by Lee Child
The old guy thought for a moment and said, “Maybe he was at the hotel and wanted to economize. Maybe he had heard the rates were cheaper here.”
“What about another guy, shorter, wiry, about the same age?”
“No guys here at all, big or small.”
“You sure?”
“It’s my house. I know who’s in it.”
“How long has it been empty?”
“It’s not empty. I live here.”
“How long since you had tenants?”
The old guy thought for another moment and said, “A long time.”
“How long?”
“Years.”
“So how do you make a living?”
“I don’t.”
“You own this place?”
“I rent it. Like my mother did. Close to fifty years.”
Reacher said, “Can I see the rooms?”
“Which rooms?”
“All of them.”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t believe you. I think there are people here.”
“You think I’m lying?”
“I’m a suspicious person.”
“I should call the police.”
“Go right ahead.”
The old guy stepped away into the gloom and picked up a phone. Reacher crossed the hallway and tried the opposite door. It was locked. He walked back and the old guy said, “There was no answer at the police station.”
“So it’s just you and me,” Reacher said. “Better that you lend me your passkey. Save yourself some repair work later, with the door locks.”
The old guy bowed to the inevitable. He took a key from his pocket and handed it over. It was a worn brass item with a length of furred string tied through the hole. The string had an old metal eyelet on it, as if the eyelet was all that was left of a paper label.
There were three guest rooms on the ground floor, four on the second, and four on the third. All eleven were identical. All eleven were empty. Each room had a narrow iron cot against one wall. The cots were like something from an old-fashioned fever hospital or an army barracks. The sheets had been washed so many times they were almost transparent. The blankets had started out thick and rough and had worn thin and smooth. Opposite the beds were chests of drawers and freestanding towel racks. The towels were as thin as the sheets. Near the ends of the beds were pine kitchen tables with two-ring electric burners plugged into outlets with frayed old cords. At the ends of the hallways on each of the floors were shared bathrooms, tiled black and white, with iron claw-foot tubs and toilets with cisterns mounted high on the walls.
Basic accommodations, for sure, but they were in good order and beautifully kept. The bathroom fitments were stained with age, but not with dirt. The floors were swept shiny. The beds were made tight. A dropped quarter would have bounced two feet off the blankets. The towels on the racks were folded precisely and perfectly aligned. The electric burners were immaculately clean. No crumbs, no spills, no dried splashes of bottled sauce.
Reacher checked everywhere and then stood in the doorway of each room before leaving it, smelling the air and listening for echoes of recent hasty departures. He found nothing and sensed nothing, eleven times over. So he headed back downstairs and returned the key and apologized to the old guy. Then he asked, “Is there an ambulance service in town?”
The old guy asked, “Are you injured?”
“Suppose I was. Who would come for me?”
“How bad?”
“Suppose I couldn’t walk. Suppose I needed a stretcher.”
The old man said, “There’s a first-aid station up at the plant. And an infirmary. In case a guy gets hurt on the job. They have a vehicle. They have a stretcher.”
“Thanks,” Reacher said.
He drove Vaughan’s old Chevy on down the street. Paused for a moment in front of the storefront church. It had a painted sign running the whole width of the building: Congregation of the End Times. In one window it had a poster written in the same way that a supermarket would advertise brisket for three bucks a pound: The Time Is at Hand. A quotation from the Book of Revelation. Chapter one, verse three. Reacher recognized it. The other window had a similar poster: The End Is Near. Inside, the place was as dark and gloomy as its exterior messages. Rows of metal chairs, a wood floor, a low stage, a podium. More posters, each one predicting with confident aplomb that the clock was ticking. Reacher read them all and then drove on, to the hotel. It was dark when he got there. He remembered the place from earlier daytime sightings as looking dowdy and faded, and by night it looked worse. It could have been an old city prison, in Prague, maybe, or Warsaw, or Leningrad. The walls were featureless and the windows were blank and unlit. Inside it had an empty and unappealing dining room on the left and a deserted bar on the right. Dead ahead in the lobby was a deserted reception desk. Behind the reception desk was a small swaybacked version of a grand staircase. It was covered with matted carpet. There was no elevator.
Hotels were required by state and federal laws and private insurance to maintain accurate guest records. In case of a fire or an earthquake or a tornado, it was in everyone’s interest to know who was resident in the building, and who wasn’t. Therefore Reacher had learned a long time ago that when searching a hotel the place to start was with the register. Which over the years had become increasingly difficult, with computers. There were all kinds of function keys to hit and passwords to discover. But Despair as a whole was behind the times, and its hotel was no exception. The register was a large square book bound in old red leather. Easy to grab, easy to swivel around, easy to open, easy to read.
The hotel had no guests.
According to the handwritten records the last room had rented seven months previously, to a couple from California, who had arrived in a private car and stayed two nights. Since then, nothing. No names that might have corresponded to single twenty-year-old men, either large or small. No names at all.
Reacher left the hotel without a single soul having seen him and got back in the Chevy. Next stop was two blocks over, in the town bar, which meant mixing with the locals.
