Free The Affair by Lee Child Page B

throbbing ground, scoured by the slipstream.
    Then the train was gone.
    The butt end of a bulk silo car rolled away from me at sixty miles an hour, and the howl of the wind dropped a half tone, and the earthquake subsided to mild tremors again, and then to nothing, and the screaming rails quieted to a low hiss. The manic bells stopped dead.
    Silence came back.
    The first thing I did was change my mind about how far I was going to have to walk to find the wreckage of the blue car. I had assumed it would be close by. But after that awesome display of power I figured it might be somewhere in New Jersey. Or Canada.

Chapter
    15
    In the end I found most of the car about two hundred yards north. It was preceded by a debris field that stretched most of the intervening distance. There were pebbles of broken windshield glass, glistening and glinting in the dew and the moonlight. The glass had been flung along random curved trajectories, as if by a giant hand. There was a chrome bumper, torn off and folded capriciously in half, a tight V, like a drinking straw. It had embedded itself in the ground, like a lawn dart. There was a wheel with no hub cap. The impact had been colossal. The car had been smashed forward like a baseball off a tee. Zero to sixty, instantaneously.
    I guessed it had been parked on the track about twenty yards north of the water tower. That was where the first of the glass was located. The locomotive had hit the car, and it had flown fifty or more yards through the air, and then it had landed and cartwheeled. Maybe wheels to roof to wheels to roof, or end over end. I guessed the initial impact had more or less disassembled it. Like an explosion. Then the rolling action had flung its constituent parts all over the place. Including its fuel, which had ignited. There were narrow black tongues of burned scrub all over the last fifty yards, and what was left of the vehicle itself was nested against the trees in the epicenter of a starburst of blackened trunks and branches. Arson investigators I had met could have worked out its rate of rotation from the fuel splatter alone.
    Pellegrino had seen the car in daylight and called it blue. In the moonlight it looked ash gray to me. I couldn’t find an intact painted surface. I couldn’t find an intact anything larger than a square inch. It was a burned-out mess, crushed and crumpled to the point of being virtually unrecognizable. I was prepared to accept it was a car, but only because I couldn’t imagine what else it could be.
    If someone’s intention had been to conceal evidence, then that someone had succeeded, big time, and comprehensively.
    I got back to the hotel at one o’clock exactly, and went straight to bed. I set the alarm in my head for seven in the morning, which was when I figured Deveraux would be getting up for work. I figured her day would start at eight. Clearly she was not neglectful of her appearance, but she was a Marine and a pragmatic person, so she wouldn’t budget more than an hour to get ready. I figured I could match her shower time with my own, and then I could find her in the diner for breakfast. Which was as far ahead as my planning extended. I wasn’t sure what I was going to say to her.
    But I didn’t sleep until seven in the morning. I was woken up at six. By someone knocking loudly on my door. I wasn’t thrilled. I rolled out of bed and pulled on my pants and opened up. It was the old guy. The hotel keeper.
    He said, “Mr. Reacher?”
    I said, “Yes?”
    He said, “Good. I’m glad I got the right person. At this hour, I mean. It’s always better to be sure.”
    “What do you want?”
    “Well, initially, as I said, I’m confirming who you are.”
    “I sincerely hope there’s more to it than that. At this hour. You only have two guests. And the other one isn’t mister anything.”
    “You have a phone call.”
    “Who from?”
    “Your uncle.”
    “My uncle ?”
    “Your uncle Leon Garber. He said it was urgent. And judging