Lee Child - Nothing to Lose

“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.

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.

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.