Make Me

And the one-eyed clerk was coming out of the motel office, and standing and sniffing the air, and glancing all around, at the inside perimeter of the horseshoe, at the parking spaces, at the sidewalk passing the first-floor rooms, at the walkway passing the second-floor rooms. A leisurely visual inspection. Of the light bulbs, all working. Of the lawn chairs, all neatly lined up. All there. All quiet. All serene. 214 was empty. 215 was empty.

They weren’t coming back, he thought.

All good.

LAX arrivals was jammed, so Reacher and Chang had to fight their way out to the curb to find a quiet spot to make their call. Chang hid behind a pillar and dialed. And woke Westwood up. Not an early starter. She was embarrassed at first, then placatory, and then she got down to business. She introduced herself again, and said she needed to meet, because something that had looked small to both of them was suddenly not so small anymore. She said there was a credible figure of two hundred deaths. She said as an ex — FBI agent she was taking it seriously. She said her colleague was from the military, and he was also taking it seriously. She said sure, the book rights were still available.

Then she listened to an address, and hung up.

“Coffee shop,” she said. “In Inglewood.”

Reacher said, “That’s close by. When?”

“Thirty minutes.”

“We should take a cab. We don’t have time to rent a car.”

Twenty miles south of Mother’s Rest, the man with the ironed jeans and the blow-dried hair took a call on his land line. Triple-A, but not exactly. Their man Hackett had logged the first contact. A cell-to-cell phone call, six minutes long, between Westwood, who was presumably at home, given his hours, and a woman who gave her name as Chang, who was at the airport, judging by the background noise, and who was with a male colleague she described as military. Deaths had been mentioned, and a rendezvous set up, in a coffee shop in Inglewood, which Hackett would monitor.

The cab line was long but brisk, and Inglewood was just the other side of the 405 from the airport, so they got to the designated coffee shop with time to spare. The place was one of many lining the street. Most had tiny outdoor tables and Italian words on their chalk boards, but Westwood’s pick didn’t. It was a straight-up vinyl-and-linoleum antique, faded over the decades to a dull khaki color. It was about a quarter full, with men on their own, all of them silently reading newspapers, or staring into space. None of them looked like a science editor.

“We’re early,” Chang said. “He’ll be late.”

So they took a booth, sitting side by side at a laminate table, on a bench upholstered in tuck-and-roll vinyl, that might have started out deep red and glittery, but was now as khaki as everything else. They ordered coffee, one hot, one iced. They waited. The place was quiet. Just the turning of newspaper pages and the clink of ironstone cups on ironstone saucers.

Five minutes.

Then eventually Westwood arrived. He looked nothing like Reacher expected, but the reality fit the bill just as well as the preconceptions had. He was an outdoors type, not a lab rat, and sturdy rather than pencil-necked. He looked like a naturalist or an explorer. He had short but unruly hair, fair going gray, and a beard of the same length and color. He was red in the face from sunburn and had squint lines around his eyes. He was forty-five, maybe. He was wearing clothing put together from high-tech fabrics and many zippers, but it was all old and creased. He had hiking boots on his feet, with speckled laces like miniature mountain-climbing ropes. He was toting a canvas bag about as big as a mail carrier’s.

He paused inside the door, and identified Chang instantly, because she was the only woman in the place. He slid in opposite, across the worn vinyl, and hauled his bag after him. He put his forearm on the table and said, “I assume your other colleague is still missing. Mr. Keever, was it?”

Chang nodded and said, “We hit the wall, as far as he’s concerned. We’re dead-ended. We can trace him so far, but no further.”

“Have you called the cops?”

“No.”

“So I guess my first question is, why not?”

“It would be a missing persons report. That’s all, at this stage. He’s an adult, gone three days. They might take the report, but they wouldn’t do anything with it. It would go straight to the back burner.”

“Two hundred deaths might get them interested.”

“We can’t prove anything. We don’t know who, why, when, where, or how.”

“So I’m buying you breakfast because there’s a guy you haven’t even reported missing, and two hundred deaths you know nothing about?”

“You’re buying us breakfast because you’re getting the book rights. You can buy all the breakfasts.”

“Except so far this breakfast alone is worth more than the book rights. So far the book rights and fifty cents will get me a cup of coffee.”

Reacher said, “You’re a scientist. You need to think about it scientifically.”

“In what way?”