Jack Reacher 01 - Killing Floor

promised ourselves it would happen. Further on up the road.

    I OPENED MY EYES AND SWITCHED OFF THE MUSIC IN MY head. Standing in front of me on the other side of the bars was the fingerprint officer. She was on her way back from the coffee hotplate.
    “Can I get you a cup of coffee?” she asked me.
    “Sure,” I said. “Great. No cream, no sugar.”
    She put her own cup down on the nearest desk and went back to the machine. Poured me a cup from the pot and walked back. This was a good-looking woman. About thirty, dark, not tall. But to call her medium would be unfair to her. She had a kind of vitality. It had come across as a sympathetic briskness in that first interview room. A professional bustle. Now she seemed unofficial. Probably was. Probably against the fat chief’s rules to bring coffee to the condemned man. It made me like her.
    She passed the cup in through the bars. Up close she looked good. Smelled good. I didn’t recall that from earlier. I remembered thinking of her like a dentist’s nurse. If dentist’s nurses all looked that good, I’d have gone more often. I took the cup. I was glad of it. I was thirsty and I love coffee. Give me the chance and I drink coffee like an alcoholic drinks vodka. I took a sip. Good coffee. I raised the cup like a toast.
    “Thank you,” I said.
    “You’re welcome,” she said, and she smiled, with her eyes too. I smiled back. Her eyes were like a welcome blast of sunshine on a rotten afternoon.
    “So you think I didn’t do it?” I asked her.
    She picked up her own cup from where she’d put it down.
    “You think I don’t bring coffee to the guilty ones?” she said.
    “Maybe you don’t even talk to the guilty ones,” I said.
    “I know you’re not guilty of much,” she said.
    “How can you tell?” I said. “Because my eyes aren’t too close together?”
    “No, fool,” she laughed. “Because we haven’t heard from Washington yet.”
    Her laugh was great. I wanted to look at her nameplate over her shirt pocket. But I didn’t want her to think I was looking at her breasts. I remembered them resting on the edge of the table when she took my photograph. I looked. Nice breasts. Her name was Roscoe. She glanced around quickly and moved closer to the bars. I sipped coffee.
    “I sent your prints to Washington over the computer link,” she said. “That was at twelve thirty-six. Big database there, you know, FBI? Millions of prints in their computer. Prints that get sent in are checked. There’s a priority order. You get checked first of all against the top-ten wanted list, then the top hundred, then the top thousand, you understand? If you’d been near the top, you know, active and unsolved, we’d have heard almost right away. It’s automatic. They don’t want any big fugitive to slip away, so the system gets right back. But you’ve been in there almost three hours and we haven’t heard. So I can tell you’re not on record for anything very bad.”
    The desk sergeant was looking over. Disapproving. She was going to have to go. I drained the coffee and handed her the cup back through the bars.
    “I’m not on record for anything at all,” I said.
    “No,” she said. “You don’t match the deviance profile.”
    “I don’t?” I said.
    “I could tell right away.” She smiled. “You got nice eyes.”
    She winked and walked away. Trashed the cups and moved over to her workstation. She sat down. All I could see was the back of her head. I moved into my corner and leaned up against the hard bars. I’d been a lonely wanderer for six months. I’d learned something. Like Blanche in that old movie, a wanderer depends on the kindness of strangers. Not for anything specific or material. For morale. I gazed at the back of Roscoe’s head and smiled. I liked her.

    BAKER HAD BEEN GONE MAYBE TWENTY MINUTES. LONG enough to get back from Hubble’s place, wherever it was. I figured you could walk there and back in twenty minutes. This was a small town, right? A dot on the map. I figured you could walk anywhere and back in twenty minutes. On your hands. Although the town limits were pretty weird. Depended whether Hubble lived in town, or somewhere else within the outer boundaries. According to my experience, you were in town even when you were fourteen miles away. If that fourteen miles extended in all directions, then Margrave was about as big as New York City.
    Baker had said Hubble was a family man. A banker who worked in Atlanta. That meant a