28
The bar was on the ground floor of yet another dull brick cube. One long narrow room. It ran the full depth of the building and had a short corridor with restrooms and a fire door way in back. The bar itself was on the left and there were tables and chairs on the right. Low light. No music. No television. No pool table, no video games. Maybe a third of the bar stools and a quarter of the chairs were occupied. The after-work crowd. But not exactly happy hour. All the customers were men. They were all tired, all grimy, all dressed in work shirts, all sipping beer from tall glasses or long-neck bottles. Reacher had seen none of them before.
He stepped into the gloom, quietly. Every head turned and every pair of eyes came to rest on him. Some kind of universal barroom radar. Stranger in the house. Reacher stood still and let them take a good look. A stranger for sure, but not the kind you want to mess with. Then he sat down on a stool and put his elbows on the bar. He was two gaps away from the nearest guy on his left and one away from the nearest guy on his right. The stools had iron bases and iron pillars and shaped mahogany seats that turned on rough bearings. The bar itself was made from scarred mahogany that didn’t match the walls, which were paneled with pine. There were mirrors all over the walls, made of plain reflective glass screen-printed with beer company advertisements. They were framed with rustic wood and were fogged with years of alcohol fumes and cigarette smoke.
The bartender was a heavy pale man of about forty. He didn’t look smart and he didn’t look pleasant. He was ten feet away, leaning back with his fat ass against his cash register drawer. Not moving. Not about to move, either. That was clear. Reacher raised his eyebrows and put a beckoning expression on his face and got no response at all.
A company town.
He swiveled his stool and faced the room.
“Listen up, guys,” he called. “I’m not a metalworker and I’m not l
ooking for a job.”
No response.
“You couldn’t pay me enough to work here. I’m not interested. I’m just a guy passing through, looking for a beer.”
No response. Just sullen and hostile stares, with bottles and glasses frozen halfway between tables and mouths.
Reacher said, “First guy to talk to me, I’ll pay his tab.”
No response.
“For a week.”
No response.
Reacher turned back and faced the bar again. The bartender hadn’t moved. Reacher looked him in the eye and said, “Sell me a beer or I’ll start busting this place up.”
The bartender moved. But not toward his refrigerator cabinets or his draft pumps. Toward his telephone instead. It was an old-fashioned instrument next to the register. The guy picked it up and dialed a long number. Reacher waited. The guy listened to a lot of ring tone and then started to say something but then stopped and put the phone down again.
“Voice mail,” he said.
“Nobody home,” Reacher said. “So it’s just you and me. I’ll take a Budweiser, no glass.”
The guy glanced beyond Reacher’s shoulder, out into the room, to see if any ad hoc coalitions were forming to help him out. They weren’t. Reacher was already monitoring the situation in a dull mirror directly in front of him. The bartender decided not to be a hero. He shrugged and his attitude changed and his face sagged a little and he bent down and pulled a cold bottle out from under the bar. Opened it up and set it down on a napkin. Foam swelled out of the neck and ran down the side of the bottle and soaked into the paper. Reacher took a ten from his pocket and folded it lengthways so it wouldn’t curl and squared it in front of him.
“I’m looking for a guy,” he said.
The bartender said, “What guy?”
“A young guy. Maybe twenty. Suntan, short hair, as big as me.”
“Nobody like that here.”
“I saw him this afternoon. In town. Coming out of the rooming house.”
“So ask there.”
“I did.”
“I can’t help you.”
“This guy looked like a college athlete. College athletes drink beer from time to time. He was probably in here once or twice.”
“He wasn’t.”
“What about another guy? Same age, much smaller. Wiry, maybe five-eight, one-forty.”
“Didn’t see him.”
“You sure?”
“I’m sure.”
“You ever work up at the plant?”
“Couple of years, way back.”
“And then?”
“He moved me here.”
“Who did?”
“Mr. Thurman. He owns the plant.”
“And this bar, too?”
“He owns everything.”
“And he moved you? He sounds like a hands-on manager.”
“He figured I’d be better working here than there.”
“And are you?”
“Not for me to say.”
Reacher took a long pull on his bottle. Asked, “Does Mr. Thurman pay you well?”
“I don’t complain.”
“Is that Mr. Thurman’s plane that flies every night?”
“Nobody else here owns a plane.”
“Where does he go?”
“I don’t ask.”
“Any rumors?”
“No.”
“You sure you never saw any young guys around here?”
“I’m sure.”
“Suppose I gave you a hundred bucks?”
The guy paused a beat and looked a little wistful, as if a hundred bucks would make a welcome change in his life. But in the end he just shrugged again and said, “I’d still be sure.”
Reacher drank a little more of his beer. It was warming up a little and tasted metallic and soapy. The bartender stayed close. Reacher glanced at the mirrors. Checked reflections of reflections. Nobody in the room was moving. He asked, “What happens to dead people here?”
“What do you mean?”
“You got undertakers in town?”
The bartender shook his head. “Forty miles west. There’s a morgue and a funeral home and a burial ground. No consecrated land in Despair.”
