Free Worth Dying For by Lee Child

sat on the sill and ducked his head and swivelled his legs up and slid inside. He closed the window against the cold and turned and looked around.
    His towels were where he had left them after his shower. Vincent hadn’t made up the room. Reacher guessed that was tomorrow’s task. No great urgency. No one was expecting a sudden demand for accommodation. Not in the wilds of Nebraska, not in the depths of winter.
    Reacher stepped through to the main room and found an undisturbed situation. All was exactly as he had left it. He kept the lights off and the drapes open. He untucked the bed all around and slid in, fully dressed, boots and all. Not the first time he had slept that way. Sometimes it paid to be ready. Hence the boots, and the untucked bedding. He rolled left, rolled right, got as comfortable as he could, and a minute later he was fast asleep.
    *     *     *
    He woke up five hours later and found out he had been wrong. Vincent was not pulling quintuple duty. Only quadruple. He employed a maid. A housekeeper. Reacher was woken by the sound of her feet on the gravel. He saw her through the window. She was heading for his door, getting ready to make up his room. He threw aside the covers and sat up, feet on the floor, blinking. His arms felt a little better. Or maybe they were still numb from sleep. There was mist and cold grey light outside, a bitter winter morning, not long after dawn.
    People see what they expect to see. The housekeeper used a pass key and pushed the door wide open and stepped into what she thought was a vacant room. Her eyes passed over Reacher’s shape on the bed and moved on and it was a whole long second before they came back again. She didn’t really react. She showed no big surprise. No yelp, no scream. She looked like a solid, capable woman. She was about sixty years old, maybe more, white, blunt and square, with blond hair fading slowly to yellow and grey. Plenty of old German genes in there, or Scandinavian.
    ‘Excuse me,’ she said. ‘But Mr Vincent believed this room to be empty.’
    ‘That was the plan,’ Reacher said. ‘Better for him that way. What you don’t know can’t hurt you.’
    ‘You’re the fellow the Duncans told him to turn out,’ she said. Not a question. Just a statement, a conclusion derived from shared intelligence on the phone tree.
    ‘I’ll move on today,’ Reacher said. ‘I don’t want to cause him any trouble.’
    ‘I’m afraid it’s you that will have the trouble. How do you plan to move on?’
    ‘I’ll hitch a ride. I’ll set up south of the crossroads. I’ve done it before.’
    ‘Will the first car you see stop?’
    ‘It might.’
    ‘What are the chances?’
    ‘Low.’
    ‘The first car you see won’t stop. Because almost certainly the first car you see will be a local resident, and that person will get straight on the phone and tell the Duncans exactly where you are. We’ve had our instructions. The word is out. So the second car you see will be full of the Duncans’ people. And the third, and the fourth. You’re in trouble, sir. The land is flat here and it’s wintertime. There’s nowhere to hide.’

FOURTEEN
    T HE HOUSEKEEPER MOVED THROUGH THE ROOM IN AN ORDERLY, preprogrammed way, following a set routine, ignoring the anomaly represented by an illicit guest seated on the bed. She checked the bathroom, as if assessing the size of the task ahead of her, and then she butted the tub armchair with her thigh, moving it back an inch to the position decreed for it by the dents in the carpet.
    Reacher asked, ‘You got a cell phone?’
    The woman said, ‘Sure. Some minutes on it, too.’
    ‘You going to rat me out?’
    ‘Rat who out? This is an empty room.’
    Reacher asked, ‘What’s to the east of here?’
    ‘Nothing worth a lick to you,’ the woman said. ‘The road goes to gravel after a mile, and doesn’t really take you anywhere.’
    ‘West?’
    ‘Same thing.’
    ‘Why have a crossroads that doesn’t lead anywhere,