Ли Чайлд - "Этаж смерти" with W_cat
[1199] Eno’s came into sight. The polished aluminum siding gleamed in the sun. Roscoe’s Chevrolet was in the lot. Standing next to it on the gravel was the black pickup I’d seen the day before outside the coffee shop. I reached the diner and pushed in through the door. I had been prodded out through it on Friday with Stevenson’s shotgun pointed at my gut. I had been in handcuffs. I wondered if the diner people would remember me. I figured they probably would. Margrave was a very quiet place. Not a whole lot of strangers passing through.
[1200] Roscoe was in a booth, the same one I’d used on Friday. She was back in uniform and she looked like the sexiest thing on earth. I stepped over to her. She smiled a tender smile up at me and I bent to kiss her mouth. She slid over the vinyl to the window. There were two cups of coffee on the table. I passed hers across.
[1201] The driver from the black pickup was sitting at the lunch counter. The Kliner boy, the pale woman’s stepson. He’d spun the stool and his back was against the counter. He was sitting legs apart, elbows back, head up, eyes blazing, staring at me again. I turned my back on him and kissed Roscoe again.
[1202] “Is this going to ruin your authority?” I asked her. “To be seen kissing a vagrant who got arrested in here on Friday?”
[1203] “Probably,” she said. “But who cares?”
[1204] So I kissed her again. The Kliner kid was watching. I could feel it on the back of my neck. I turned to look back at him. He held my gaze for a second, then he slid off his stool and left. Stopped in the doorway and glared at me one last time. Then he hustled over to his pickup and took off. I heard the roar of the motor and then the diner was quiet. It was more or less empty, just like on Friday. A couple of old guys and a couple of waitresses. They were the same women as on Friday. Both blond, one taller and heavier than the other. Waitress uniforms. The shorter one wore eyeglasses. Not really alike, but similar. Like sisters or cousins. The same genes in there somewhere. Small town, miles from anywhere.
[1205] “I made a decision,” I said. “I have to find out what happened with Joe. So I just want to apologize in advance in case that gets in the way, OK?”
[1206] Roscoe shrugged and smiled a tender smile. Looked concerned for me.
[1207] “It won’t get in the way,” she said. “No reason why it should.”
[1208] I sipped my coffee. It was good coffee. I remembered that from Friday.
[1209] “We got an ID on the second body,” she said. “His prints matched with an arrest two years ago in Florida. His name was Sherman Stoller. That name mean anything at all to you?”
[1210] I shook my head.
[1211] “Never heard of him,” I said.
[1212] Then her beeper started going. It was a little black pager thing clipped to her belt. I hadn’t seen it before. Maybe she was only required to use it during working hours. It was beeping away. She reached around and clicked it off.
[1213] “Damn,” she said. “I’ve got to call in. Sorry. I’ll use the phone in the car.”
[1214] I slid out of the booth and stepped back to let her by.
[1215] “Order me some food, OK?” she said. “I’ll have whatever you have.”
[1216] “OK,” I said. “Which one is our waitress?”
[1217] “The one with the glasses,” she said.
[1218] She walked out of the diner. I was aware of her leaning into her car, using the phone. Then she was gesturing to me from the parking lot. Miming urgency. Miming that she had to get back. Miming that I should stay put. She jumped into the car and took off, south. I waved vaguely after her, not really looking, because I was staring at the waitresses instead. I had almost stopped breathing. I needed Hubble. And Roscoe had just told me Hubble was dead.
11
[1219] I STARED BLANKLY OVER AT THE TWO BLOND WAITRESSES. One was perhaps three inches taller than the other. Perhaps fifteen pounds heavier. A couple of years older. The smaller woman looked petite in comparison. Better looking. She had longer, lighter hair. Nicer eyes behind the glasses. As a pair, the waitresses were similar in a superficial kind of a way. But not alike. There were a million differences between them. No way were they hard to distinguish one from the other.
