Nothing to Lose by Lee Child
Reacher said, “I’m not investigating any kind of crimes. I told you, I’m not a cop.”
The woman didn’t answer.
Reacher asked, “What real crimes?”
“Violations.”
“Where?”
“At the metal plant in Despair.”
“What kind of violations?”
“All kinds.”
“I don’t care about violations. I’m not an EPA inspector. I’m not any kind of an inspector.”
The woman said, “Then you should ask yourself why that plane flies every night.”
26
Reacher got halfway back to his room and saw Vaughan’s old pick-up turn in off the street. It was moving fast. It bounced up over the curb and headed through the lot straight at him. Vaughan was at the wheel in her cop uniform. Incongruous. And urgent. She hadn’t taken time to go fetch her official cruiser. She braked hard and stopped with her radiator grille an inch away from him. She leaned out the window and said, “Get in, now.”
Reacher asked, “Why?”
“Just do it.”
“Do I have a choice?”
“None at all.”
“Really?”
“I’m not kidding.”
“Are you arresting me?”
“I’m prepared to. I’ll use my gun and my cuffs if that’s what it takes. Just get in the car.”
Reacher studied her face through the windshield glass. She was serious about something. And determined. That was for sure. The evidence was right there in the set of her jaw. So he climbed in. Vaughan waited until he closed his door behind him and asked, “You ever done a ride-along with a cop before? All night? A whole watch?”
“Why would I? I was a cop.”
“Well, whatever, you’re doing one tonight.”
“Why?”
“We got a courtesy call. From Despair. You’re a wanted man. They’re coming for you. So tonight you stay where I can see you.”
“They can’t be coming for me. They can’t even have woken up yet.”
“Their deputies are coming. All four of them.”
“Really?”
“That’s what deputies do. They deputize.”
“So I hide in your car? All night?”
“Damn straight.”
“You think I need protection?”
“My town needs protection. I don’t want trouble here.”
“Those four won’t be any trouble. One of them is already busted up and one was throwing his guts up the last time I saw him.”
“So you could take them?”
“With one hand behind my back and my head in a bag.”
“Exactly. I’m a cop. I have a responsibility. No fighting in my streets. It’s unseemly.” She pulled a tight U-turn in the motel lot and headed back the way she had come. Reacher asked, “When will they get here?”
“The plant shuts down at six. I imagine they’ll head right over.”
“How long will they stay?”
“The plant opens up again at six tomorrow morning.”
Reacher said, “You don’t want me in your car all night.”
“I’ll do what it takes. Like I said. This is a decent place. I’m not going to let it get trashed, either literally or metaphorically.”
Reacher paused and said, “I could leave town.”
“Permanently?” Vaughan asked.
“Temporarily.”
“And go where?”
“Despair, obviously. I can’t get in trouble there, can I? Their cops are in the hospital and their deputies will be here all night.”
Vaughan made a right and a left and headed down Second Street toward the diner. She stayed quiet for a moment and then she said, “There’s another one in town today.”
“Another what?”
“Another girl. Just like Lucy Anderson. But dark, not blonde. She blew in this afternoon and now she’s sitting around and staring west like she’s waiting for word from Despair.”
“From a boyfriend or a husband?”
“Possibly.”
“Possibly a dead boyfriend or husband, Caucasian, about twenty years old, five-eight and one-forty.”
“Possibly.”
“I should go there.”
Vaughan drove past the diner and kept on driving. She drove two blocks south and came back east on Fourth Street. No real reason. Just motion, for the sake of it. Fourth Street had trees and retail establishments behind the north sidewalk and trees and a long line of neat homes behind the south. Small yards, picket fences, foundation plantings, mailboxes on poles that had settled to every angle except the truly vertical.
“I should go there,” Reacher said again.
“Wait until the deputies get here. You don’t want to pass them on the road.”
“OK.”
“And don’t let them see you leave.”
“OK.”
“And don’t make trouble over there.”
“I’m not sure there’s anybody left to make trouble with. Unless I meet the judge.”
