Killing Floor

“Easy,” I said. “I’ve had a lot of practice. I’ve found a lot of guys. Spent years picking up deserters for the army.”

I was threading through the grids, working my way back to the highway. I could see the line of lights streaming west, but the on-ramp was like the prize at the center of a maze. I was unwinding the same jagged spiral I’d been forced around on the way in.

“But how did you do it?” he said. “I could have been anywhere.”

“No, you couldn’t,” I said. “That was the exact point. That’s what made it easy. You had no credit cards, no driver’s license, no ID. All you had was cash. So you weren’t using planes or rental cars. You were stuck with the bus.”

I found the on-ramp. Concentrated on the lane-change and nudged the wheel. Accelerated up the ramp and merged with the flow back toward Atlanta.

“That gave me a start,” I said to him. “Then I put myself in your shoes, psychologically. You were terrified for your family. So I figured you’d circle around Margrave at a distance. You’d want to feel you were still co

“Right,” he said. “First bus out of there was to Memphis, but I waited for the next one. Memphis was too far. I didn’t want to go that far away.”

“That’s what made it easy,” I said. “You were circling Margrave. Not too close, not too far. And counterclockwise. Give people a free choice, they always go counterclockwise. It’s a universal truth, Hubble. All I had to do was to count the days and study the map and predict the hop you’d take each time. I figure Monday you were in Birmingham, Alabama. Tuesday was Montgomery, Wednesday was Columbus. I had a problem with Thursday. I gambled on Macon, but I thought it was maybe too close to Margrave.”

He nodded.

“Thursday was a nightmare,” he said. “I was in Macon, some terrible dive, didn’t sleep a wink.”

“So Friday morning you came out here to Augusta,” I said. “My other big gamble was you stayed here two nights. I figured you were shaken up after Macon, maybe ru

Hubble went quiet. He’d thought he’d been invisible, but he’d been circling Margrave like a beacon flashing away in the night sky.

“But I used a false name,” he said. Defiantly.

“You used five false names,” I said. “Five nights, five hotels, five names. The fifth name was the same as the first name, right?”

He was amazed. He thought back and nodded.

“How the hell did you know that?” he said again.

“I’ve hunted a lot of guys,” I said. “And I knew a little about you.”

“Knew what?” he said.

“You’re a Beatles guy,” I said. “You told me about visiting the Dakota building and going to Liverpool in England. You’ve got just about every Beatles CD ever made in your den. So the first night, you were at some hotel desk and you signed Paul Le

“Right,” he said.

“Not John Le

“Right,” he said. “But there’s a million hotels in Augusta. Conventions, golf. How the hell did you know where to look?”

“I thought about it,” I said. “You got in Friday, late morning, coming in from the west. Guy like you walks back the way he’s already seen. Feels safer that way. You’d been on the bus four hours, you were cramped up, you wanted the air, so you walked a spell, maybe a quarter mile. Then you got panicky and dived off the main drag a block or two. So I had a pretty small target area. Eighteen places. You were in number fifteen.”

He shook his head. Mixed feelings. We barreled on down the road in the dark. The big old Bentley loped along, a hair over the legal limit.

“How are things in Margrave now?” he asked me.

That was the big question. He asked it tentatively, like he was nervous about it. I was nervous about answering it. I backed off the gas a little and slowed down. Just in case he got so upset that he grabbed at me. I didn’t want to wreck the car. Didn’t have time for that.

“We’re in deep shit,” I told him. “We’ve got about seven hours to fix it.”

I saved the worst part for last. I told him Charlie and the kids had gone with an FBI agent back on Monday. Because of the danger. And then I told him the FBI agent had been Picard.

There was silence in the car. I drove on three, four miles in the silence. It was more than a silence. It was a crushing vacuum of stillness. Like all the atmosphere had been sucked off the planet. It was a silence that roared and buzzed in my ears.

He started clenching and unclenching his hands. Started rocking back and forth on the big leather chair beside me. But then he went quiet. His reaction never really got going. Never really took hold. His brain just shut down and refused to react anymore. Like a circuit breaker clicking open. It was too big and too awful to react to. He just looked at me.

“OK,” he said. “Then you’ll have to get them back, won’t you?”

I sped up again. Charged on toward Atlanta.

“I’ll get them back,” I said. “But I’ll need your help. That’s why I picked you up first.”

He nodded again. He had crashed through the barrier. He had stopped worrying and started relaxing. He was up on that plateau where you just did whatever needed doing. I knew that place. I lived there.

TWENTY MILES OUT FROM AUGUSTA WE SAW FLASHING lights up ahead and guys waving danger flares. There was an accident on the other side of the divider. A truck had plowed into a parked sedan. A gaggle of other vehicles were slewed all over the place. There were drifts of what looked like litter lying around. A big crowd of people was milling about, collecting it up. We crawled past in a slow line of traffic. Hubble watched out the window.

“I’m very sorry about your brother,” he said. “I had no idea. I guess I got him killed, didn’t I?”

He slumped down in the seat. But I wanted to keep him talking. He had to stay on the ball. So I asked him the question I’d been waiting a week to ask.

“How the hell did you get into all this?” I said.

He shrugged. Blew a big sigh at the windshield. Like it was impossible to imagine any way of getting into it. Like it was impossible to imagine any way of staying out of it.

“I lost my job,” he said. A simple statement. “I was devastated. I felt angry and upset. And scared, Reacher. We’d been living a dream, you know? A golden dream. It was a perfect, idyllic life. I was earning a fortune and I was spending a fortune. It was totally fabulous. But then I started hearing things. The retail operation was under threat. My department was under review. I suddenly realized I was just one paycheck away from disaster. Then the department got shut down. I got ca

“And?” I said.

“I was out of my head,” he said. “I was so angry. I had worked my butt off for those bastards. I was good at my job. I had made them a fortune. And they just slung me out like suddenly I was shit on their shoe. And I was scared. I was going to lose it all, right? And I was tired. I couldn’t start again at the bottom of something else. I was too old and I had no energy. I just didn’t know what to do.”

“And then Kliner turned up?” I said.

He nodded. Looked pale.

“He had heard about it,” he said. “I guess Teale told him. Teale knows everything about everybody. Kliner called me within a couple of days. I hadn’t even told Charlie at that point. I couldn’t face it. He called me and asked me to meet him up at the airport. He was in a private jet, on his way back from Venezuela. He flew me out to the Bahamas for lunch, and we talked. I was flattered, to be honest.”