Page 3 (1/2)

Chapter 1

Moving a guy as big as Keever wasn’t easy It was like trying to wrestle a king-size mattress off a waterbed So they buried him close to the house Which made sense anyway The harvest was still a month away, and a disturbance in a field would show up frouy like Keever They would use search planes, and helicopters, and maybe even drones

They started at h They were in the ness, and the only man-made structure their side of any horizon was the railroad track to the east, buttrain and seven hours before theeyes Their backhoe had four spotlights on a bar above the cab, the saether the four beahtness Therefore, visibility was not a proble pen, which was a perhed two hundred pounds, and each hog had four feet The dirt was always chewed up Nothing to see from the air, not even with a thermal ca ani piles and pools of waste

Safe enough

Hogs were rooting animals, so they made sure the hole was deep Which was not a proble, and it bit rhythmically, in fluent articulated seven-foot scoops, the hydraulic ra and roaring and pausing, the cab falling and rising, as each bucket-load was dumped aside When the hole was done they backed the machine up and turned it around and used the front bucket to push Keever into his grave, scraping hi his body with dirt, until finally it fell over the lip and thumped down into the electric shadows

Only one thing rong, and it happened right then

The evening train ca they heard on the AM station that a broken locomotive had caused a jam a hundred miles south But they didn’t know that at the time All they heard was the , and then all they could do was turn and stare, at the long lit cars ru past in the middle distance, one after the other, like a vision in a dreaone, and the rails sang for a ht ed by the ht darkness, and they turned back to their task

Twenty miles north the train slowed, and slowed, and then eased to a hissing stop, and the doors sucked open, and Jack Reacher stepped down to a concrete ra as an apartment house To his left were four er than the first, and to his right was an enorar There were vapor lights on poles, set at regular intervals, and they cut cones of yellow in the darkness There was httime air, like a note on a calendar The end of su Fall was on its way

Reacher stood still and behind hi, settling to a slow rat-a-tat rhyth at his clothes He was the only passenger who had gotten out Which was not surprising The place was no kind of a coer facilities it had edged between the last elevator and the huge shed, and were li which see It was built in a traditional railroad style, and it looked like a child’s toy, temporarily set down between two shiny oil drums

But on a sign board running its whole length ritten the reason Reacher was there: Mother’s Rest Which he had seen on a reat naured the line ht there, where sonant wo could not have helped Maybe the wagon train stopped for a couple of weeks Or a month Maybe someone remembered the place years later A descendant, perhaps A faend Maybe there was a one-room museum

Or perhaps there was a sadder interpretation Maybe they had buried a woman there Too old to make it In which case there would be a commemorative stone

Either way Reacher figured he o, and all the ti Which is why he got out of the train To a sense of disappointment, initially His expectations had been way off base He had pictured a couple of dusty houses, and a lonely one-horse corral And the one-roouy from one of the houses Or the headstone, ht-iron fence

He had not expected the iricultural infrastructure He should have, he supposed Grain, meet the railroad It had to be loaded somewhere Billions of bushels and h a gap between structures The vieas dark, but he could sense a rough semicircle of habitation Houses, obviously, for the depot workers He could see lights, which he hoped were a motel, or a diner, or both

He walked to the exit, skirting the pools of vapor light purely out of habit, but he saw that the last lamp was unavoidable, because it was set directly above the exit gate So he saved hih the next-to-last pool of light too

At which point a woman stepped out of the shadows

She cay, two fast paces, eager, like she was pleased to see hie was all about relief

Then it wasn’t Then it was all about disappointment She stopped dead, and she said, “Oh”

She was Asian But not petite Five-nine, ht No kind of a aif She was about forty, Reacher guessed, with black hair worn long, with jeans and a T-shirt under a short cotton coat She had lace-up shoes on her feet

He said, “Good evening, ma’am”

She was looking past his shoulder

He said, “I’er”

She looked him in the eye

He said, “No one else got out of the train So I guess your friend isn’t co”

“My friend?” she said A neutral kind of accent Regular American The kind he heard everywhere

He said, “Why else would a person be here, except to uess norht”

She didn’t answer

He said, “Don’t tellhere since seven o’clock”

“I didn’t know the train was late,” she said “There’s no cell signal here And no one frouess the Pony Express is out sick today”

“He wasn’t in my car Or the next two, either”

“Who wasn’t?”

“Your friend”

“You don’t knohat he looks like”

“He’s a big guy,” Reacher said “That’s why you juht I was hiuys in my car Or the next two”

“When is the next train?”

“Seven in the ”

She said, “Who are you and why have you come here?”

“I’h”

“The train passed through Not you You got out”

“You know anything about this place?”

“Not a thing”

“Have you seen a ravestone?”

“Why are you here?”

“Who’s asking??

?

She paused a beat, and said, “Nobody”

Reacher said, “Is there a motel in town?”

“I’ there”

“How is it?”

“It’s a motel”

“Works for me,” Reacher said “Does it have vacancies?”