by Lee Child
Inside, the main building was mostly an open space, except for a slice boxed off for a back office and what Reacher guessed were two restrooms. There was a curved reception counter and a hundred feet opposite there was a curved bar. The place was basically a lounge, with a pie-shaped parquet dancefloor and huddles of red velvet chairs set around cocktail tables equipped with lamps with tasseled shades. The interior of the domed roof was a concave cyclorama washed by red neon. There was plenty more indirect lighting everywhere else, all of it red or pink. There was tinkly piano music playing softly over hidden loudspeakers. The whole place was bizarre, like a 1960s vision of Las Vegas transplanted to outer space.
And the whole place was deserted, apart from one guy at the bar and one guy behind it. Reacher waited at the reception counter and the guy behind the bar hustled over and seemed genuinely surprised when Reacher asked him for a room, as if such requests were rare. But he stepped to it smartly enough and coughed up a key in exchange for thirty dollars in cash. He was more than middle-aged, maybe fifty-five or sixty, not tall, not lean, with a full head of hair dyed a lively russet color that Reacher was more used to seeing on Frenchwomen of a certain age. He put Reacher’s thirty bucks in a drawer and made a fussy notation in a book. Probably the heir of the lunatics who had built the place. Probably worked nowhere else his whole life, probably making ends meet by pulling quintuple duty as manager, desk clerk, barman, handyman, and maid. He closed the book and put it in a different drawer and set off back toward the bar.
“Got coffee over there?” Reacher asked him.
The guy turned and said, “Sure,” with a smile and a measure of satisfaction in his voice, as if an ancient decision to set a Bunn flask going every night had been finally vindicated. Reacher followed him through the neon wash and propped himself on a stool three spaces away from the other customer. The other customer was a man of about forty. He was wearing a thick tweed sport coat with leather patches at the elbows. He had those elbows on the bar, and his hands were curled protectively around a rocks glass full of ice and amber liquid. He was staring down at it with an unfocused gaze. Probably not his first glass of the evening. Maybe not even his third or his fourth. His skin was damp. He looked pretty far gone.
The guy with the dyed hair poured coffee into a china mug decorated with the NASA logo and slid it across the bar with great pride and ceremony. Maybe a priceless antique.
“Cream?” he asked. “Sugar?”
“Neither,” Reacher said.
“Passing through?”
“Aiming to turn east as soon as I can.”
“How far east?”
“All the way east,” Reacher said. “Virginia.”
The guy with the hair nodded sagely. “Then you’ll need to go south first. Until you hit the Interstate.”
“That’s the plan,” Reacher said.
“Where did you start out today?”
“North of here,” Reacher said.
“Driving?”
“Hitching rides.”
The guy with the hair said nothing more, because there was nothing more to say. Bartenders like to stay cheerful, and there was no cheerful direction for the conversation to go. Hitching a ride on a back road in the dead of winter in the forty-first least densely populated state of America’s fifty was not going to be easy, and the guy was too polite to say so. Reacher picked up the mug and tried to hold it steady. A test. The result was not good. Every tendon and ligament and muscle from his fingertips to his ribcage burned and quivered and the microscopic motion in his hand set up small concentric ripples in the coffee. He concentrated hard and brought the mug to his lips, aiming for smoothness, achieving lurching, erratic movement. The drunk guy watched him for a moment and then looked away. The coffee was hot and a little stewed, but it had caffeine in it, which was really all it needed. The drunk guy took a sip from his glass and put it back on its coaster and stared at it miserably. His lips were parted slightly and bubbles of moisture were forming in their corners. He sipped again. Reacher sipped again, slower. Nobody spoke. The drunk guy finished up and got a refill. Jim Beam. Bourbon, at least a triple. Reacher’s arm started to feel a little better. Coffee, good for what ails you.
Then the phone rang.
Actually, two phones rang. One number, two instruments, one over on the reception desk, the other on a shelf behind the bar. Quintuple duty. The guy with the hair couldn’t be everywhere at once. He picked up and said, “This is the Apollo Inn,” just as proudly and brightly and enthusiastically as if it was the establishment’s first-ever call on opening night. Then he listened for a spell and pressed the mouthpiece to his chest and said, “Doctor, it’s for you.”
Automatically Reacher glanced backward, looking for a doctor. No one there. Beside him the drunk guy said, “Who is it?”
The bartender said, “It’s Mrs. Duncan.”
The drunk guy said, “What’s her problem?”
“Her nose is bleeding. Won’t stop.”
The drunk guy said, “Tell her you haven’t seen me.”
The guy with the hair relayed the lie and put the phone down. The drunk guy slumped and his face dropped almost level with the rim of his glass.
“You’re a doctor?” Reacher asked him.
“What do you care?”
“Is Mrs. Duncan your patient?”
“Technically.”
“And you’re blowing her off?”
“What are you, the ethics board? It’s a nosebleed.”
“That won’t stop. Could be serious.”
“She’s thirty-three years old and healthy. No history of hypertension or blood disorders. She’s not a drug user. No reason to get alarmed.” The guy picked up his glass. A gulp, a swallow, a gulp, a swallow.
