Page 56 of Bulletproof Jack: Hunting Lee Child's Jack Reacher

The hotel lobby was as charming as the exterior. A cozy fire in the big fireplace might have warmed the room earlier in the evening, Kim imagined. Subdued lighting, comfortable furnishings, and deep pile carpets under, she loved the hotel already.

At the same time, the cozy ambience nagged her. Intuition. The skinny man would have been grossly out of place here, even before he’d spend the night rolling in the mud.

Perhaps he’d stolen the key card. Russell’s warning repeated in her head. Maybe another guest occupied the room.

Only one way to find out.

The desk clerk wasn’t sitting behind the big desk out front. She didn’t see him anywhere. But it was very late. Maybe he was napping on a cot in the back.

Kim took advantage of his absence to duck into the restroom off the right side of the lobby.

When she pushed the door open, bizarrely blinding ceiling lights bounced off the white marble tile and white fixtures as if she’d stepped from the 1832 lobby directly into a sterile space station five hundred years later.

She closed her eyes against the piercing glare.

After a moment, she opened her eyelids again, slowly allowing her pupils to adjust to the unforgiving blaze. Why the hell did the decorator make the lights so bright and unforgiving in here?

She glanced at her reflection and grimaced. She’d tidied her face in the SUV’s small lighted mirror on the way here. This glaring light ravaged all illusions. No question. She looked worse than a vagrant.

If the desk clerk had been manning his station when she’d entered the hotel, he’d have been smart to summon the police.

Kim ran water from the faucet until the stream warmed. She splashed her face and neck, sluicing the last of the dirt down the drain.

She used a damp paper towel to remove the worst of the dried mud on her clothes and shoes. Then she unwound her long hair from its knot at the back of her neck, smoothed the straggling strands into a ponytail, and twisted the thick, black rope into place again.

When she’d finished, Kim gave herself a critical inspection in the big mirror and frowned.

She looked like she’d wrestled with an alligator in a mud pit. Probably smelled like it, too.

She shrugged. Nothing more she could do here. Maybe Russell would bring the travel bags with him and she could do a proper job.

Kim returned to the lobby. The desk clerk was back at his post. She stood away from the desk, hoping the clerk couldn’t see her very well and wasn’t squeamish about the stench.

Truth was, he didn’t look a lot better than she did. Messy brown hair and rumpled clothes made it look like he’d been sleeping. Perhaps a doorbell of some sort had sounded in the back to wake him when she’d first entered.

The tag fastened to his green shirt saidTodd.

Kim sidled up to the desk and displayed all the pathetic charm she could muster. “Todd, I’m so sorry to wake you.”

Which was true enough. She’d have preferred to let Todd sleep at least another couple of days while she approached the dead man’s room undetected.

“No problem,” he said, rubbing his eyes with his knuckles the way a six-year-old might. “How can I help?”

“I can’t remember which room is mine.” She smiled as she pulled the key card out of her pocket.

She displayed the card with what she hoped was charming chagrin and forgivable incompetence. “The number isn’t written on here anywhere.”

“Yeah. We do that for security. We write the number on the little paper sleeve we gave you for the card at check in,” he said, palm out to receive the card. “Don’t worry. Nobody ever remembers the numbers. I’ll look it up for you.”

He swiped the plastic through a reader of some sort attached to the screen of his computer system. As the data came up on the screen in front of him, he frowned.

“What’s wrong, Todd? Can’t you figure out the room number, either?” Kim said, half flirting with him as if she were clueless. Which, in this instance, she certainly was.

“It’s not that.” He cleared his throat and peered at the screen as if the print were very tiny and his vision simply wasn’t up to the task. “Your visitor profile hasn’t been filled out here. Like, how many people are in your party. You’ve got a two-room suite, but we didn’t swipe your passports and—”

“I’m sorry.” Kim used her hand to cover a big fake yawn. “It’s late. Can we do the rest tomorrow? I’d really like to get to bed.”

“Okay, well, yeah, we can deal with this stuff in the morning, I guess.” Took him a minute to locate a pen to write the room number on a sticky note and hand both the note and the card back to her.

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