoh its dusty ground-floor s Next to it was an identical three-story brick cube, and then another, and another The don area seemed to be about twelve blocks square, bulked mostly to the south of Main Street Reacher was no kind of an architectural expert, and he kneay west of the Mississippi, but the whole place gave him the feel of an old Connecticut factory town, or the Cincinnati riverfront It was plain, and severe, and unadorned, and out of date He had seen movies about small-town America in which the sets had been artfully dressed to look a little more perfect and vibrant than reality This place was the exact opposite It looked like a designer and a whole tealooht Sedans and pick-up trucks wereslow and lazy None of them was newer than three years old There were few pedestrians on the sidewalks

Reacherthe prorocery store and a barber shop and a bar and a roo house and a faded old hotel before he found the eatery It took up the whole ground floor of another dull brick cube The ceiling was high and the ere floor-to-ceiling plate glass iteht have been an automobile showroom in the past The floor was tiled and the tables and chairs were plain broood and the air sister station inside the door with a Please Wait to Be Seated sign on a short brassed pole with a heavy base San he had seen everywhere, coast to coast Saured there was a catering supply co thens in Calais, Maine, and expected to see ister and waited

And waited

There were eleven custoletons One waitress No front-of-house staff Nobody at the register Not an unusual ratio Reacher had eaten in a thousand similar places and he knew the rhythlance over at hiht with you Then she would take an order, deliver a plate, and scoot over, esture designed to be both an apology and an appeal for sympathy She would collect a menu from a stack and lead him to a table and bustle away and then revisit him in strict sequence