Reacher asked, “Is she married?”
“What, marriage causes nosebleeds now?”
“Sometimes,” Reacher said. “I was a military cop. Sometimes we would get called off-post, or to the married quarters. Women who get hit a lot take a lot of aspirin, because of the pain. But aspirin thins the blood, so the next time they get hit, they don’t stop bleeding.”
The drunk guy said nothing.
The barman looked away.
Reacher said, “What? This happens a lot?”
The drunk guy said, “It’s a nosebleed.”
Reacher said, “You’re afraid of getting in the middle of a domestic dispute?”
No one spoke.
“There could be other injuries,” Reacher said. “Maybe less visible. She’s your patient.”
No one spoke.
Reacher said, “Bleeding from the nose is the same as bleeding from anyplace else. If it doesn’t stop, she’s going to pass out. Like a knife wound. You wouldn’t leave her sitting there with a knife wound, would you?”
No one spoke.
“Whatever,” Reacher said. “Not my business. And you’d be no good anyway. You’re not even fit to drive out there, wherever she is. But you should call someone.”
The drunk guy said, “There isn’t anyone. There’s an emergency room sixty miles away. But they’re not going to send an ambulance sixty miles for a nosebleed.”
Reacher took another sip of coffee. The drunk guy left his glass alone. He said, “Sure, I would have a problem driving. But I’d be OK when I got there. I’m a good doctor.”
“Then I’d hate to see a bad one,” Reacher said.
“I know what’s wrong with you, for instance. Physically, I mean. Mentally, I can’t comment.”
“Don’t push it, pal.”
“Or what?”
Reacher said nothing.
“It’s a nosebleed,” the doctor said again.
“How would you treat it?” Reacher asked.
“A little local anesthetic. Pack the nasal cavities with gauze. The pressure would stop the bleeding, aspirin or no aspirin.”
Reacher nodded. He’d seen it done that way before, in the army. He said, “So let’s go, doctor. I’ll drive.”
Chapter 3
The doctor was unsteady on his feet. He did the usual drunk-guy thing of walking across a flat floor and making it look like he was walking up a hill. But he got out to the lot OK and then the cold air hit him and he got some temporary focus. Enough to find his car keys, anyway. He patted one pocket after another and eventually came out with a big bunch on a worn leather fob that had Duncan Transportation printed on it in flaking gold.
“Same Duncan?” Reacher asked.
The guy said, “There’s only one Duncan family in this county.”
“You treat all of them?”
“Only the daughter-in-law. The son goes to Denver. The father and the uncles treat themselves with roots and berries, for all I know.”
The car was a Subaru wagon. It was the only vehicle in the lot. It was reasonably new and reasonably clean. Reacher found the remote on the fob and clicked it open. The doctor made a big show of heading for the driver’s door and then ruefully changing direction. Reacher got in and racked the seat back and started the engine and found the lights.
“Head south,” the doctor said.
Reacher coughed.
“Try not to breathe on me,” he said. “Or the patient.”
He put his hands on the wheel the same way a person might maneuver two baseball gloves on the end of two long sticks. When they got there he clamped his fingers and held on tight, to relieve the pressure on his shoulders. He eased out of the lot and turned south. It was full dark. Nothing to see, but he knew the land was flat and infinite all around.
“What grows here?” he asked, just to keep the doctor awake.
“Corn, of course,” the guy said. “Corn and more corn. Lots and lots of corn. More corn than a sane man ever wants to see.”
“You local?”
“From Idaho originally.”
“Potatoes.”
“Better than corn.”
“So what brought you to Nebraska?”
“My wife,” the guy said. “Born and raised right here.”
They were quiet for a moment, and then Reacher asked, “What’s wrong with me?”
The doctor said, “What?”
“You claimed you knew what’s wrong with me. Physically, at least. So let’s hear it.”
“What is this, an audition?”
“Don’t pretend you don’t need one.”
“Go to hell. I’m functioning.”
“Prove it.”
“I know what you did,” the guy said. “I don’t know how.”
“What did I do?”
“You strained everything from your flexor digiti minimi brevis to your quadratus lumborum, both sides of your body, just about symmetrically.”
“Try English, not Latin.”
“You damaged every muscle, tendon, and ligament associated with moving your arms, all the way from your little fingers to the anchor on your twelfth rib. You’ve got severe pain and discomfort and your fine motor control is screwed up because every system is barking.”
“Prognosis?”
“You’ll heal.”
“When?”
“A few days. Maybe a week. You could try aspirin.”
Reacher drove on. He cracked his window an inch, to suck out the bourbon fumes. They passed a small cluster of three large homes, set close together a hundred yards off the two-lane road at the end of a long shared driveway. They were all hemmed in together by a post-and-rail fence. They were old places, once fine, still sturdy, now maybe a little neglected. The doctor turned his head and took a long hard look at them, and then he faced front again.
“How did you do it?” he asked.
“Do what?” Reacher said.
“How did you hurt your arms?”
“You’re the doctor,” Reacher said. “You tell me.”