[1220] I’d asked Roscoe which was our waitress. And how had she answered? She hadn’t said the smaller one, or the one with the long hair, or the blonder one, or the slimmer one, or the prettier one or the younger one. She’d said the one with glasses. One was wearing glasses, the other wasn’t. Ours was the one with glasses. Wearing glasses was the major difference between them. It overrode all the other differences. The other differences were matters of degree. Taller, heavier, longer, shorter, smaller, prettier, darker, younger. The glasses were not a matter of degree. One woman wore them, the other didn’t. An absolute difference. No confusion. Our waitress was the one with glasses.
[1221] That’s what Spivey had seen on Friday night. Spivey had come into the reception bunker a little after ten o’clock. With a shotgun and a clipboard in his big red farmer’s hands. He had asked which one of us was Hubble. I remembered his high voice in the stillness of the bunker. There was no reason for his question. Why the hell should Spivey care which one of us was which? He didn’t need to know. But he’d asked. Hubble had raised his hand. Spivey had looked him over with his little snake eyes. He had seen that Hubble was smaller, shorter, lighter, sandier, balder, younger than me. But what was the major difference he had hung on to? Hubble wore glasses. I didn’t. The little gold rims. An absolute difference. Spivey had said to himself that night: Hubble’s the one with glasses.
[1222] But by the next morning I was the one with glasses, not Hubble. Because Hubble’s gold rims had been smashed up by the Red Boys outside our cell. First thing in the morning. The little gold rims were gone. I had taken some shades from one of them as a trophy. Taken them and forgotten about them. I’d leaned up against the sink in that bathroom inspecting my tender forehead in the steel mirror. I’d felt those shades in my pocket. I’d pulled them out and put them on. They weren’t dark because they were supposed to react to sunlight. They looked like ordinary glasses. I’d been standing there with them on when the Aryans came trawling into the bathroom. Spivey had just told them: find the new boys and kill the one with glasses. They’d tried hard. They’d tried very hard to kill Paul Hubble.
[1223] They had attacked me because the description they’d been given was suddenly the wrong description. Spivey had reported that back long ago. Whoever had set him on Hubble hadn’t given up. They’d made a second attempt. And the second attempt had succeeded. The whole police department had been summoned up to Beckman Drive. Up to number twenty-five. Because somebody had discovered an appalling scene there. Carnage. He was dead. All four of them were dead. Tortured and butchered. My fault. I hadn’t thought hard enough.
[1224] I RAN OVER TO THE COUNTER. SPOKE TO OUR WAITRESS. THE one with glasses.
[1225] “Can you call me a taxi?” I asked her.
[1226] The cook was watching from the kitchen hatch. Maybe he was Eno himself. Short, stocky, dark, balding. Older than me.
[1227] “No, we can’t,” he called through. “What do you think this place is? A hotel? This ain’t the Waldorf-Astoria, pal. You want a taxi, you find it yourself. You ain’t particularly welcome here, pal. You’re trouble.”
[1228] I gazed back at him bleakly. Too drained for any reaction. But the waitress just laughed at him. Put her hand on my arm.
[1229] “Don’t pay no mind to Eno,” she said. “He’s just a grumpy old thing. I’ll call you the taxi. Just wait out in the parking lot, OK?”
[1230] I waited out on the road. Five minutes. The taxi drove up. Brand-new and immaculate, like everything else in Margrave.
[1231] “Where to, sir?” the driver asked.
[1232] I gave him Hubble’s address and he made a wide, slow turn, shoulder to shoulder across the county road. Headed back to town. We passed the firehouse and the police headquarters. The lot was empty. Roscoe’s Chevy wasn’t there. No cruisers. They were all out. Up at Hubble’s. We made the right at the village green and swung past the silent church. Headed up Beckman. In a mile I would see a cluster of vehicles outside number twenty-five. The cruisers with their light bars flashing and popping. Unmarked cars for Finlay and Roscoe. An ambulance or two. The coroner would be there, up from his shabby office in Yellow Springs.
[1233] But the street was empty. I walked into Hubble’s driveway. The taxi turned and drove back to town. Then it was silent. That heavy silence you get in a quiet street on a hot, quiet day. I rounded the big banks of garden. There was nobody there. No police cars, no ambulances, no shouting. No clattering gurneys, no gasps of horror. No police photographers, no tape sealing off the access.
[1234] The big dark Bentley was parked up on the gravel. I walked past it on my way to the house. The front door crashed open. Charlie Hubble ran out. She was screaming. She was hysterical. But she was alive.