27
For the second time that day Vaughan gave up her pick-up truck and walked home to get her cruiser. Reacher drove the truck to a quiet side street and parked facing north in the shadow of a tree and watched the traffic on First Street directly ahead of him. He had a limited field of view. But there wasn’t much to see, anyway. Whole ten-minute periods passed without visible activity. Not surprising. Residents returning from the Kansas direction would have peeled off into town down earlier streets. And no one in their right mind was returning from Despair, or heading there. The daylight was fading fast. The world was going gray and still. The clock in Reacher’s head was ticking around, relentlessly.
When it hit six-thirty-two he saw an old crew-cab pick-up truck flash through his field of vision. Moving smartly, from the Despair direction. A driver, and three passengers inside. Big men, close together. They filled the cramped quarters, shoulder to shoulder.
Reacher recognized the truck.
He recognized the driver.
He recognized the passengers.
The Despair deputies, right on time.
He paused a beat and started the old Chevy’s engine and moved off the curb. He eased north to First Street and turned left. Checked his mirror. The old crew-cab was already a hundred yards behind him, moving away in the opposite direction, slowing down and getting ready to turn. The road ahead was empty. He passed the hardware store and hit the gas and forced the old truck up to sixty miles an hour. Five minutes later he thumped over the expansion joint and settled in to a noisy cruise west.
Twelve miles later he coasted past the vacant lot and the shuttered motor court and the gas station and the household goods store and then he turned left into Despair’s downtown maze. First port of call was the police station. He wanted to be sure that no miraculous recoveries had been made, and that no replacement personnel had been provided.
They hadn’t, and they hadn’t.
The place was dark inside and quiet outside. No lights, no activity. There were no cars at the curb. No stand-in State Police cruisers, no newly-deputized pick-up trucks, no plain sedans with temporary Police signs stickered on their doors.
Nothing.
Just silence.
Reacher smiled. Open season and lawless, he thought, like a bleak view of the future in a movie. The way he liked it. He U-turned through the empty diagonal parking slots and headed back toward the rooming house. He parked on the curb out front and killed the motor and wound the window down. Heard a single aero engine in the far distance, climbing hard. Seven o’clock in the evening. The Cessna or the Beech or the Piper, taking off again. You should ask yourself why that plane flies every night, the motel clerk had said.
Maybe I will, Reacher thought. One day.
He climbed out of the truck. The rooming house was built of dull brick, on a corner lot. Three stories high, narrow windows, flat roof, four stone steps up to a doorway set off center in the façade. There was a woo
He went up the stone steps and pushed the front door. It was open. Behind it was a square hallway with a brown linoleum floor and a steep staircase on the right. The walls were painted brown with some kind of a trick effect that matched the swirls in the linoleum. A bare bulb was burning dimly a foot below the ceiling. The air smelled of dust and cabbage. There were four interior doors, all dull green, all closed. Two were in back and two were in front, one at the foot of the staircase and the other directly opposite it across the hallway. Two front rooms, one of which would house the owner or the super. In Reacher’s experience the owner or the super always chose a ground-floor room at the front, to monitor entrances and exits. Entrances and exits were very important to owners and supers. Unauthorized guests and multiple occupancies were to be discouraged, and tenants had been known to try to sneak out quietly just before final payment of long-overdue rent had been promised.
He opted to start with the door at the foot of the staircase. Better surveillance potential. He knocked and waited. A long moment later the door opened and revealed a thin man in a white shirt and a black tie. The guy was close to seventy years old, and his hair was the same color as his shirt. The shirt wasn’t clean. Neither was the tie, but it had been carefully knotted.
“Help you?” the old guy said.
“Is this your place?” Reacher asked.
The old guy nodded. “And my mother’s before me. In the family for close to fifty years.”
“I’m looking for a friend of mine,” Reacher said. “From California. I heard he was staying here.”
No reply from the old man.
“Young guy,” Reacher said. “Maybe twenty. Very big. Tan, with short hair.”
“Nobody like that here.”
“You sure?”
“Nobody here at all.”
“He was seen stepping out your door this afternoon.”
“Maybe he was visiting.”
“Visiting who, if there’s nobody here at all?”
“Visiting me,” the old man said.
“Did he visit you?”
“I don’t know. I was out. Maybe he knocked on my door and got no reply and left again.”
“Why would he have been knocking on your door?”
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.