Without Fail

the dirt road and crossed the graveyard. Found the church door and went inside. Crept up the tower stairs by feel. Found the ladder in the dark and climbed up into the bell chamber. The clock ticked loudly. Louder than in the daytime. It sounded like a mad blacksmith beating his iron hammer against his anvil once a second.
    He ducked under the clock shaft and found the next ladder. Climbed up out of the darkness onto the roof. Crawled over to the west wall and raised his head. The landscape was infinitely dark and silent. The distant looming mountains were invisible. He could see nothing. He could hear nothing. The air was freezing. He waited.
    He waited thirty minutes in the cold. It set his eyes watering and his nose running. He started shivering violently. If I’m cold, they’re nearly dead , he thought. And sure enough after thirty long minutes he heard the sound he had been listening for. The Tahoe’s engine started. It was far away, but it sounded deafening in the night silence. It was somewhere out there to the west, maybe a couple hundred yards distant. It idled for ten whole minutes, running the heater. He couldn’t fix an exact location by sound alone. But then they made a fatal mistake. They flicked the dome light on and off for a second. He saw a brief yellow glow deep down in the grass. The truck was down in a dip. Absolutely concealed, its roof well below the average grade level. A little south of west, but not by much. Maybe a hundred and fifty yards out. It was a fine location. They would probably use the truck itself as the shooting platform. Lie prone on the roof, aim, fire, jump down, jump in, drive away.
    He put both arms flat along the wall and faced due west and fixed the memory of the brief yellow flash in his mind against the location of the tower. A hundred and fifty yards out, maybe thirty yards south of perpendicular. He crawled back into the bell tower, past the hammering clock, down to the nave. He retrieved the long guns from under the pew and left them on the cold ground underneath the Yukon. He didn’t want to put them inside. Didn’t want to answer their flash of light with one of his own.
    Then he walked back to the boardinghouse and found Neagley coming out of her room. It was nearly six o’clock. She was showered and dressed. They went into his room to talk.
    “Couldn’t sleep?” he asked.
    “I never sleep,” she said. “They still there?”
    He nodded. “But there’s a problem. We can’t take them down where they are. We need to move them first.”
    “Why?”
    “Too close to home. We can’t start World War Three out there an hour before Armstrong gets here. And we can’t leave two corpses lying around a hundred and fifty yards from the town. People here have seen us. There’ll be early cops up from Casper. Maybe state troopers. You’ve got your license to think about. We need to drive them off and take them down somewhere deserted. West, where it’s snowing, maybe. This snow will be around until April. That’s what I want. I want to do it far away and I want it to be April before anybody knows that anything happened here.”
    “OK, how?”
    “They’re Edward Fox. They’re not John Malkovich. They want to live to fight another day. We can make them run if we do it right.”

    They were back at the Yukon before six-thirty. The snowflakes were still drifting in the air. But the sky was beginning to lighten in the east. There was a band of dark purple on the horizon, and then a band of charcoal, and then the blackness of night. They checked their weapons. Laced their shoes, zipped their coats, swung their shoulders to check freedom of action. Reacher put his hat on, and his left glove. Neagley put her Steyr in her inside pocket and slung the Heckler & Koch over her back.
    “See you later,” she whispered.
    She walked west into the graveyard. He saw her step over the low fence and turn a little south and then she disappeared in the darkness. He walked to the base of the tower and stood flat against the middle of the west wall and recalculated the Tahoe’s position. Pointed his arm out straight toward it and walked back, moving his arm to compensate for his changes of position, keeping the target locked in. He laid the M16 on the ground with the muzzle pointing a little south of west. He stepped behind the Yukon and leaned on the tailgate and waited for the dawn.
    It came slowly and gradually and magnificently. The purple color grew lighter and reddened at