[1235] “Hub’s disappeared,” she screamed.
[1236] She ran over the gravel. Stood right in front of me.
[1237] “Hub’s gone,” she screamed. “He’s disappeared. I can’t find him.”
[1238] It was just Hubble on his own. They’d taken him and dumped him somewhere. Someone had found the body and called the police. A screaming, gagging phone call. The cluster of cars and ambulances was there. Not here on Beckman. Somewhere else. But it was just Hubble on his own.
[1239] “Something’s wrong,” Charlie wailed. “This prison thing. Something’s gone wrong at the bank. It must be that. Hub’s been so uptight. Now he’s gone. He’s disappeared. Something’s happened, I know it.”
[1240] She screwed her eyes tight shut. Started screaming. She was losing it. Getting more and more hysterical. I didn’t know how to handle her.
[1241] “He got back late last night,” she screamed. “He was still here this morning. I took Ben and Lucy to school. Now he’s gone. He hasn’t gone to work. He got a call from his office telling him to stay home, and his briefcase is still here, his phone is still here, his jacket is still here, his wallet is still here, his credit cards are in it, his driver’s license is in it, his keys are in the kitchen. The front door was standing wide open. He hasn’t gone to work. He’s just disappeared.”
[1242] I stood still. Paralyzed. He’d been dragged out of there by force and killed. Charlie sagged in front of me. Then she started whispering to me. The whispering was worse than the screaming.
[1243] “His car is still here,” she whispered. “He can’t have walked anywhere. He never walks anywhere. He always takes his Bentley.”
[1244] She waved vaguely toward the back of the house.
[1245] “Hub’s Bentley is green,” she said. “It’s still in the garage. I checked. You’ve got to help us. You’ve got to find him. Mr. Reacher, please. I’m asking you to help us. Hub’s in trouble, I know it. He’s vanished. He said you might help. You saved his life. He said you knew how to do things.”
[1246] She was hysterical. She was pleading. But I couldn’t help her. She would know that soon enough. Baker or Finlay would come up to the house very soon. They would tell her the shattering news. Probably Finlay would handle it. Probably he was very good at it. Probably he had done it a thousand times in Boston. He had dignity and gravity. He would break the news, gloss over the details, drive her down to the morgue to identify the body. The morgue people would shroud the corpse with heavy gauze to hide the appalling wounds.
[1247] “Will you help us?” Charlie asked me.
[1248] I decided not to wait with her. I decided to go down to the station house. Find out details like where and when and how. But I’d come back with Finlay. This was my fault, so I should come back.
[1249] “You stay here,” I said. “You’ll have to lend me your car, OK?”
[1250] She rooted in her bag and pulled out a big bunch of keys. Handed them to me. The car key had a big letter B embossed on it. She nodded vaguely and stayed where she was. I stepped over to the Bentley and slid into the driver’s seat. Backed it up and swung it down the curving driveway. Glided down Beckman in silence. Made the left onto Main Street up toward the station house.
[1251] THERE WERE CRUISERS AND UNMARKED UNITS SPRAWLED right across the police parking lot. I left Charlie’s Bentley at the curb and stepped inside. They were all milling around the open area. I saw Baker, Stevenson, Finlay. I saw Roscoe. I recognized the backup team from Friday. Morrison wasn’t there. Nor was the desk guy. The long counter was unattended. Everybody was stunned. They were all vague and staring. Horrified. Distracted. Nobody would talk to me. They looked over bleakly. Didn’t really look away, it was like they didn’t see me at all. There was total silence. Finally Roscoe came over. She’d been crying. She walked up to me. Pressed her face against my chest. She was burning up. She put her arms around me and held on.
[1252] “It was horrible,” she said. Wouldn’t say any more.
[1253] I walked her around to her desk and sat her down. Squeezed her shoulder and stepped over toward Finlay. He was sitting on a desk, looking blank. I nodded him over to the big office in back. I needed to know, and Finlay was the guy who would tell me. He followed me into the office. Sat down in the chair in front of the desk. Where I had sat in handcuffs on Friday. I sat behind the desk. Roles reversed.
