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moon. There was thick cloud and patches of distant starlight. He packed his purchases into one of the black garbage bags and slung it over his shoulder. Then he left the motel and headed up to First Street in the darkness and turned west. There was no traffic. No pedestrians. Few lit windows. It was the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere. The sidewalk ended twenty feet west of the hardware store. He stepped off the curb onto the asphalt and kept on going. Route-march speed, four miles an hour. Not difficult on the smooth flat surface. He built up a rhythm to the point where he felt he could keep on walking forever and never stop.
    But he did stop. He stopped five miles later, a hundred yards short of the line between Hope and Despair, because he sensed a shape ahead of him in the blackness. A hole in the darkness. A car, parked on the shoulder. Mostly black, some hints of white.
    A police cruiser.
    Vaughan.
    The name settled in his mind and at the exact same time the car’s lights flicked on. High beams. Very bright. He was pinned. His shadow shot out behind him, infinitely long. He shielded his eyes, left-handed, because his bag was in his right. He stood still. The lights stayed on. He stepped off the road and looped out over the crusted sand to the north. The lights died back and the spot on the windshield pillar tracked him. It wouldn’t leave him. So he changed direction and headed straight for it.
    Vaughan turned the light off and buzzed her window down as he approached. She was parked facing east, with two wheels on the sand and the rear bumper of the car exactly level with the expansion joint in the road. Inside her own jurisdiction, but only just. She said, “I thought I might see you here.”
    Reacher looked at her and said nothing.
    She asked, “What are you doing?”
    “Taking a stroll.”
    “That all?”
    “No law against it.”
    “Not here,” Vaughan said. “But there is if you take three more steps.”
    “Not your law.”
    “You’re a stubborn man.”
    Reacher nodded. “I wanted to see Despair and I’m going to.”
    “It isn’t that great of a place.”
    “I like to make my own mind up about things like that.”
    “They’re serious, you know. Either you’ll spend thirty days in jail or they’ll shoot you.”
    “If they find me.”
    “They’ll find you. I found you.”
    “I wasn’t hiding from you.”
    “Did you hurt a deputy over there?”
    “Why do you ask?”
    “I was thinking about the question you asked me.”
    “I don’t know for sure what he was.”
    “I don’t like the idea of deputies getting hurt.”
    “You wouldn’t have liked the deputy. If that’s what he was.”
    “They’ll be looking for you.”
    “How big is their department?”
    “Smaller than ours. Two cars, two guys, I think.”
    “They won’t find me.”
    “Why are you going back?”
    “Because they told me not to.”
    “Is it worth it?”
    “What would you do?”
    Vaughan said, “I’m an estrogen-based life-form, not testosterone. And I’m all grown up now. I’d suck it up and move on. Or stay in Hope. It’s a nice place.”
    “I’ll see you tomorrow,” Reacher said.
    “You won’t. Either I’ll be picking you up right here a month from now or I’ll be reading about you in the newspaper. Beaten and shot while resisting arrest.”
    “Tomorrow,” Reacher said. “I’ll buy you a late dinner.”
    He moved on, one pace, two, three, and then he stepped over the line.

 
    10
    He got off the road immediately. The Hope PD had predicted that he would rise to the challenge. It was an easy guess that the Despair PD would make the same assessment. And he didn’t want to blunder into a parked Despair cruiser. That event would have an altogether different conclusion than a pleasant chat with the pretty Officer Vaughan.
    He looped fifty yards into the scrub north of the road. Near enough to retain a sense of direction, far enough to stay out of a driver’s peripheral vision. The night