CHAPTER FOUR

She kept her head high, covered another mile, heard herself panting, and still she ran.

She felt caged. At loose ends. All sixes and sevens, as the Brits put it. No longer master of her days and nights.

Face it.

She grimaced.

Okay.

Truth was, she was no longer matching wits with the most worthy adversary she’d ever hunted. The hunt for Reacher was dangerous. Deadly. But also exhilarating, in a frightening way.

Like a drug addict, she craved the adrenaline.

The real problem was, her life had returned to normal.

She’d come home to her Detroit apartment and her desk at the FBI Detroit Field Office. Her world had continued as if the Boss had never called that cold November morning at four a.m. and tasked her with the most dangerous assignment of her career. A baffling subject, no data or background on him anywhere. FBI resources off limits. An assignment she was forbidden to discuss with anyone.

Except Gaspar. She could talk to him. She’d left him a message earlier. Another one.

She kept running. What else was she to do?

Four miles later, her cell phone rang. Distracted by the phone, she stumbled on the treadmill again. She grabbed the side rails and struggled to right herself.

Her legs were as weak as the flimsy rice noodles her mother made for special family dinners. She could barely stand. Enough.

She pushed her weight up, placing her feet onto the stationary treads on either side of the belt. She palmed the big red off button before she stepped onto the floor, still hanging on to one side rail.

Her legs quivered with fatigue and collapsed. She landed on her ass on the floor.

She picked up the phone with a shaking hand, thumbed the talk button, and managed to squeak out a breathless, “Otto.”

When he heard the greeting, FBI Special Agent Carlos Gaspar chuckled. “What’re you chasing now, Suzie Wong?”

She bristled, but she had no breath to argue. They’d separated at Boston Logan Airport the day after the old house exploded. It was the last time she’d seen him.

He said, “Sorry I couldn’t get back to you earlier. What’s up?”

Otto glanced around the gym. It was deserted at three in the morning. Most people slept at night. She remembered those days, when she kept somewhat normal hours, the same as everyone else.

Her breath was slowly coming back. “How’s the baby?”

“You called me at this hour to ask me that?” Gaspar’s fifth child, his only son, had been born three days after the explosion that killed Reacher. Mother and child were fine. Whenever she’d asked, he said he was glad to be home and sounded like he meant it. He’d returned to work in the Miami Field Office and never looked back.

Otto had respected his decision. Mostly because she could find no reason not to.

“I knew you’d be awake,” she replied.

A while ago, she’d discovered that Gaspar rarely slept, because of his injury. He didn’t deny the accusation. He never wanted to talk about his damaged body or the constant pain it caused him, and she respected that decision, too. As long as he did the job, the rest was none of her business. She liked boundaries. She had her own secrets to protect, just as he did.

“The baby’s fine. Everyone here is fine. Thanks for checking in.” He paused a couple of moments before he asked, “Reacher still keeping you awake nights?”

She said nothing.

He sighed, and she heard the exasperation all the way from Miami. “Look, Sunshine, it’s over. We filled in a few blanks on Reacher’s Special Personnel Task Force Background Check. That’s all we can do. The candidate died. It happens.”

“It doesn’t bother you that the file remains incomplete?”

“Not really. So, Reacher’s file will always be too thin. Like many other files stowed in the U.S. Government’s cavernous inventory and forgotten. So what?”

“And the top-secret assignment Reacher was being considered for? Such a big deal that we absolutely had to find out every last thing about him, no matter what and nearly died trying? You’re not curious about that?”

“Whatever that job was, it’ll go to a different candidate if Uncle Sam still needs it done.” He breathed deeply through his nose a couple of times while she waited. “Look, we’ve been over this. Whatever Reacher did or didn’t do during all those years after he left the Army doesn’t really matter now, does it?”

She hung her head and closed her eyes, worn down, in body and spirit. It was hard to argue with the cold facts. But she didn’t have it in her to give up. She never had. She never would.

“Reacher’s dead, Kim. It’s over.” Gaspar paused again, perhaps waiting for a response, but she had nothing to offer. She heard the baby crying in the background. “Quite a set of lungs on that kid, eh? I’ve got to get to Juan before he wakes up the whole house.”

“Yeah,” she said, weary.

“Otto? Seriously. You’ve got to move on.” Gaspar’s tone was kind. “You had a life before this case. Try to find that again, okay?”

Juan’s crying raised another decibel.

She said, “You go. We can talk another time.”

“Okay.” But he hung on the open line until she disconnected.

She pushed herself off the floor, grabbed her towel, and wobbled toward the showers. She leaned against the tile, under the pounding hot water, for a full twenty minutes before she gathered her remaining energy and stepped out. She wrapped herself in an oversized terry robe, left the gym, and took the elevator down to her apartment.

Ten minutes later, she had dropped into a fitful sleep fueled by energy depletion.

She tossed and turned because Reacher once again invaded her dreams. She ran from the big old house on Rocky Pointe, full out, as fast as she could run.

But this time, when she looked back at the house for half a moment before it blasted to smithereens, she saw a shadowy figure emerge and move toward the renovated stables.

Half a breath later, the house exploded. Not in the blinding, ear-splitting, concussive blast she’d actually experienced, but a hard thump against a harder surface.

She sat bolt upright, heart still pounding, head clear and firmly in the present.

A lingering odor, something familiar, wafted from the chair in the far corner of her bedroom, but she couldn’t immediately identify it.

The chair was bathed in the diffuse glow from the streetlights below through the sheer drapes across the window.

No one sitting in the chair.

No one in the room with her.

She listened hard. She caught the noise again. Not an explosion. Not a dream.

An intruder.

Thudding, fast footsteps pounded the wood floors in the hallway outside her bedroom door. Moving toward the front door.

Quietly, she pulled the bedside table drawer open, grabbed her gun, and slid her bare feet onto the cold carpet.