Killing Floor (36 page)

He was telling the truth. But I was lying. I waited until he was lined up with the wreckage of the truck and I was next to the Bentley. Then I pulled the trigger. The .44 shell caught him and smashed his huge bulk backward into the tangled metal. I didn’t wait around for a second shot. I slammed the trunk lid and jumped for the driver’s seat. Fired the car up and burned rubber. I peeled away from the shoulder and dodged the people running around after the dollar bills. Jammed my foot down and hurtled east.

Twenty miles to go. Took me twenty minutes. I was gasping and shaky with adrenaline. I forced my heartbeat down and took big gulps of air. Then I yelled to myself in triumph. Screamed and yelled out loud. Picard was gone.

31

IT WAS DARK WHEN I HIT THE OUTLYING AUGUSTA SUBURBS
. I pulled off the highway as soon as the taller buildings started to thicken up. Drove down the city streets and stopped at the first motel I saw. Locked the Bentley up and dodged into the office. Stepped over to the desk. The clerk looked up.

“Got a room?” I asked him.

“Thirty-six bucks,” the guy said.

“Phone in the room?” I asked him.

“Sure,” he said. “Air-conditioning and cable TV.”

“Yellow Pages in the room?” I asked him.

He nodded.

“Got a map of Augusta?” I said.

He jerked his thumb over to a rack next to a cigarette machine. It was stuffed with maps and brochures. I peeled off thirty-six bucks from the roll in my trouser pocket. Dropped the cash on the desk. Filled in the register. I put my name down as Roscoe Finlay.

“Room twelve,” the guy said. Slid me the key.

I stopped to grab a map and hustled out. Ran down the row to room twelve. Let myself in and locked the door. I didn’t look at the room. Just looked for the phone and the Yellow Pages. I lay on the bed and unfolded the map. Opened up the Yellow Pages to H for hotels.

There was a huge list. In Augusta, there were hundreds of places where you could pay for a bed for the night. Literally hundreds. Pages and pages of them. So I looked at the map. Concentrated on a wedge a half mile long and four blocks deep, either side of the main drag in from the west. That was my target area. I downgraded the places right on the main drag. I upgraded the places a block or two off. Prioritized the places between a quarter mile and a half mile out. I was looking at a rough square, a quarter mile long and a quarter mile deep. I put the map and the phone book side by side and made a hit list.

Eighteen hotels. One of them was the place I was lying there in. So I picked up the phone and dialed zero for the desk. The clerk answered.

“You got a guy called Paul Lennon registered?” I asked him.

There was a pause. He was checking the book.

“Lennon?” he said. “No, sir.”

“OK,” I said. Put the phone down.

I took a deep breath and started at the top of my list. Dialed the first place.

“You got a guy called Paul Lennon registered?” I asked the guy who answered.

There was a pause.

“No, sir,” the guy said.

I worked down the list. Dialed one place after another.

“You got a guy called Paul Lennon registered?” I asked each clerk.

There was always a pause while they checked their registers. Sometimes I could hear the pages turning. Some of them had computers. I could hear keyboards pattering.

“No, sir,” they all said. One after the other.

I lay there on the bed with the phone balanced on my chest. I was down to number thirteen out of the eighteen on my list.

“You got a guy called Paul Lennon registered?” I asked.

There was a pause. I could hear pages turning.

“No, sir,” the thirteenth clerk said.

“OK,” I said. Put the phone down.

I picked it up again and stabbed out the fourteenth number. Got a busy signal. So I dabbed the cradle and stabbed out the fifteenth number.

“You got a guy called Paul Lennon registered?” I asked.

There was a pause.

“Room one twenty,” the fifteenth clerk said.

“Thank you,” I said. Put the phone down.

I lay there. Closed my eyes. Breathed out. I put the phone back on the nightstand thing and checked the map. The fifteenth hotel was three blocks away. North of the main drag. I left the room key on the bed and went back out to the car. The engine was still warm. I’d been in there about twenty-five minutes.

I had to drive three blocks east before I could make a left. Then three blocks north before I could make another. I went around a kind of jagged spiral. I found the fifteenth hotel and parked at the door. Went into the lobby. It was a dingy sort of a place. Not clean, not well lit. It looked like a cave.

“Can I help you?” the desk guy asked.

“No,” I said.

I followed an arrow down a warren of corridors. Found room one twenty. Rapped on the door. I heard the rattle of the chain going on. I stood there. The door cracked open.

“Hello, Reacher,” he said.

“Hello, Hubble,” I said.

HE WAS SPILLING OVER WITH QUESTIONS FOR ME, BUT I JUST
hustled him out to the car. We had four hours on the road for all that stuff. We had to get going. I was over two hours ahead of schedule. I wanted to keep it that way. I wanted to put those two hours in the bank. I figured I might need them later.

He looked OK. He wasn’t a wreck. He’d been running for six days and it had done him good. It had burned off that complacent gloss he’d had. Left him looking a little more tight and rangy. A bit tougher. More like my type of a guy. He was dressed up in cheap chainstore clothes and he was wearing socks. He was using an old pair of spectacles made from stainless steel. A seven-dollar digital watch covered the band of pale skin where the Rolex had been. He looked like a plumber or the guy who runs your local muffler franchise.

He had no bags. He was traveling light. He just glanced around his room and walked out with me. Like he couldn’t believe his life on the road was over. Like he might be going to miss it to a degree. We stepped through the dark lobby and out into the night. He stopped when he saw the car parked at the door.

“You came in Charlie’s car?” he said.

“She was worried about you,” I told him. “She asked me to find you.”

He nodded. Looked blank.

“What’s with the tinted glass?” he said.

I grinned at him and shrugged.

“Don’t ask,” I said. “Long story.”

I started up and eased away from the hotel. He should have asked me right away how Charlie was, but something was bothering him. I had seen when he cracked the hotel room door that a tidal wave of relief had hit him. But he had a tiny reservation. It was a pride thing. He’d been running and hiding. He’d thought he’d been doing it well. But he hadn’t been, because I had found him. He was thinking about that. He was relieved and disappointed all at the same time.

“How the hell did you find me?” he asked.

I shrugged at him again.

“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 connected, consciously or subconsciously. You took the taxi up to the Atlanta bus depot, right?”

“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 running out of energy. I really wasn’t sure. I nearly went up to Greenville tonight, up in South Carolina. But I guessed right.”

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 Lennon, right?”

“Right,” he said.

“Not John Lennon,” I said. “People usually stick with their own first name. I don’t know why, but they usually do. So you were Paul Lennon. Tuesday, you were Paul Mc-Cartney. Wednesday, you were Paul Harrison. Thursday, you were Paul Starr. Friday in Augusta, you started over again with Paul Lennon, right?”

“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 canned. And the paychecks stopped.”

“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.”

“And?” I said.