by Child, Lee
The guy staggered back and clutched at the parlour doorframe, and then kind of fell around it into the room, like tripping over it, but vertically, whirling backward, helpless. Reacher followed, and saw the guy go down. He bounced off the immense eight-speaker cabinet and thumped on his back on the floor.
He put his hand under his suit coat.
Reacher stopped.
Don’t do it, he thought. Reaction. Complications. I don’t care what kind of accommodations you think you got. The law moved slow, as Mrs Shevick knew. She had no time for slow.
Out loud he said, ‘Don’t do it.’
The guy paid no attention.
THIRTY-ONE
The big blunt hand slid higher under the coat, the palm flattening, opening, the fingertips seeking ahead for the butt of the gun. Probably a Glock, like the other guy. Point and shoot. Or not, preferably. Reacher scoped out the time and the space and the relative distance. The guy’s hand still had inches to travel, a grip still to organize, a draw, an aim, all while lying on his back, and maybe groggy from blows to the head. In other words slow, but still faster than Reacher could beat, under the circumstances, because whatever else, the guy’s hand was already way up high under his coat, slow as it was, whereas both of Reacher’s hands were still down below his waist, held low and away from his sides, wrists bent back, in a whoa calm down don’t do it kind of gesture.
Far from his jacket pockets.
Not that he wanted to use a gun.
Not that he needed to.
He saw a better alternative. Somewhat improvised. By no means perfect. On the upside, it would get the job done. No question about that. With an extremely rapid deployment time, followed by speed and efficiency thereafter. That was the good news. On the downside, it was almost certainly a gross breach of etiquette. Almost certainly professionally offensive. Also no doubt personally offensive. Like guys out west with their hats. Some things you just didn’t touch.
Some things you had to.
Reacher snatched Barton’s Fender bass out of its stand and gripped it vertically by the neck and instantly smashed it straight down, end-on into the Albanian guy’s throat. Like thrusting a post hole shovel deep into hard-packed dirt. Same kind of action, same kind of aim, same kind of violent stabbing downward force.
The Albanian guy went still.
Reacher put the guitar back in its stand.
‘I apologize,’ he said. ‘I hope I didn’t damage it.’
‘Don’t worry,’ Barton said. ‘It’s a Fender Precision. It’s a ten-pound plank of wood. I got it from a pawn shop in Memphis, Tennessee, for thirty-four dollars. I’m sure worse things have happened in its life.’
The clock in Reacher’s head showed ten past four in the morning. The guy on the floor was still breathing. But in a shallow, desperate kind of a way, with a reedy plastic wheeze, in and out, in and out, as fast as he could. Like panting. But without getting anywhere. Probably the fault of the strap button on the bottom of the guitar, punching a half-inch ahead of the mass of the body itself. Probably clipped a vital component. Larynx, or pharynx, or some other kind of essential structure, made of cartilage and spelled with letters from late in the alphabet. The guy’s eyes were rolled up in his head. His fingers were scrabbling gently against the floor, as if trying to get a grip or a purchase on something. Reacher squatted down and went through his pockets, and took his gun, and his phone, and his wallet, and his car keys. The gun was another Glock 17, not recent vintage, worn, but well maintained. The phone was a flat black thing with a glass screen, the same as every other phone. The wallet was a black leather item moulded by time into the shape of a potato. It was stuffed with hundreds of dollars in cash, and a raft of cards, and a local in-state driver’s licence, with the guy’s picture on it, and the name Gezim Hoxha. He was forty-seven years old. He drove a Chrysler, according to the logo on his car keys.
Hogan asked, ‘What are we going to do with him?’
Abby said, ‘We can’t let him go.’
‘We can’t keep him here.’
Barton said, ‘He needs medical attention.’
‘No,’ Reacher said. ‘He waived that right when he knocked on the door.’
‘That’s harsh, man.’
‘Would he take me to the hospital? Or you? The shoe on the other foot. That’s what sets the bar. Anyway, we can’t. Hospitals ask too many questions.’
