"I want to see some ID."
"You had a criminal conspiracy running out of your store. If I were you, the less I knew about it, the better."
"I want to see something."
"What about the inside of an ambulance? That's the next thing you're going to see, Gary, unless you give me Jeb Oliver's address."
The guy paused a moment. Glanced beyond Reacher's shoulder at the line forming behind him. Apparently decided that he didn't want to start a fight he knew he couldn't win, with a whole bunch of people watching. So he opened a drawer and took out a file and copied an address onto a slip of paper torn off the top of a memo pad provided by an oil filter manufacturer.
"North of here," he said. "About five miles."
"Thank you," Reacher said, and took the slip of paper.
The redhead's Toyota started on the first turn of the key. Reacher let the engine idle and racked the seat back and adjusted the mirror. Clipped his belt and propped the slip of paper against the instrument panel. It meant he couldn't see the tachometer, but he wasn't very interested in whatever information that dial might supply. All he cared about was how much gas was in the tank, and there looked to be more than enough for five miles out and five miles back.
Jeb Oliver's address was nothing more than a house number on a rural route. Easier to find than a road with a name, like Elm Street, or Maple Avenue. In Reacher's experience some towns had more roads named after trees than trees themselves.
He moved out of the parking lot and drove north to the highway cloverleaf. There was the usual forest of signs. He saw the route number he wanted. It was going to be a dogleg, right and then left. East, and then north. The little SUV hummed along OK. It was tall for its width, which made it feel tippy on the turns. But it didn't fall over. It had a small engine that kept itself working hard. The interior smelled of perfume.
The west-east part of the dogleg was some kind of a major county road. But after the turn north the blacktop narrowed and the shoulders grew ragged. There was agriculture going on to the left and the right. Some kind of a winter crop was planted in giant circles. Radial irrigation booms turned slowly. The corners where the booms didn't reach were unplanted and stony. Superimposing circles on squares wasted more than twenty-one percent of every acre, but Reacher figured that might be an efficient trade-off in places where land was plentiful and irrigation hardware wasn't.
He drove four more miles through the fields and passed a half-dozen tracks with mailboxes at the end of them. The mailboxes were painted with numbers and the tracks led away west and east to small swaybacked farm dwellings maybe two hundred yards off the road. He watched the numbers and slowed before he got to the Oliver place. It had a mailbox like all the others, up on a post made out of two figure-eight concrete blocks stacked end on end. The number was daubed in white on a weathered plywood rectangle wired to the concrete. The track was narrow with two muddy ruts flanking a weedy center hump. There were sharp tire tracks in the mud. New treads, wide, aggressive, from a big truck. Not the kind of tires you bought at the $99-for-four place.
Reacher turned the Toyota in and bumped down the track. At the end of it he could see a clapboard farmhouse with a barn behind it and a clean red pickup truck next to it. The truck was turned nose-out and it had a massive chrome radiator grille. A Dodge Ram, Reacher figured. He parked in front of it and got out. The house and the barn were about a hundred years old and the truck was about a month old. It had the big Hemi motor, and the crew cab, and four-wheel drive, and huge tires. It was probably worth more than the house, which was badly maintained and one winter away from serious trouble. The barn was no better. But it had new iron clasps on the doors, with a bicycle U-lock through them.
There was no sound except for a distant rainfall hiss as the irrigation booms turned slowly in the fields. No activity anywhere. No traffic on the road. No dogs barking. The air was still and full of the sharp smell of fertilizer and earth. Reacher walked to the front door and knocked twice with the flat of his hand. No response. He tried again. No response. He walked around to the back of the house and found a woman sitting on a porch glider. She was a lean and leathery person, wearing a faded print dress and holding a pint bottle of something golden in color. She was probably fifty, but she could have passed for seventy, or forty if she took a bath and got a good night's sleep. She had one foot tucked up underneath her and was using the other to scoot the glider slowly back and forth. She wasn't wearing shoes.
"What do you want?" she said.
"Jeb," Reacher said.
"Not here."
"He's not at work, either."
"I know that."
"So where is he?"
"How would I know?"
"Are you his mother?"
"Yes, I am. You think I'm hiding him here? Go ahead and check."
Reacher said nothing. The woman stared at him and rocked the glider, back and forth, back and forth. The bottle rested easy in her lap.
"I insist," she said. "I mean it. Search the damn house."
"I'll take your word for it."
"Why should you?"
"Because if you invite me to search the house it means he's not in it."
"Like I said. Jeb's not here."
"What about the barn?"
"It's locked from the outside. There's only one key and he's got it."
Reacher said nothing.
"He went away," the woman said. "Disappeared."
"Disappeared?"
"Only temporarily, I hope."
"Is that his truck?"
The woman nodded. Took a small, delicate sip from her bottle.
"So he walked?" Reacher said.
"He was picked up. By a friend."
"When?"
"Late last night."
"To go where?"
"I have no idea."
"Take a guess."
The woman shrugged, rocked, sipped.
"Far away, probably," she said. "He has friends all over. California, maybe. Or Arizona. Or Texas. Or Mexico."
"Was this trip planned?" Reacher asked.
The woman wiped the neck of the bottle on the hem of her dress and held it out toward him. He shook his head. Sat down on the porch step. The old wood creaked once under his weight. The glider kept on rocking, back and forth. It was almost silent. Almost, but not quite. There was a small sound from the mechanism that came once at the end of each swing, and a little creak from a porch board as it started its return. Reacher could smell mildew from the cushions, and bourbon from the bottle.
"Cards on the table, whoever the hell you are," the woman said. "Jeb got home last night limping. With his nose busted. And I'm figuring you for the guy who bust it."
"Why?"
"Who else would come looking for him? I'm guessing he started something he couldn't finish."
Reacher said nothing.
"So he ran," the woman said. "The pussy."
"Did he call someone last night? Or did someone call him?"
"How would I know? He makes a thousand calls a day, he takes a thousand calls a day. His cell phone is the biggest thing in his life. Next to his truck."
"Did you see who picked him up?"
"Some guy in a car. He waited on the road. Wouldn't come down the track. I didn't see much. It was dark. White lights on the front, red lights on the back, but all cars have those."
Reacher nodded. He had seen only a single set of tire marks in the mud, from the big pickup. The car that had waited on the road was probably a sedan, too low-slung to make it down the farm track.