Page 4 of The Drifter

But I will not love one.

I picked up my pen. I opened the leather book to the arrivals page, and I wrote Magnolia Suite—hold, open, and then I stopped, because the next column wanted a name.

There wasn't one.

So, I left it blank. I closed the book, and I went back to work.

2

CLINT

The coffee was bad, and the cup never got empty, which was the whole arrangement. Anybody who tells you they'd rather have the good stuff is lying or from somewhere else.

The place was called the Hi-Way. It had been called that since before anybody in it was born. The sign out front still promised air conditioning like it was news. Truck stop town. A hundred and some miles from where I'd started and nowhere in particular from where I was going. Eighteen-wheelers idling out on the shoulder. A water tower with the town's name half faded off it. The kind of place that exists because the road needed somewhere to stop.

I'd taken the booth in the back corner. I take the back corner. Two exits—the front door with the bell on it, the swinging door to the kitchen that would put me in an alley on the north side of the building in about nine seconds. I'd counted them on the way in without deciding to. It's not a thing I do anymore. It's a thing that happens to me, the way some men crack their knuckles.

Six-forty in the morning, and the room was near full.

Old men, mostly. Ranchers and retired ranchers and men who'd been retired so long, the ranch had gone to somebody else's boy and they still came in at six-thirty to say so. A four-top of them by the window had the ruined, comfortable look of men who'd been having the same argument for fifty years and would be disappointed to win it. Feed caps. Snap-button shirts washed to the color of dishwater. Hands like tack. There was a Sons of Hermann calendar on the wall behind the register with a month on it that had already gone by.

They'd looked me over when I came in. Every one of them. Not hard, just thorough.

I'm a stranger everywhere. I've made my peace with it. But Texas has a way of reading its own. What they saw was blue jeans gone soft at the knee, a T-shirt that had seen better decades and had no holes in it, and boots. The boots did most of the talking. They were shot. The heels were run over on the outside. The leather had given up any pretense of shape and pulled on like a pair of house slippers. Any man in that room could look at them and know I hadn't bought them last spring to look like something.

So, the looking stopped, and the arguing started back up, and I got left alone. Which is the only hospitality I've ever needed.

My brother Tommy told me once I was turning into Reacher.

We were standing in a parking lot somewhere and he'd been looking at my whole situation—the pack, the boots, the nothing. He'd said it with that grin he's had since he was five and could get away with anything.

I asked him what was wrong with that.

He rolled his eyes so hard I thought he'd pull something.

I love my brothers more than I have any right to. They stayed in their respective services. Every one of them stayed in, and I was the first one to punch out. There's a version of that story where it means I was the weak one.

That's not the version. I was good at it. I was better than good. The thing nobody understands is that I loved it. I loved the work. Twelve countries and change, and I loved the whole ugly enterprise of it right up until the morning I didn't. Even then, it wasn't the work I was done with.

It was the coming back to the same door.

So, I got out, and I got on the road. The road and I have had an understanding ever since.

I carry a pack. Not much in it—two shirts, socks, a razor, a folding knife, toothbrush, toothpaste, ATM card, cash, and a pistol I've had longer than some marriages, with three extra mags. I don't own a phone. People find that hard to believe, and then they find it rude, and then they get over it. A man with a phone is a man who can be found. I've never been in the business of being found.

The waitress came by with the pot before I'd asked, filled me up, and told me my food was working.

Twenty-two, maybe. Ponytail. June on the tag. She had that small-town competence you can't teach, six tables running and not one of them waiting. She called every man in that room hon except the ones she called by name.

"Thank you, ma'am," I said.

She laughed like nobody had called her that before, and went on down the line.

Then, the bell over the door jingled, and the morning changed.

I knew it before I looked. That's not mysticism, it's reality. A room has a sound and that sound has a shape. When the shape changes, you look.

Two of them.