‘We can answer their questions. We were in the right. He pushed his way in. He was a home invader.’
‘Try telling that to a cop getting a grand a week under the table. Could go either way. Could take years. We don’t have time.’
‘He might die.’
‘You say that like it’s a bad thing.’
‘Well, isn’t it?’
‘I would trade him for the Shevicks’ daughter. If you asked me to put a value on things. Anyway, he hasn’t died so far. Maybe not in the peak of condition, but he’s hanging in there.’
‘So what are we going to do with him?’
‘We need to stash him somewhere. Just temporarily. Out of sight, out of mind. Out of harm’s way. Until we know for sure, one way or the other.’
‘Know what?’
‘What his long-term fate is likely to be.’
Silence for a beat.
Then Barton asked, ‘Where could we stash him?’
‘In the trunk of his car,’ Reacher said. ‘He’ll be safe and secure. Maybe not very comfortable, but a crick in the neck is the least of his problems right now.’
‘He could get out,’ Hogan said. ‘They have a safety device now. A plastic handle, that glows in the dark. It pops the trunk from the inside.’
‘Not in a gangster car,’ Reacher said. ‘I’m sure they removed it.’
He lifted the guy under the arms, and Hogan lifted him by the feet, and they carried him out to the hallway, where Abby scooted ahead and opened the street door. She craned out in the dark and checked left and right. She waved an all-clear, and Reacher and Hogan lurched out with the guy, across the sidewalk. The car on the kerb was a black sedan, with a low roof and a high waistline, which made the windows look shallow from top to bottom, like slots. They reminded Reacher of the vision ports in the side of an armoured vehicle. Abby put her hand in Reacher’s pocket and found the guy’s key. She blipped it and the trunk lid raised up. Reacher dumped the guy’s shoulders in first, and then Hogan shuffled around and folded the guy’s legs in afterwards. Reacher checked all around the inside of the lock. No glow-in-the-dark handle. Removed.
Hogan stepped away. Reacher looked down at the guy. Gezim Hoxha. Forty-seven years old. Once a police detective in Tirana. He closed the trunk lid on him, and stepped away to join the others. Once a police detective in the United States Army.
Hogan said, ‘We can’t leave the car here. Not right outside the house. Especially not with their boy in the trunk. Sooner or later they’ll cruise by and spot it and check it.’
Reacher nodded.
‘Abby and I need to use it,’ he said. ‘We’ll park it someplace else when we’re done.’
‘You’re going to drive around with him in the trunk?’
‘Keep your enemies close.’
‘Where are we going?’ Abby asked.
‘When the guy in the trunk talked about people getting banned from playing in their clubs, I thought yeah, that’s obviously a problem, because they got to eat. Then I remembered saying the same words to you once before. When we stopped at the gas station deli counter, on the way to visit with the Shevicks. You asked were they OK with that. I said they got to eat. Their cupboards are always bare. Especially now. I bet they haven’t left the house since the Ukrainians arrived out front. I know how people are. They would be shy and embarrassed and scared to walk past the car, and certainly neither one would let the other do it alone, and they wouldn’t do it together, either, because then the house would be empty behind them, and they would be suspicious the Ukrainians would sneak in and rummage through their underwear draw
ers. So all things considered, I bet they didn’t eat anything yesterday, and won’t eat anything today. We need to take them some food.’
‘What about the car out front of their house?’
‘We’ll go in the back. Probably through someone else’s yard. We’ll do the last part on foot.’
First they drove to the giant supermarket on the road out of town. Like most such places it was open all night, cold, empty, vast, cavernous, flooded with bright hard light. They rolled a cart the size of a bathtub through the aisles, and they filled it up with four of everything they could think of. Reacher paid at the check-out register, all in cash, all from Gezim Hoxha’s potato-shaped wallet. It seemed like the least the guy could do, under the circumstances. They packed the groceries carefully, into six balanced bags. Doing the last part on foot meant carrying them, maybe a decent distance, maybe over gates and fences.
