Lee Child - Make Me

Very early in San Francisco was a couple hours into the day in Mother’s Rest. Not the difference between city and country habits, but merely time zones. Mother’s Rest was ahead. The general store was doing business. The diner had a few last stragglers. The motel maid was hard at work. The one-eyed clerk was in the bathroom. The Cadillac driver was in his store, and Western Union and MoneyGram and FedEx were busy.

But the spare parts store was closed. For the irrigation systems. And the diner had no counter service. Those two guys were on a metal walkway on top of what they called Elevator Three, the old concrete giant, the biggest they had. With binoculars. And a simple system. There were two roads in, one from the east and one from the west, which was the wagon train trail, running crossways, almost directly below them. But there were no roads in from the north or the south. Just the railroad tracks. The system split the risk heavily in favor of the roads. The guys sat across from each other, one looking west, one looking east, and once every five minutes or so they would turn, and scan the railroad to the north and south, a leisurely sweep from close to far, just in case someone was walking in, or using some weird self-propelled machine, like an old Western movie. It became a ritual. A chance to stretch.

Except at train time. Then the role was harder. They were looking straight down on the train, more or less, so they could see the far side. Almost. Certainly they would see someone force a door and jump down on the blind side, like an old spy movie. But at the same time equal attention had to be paid to the roads. Always. Intrusion by vehicle was judged far more likely.

Which meant apart from once in the morning and once in the evening, the binoculars were trained on the far horizon, for early warning, through the dust in the air, fine and golden close by, then a haze in the distance.

Visibility, about fifteen miles.

You know the plan .

You know it works .

They checked out, and a doorman got a cab, and they squeezed in, three across the rear seat, with a measure of regret in some, but not in Westwood, who was a little unsettled. He said, “That was a very weird hotel. Only in San Francisco, I guess. All the time I was showering they had some guy reciting the Gettysburg Address through the bathroom ventilator.”

The flight was fine and the Oklahoma City hotel the LA Times had booked was a grand old three-spired confection, built a hundred years before and gone a little musty, but rescued by a refresh about a decade in the past. It was adequate in every respect, and most of all it retained the kind of service Reacher wanted. He said to Chang, “Go chat with the concierge and tell him you’re the kind of person who likes to get to know a town by walking all over. But tell him naturally you’re concerned about safety. Ask him if there are parts you should avoid.”

She came back ten minutes later with a paper tourist map, printed by the thousand for convention folk, and marked up by the concierge with a ballpoint pen. Certain inner-city neighborhoods were walled off by a thick blue line. No-go areas. Like a napkin sketch of East Berlin in the old days. One particular quadrant was both walled off and and then re-emphasized with an X so vigorous it scored through the paper.

Chang said, “He told me not to go there day or night.”

“My kind of place,” Reacher said.

“I’m coming with you.”

“I was counting on it.”

They ate early, a late-afternoon equivalent of brunch. Plain ingredients, dressed up fancy. The coffee was good. Afterward they waited an hour for the sun to set. The long plains day came to an end. The streetlights came on. Headlights came on. The bar noise changed from afternoon quiet to evening buzz.

Reacher said, “Let’s go.”

It was a long walk, because the city fathers knew which side their bread was buttered. Convention business had to be protected. The wild frontier was many blocks away. The street life changed as they walked, from occasional busy workers heading home briskly, to a stoop culture with knots of people hanging out in doorways doing not very much of anything. Some of the stores had been shuttered at the close of business, and some looked like they had been boarded up for years, but others were still open and doing a trade. Food, soda, loose cigarettes.

Chang said, “You OK?”

“Doing fine,” Reacher said.

He navigated by instinct, looking for the kind of place where people could gather and cars could double park for a moment. There were cars at the curbs, and some in motion. There were tricked-out Japanese coupes, and low-riders, and enormous old aircraft-carrier sedans from Buick and Plymouth and Pontiac. Some had custom modifications, with wide mag wheels, and chrome pipes, and blue chassis lights underneath. One car was lowered waist-high, with the motor sticking up through a hole in the hood panel, vertical like a miniature oil rig, with a huge four-barrel carburetor and a giant chrome air filter about level with the roof.

Reacher stopped and looked at it.

He said, “I need to see those satellite pictures again.”

Chang said, “Why?”

“There’s something wrong with them.”

“What?”

“I don’t know. Something in the back of my mind. Not a regular memory thing. I’m OK.”

“You sure?”

“Ask me a question.”

“Teddy Roosevelt’s vice president.”

“Charles Fairbanks.”

“I thought he was a movie actor.”

“I think that was Douglas.”

They moved on, past sagging wood houses set close together, past weedy front yards behind wire fences, some empty, some full of trash, some with chained dogs, some littered with bright bicycles and tricycles and other children’s toys. They found a diagonal street that cut the corner between one not-quite-main drag and another. It was wide enough for three lanes, but the curbs were parked solid. It was long enough to slow down, and stop, and speed up again.

Reacher said, “This should be fine.”

There was stoop activity, but most of it was happening about halfway down the street. Young guys, maybe twelve years old, milling around in groups, scanning left and right for traffic.

Reacher said, “OK, here’s where we pretend we suddenly realize what we’ve gotten ourselves into, and we beat a hasty retreat.”

They turned around and hustled back to the not-quite-main drag behind them. They turned the tight right and walked on, roughly the same direction they had been headed, behind the street they had seen. They stopped when they guessed they were level with the invisible knot of twelve-year-olds, who they figured were hanging out a long lot’s length to their right. Plus the depth of their own back yard, plus the depth of their own house, plus their own front yard, and the sidewalk. About four hundred dark feet, Reacher figured.

He said, “Let’s go see what they have for us.”

They picked a boarded-up house with a broken chain on its gate. They went in, swift and decisive like they belonged, and they slipped down the side of the house, and through its back yard, to its back fence, which shared a blunt angle with the back yard of a house on the diagonal street. Probably not the house they were looking for, but close. Reacher forced a wire panel out of its frame and they slipped through, unobtrusive except for the white gleam of their faces in the yellow evening gloom.

They walked through the new back yard and checked the view between the house and its neighbor. They were one short. All the commerce was taking place one lot to the left. There was a chain-link fence separating the yards. Easily climbed, at the cost of metallic chinking and clinking. Chang was agile. Better than Reacher. He was built for bulldozing, not gymnastics.