Echo Burning

wasn’t as comfortable. It was narrow and there were old dust bunnies up there. A wire coat hanger and a plastic bag with a word on it too long to read. But she could lie down flat and hide. It was a good place, she thought. Difficult to get up to. She had climbed on the smaller shelves at the side. They were like a ladder. Very high. But it was dusty. She might sneeze. She knew she mustn’t. Was she high enough? He wasn’t a very tall man. She held her breath.

    Alice kept the speed steady at sixty. The first motel they came back to was on the left side of the road. It had a low tended hedge running a hundred yards to screen the parkinglot. There was a center office and two one-story wings of six rooms each. The office was dark. There was a soda machine next to it, glowing red. Five cars in the lot.
    “No,” Reacher said. “We don’t stop at the first place we see. We’d more likely go for the second place.”
    The second place was four hundred yards south.
    And it was a possibility.
    It was built at right angles to the road. The office was face-on to the highway but the cabins ran away into the distance behind it, which made the lot U-shaped. And concealed. There were planted trees all around it, wet and dripping from the rain.
    Possible.
    Alice slowed the car to a crawl.
    “Drive through,” he said.
    She swung into the lot and nosed down the row. It was eight cabins long. Three cars were parked. She swung around the far end and up the other side. Eight more cabins. Another three cars. She paused alongside the office door.
    “Well?” she asked.
    He shook his head.
    “No,” he said.
    “Why not?”
    “Occupancy ratio is wrong. Sixteen cabins, six cars. I’d need to see eight cars, at least.”
    “Why?”
    “They didn’t want a place that’s practically empty. Too likely to be remembered. They were looking for somewhere around two-thirds full, which would be ten or eleven cars for sixteen cabins. They’ve got two rooms but right now no car at all, so that would be eight or nine cars for sixteen cabins. That’s the ratio we need. Two-thirds minus two. Approximately.”
    She glanced across at him and shrugged. Eased back to the road and continued south.

    He got a couple of paces toward the door and stopped dead. There was a yellow light off to one side of the lot, casting a low glow over the soaked blacktop. It showed him hisfootsteps. They were a line of curious fluid imprints blotted into the dampness. He could see his heels and his toes and his arches. Mostly toes, because he’d been running. The prints were filmy and wet. They weren’t about to dry up and disappear anytime soon.
    But he couldn’t see her footprints.
    There was just one set of tracks, and they were his. No doubt about it. She hadn’t come out . Not unless she could levitate herself and fly. Which was impossible. He smiled.
    She was hiding in the room.
    He ran the final eight steps and ducked back inside. Closed the door gently and fastened the chain and clicked the lock.
    “Come on out,” he called softly.
    There was no response, but he hadn’t really expected one.
    “I’m coming to get you,” he called.
    He started by the window, where there was an upholstered chair across the corner of the room with a space behind it large enough for a kid to hide. But she wasn’t there. He got on his knees and bent down and looked under the beds. Not there, either.
    “Hey, kid,” he called. “Enough already.”
    There was a shared bedside cabinet with a little door. She wasn’t in there. He straightened up and adjusted his towels. She wasn’t in the bathroom, he knew that. So where was she? He looked around the room. The closet. Of course . He smiled to himself and danced over.
    “Here I come, honey,” he called.
    He slid the doors and checked the floor. There was a folded valise rack and nothing else. There was a set of vertical shelves on the right, nothing in them. A high shelf above, running the whole width of the space. He stretched tall and checked it out. Nothing there. Just dust bunnies and an old wire coat hanger and a plastic bag from a grocery called Subrahamian’s in Cleveland.
    He turned around, temporarily defeated.

    The third motel had a painted sign. No neon. Just a board hung from a gallows with chains. It was carefully lettered ina script so fancy Reacher wasn’t sure what it said. Something Canyon, maybe, with old-fashioned spelling, cañon, like Spanish. The letters were shadowed in gold.
    “I like