Hunting Zero. Джек Марс

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ 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 grabbed a fistful of filthy dreadlocks and slammed the guy’s face into the counter.

      The clerk collapsed to the rough green carpet, moaning as he spat blood onto the floor from his nose and two cracked lips. He groaned and tried to get to his hands and knees. “You… oh, god… you broke my fuckin’ nose, man!”

      Reid snapped up the shotgun. “That’s the least of your concerns right now.” He pressed the barrel into the dirty-blond dreadlocks.

      The clerk immediately dropped to his stomach and whimpered. “Don’t… don’t kill me… please don’t… please… don’t kill me…”

      “Give me your phone.”

      “I don’t… I don’t have one…”

      Reid bent at the waist and quickly patted the guy down. He was being honest; he didn’t have a phone, but he did have a wallet. Reid flipped it open and checked the driver’s license.

      “George.” Reid scoffed. The clerk didn’t look much like a George. “You got a car here, George?”

      “I got, I got a dirt bike, p-parked out back…”

      “Good enough. Here’s what’s going to happen, George. I’m taking your bike. You, you’re going to walk out of here. Or run, if you prefer. You’re going to go to the hospital and get your nose checked out. You’re going to tell them that you were sucker-punched in a bar. You’re not going to say a word about this place, or a word about me.” He leaned over and lowered his voice. “Because I’ve got a police scanner, George. And if I hear one mention, even one word of a man fitting my description, I’m going to come to…” He checked the ID again. “Apartment 121B on Cedar Road, and I’m going to bring your shotgun with me. You got all that?”

      “I got it, I got it.” The clerk blubbered, blood and spittle hanging from his lips. “I got it, I promise I got it.”

      “Now, the man with the girls. When were they here?”

      “There was… was a guy, like you said, but I didn’t see no girls…”

      “But you saw a man that fit that description?”

      “Yes, yes. He was real serious. Barely said a word. Came last night, after dark, and paid for the night in cash…”

      “When did he leave?”

      “I don’t know! Sometime in the night. Left the door СКАЧАТЬ