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“They’ll be there in thirty minutes,” she said.
Elwood turned the truck around and looped back past the diner to the two-lane. He drove across it and into the mirror-image approach road. The motel was dead ahead. Long and low, barn red like New England, straight and true and well maintained. Elwood drove in under the portico and stopped at the office door. They went inside.
The kid was at the desk. The same guy. Tall, thin, the shock of curly black hair. His face looked better. The old bruise was almost gone. He remembered Reacher and Elwood. He said, “Welcome back.” He slid keys across the counter. He said, “I gave you room two and room twelve.”
“A quiet night guaranteed,” Reacher said. “No one in between.”
“It isn’t always this quiet. We just had a big crew in, replacing solar panels.”
“Your business model is working.”
“Between the servers and the solar there’s always something needs fixing.”
“You told me that before. You should put it on your business card.”
“It’s on the office wall. I made a sign. I look at it on days like this, when it’s slow.”
“Do you remember four, five months back?”
“Anything in particular?”
“One of the data centers went bust.”
“Yeah, we did OK out of that. We had engineers in and out for a couple of weeks, doing inspections for prospective buyers. Then one of them bought the place, and sent their own engineers in to configure it, so that was another couple of weeks.”
“And they built curbs and laid gravel.”
“Yeah, I saw them do the curbs. I would wander over there in my lunch break to take a look. They were pretty quick. Only about three days, and it could be more than a mile long, total, all four sides. I didn’t see the gravel go down. They did it all in one night, when my dad was working.”
“What do you think of the result?”
“It looks good to me. It matches the solar fields. I was thinking we should do the same with this place. You know, blacktop where we need it, and curbs and gravel all around. Like a Summertown brand. What do you think?”
“Wouldn’t make any difference to me,” Reacher said. “You’re the only game in town. I wouldn’t get here and think, shit, now I got to drive another hundred miles because I like gravel and these guys don’t have any.”
“Fair point,” the kid said.
“Which one of the data centers was it that got sold?”
“The middle one.”
“Do you know who bought it?”
“I’m not sure we ever heard a name.”
“I understand you get fifty-one inches of snow in an average winter.”
“What?”
“Snow,” Reacher said. “In the winter.”
“Sounds about right. I never measured it exactly.”
“Do you have your own snowplow?”
“Sure,” the kid said. “The county takes care of the two-lane, and I do the rest.”
“Good to know,” Reacher said.