“The smaller guy died,” Reacher said.
“What smaller guy?”
“The one I was asking you about.”
“I didn’t see any small guys, alive or dead.”
Reacher went quiet again and the bartender said, “So, you’re just passing through?” A meaningless, for-the-sake-of-it conversational gambit, which confirmed what Reacher already knew. Bring it on, he thought. He glanced at the fire exit in back and checked the front door in the mirrors. He said, “Yes, I’m just passing through.”
“Not much to see here.”
“Actually I think this is a pretty interesting place.”
“You do?”
“Who hires the cops here?”
“The mayor.”
“Who’s the mayor?”
“Mr. Thurman.”
“There’s a big surprise.”
“It’s his town.”
Reacher said, “I’d like to meet him.”
The bartender said, “He’s a very private man.”
“I’m just saying. I’m not asking for an appointment.”
Six minutes, Reacher thought. I’ve been working on this beer for six minutes. Maybe ten more to go. He asked, “Do you know the judge?”
“He doesn’t come in here.”
“I didn’t ask where he goes.”
“He’s Mr. Thurman’s lawyer, up at the plant.”
“I thought it was an elected position.”
“It is. We all voted for him.”
“How many candidates were on the ballot?”
“He was unopposed.”
Reacher said, “Does this judge have a name?”
The bartender said, “His name is Judge Gardner.”
“Does Judge Gardner live here in town?”
“Sure. You work for Mr. Thurman, you have to live in town.”
“You know Judge Gardner’s address?”
“The big house on Nickel.”
“Nickel?”
“All the residential streets here are named for metals.”
Reacher nodded. Not so very different from the way streets on army bases were named for generals or Medal of Honor winners. He went quiet again and waited for the bartender to fill the silence, like he had to. Like he had been told to. The guy said, “A hundred and some years ago there were only five miles of paved road in the United States.”
Reacher said nothing.
The guy said, “Apart from city centers, of course, which were cobbled anyway, not really paved. Not with blacktop, like now. Then county roads got built, then state, then the Interstates. Towns got passed by. We were on the main road to Denver, once. Not so much anymore. People use I-70 now.”
Reacher said, “Hence the closed-down motel.”
“Exactly.”
“And the general feeling of isolation.”
“I guess.”
Reacher said, “I know those two young guys were here. It’s only a matter of time before I find out who they were and why they came.”
“I can’t help you with that.”
“One of them died.”
“You told me that already. And I still don’t know anything about it.”
Eleven minutes, Reacher thought. Five to go. He asked, “Is this the only bar in town?”
The guy said, “One is all we need.”
“Movies?”
“No.”
“So what do people do for entertainment?”
“They watch satellite television.”
“I heard there’s a first-aid station at the plant.”
“That’s right.”
“With an ambulance.”
“An old one. It’s a big plant. It covers a big area.”
“Are there a lot of accidents?”
; “It’s an industrial operation. Shit happens.”
“Does the plant pay disability?”
“Mr. Thurman looks after people if they get hurt on the job.”
Reacher nodded and sipped his beer. Watched the other customers sipping theirs, directly and in the mirrors. Three minutes, he thought.
Unless they’re early.
Which they were.
Reacher looked to his right and saw two deputies step in through the fire door. He glanced in a mirror and saw the other two walk in the front.
29
The telephone. A useful invention, and instructive in the way it was used. Or not used. Four deputies heading east to make a surprise arrest would not tip their hand with a courtesy telephone call. Not in the real world. They would swoop down unannounced. They would aim to grab up their prey unawares. Therefore their courtesy call was a decoy. It was a move in a game. A move designed to flush Reacher westward into safer territory. It was an invitation.
Which Reacher had interpreted correctly.
And accepted.
And the bartender had not called the station house. Had not gotten voice mail. Had not made a local call at all. He had dialed too many digits. He had called a deputy’s cell, and spoken just long enough to let the deputy know who he was, and therefore where Reacher was. Whereupon he had changed his attitude and turned talkative and friendly, to keep Reacher sitting tight. Like he had been told to, beforehand, should the opportunity arise.
Which is why Reacher had not left the bar. If the guy wanted to participate, he was welcome to. He could participate by cleaning up the mess.
And there was going to be a mess.
That was for damn sure.
The deputies who had come in the back walked through the short corridor past the restrooms and stopped where the main room widened out. Reacher kept his eyes on them. Didn’t turn his head. A two-front attack was fairly pointless in a room full of mirrors. He could see the other guys quite clearly, smaller than life and reversed. They had stopped a yard inside the front door and were standing shoulder to shoulder, waiting.
The big guy who had thrown up the night before was one of the pair that had come in the front. With him was the guy Reacher had smacked outside the family restaurant. Neither one of them looked in great shape. The two who had come in the back looked large and healthy enough, but manageable. Four against one, but no real cause for concern. Reacher had first fought four-on-one when he was five years old, against seven-year-olds, on his father’s base in the Philippines. He had won then, easily, and he expected to win now.