Free The Affair: A Reacher Novel by Lee Child

table, and on the floor there was a threadbare Persian rug worn thin by use and beating.
    I pulled the drapes closed and unpacked, which consisted solely of assembling my new toothbrush and propping it upright in a milky glass on the bathroom shelf. I had no toothpaste, but then, I had never been convinced toothpaste was anything more than a pleasant-tasting lubricant. An army dentist I had known swore that the mechanical action of the brush’s bristles was all that was needed for perfect oral health. And I had chewing gum for freshness. And I still had all my teeth, apart from a top-row molar knocked out many years before by a lucky knuckle in a street fight in Cleveland, Ohio.
    The clock in my head said it was about twenty after eleven. I sat on the bed for a spell. I had been up early and was moderately tired, but not exhausted. And I had things to do, and limited time to do them in, so I waited long enough to let an average person get off to sleep, and then I went out to the corridor again. Deveraux’s light was off. There was nothing showing under her door. I crept down the stairs to the lobby. The reception desk was once again unattended. I went out to the street and turned left, toward territory as yet unexplored.

Chapter
14
    I looked at the whole length of Main Street as carefully as was possible in the gray moonlight. It ran on south for about two hundred yards, as straight as a die, and then it narrowed a little and started to meander and became residential, with modest homes randomly spaced in yards of varying sizes. The west side of the straight downtown stretch had stores and commercial operations of various kinds, punctuated with narrow alleys, some of which led onward into the scrub and had more small houses on the left and the right. Those stores and commercial operations were matched by similar establishments on the east side of Main Street, neatly in line with the diner and the hotel, and the alleys to the west were matched by broader paved passageways opposite, which linked all the way through to a one-sided street built parallel to and behind Main Street. I guessed that one-sided street had been the whole point of the town in the early days, and was certainly the point in my being there that night.
    It ran north and south and had a long line of establishments that faced the railroad track across nothing but a blank width of beaten earth. I imagined old passenger trains wheezing to a stop, with their panting locomotives next to the water tower a little ways up the line, the trains’ long windowed sides stretching south. I imagined restaurant staff and café owners running across the beaten earth and placing wooden steps below the train doors. I imagined passengersstepping down, spilling out, dry and hungry from their long haul, hundreds of them eagerly crossing the width of earth, and then eating and drinking their fill. I imagined coins clattering, cash registers ringing, the train whistles blowing, the passengers returning, the trains moving onward, the wooden steps being retrieved, then stillness returning for an hour, then the next train easing in, and the whole process repeating itself endlessly.
    That single-sided street had powered the local economy, and it still did.
    The passenger trains were long gone, of course, and so were the cafés and the restaurants. But the cafés and the restaurants had been replaced by bars, and auto parts stores, and bars, and loan offices, and bars, and gun shops, and bars, and secondhand stereo stores, and bars, and the trains had been replaced by streams of cars coming in from Kelham. I imagined the cars parking on the beaten earth, and small groups of Rangers-in-training spilling out and spending Uncle Sam’s money up and down the row. A captive market, miles from anywhere, like Garber had said, just like the railroad passengers back in the day. I had seen the proposition repeated at a hundred bases all around the world. The cars would be old Mustangs or Gran