“I’ve seen the same kind of symptoms twice before. I volunteered in Florida after one of the hurricanes. A few years ago. I’m not such a bad guy.”
“And?”
“People who get caught outside in a hundred-mile-an-hour wind either get bowled along the street or they catch on to a cyclone fence and try to haul themselves to safety. Like dragging their own body weight against the resistance of a gale. Unbelievable stress. That’s how the injuries happen. But yours aren’t more than a couple of days old, judging by the way you look. And you said you came in from the north. No hurricanes north of here. And it’s the wrong season for hurricanes, anyway. I bet there wasn’t a hurricane anywhere in the world this week. Not a single one. So I don’t know how you hurt yourself. But I wish you well for a speedy recovery. I really do.”
Reacher said nothing.
The doctor said, “Left at the next crossroads.”
They got to the Duncan house five minutes later. It had exterior lighting, including a pair of spots angled up at a white mailbox, one from each side. The mailbox had Duncan written on it. The house itself looked like a restored farmhouse. It was modest in terms of size but immaculate in terms of condition. There was a front lawn of hibernating grass with an antique horse buggy parked on it. Tall spoked wheels, long empty shafts. There was a long straight driveway leading to an outbuilding big enough to have been a working barn back when work was done around the place. Now it was a garage. It had three sets of doors. One set was standing open, as if someone had left in a hurry.
Reacher stopped the car level with a path that led to the front door.
“Showtime, doctor,” he said. “If she’s still here.”
“She will be,” the guy said.
“So let’s go.”
They got out of the car.
Chapter 4
The doctor took a leather bag from the back of the car. Then he repeated his uphill drunk-guy stumble all the way along the path, this time with more reason, because the gravel surface was difficult. But he made it unassisted to the door, which was a fine piece of old wood with glassy white paint carefully applied to it. Reacher found a brass button and laid a knuckle on it. Inside he heard the sound of an electric bell, and then nothing for a minute, and then the sound of slow feet on floorboards. Then the door opened a crack and a face looked out.
Quite a face. It was framed by black hair and had pale skin and frightened eyes at the top, and then a red-soaked handkerchief pressed tight at the apex of a triangular red gush that had flooded downward past the mouth and neck to the blouse below. There was a string of blood-soaked pearls. The blouse was silk and it was wet to the waist. The woman took the handkerchief away from her nose. She had split lips and blood-rimed teeth. Her nose was still leaking, a steady stream.
“You came,” she said.
The doctor blinked twice and focused hard and turned down his mouth in a frown and nodded. He said, “We should take a look at that.”
“You’ve been drinking,” the woman said. Then she looked at Reacher and asked, “Who are you?”
“I drove,” Reacher said.
“Because he’s drunk?”
“He’ll be OK. I wouldn’t let him do brain surgery, but he can stop the bleeding.”
The woman thought about it for a moment and then she nodded and put the handkerchief back to her face and opened the door wide.
They used the kitchen. The doctor was drunk as a skunk but the procedure was simple and the guy retained enough muscle memory to get himself through it. Reacher soaked cloths in warm water and passed them across and the doctor cleaned the woman’s face and jammed her nostrils solid with gauze and used butterfly closures on her cut lips. The anesthetic took the pain away and she settled into a calm and dreamy state. It was hard to say exactly what she looked like. Her nose had been busted before. That was clear. Apart from that she had good skin and fine bone structure and pretty eyes. She was slim and fairly tall, well dressed and solidly prosperous. As was the house itself. It was warm. The floors were wide planks, lustrous with a hundred years of wax. There was a lot of millwork and fine detail and subtle pastel shades. Books on the shelves, paintings on the walls, rugs on the floors. In the living ro
om there was a wedding photograph in a silver frame. It showed a younger and intact version of the woman with a tall reedy man in a gray morning suit. He had dark hair and a long nose and bright eyes and he looked very smug. Not an athlete or a manual worker, not a professor or a poet. Not a farmer, either. A businessman, probably. An executive of some kind. An indoors type of guy, soft, with energy but no vigor.
Reacher headed back to the kitchen and found the doctor washing his hands in the sink and the woman brushing her hair without the help of a mirror. He asked her, “You OK now?”
She said, “Not too bad,” slow and nasal and indistinct.
“Your husband’s not here?”
“He decided to go out for dinner. With his friends.”
“What’s his name?”
“His name is Seth.”
“And what’s your name?”
“My name is Eleanor.”
“You been taking aspirin, Eleanor?”
“Yes.”
“Because Seth does this a lot?”
She paused a long, long time, and then she shook her head.
“I tripped,” she said. “On the edge of the rug.”
“More than once, all in a few days? The same rug?”
“Yes.”
“I’d change that rug, if I were you.”
“I’m sure it won’t happen again.”
They waited ten minutes in the kitchen while she went upstairs to take a shower and change. They heard the water run and stop and heard her call down that she was OK and on her way to bed. So they left. The front door clicked behind them. The doctor staggered to the car and dumped himself in the passenger seat with his bag between his feet. Reacher started up and reversed down the driveway to the road. He spun the wheel and hit the gas and took off, back the way they had come.