Hunting Zero. Джек МарсЧитать онлайн книгу.
warehouse across the street from the dingy motel, dimly lit by only a few yellow bulbs outside. A hand-painted sign facing the street told him that he was in the right place.
He scanned left and right as he hurried across the empty street. It was quiet here, eerily quiet. There were three cars in the lot, each spaced out along the row of rooms facing him—and one of them was clearly the white SUV that had been stolen from the used car lot in Maryland.
It was parked right outside of a room with a brass number 9 on the door.
There were no lights on inside; it didn’t seem like anyone was staying there at the moment. Even so, he dropped his bag just outside the door and listened carefully for about three seconds.
He didn’t hear anything, so he pulled the Glock from his shoulder holster and kicked the door in.
The jamb splintered easily as the door flew open and Reid stepped inside, the gun level at the darkness. Yet nothing moved in the shadows. There were still no sounds, no one crying out in surprise or scrambling for a weapon.
His left hand felt along the wall for a light switch and flicked it on. Room 9 had an orange carpet and yellow wallpaper that was curling at the corners. The room had recently been cleaned, insofar as “cleaned” seemed to go at the Starlight Motel. The bed had been hastily made and it reeked of cheap aerosol disinfectant.
But it was empty. His heart sank. There was no one here—no Sara or Maya or the assassin that had taken them.
Reid stepped carefully, looking over the room. Near the door was a green armchair. The fabric of the seat cushion and back was slightly discolored with the imprint of someone who had sat there recently. He knelt beside it, outlining the shape of the person with his gloved fingertips.
Someone sat here for hours. About six-foot, a hundred and eighty pounds.
It was him. He sat here, next to the only point of entry, near the window.
Reid tucked his gun back into its holster and carefully peeled back the bedspread. The sheets were stained; they hadn’t been changed. He inspected them cautiously, lifting each pillow in turn, careful not to disrupt any potential evidence.
He found two blonde hairs, long strands without the roots. They had fallen out naturally. He found a single brunette strand in the same fashion. They were here, together, on this bed, while he sat there and watched them. But why? Why had Rais brought them here? Why had they stopped? Was it another ploy in the assassin’s cat-and-mouse game, or was he waiting for something?
Maybe he was waiting for me. I took too long to follow the clues. Now they’re gone again.
If Watson had called in the fake report, the police would be at the motel in minutes, and Strickland was likely already on a chopper. But Reid refused to leave without something to go on, or else all of it would have been for nothing, just another dead end.
He hurried to the motel office.
The carpet was green and coarse beneath his boots, reminiscent of Astroturf. The place stank of cigarette smoke. Beyond the counter was a dark doorway, and behind it Reid could hear something playing at low volume, a radio or television.
He rang the service bell on the counter, a dissonant chime ringing out in the quiet office.
“Hmm.” He heard a soft grunt from the back room, but no one came.
Reid rang the bell again three times in quick succession.
“All right, man! Jesus.” A male voice. “I’m coming.” A young man stepped out from the rear. He looked to be in his mid-twenties or early thirties; it was hard for Reid to tell on account of his bad skin and red-rimmed eyes, which he rubbed as if he’d just awoken from a nap. There was a small silver hoop in his left nostril and his dirty-blond hair was trussed up in mangy-looking dreadlocks.
He stared at Reid for a long moment, as if annoyed by the very concept of someone walking through the office door. “Yeah? What?”
“I’m looking for information,” Reid said flatly. “There was a man here recently, Caucasian, early thirties or so, with two teenage girls. One brunette, and a younger one, blonde. He drove that white SUV here. They stayed in room nine—”
“You a cop?” the clerk interrupted.
Reid was quickly growing irritated. “No. I’m not a cop.” He wanted to add that he was the father of those two girls, but he stopped himself; he didn’t want this clerk to be able to identify him by any more than he already could.
“Look, bro, I don’t know nothin’ about teenage girls,” the clerk insisted. “What people do here is their business—”
“I just want to know when he was here. If you saw the two girls. I want the name that the man gave you. I want to know if he paid in cash or with a card. If it was a card, I want the last four digits of the number. And I want to know if he said anything at all, or if you overheard anything, that might tell me where he went from here.”
The clerk stared at him for a long moment, and then he let out a hoarse, raspy snicker. “My man, look around you. This ain’t the kind of place that takes names or credit cards or anything like that. This is the kind of place people rent rooms by the hour, if you know what I mean.”
Reid’s nostrils flared. He’d had just about enough of this nitwit. “There must be something, anything, you can tell me. When did they check in? When did they check out? What did he say to you?”
The clerk shot him a pointed stare. “What’s it worth to you? For fifty bucks I’ll tell you whatever you want to know.”
Reid’s fury ignited like a fireball as he reached across the counter, grabbed the young clerk by the front of his T-shirt, and yanked him forward, almost off his feet. “You have no idea what you’re keeping me from,” he growled in the kid’s face, “or how far I’ll go to get it. You’re going to tell me what I want to know or you’ll be eating through a straw for the foreseeable future.”
The clerk put his hands up, his eyes wide as Reid shook him. “All right, man! All right! There’s a, uh, registry under the counter… let me grab it and I’ll look it up. I’ll tell you when they were here. Okay?”
Reid hissed a breath and released the young guy. He stumbled back, smoothed his T-shirt, and then reached for something unseen beneath the counter.
“Place like this,” the clerk said slowly, “the kind of people we get here… they value their privacy, if you know what I mean. They don’t care much for people snooping.” He took two slow steps back, withdrawing his right arm from underneath the counter… as it gripped the dark brown slide of a sawed-off twelve-gauge shotgun.
Reid sighed ruefully and shook his head. “You’re going to wish you hadn’t done that.” The clerk was wasting his time for the sake of protecting scumbags like Rais—not that he knew what Rais was involved in, but other sordid types, pimps and traffickers and the like.
“Go on back to the suburbs, man.” The barrel of the shotgun was pointed at center mass, but it was shaky. Reid got the impression that the kid had used it to threaten, but never actually fired it before.
He had no doubt that he had the faster draw on the clerk; he wouldn’t even hesitate to shoot him, in the shoulder or in the leg, if it meant getting what he needed. But he didn’t want to fire a shot. The report would be heard for a half mile in the industrial park. It might spook whatever guests were staying in the motel—might even prompt someone to call the police, and he didn’t need that attention.
Instead he took a different approach. “You sure that thing’s loaded?” he asked.
The clerk glanced down at the shotgun for a dubious second. In that moment, with his gaze averted, Reid planted a hand firmly on the counter and vaulted over it easily. At the same time he swung out his right leg and kicked the shotgun out of the clerk’s hands. As soon as his feet were on the ground he leaned forward and swung his elbow into the kid’s nose. A sharp gasp erupted from the clerk’s throat as blood flowed from both nostrils.
Then, just for good measure, Reid