Killing Floor

He nodded glumly.

“Biggest thing you ever heard of,” he said again.

“And right now it’s very exposed?” I asked him. “Why? Because of this investigator poking about?”

Hubble shook his head again. He was writhing around like my questions were tearing him up.

“No,” he said. “For another reason altogether. It’s like a window of vulnerability is wide open right now. An exposure. It’s been very risky, getting worse all the time. But now it could go either way. If we get through it, nobody will ever know anything. But if we don’t get through it, it’ll be the biggest sensation you ever heard of, believe me. Either way, it’s going to be a close call.”

I looked at him. He didn’t look to me much like the sort of a guy who could cause the biggest sensation I ever heard of.

“So how long is this exposure going to last?” I asked him.

“It’s nearly over,” he said. “Maybe a week. A week tomorrow is my guess. Next Sunday. Maybe I’ll live to see it.”

“So after next Sunday you’re not vulnerable anymore?” I said. “Why not? What’s going to happen next Sunday?”

He shook his head and turned his face away. It was like if he couldn’t see me, I wasn’t there, asking him questions.

“What does Pluribus mean?” I asked him.

He wouldn’t answer. Just kept on shaking his head. His eyes were screwed shut with terror.

“Is it a code for something?” I said.

He wasn’t hearing me. The conversation was over. I gave it up and we lapsed back into silence. That suited me well enough. I didn’t want to know anything more. I didn’t want to know anything at all. Being an outsider and knowing Hubble’s business didn’t seem to be a very smart combination. It hadn’t done the tall guy with the shaved head a whole lot of good. I wasn’t interested in sharing the same fate as him, dead at a warehouse gate, partially hidden under some old cardboard, two holes in my head, all my bones smashed. I just wanted to pass the time until Monday, and then get the hell out. By next Sunday, I pla

“OK, Hubble,” I said. “No more questions.”

He shrugged and nodded. Sat silent for a long time. Then he spoke, quietly, with a lot of resignation in his voice.

“Thanks,” he said. “It’s better that way.”

I WAS ROLLED OVER ON THE NARROW COT TRYING TO FLOAT away into some kind of limbo. But Hubble was restless. He was tossing and turning and blowing tight sighs. He was coming close to irritating me again. I turned to face him.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m very uptight. It was doing me good just to talk to somebody. I’d go crazy in here on my own. Can’t we talk about something else? What about you? Tell me about yourself. Who are you, Reacher?”

I shrugged at him.

“I’m nobody,” I said. “Just a guy passing through. I’ll be gone on Monday.”

“Nobody’s nobody,” he said. “We’ve all got a story. Tell me.”

So I talked for a while, lying on my bed, ru

I told Hubble about the long hop through the endless plains and deltas all the way down from Chicago to New Orleans. Sliding around the Gulf Coast as far as Tampa. Then the Greyhound blasting north toward Atlanta. The crazy decision to bail out near Margrave. The long walk in the rain yesterday morning. Following a whim. Following some half-remembered note from my brother saying he’d been through some little place where Blind Blake might have died over sixty years ago. As I told him about it, I felt pretty stupid. Hubble was scuffling with a nightmare and I was following a meaningless pilgrimage. But he understood the urge.

“I did that once,” he said. “On our honeymoon. We went to Europe. We stopped off in New York and I spent half a day looking for the Dakota building, you know, where John Le

He talked on for a while. Mostly about traveling. He’d taken plenty of trips with his wife. They’d enjoyed it. Been all over, Europe, Mexico, the Caribbean. All over the States and Canada. Had a great time together.

“Don’t you get lonely?” he asked me. “Traveling on your own all the time?”

I told him no, I enjoyed it. I told him I appreciated the solitude, the anonymity. Like I was invisible.

“How do you mean, invisible?” he said. He seemed interested.

“I travel by road,” I said. “Always by road. Walk a bit, and ride the buses. Sometimes trains. Always pay cash. That way there’s never a paper trail. No credit card transactions, no passenger manifests, nothing. Nobody could trace me. I never tell anybody my name. If I stay in a hotel, I pay cash and give them a made-up name.”

“Why?” he said. “Who the hell’s after you?”

“Nobody,” I said. “It’s just a bit of fun. I like anonymity. I feel like I’m beating the system. And right now, I’m truly pissed at the system.”

I saw him fall back to thinking. He thought a long time. I could see him deflate as he struggled with the problems that wouldn’t go away. I could see his panic come and go like a tide.

“So give me your advice about Finlay,” he said. “When he asks me about the confession, I’ll say I was stressed-out because of some business situation. I’ll say there was some kind of rivalry, threats against my family. I’ll say I don’t know anything about the dead guy or anything about the phone number. I’ll deny everything. Then I’ll just try to settle everything down. What do you think?”

I thought it sounded like a pretty thin plan.

“Tell me one thing,” I said. “Without giving me any more details, do you perform a useful function for them? Or are you just some kind of onlooker?”

He pulled on his fingers and thought for a moment.

“Yes, I perform a useful function for them,” he said. “Crucial, even.”

“And if you weren’t there to do it?” I asked him. “Would they have to recruit someone else?”

“Yes, they would,” he said. “And it would be moderately difficult to do that, given the parameters of the function.”

He was rating his chances of staying alive like he would rate a credit application up at his office.

“OK,” I said. “Your plan is as good as you’re going to get. Go for it.”

I didn’t see what else he could do. He was a small cog in some kind of a big operation. But a crucial cog. And nobody wrecks a big operation for no reason. So his future was actually clear-cut. If they ever figured it was him who had brought in the outside investigator, then he was definitely dead. But if they never found that out, then he was definitely safe. Simple as that. I figured he had a good enough chance, because of one very persuasive fact.

He had confessed because he had thought prison was some kind of a safe sanctuary where they couldn’t get him. That had been part of his thinking behind it. It was bad thinking. He’d been wrong. He wasn’t safe from attack, quite the reverse. They could have got him if they had wanted to. But the other side of that particular coin was that he hadn’t been attacked. As it happened, I had been. Not Hubble. So I figured there was some kind of a proof there that he was OK. They weren’t out to get him, because if they had wanted to kill him, they could have killed him by now, and they would have killed him by now. But they hadn’t. Even though they were apparently very uptight right now because of some kind of a temporary risk. So it seemed like proof. I began to think he would be OK.