Make Me

It was dark when they came off the highway. The county road ran onward through the vastness, visible only a headlight’s length ahead, and unrevealed beyond. The little Ford hummed along, bouncing now and then on eroded blacktop, pale wheat stalks strobing by on both sides. Overhead were thin clouds, and a new moon, and a dusting of distant stars.

It was impossible to say when they passed the point where they had left the Moynahans. Every mile looked exactly the same as every other mile. But the dull red pick-up had gone. They saw it nowhere, not on the county road itself, or on the right-left-right-left local turns that led back through the fields to Mother’s Rest. Which they saw a mile away, faint and ghostly in the night, the elevators by far the tallest things in the landscape. They came in on the old trail, through the widest part of town, six low-rise blocks, and they turned on the plaza and drove down to the motel. The light was burning in the office window.

Chang said, “Let the fun begin.”

She parked in the slot under her room and shut down the engine. They paused a moment in the sudden silence, and then they climbed out. They put their hands on their captured guns in their pockets, and stood near the car, in the yellow nighttime half-light, from the glow of the electric bulbs in their bulkhead fixtures, one above every door, and all of them working.

No movement. No sound.

No Moynahans, no posse.

Nothing.

Then a hundred feet away the one-eyed guy came out of the office.

He hustled over, the same way he had before, waving and gesturing, and when he arrived he fixed his imperfect gaze on the ground, and he took a breath.

“I apologize,” he said. “A mistake was made. It led to a misunderstanding. Room 215 is yours to use, until the other gentleman gets back.”

Chang said nothing.

Reacher said, “Understood.”

The one-eyed guy nodded, as if to seal the deal, and then he turned tail and hustled back. Chang watched him go, and said, “Could be a trap or an ambush.”

“Could be,” Reacher said. “But I don’t think it is. He wouldn’t want fighting inside the actual room itself. The furniture would get busted up, and he would be patching bullet holes in the drywall all winter long.”

“You saying they’ve surrendered?”

“It’s a move in the game.”

“What’s the next move?”

“I don’t know.”

“And when will it come?”

“Tomorrow, probably,” Reacher said. He looked all around, all three sides of the horseshoe, downstairs and upstairs. There was a rim of light around the drapes in room 203. Where the man in the suit had stayed. It had a new occupant.

“Not before dawn,” he said. “That would be my guess.”

“Will you sleep OK?”

“I expect so. Will you?”

“If I don’t, I’ll bang on the wall.”

They went up the metal stairs together, and pulled their keys, and turned their locks, side by side but twenty feet apart, like neighbors getting home from work.

A hundred feet away the one-eyed guy took the lawn chair from outside 102, which was empty, and hauled it over to the spot he had used before, on the sidewalk under his office window. He lined it up and dumped himself down, in the nighttime air, ready to obey the second of the evening’s commands, which had been Watch their rooms all night.

The first command had been Even if they come back, do not under any circumstances rock the boat tonight. Which matter he thought he had handled in a satisfactory manner.

Chapter 19

As before, Reacher sat in his room in the dark, back from the window, invisible from the outside, just watching, this time from a second-floor perspective. Fifteen minutes, then twenty, then thirty. As long as it took, to be sure. The one-eyed guy in his plastic chair was the same pale smudge in the distance, a hundred feet away. The rim of light around 203’s drapes burned steadily. Nothing moved. No cars, no people. No glowing cigarettes in the shadows.

Nothing doing.

Forty minutes. Room 203’s lights went out. The one-eyed guy stayed where he was. Reacher gave it ten minutes more, and went to bed.

Morning came, and it looked as good as the previous morning. The light was pale gold, and the shadows were long. As good as the first morning ever, maybe. Reacher sat on the bed, in a towel, without coffee, and watched. The plastic chair was a hundred feet away, outside the office, but it was abandoned again. Room 203’s drapes were still closed. No one was moving. There was traffic out on the wide street, heard but not seen, first one truck, then a couple more.

Then silence.

He waited.

And the same things happened.

The shadows retreated, yard by yard, as the sun climbed higher. The seven o’clock train rolled in, and waited, and rolled out again. And the drapes opened in room 203.