Jack Reacher 01 - Killing Floor

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.”
    I gazed back at him bleakly. Too drained for any reaction. But the waitress just laughed at him. Put her hand on my arm.
    “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?”
    I waited out on the road. Five minutes. The taxi drove up. Brand-new and immaculate, like everything else in Margrave.
    “Where to, sir?” the driver asked.
    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.
    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.
    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.
    “Hub’s disappeared,” she screamed.
    She ran over the gravel. Stood right in front of me.
    “Hub’s gone,” she screamed. “He’s disappeared. I can’t find him.”
    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.
    “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.”
    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.
    “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.”
    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.
    “His car is still here,” she whispered. “He can’t have walked anywhere. He never walks anywhere. He always takes his Bentley.”
    She waved vaguely toward the back of the house.
    “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.”
    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.
    “Will you help us?” Charlie asked me.
    I decided not to wait with her. I decided to go down to the station house.