Lee Child - Echo Burning

Nothing doing. The room was completely empty. It was completely undisturbed. It might never have been occupied. It was just sitting there, still and sterile, cleaned and readied, the way motel rooms are. He felt a flash of panic. Maybe they made multiple bookings all over the place. Two or three similar places, to give themselves a choice. Thirty or forty bucks a night, why not? He stood up straight. Stopped worrying about the noise from the gravel. Ran past seven and six, straight to five's window. Put himself right in front of it and looked in.

And saw a small dark man wearing two white towels dragging Ellie out of the bathroom. Bright light was spilling out behind him. He had both her wrists caught in one hand above her head. She was kicking and bucking violently in his grip. Reacher stared in for maybe a quarter of a second, long enough to sense the layout of the room and see a black 9-mm handgun with a silencer lying on the credenza. Then he took a breath and one long fluid step away and bent down and picked up a rock from the garden. It was bigger than a basketball and could have weighed a hundred pounds. He heaved it straight through the window. The screen disintegrated and glass shattered and he followed it headfirst into the room with the window frame caught around his shoulders like a wreath of victory.

The small dark man froze in shock for a split second and then let Ellie go and turned and scrabbled desperately toward the credenza. Reacher batted away the splintered frame and got there first and caught him by the throat with his right hand and jammed him back against the wall and followed up with a colossal left to the gut and let him fall and kicked him once in the head, very hard. Saw his eyes roll up into his skull. Then he breathed in and out like a train and gasped and shuffled his feet and flexed his hands and fought the temptation to kick him to death.

Then he turned to Ellie.

"You O.K.?" he asked.

She nodded. Paused in the sudden silence.

"He's a bad man," she said. "I think he was going to shoot me."

He paused in turn. Fought to control his breathing.

"He can't do that now," he said.

"There was thunder and lightning."

"I heard it too. I was outside. Got all wet."

She nodded. "It rained a whole lot."

"You O.K.?" he asked for the second time.

She just thought about it and nodded. She was very composed. Very serious. No tears, no screaming. The room went absolutely quiet. The action had lasted all of three seconds, beginning to end. It was like it hadn't happened at all. But the rock from the garden was lying there in the middle of the floor, nested in shards of broken glass. He picked it up and carried it to the shattered window and tipped it through. It crunched on the gravel and rolled away.

"You O.K.?" he asked for the third time.

Ellie nodded. He picked up the phone and dialed zero. The night guy answered. Reacher told him to send Alice down to room five. Then he walked over and unlatched the chain and unlocked the door. Left it propped open. It set up a breeze, all the way through the room to the broken window. The outside air was damp. And warm. Warmer than the inside air.

"You O.K.?" he asked for the fourth time.

"Yes," Ellie said. "I'm O.K."

Alice stepped inside a minute later. Ellie looked at her, curiously.

"This is Alice," Reacher said. "She's helping your mom."

"Where is my mom?"

"She'll be with you soon," Alice said.

Then she turned and looked down at the small dark guy. He was inert on the floor, pressed up against the wall, arms and legs tangled.

"Is he alive?" she whispered.

Reacher nodded. "Concussed, is all. I think. I hope."

"State police is responding," she whispered. "And I called my boss at home. Got him out of bed. He's setting up a chambers meeting with a judge, first thing. But he says we'll need a straightforward confession from this guy if we want to avoid a big delay."

Reacher nodded. "We'll get one."

He bent down and twisted one of the small dark man's towels tight around his neck like a noose and used it to drag him across the floor and into the bathroom.

Twenty minutes later he came out again and found two state cops standing in the room. A sergeant and a trooper, both Hispanic, both composed and immaculate in their tan uniforms. He could hear their car idling outside the door. He nodded to them and walked over and picked up the driver's clothes from the chair. Tossed them back into the bathroom.

"So?" the sergeant said.

"He's ready to talk," Reacher said. "He's offering a full and voluntary confession. But he wants you to understand he was just the driver."

"He wasn't a shooter?"

Reacher shook his head. "But he saw everything."

"What about the kidnap?"

"He wasn't there. He was guarding her afterward, is all. And there's a lot of other stuff, too, going back a number of years."

"Situation like this, he talks, he's going away for a long time."

"He knows that. He accepts it. He's happy about it. He's looking for redemption."

The cops just glanced at each other and went into the bathroom. Reacher heard people shuffling and moving around and handcuffs clicking.

"I have to get back," Alice said. "I have to prepare the writ. Lot of work involved, with habeas corpus."

"Take the Crown Vic," Reacher said. "I'll wait here with Ellie."

The cops brought the driver out of the bathroom. He was dressed and his hands were cuffed behind him and each cop had hold of an elbow. He was bent over and white with pain and already talking fast. The cops hustled him straight out to their cruiser and the room door swung shut behind them. There was the muffled sound of car doors slamming and the growl of an engine.

"What did you do to him?" Alice whispered.

Reacher shrugged. "I'm a hard man. Like you said."

He asked her to send the night clerk down with a master key and she walked away toward the office. He turned to Ellie.

"You O.K.?" he said.

"You don't need to keep asking me," she replied.

"Tired?"

"Yes," she said.

"Your mom will come soon," he said. "We'll wait for her right here. But let's change rooms, shall we? This one's got a broken window."

She giggled. "You broke it. With that rock."

He heard the Crown Vic start up in the distance. Heard its tires on the road.

"Let's try room eight," he said. "It's nice and clean. Nobody's been in it. It can be ours."

She took his hand and they walked out together and along the concrete walkway to number eight, a dozen steps for him, three dozen for her, damp filmy tracks left in the wet behind both of them. The clerk met them with a pass key and Ellie got straight into the bed nearest the window. Reacher lay down on the other and watched her until she was sound asleep. Then he wrapped his arm under his head and tried to doze.

* * *

Less than two hours later the new day dawned bright and hot and the air stirred and the metal roof clicked and cracked and the timbers under it creaked and moved. Reacher opened his eyes after a short uneasy rest and swung his legs to the floor. Crept quietly to the door and opened it up and stepped outside. The eastern horizon was far off to his right beyond the motel office. It was flaring with pure white light. There were rags of old cloud in the sky. They were burning off as he watched. No storm today. People had talked about it for a week, but it wasn't going to happen. Last night's hour of rain was all it was ever going to be. A complete misfire.

He crept back into the room and lay down again. Ellie was still asleep. She had kicked the sheet down and her shirt had ridden up and he could see the plump band of pink skin at her waist. Her legs were bent, like she had been running in her dreams. But her arms were thrown up above her head, which some army psychiatrist had once told him was a sign of security. A kid sleeps like that, he had said, deep down it feels safe. Safe? She was some kid. That was for damn sure. Most adults he knew would be wrecks after an experience like hers. For weeks. Or longer. But she wasn't. Maybe she was too young to fully comprehend. Or maybe she was just a tough kid. One or the other. He didn't know. He had no experience. He closed his eyes again.