Jack Reacher 01 - Killing Floor

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