Lee Child - Never Go Back

‘I’m still hungry.’

‘It might be easier to take them inside a restaurant. Crowded quarters, a little inhibition on their part. Plus knives on the tables. Then we could eat their dinners. They must have ordered by now. Steak, ideally.’

‘The waiter would call the cops.’

Reacher checked the cross street on the right. Nothing doing. He checked the cross street on the left. Empty. He walked back to where Turner was waiting. She said, ‘They’re eating. They have to be. What else could they be doing? They could have searched the whole of Berryville by now. Twice over. So they’re in the restaurant. They could be another hour. And we can’t stay here much longer. We’re loitering on private property. And I’m sure Berryville has laws. And a police department. The motel guy could be on the phone two minutes from now.’

‘OK,’ Reacher said. ‘Let’s go check it out.’

‘Left or right?’

‘Left,’ Reacher said.

They were cautious at the corner. But the left-hand cross street was still empty. It was more of an alley than a street. It had the motel’s wooden fence on one side, and the blank flank of a brick-built general store on the other. A hundred yards later it was crossed by a wider street that ran parallel with West Main. The second block was shorter and more varied, with some stand-alone buildings, and some narrow vacant lots, and then up ahead were the rear elevations of the buildings that stood on the next parallel street, including one on the right, which had a tall metal kitchen chimney, which was blowing steam, pretty hard. The Berryville Grill, for sure, doing some serious mid-evening business.

Turner said, ‘Back door or front door?’

‘Front window,’ Reacher said. ‘Reconnaissance is everything.’

They turned right out of the cross street and got cautious again. First came a dark storefront that could have been a flower shop. Then came the restaurant, second in line. It was a big place, but deeper than it was wide. It had four front windows, separated into two pairs by a central door. The windows came all the way down to the floor. Maybe they opened up, for the summer. Maybe they put tables on the sidewalk.

Reacher kept close to the wall and moved towards the near edge of the first window. From that angle he could see about a third of the interior space. Which was considerable. And well filled. The tables were small and close together. It was a family-style restaurant. Nothing fancy. The wait staff looked to be all girls, about high-school age. The tables were plain wood. About half of them were occupied. By couples, and threesomes, and by family groups. Old people and their adult children, some of them having fun, some of them a little strained and quiet.

But none of the tables was occupied by four men. Not in the part of the restaurant Reacher could see. He backed off. She leapfrogged past him and walked briskly along the restaurant frontage, looking away, and she stopped beyond the last window. He watched the door. No reaction. No one came out. She hugged the wall and crept back and looked inside from the far edge of the last window. Reacher figured from there she could see a symmetrical one-third, the same as he had, but on the other side of the room. Which would leave a central wedge unexamined.

She shook her head. He set off, and she set off, and they met at the door. He pulled it, and she went in first. The central wedge had plenty of tables. But none of them was occupied by four men. There was no maître d’ lectern. No hostess station, either. Just empty floor inside the door. A young woman bustled over. A girl, really. Seventeen, maybe. The designated greeter. She was wearing black pants, and a black polo shirt with short sleeves and an embroidered Berryville Grill logo on the front. She had a livid red birthmark on her forearm. She said, ‘Two for dinner?’

Turner said, ‘We’re looking for some people. They might have been asking for us.’

The girl went quiet. She looked from Turner to Reacher, suddenly understanding: a man and a woman .

‘Were they here?’ Reacher asked. ‘Four men, three of them big, and one of them bigger?’

The girl nodded, and rubbed her forearm, subconsciously. Or nervously. Reacher glanced down.

It wasn’t a birthmark.

It was changing shape. And changing colour.

It was a bruise.

He said, ‘Did they do that?’

The girl nodded.

‘The big one,’ she said.

‘With the shaved head and the small ears?’

‘Yes,’ the girl said. ‘He squeezed my arm.’

‘Why?’

‘He wanted to know where else you could be. And I couldn’t tell him.’

It was a big mark. From a big hand. More than six inches across.

The girl said, ‘He really scared me. He has cruel eyes.’

Reacher asked, ‘When were they here?’

‘About ten minutes ago.’

‘Where did they go?’

‘I don’t know. I couldn’t tell them where to look.’

‘No bars, no hamburger joints?’

‘That’s exactly what he asked. But there’s nothing like that here.’

The girl was close to tears.

Reacher said, ‘They won’t be coming back.’

It was all he could think of to say.

They left the girl standing there, rubbing her arm, and they used the cross street they hadn’t used before. It was a similar thoroughfare, narrow, unlit, raggedy at first, and then firming up on the second block, with the motel’s fence on the right. They took the corner cautiously, and scanned ahead before moving out.

The motel lot was empty.

The car with the dented doors was gone.

TWENTY-SIX

THREE HUNDRED YARDS later Reacher and Turner hit Berryville’s city limit, and West Main became plain old State Route 7. Turner said, ‘If those guys could figure out where we went, we have to assume the army could too. The FBI as well, even.’

Which made hitchhiking a nightmare. It was pitch dark. A winter night, in the middle of nowhere. A long straight road. Oncoming headlights would be visible a mile away, but there would be no way of knowing what lay behind those headlights. Who was at the wheel. Civilian or not? Friend or foe?

Too big of a risk to take a gamble.

So they compromised, in a win-some, lose-some kind of way that Reacher felt came out about equal in terms of drawbacks and benefits. They retraced their steps, and Turner waited on the shoulder about fifty yards ahead of the last lit-up town block, and Reacher kept on going, to where he could lean on the corner of a building, half in and half out of a cross-street alley, where there was some light spill on the blacktop. A bad idea, in the sense that any car turning west beyond them was a lost opportunity in terms of a potential ride, but a good idea in the sense that Reacher could make a quick and dirty evaluation of the through-town drivers, as and when they appeared. They agreed he should err on the side of caution, but if he felt it was OK, he would step out and signal to Turner, who would then step up to the kerb and jam her thumb out.

Which overall, he thought at the beginning, was maybe more win-some than lose-some. Because by accident their improvised system would imitate a very old hitchhiking trick. A pretty girl sticks out her thumb, a driver stops, full of enthusiasm, and then the big ugly boyfriend jogs up and gets in too.

But thirty minutes later Reacher was seeing it as more lose-some than win-some. Traffic was light, and he was getting no time at all to make a judgement. He would see headlights coming, he would wait, then the car would flash past in a split second, and his brain would process, sedan, domestic, model year, specification , and long before he got to a conclusion the car was already well past Turner and speeding onward.

So he switched to a pre-screening approach. He decided to reject all sedans, and all SUVs younger than five years, and to approve all pick-up trucks, and all older SUVs. He had never known the army to hunt in pick-up trucks, and he guessed all army road vehicles would be swapped out before they got to be five years old. Same for the FBI, surely. The remaining risk was off-duty local deputies, joining in the fun in their POVs. But some risk had to be taken, otherwise they would be there all night long, which would end up the same as sleeping in a D.C. park. They would get busted at first light tomorrow, instead of last light today.