Nothing to Lose

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 ru

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.

28

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.

The bartender was a heavy pale man of about forty. He didn’t look smart and he didn’t look pleasant. He was ten feet away, leaning back with his fat ass against his cash register drawer. Not moving. Not about to move, either. That was clear. Reacher raised his eyebrows and put a beckoning expression on his face and got no response at all.

A company town.

He swiveled his stool and faced the room.

“Listen up, guys,” he called. “I’m not a metalworker and I’m not looking for a job.”

No response.

“You couldn’t pay me enough to work here. I’m not interested. I’m just a guy passing through, looking for a beer.”

No response. Just sullen and hostile stares, with bottles and glasses frozen halfway between tables and mouths.

Reacher said, “First guy to talk to me, I’ll pay his tab.”

No response.

“For a week.”

No response.

Reacher turned back and faced the bar again. The bartender hadn’t moved. Reacher looked him in the eye and said, “Sell me a beer or I’ll start busting this place up.”

The bartender moved. But not toward his refrigerator cabinets or his draft pumps. Toward his telephone instead. It was an old-fashioned instrument next to the register. The guy picked it up and dialed a long number. Reacher waited. The guy listened to a lot of ring tone and then started to say something but then stopped and put the phone down again.

“Voice mail,” he said.

“Nobody home,” Reacher said. “So it’s just you and me. I’ll take a Budweiser, no glass.”

The guy glanced beyond Reacher’s shoulder, out into the room, to see if any ad hoc coalitions were forming to help him out. They weren’t. Reacher was already monitoring the situation in a dull mirror directly in front of him. The bartender decided not to be a hero. He shrugged and his attitude changed and his face sagged a little and he bent down and pulled a cold bottle out from under the bar. Opened it up and set it down on a napkin. Foam swelled out of the neck and ran down the side of the bottle and soaked into the paper. Reacher took a ten from his pocket and folded it lengthways so it wouldn’t curl and squared it in front of him.

“I’m looking for a guy,” he said.

The bartender said, “What guy?”

“A young guy. Maybe twenty. Suntan, short hair, as big as me.”

“Nobody like that here.”

“I saw him this afternoon. In town. Coming out of the rooming house.”

“So ask there.”

“I did.”

“I can’t help you.”

“This guy looked like a college athlete. College athletes drink beer from time to time. He was probably in here once or twice.”