Without Fail - Lee Child [162]
“We need it to be totally flat,” Neagley said.
Reacher nodded at the wheel. “Except for maybe one little hill a hundred yards from where Armstrong is going to be. And another little hill a hundred yards back from it, where we can watch from.”
“It isn’t going to be that easy.”
“It never is,” Reacher said.
They drove on, another whole hour. They were heading north and east into emptiness. The sun rose well clear of the horizon. The sky was banded pink and purple. Behind them the Rockies blazed with reflected light. Ahead and to the right the grasslands ran into the distance like a stormy ocean.
There was no more snow in the air. The big lazy flakes had disappeared.
“Turn here,” Neagley said.
“Here?” He slowed to a stop and looked at the turn. It was just a dirt road, leading south to the middle of nowhere.
“There’s a town down there?” he asked.
“According to the map,” Neagley said.
He backed up and made the turn. The dirt road ran a mile through pines and then broke out with a view of absolutely nothing.
“Keep going,” Neagley said.
They drove on, twenty miles, thirty. The road rose and fell. Then it peaked and the land fell away in front of them into a fifty-mile-wide bowl of grass and sage. The road ran ahead through it straight south like a faint pencil line and crossed a river in the base of the bowl. Two more roads ran into the bridge from nowhere. There were tiny buildings scattered randomly. The whole thing looked like a capital letter K, lightly peppered with habitation where the three lines of the letter met.
“That’s Grace, Wyoming,” Neagley said. “Where this road crosses the south fork of the Cheyenne River.”
Reacher eased the Yukon to a stop. Put it in park and crossed his arms on the top of the wheel. Leaned forward with his chin on his hands and stared ahead through the windshield.
“We should be on horses,” he said.
“Wearing white hats,” Neagley said. “With Colt .45s.”
“I’ll stick with the Steyrs,” Reacher said. “How many ways in?”
Neagley traced her finger over the map.
“North or south,” she said. “On this road. The other two roads don’t go anywhere. They peter out in the brush. Maybe they head out to old cattle ranches.”
“Which way will the bad guys come?”
“Nevada, they’ll come in from the south. Idaho, from the north.”
“So we can’t stay right here and block the road.”
“They might be down there already.”
One of the buildings was a tiny pinprick of white in a square of green. Froelich’s church, he thought. He opened his door and got out of the car. Walked around to the tailgate and came back with the bird-watcher’s spotting scope. It was like half of a huge pair of binoculars. He steadied it against the open door and put it to his eye.
The optics compressed the view into a flat grainy picture that danced and quivered with his heartbeat. He focused until it was like looking down at the town from a half-mile away. The river was a narrow cut. The bridge was a stone structure. The roads were all dirt. There were more buildings than he had first thought. The church stood alone in a tended acre inside the south angle of the K. It had a stone foundation and the rest of it was clapboard painted white. It would have looked right at home in Massachusetts. Its grounds widened out to the south and were mowed grass studded with headstones.
South of the graveyard was a fence, and behind the fence was a cluster of two-story buildings made of weathered cedar. They were set at random angles to one another. North of the church were more of the same. Houses, stores, barns. Along the short legs of the K were more buildings. Some of them were painted white. They were close together near the center of town, farther apart as the distance increased. The river ran blue and clear, east and north into the sea of grass. There were cars and pickups parked here and there. Some pedestrian activity. It looked like the population might reach a couple of hundred.