Lee Child - The Hard Way

Reacher, alone in the dark.

The Grange Farm boundary was a trench ten feet across with a muddy bottom six feet down. Drainage, for the flat land. Not exactly canals like in Holland, but not anything easily cleared, either. Not anything to just step across. Reacher had to slide down the near bank, struggle through the mud, and then climb up the far bank again. A mile into the trip his pants were a real mess. And he was going to have to invest some serious shoeshine time on the trip home. Or else deduct the price of a new pair of Cheaneys from Hobart’s compensation. Maybe he could detour to the source. The motoring atlas had shown Northampton about forty miles west of Cambridge. Maybe he could talk Pauling into a two-hour shopping expedition. He had let her insist on Macy’s after all.

Two miles into the trip he was very tired. And slow. Behind schedule. He changed course and moved slightly south and west. Came closer to the road. Found a tractor route through the next farmer’s fields. Huge tires had beaten the earth into hard ruts either side of a grassy center hump. He wiped his shoes on the grass and sped up a little. Found that the next ditch was crossed by an improvised trestle made of old railroad ties. Strong enough for a tractor, strong enough for him. He followed the tire tracks until they turned abruptly north. Then he struck off through the fields again on his own.

After four miles the clock in his head told him that it was ten-thirty at night. Twilight had gone completely but the rags of cloud had cleared a little and the moon was bright. The stars were out. Far away to his left he could see occasional cars passing by on the road. Three had gone west and two had gone east. Bright lights, sedate speeds. Theoretically the two heading east could have been Lane’s guys, but he doubted it. Ten and eleven in the evening was no kind of a time to attack. He guessed rural roads saw a minor traffic peak right around then. Pubs letting out, friends going home. Too many witnesses. If he knew it, then Lane knew it, too. Certainly Gregory knew it.

He kept on going. The spare magazines in his pocket were bruising his hip. Five minutes before eleven o’clock he spotted the glow from the pub’s sign. Just an electric brightness in the misty air, because the sign itself was hidden by the bulk of the building. He could smell woodsmoke from a chimney. He looped around toward the light and the smell, staying well to the north of the road, just in case Lane had watchers out. He kept to the fields until he was facing the back of the building from four hundred yards away. He saw small squares of harsh white fluorescent light. Windows. Undraped and unglamorous. Therefore kitchens and bathrooms, he guessed. Therefore frosted or pebbled glass. No view out.

He headed south, straight for the squares of light.

DIRECTLY BEHIND THEpub the parking lot had been closed off and turned into a service yard. It was full of crates of bottles and stacks of metal beer kegs and big commercial-sized trash receptacles. There was a broken-down old car with bricks wedged under its brake drums. No wheels. Another old car, humped under a stained tarpaulin. Behind it the building had a rear door, inconspicuous among all the chaos, almost certainly unlocked during business hours to allow easy access from the kitchen to the trash pile.

Reacher ignored the door. He circled the building in the dark, clockwise, thirty feet out from the walls, well away from the spill of light from the windows.

The small bright rooms in back were clearly bathrooms. Their windows blazed with the kind of green-tinged light that comes from cheap tubes and white tile. Around the corner in the end wall to the east of the building there were no windows at all, just an unbroken expanse of brick. Around the next corner in the front wall east of the entrance there were three windows into the public bar. From a distance Reacher peered in and saw the same four farmers he had seen two nights previously. On the same stools. And the same bartender, busy as before with his beer pumps and his towel. The lighting was dim, but there was nobody else in the room. None of the tables was occupied.

Reacher moved on.

The front door was closed. The parking lot had four cars in it, haphazardly slotted side by side. None of the cars was new. None of them was the kind of thing a Park Lane rental company could have produced in a hurry. They were all old and dirty and battered. Bald tires. Dented fenders. Streaks of mud and manure. Farmers’ cars.

Reacher moved on.

West of the entrance were three more windows, into the saloon bar.

Two nights previously the saloon bar had been empty.

It wasn’t empty anymore.

Now a single table was occupied.

By three men: Groom, and Burke, and Kowalski.

Reacher could see them clearly. On the table in front of them he could see the long-dead remains of a meal and half a dozen empty glasses. And three half-full glasses. Pint mugs of beer, half-gone. It was a rectangular table. Kowalski and Burke were shoulder to shoulder on one side and Groom was opposite them, alone. Kowalski was talking and Burke was listening to him. Groom had his chair tipped back and was staring into space. There was a log fire burning in a soot-stained grate beyond him. The room was lit up warm and bright and inviting.

Reacher moved on.

Around the next corner there was a single window in the end wall to the west and through it Reacher got a different version of the same view. Groom, Burke, and Kowalski at their table. Drinking. Talking. Passing time. They were all alone in the room. The door to the foyer was closed. A private party.

Reacher backtracked four short steps and then headed for the front corner of the building on an exact forty-five-degree angle. Invisible from any window. He touched the wall and dropped to his knees. He kept his right palm on the brick and shuffled north and stretched out his left arm as far as it would go and very carefully laid his rifle on the ground directly under the west-facing window. He put it tight against the base of the wall where the shadows were deep. Then he shuffled south and stood up again and backed away on the same angle and checked. He couldn’t see the rifle. Nobody would find it, unless they tripped over it.

He backed away until he was clear of the light spill and looped through the lot. Headed for the front door. Opened it up and stepped into the foyer. The low beams, the patterned carpet, the ten thousand brass ornaments. The shiny reception desk.

The register.

He stepped to the desk. To his right he could hear sociable silence from the public bar. The farmers, drinking, not saying much. The bartender, working quietly. To his left he could hear Kowalski’s voice, muffled by the closed door. He couldn’t make out what he was saying. He couldn’t hear individual words. Just a low drone. Occasional rising intonations. Short barks of contempt. Old soldier’s bullshit, probably.

He turned the register through a hundred and eighty degrees. It moved easily, leather on shiny varnish. He opened it up. Leafed through the pages until he found his own entry. Two nights previously, J amp; L Bayswater, East 161st Street, Bronx, New York, USA, Rolls-Royce, R34-CHR . Then he scanned ahead. The following night three guests had registered: C. Groom, A. Burke, L. Kowalski. They had been less shy than Reacher himself about supplying personal information. Their business address had been accurately given as One 72nd Street, New York, New York, USA, which was the Dakota Building. Make of Vehicle had been given as Toyota Land Cruiser. There was a plate number entered, a British seven-character mix of letters and numbers that meant nothing to Reacher beyond the fact that the car had to be a rental from London.