They unlocked the Chrysler and lined up the bags on the rear seat. There was no sound from the trunk. No commotion. Nothing at all. Abby wanted to check the guy was OK.
‘What if he isn’t?’ Reacher said. ‘What are you going to do about it?’
‘Nothing, I guess.’
‘No point checking, then.’
‘How long are we going to leave him in there?’
‘As long as it takes. He should have thought about all this before. I don’t see how his welfare suddenly becomes my responsibility, just because he chose to attack my welfare first. I’m not clear how that works exactly. They started it. They can’t expect me to provide a health plan.’
‘We should be magnanimous in victory. Someone said that.’
‘Full disclosure,’ Reacher said. ‘I told you before. I’m a certain kind of person. Is the guy in the trunk still breathing?’
‘I don’t know,’ Abby said.
‘But there’s a possibility.’
‘Yes, there’s a possibility.’
‘That’s me being magnanimous in victory. Normally I kill them, kill their families, and piss on their ancestors’ graves.’
‘I never know when you’re kidding me.’
‘I guess that’s true.’
‘Are you saying you’re not kidding me now?’
‘I’m saying in my case magnanimity is in short supply.’
‘You’re taking food to an old couple in the middle of the night.’
‘That’s a different word than magnanimous.’
‘Still a nice gesture.’
‘Because one day I could be them. But I’ll never be the guy in the trunk.’
‘So it’s purely tribal,’ Abby said. ‘Your kind of people, or the other kind.’
‘My kind of people, or the wrong kind.’
‘Who’s in your tribe?’
‘Almost nobody,’ Reacher said. ‘I live a lonely life.’
They drove the Chrysler back towards town, and took the left that led them into the east side hinterland, through the original city blocks, and out towards where the Shevicks lived. The old postwar development lay up ahead. By that point Reacher felt he knew it well enough. He figured they could get to a parallel street without the Ukrainians ever seeing them pass by, even at a distance. They could sneak around to the rear of the block and park outside the Shevicks’ back-to-back neighbour’s house. The Chrysler would be lined up with the Lincoln, more or less exactly, nose to nose and tail to tail, but about two hundred feet apart. The depth of two small residential lots. Two buildings in the way.
They cut the lights and idled through the narrow streets, slowly, in the dark. They took a right, ahead of their usual turn, and a left, and they eased to a stop in what they were sure was the right spot. Outside the Shevicks’ back-to-back neighbour. A ranch house with pale siding and an asphalt roof. The same but different. The front half of the structure butted out into an open front yard. The rear half of the structure was included in a large rectangle of head-high fence that ran all around the back yard. To get a mower from front to back, there was a fold-back section of fence, like a gate.
The house had five windows facing the street. One had drapes closed tight behind it. Probably a bedroom. People sleeping.
Abby said, ‘Suppose they see us?’
Reacher said, ‘They’re asleep.’
‘Suppose they wake up?’
‘Doesn’t matter.’
‘They’ll call the cops.’
‘Probably not. They’ll look out the window and see a gangster car. They’ll close their eyes and hope it goes away again. By morning, if anyone were to ask them, they’ll have decided the safest approach is to have forgotten all about it. They’ll say, what car?’
Reacher turned the motor off.
He said, ‘A dog would be a bigger problem. It might start barking. There might be others around. They could set up a big commotion. The Ukrainians might get out to check. Out of sheer boredom, if nothing else.’
‘We bought steaks,’ Abby said. ‘We have raw meat in those bags.’
‘Is a dog’s sense of smell better than its hearing, or is it the other way around?’
‘They’re both pretty good.’
‘About a third of U.S. households own a dog. Just over thirty-six per cent, to be precise. Which gives us a little worse than a two in three chance of being OK. Plus maybe it won’t bark anyway. Maybe the neighbourhood dogs are calm. Maybe the Ukrainians are too lazy to get out to check. Too warm, too comfortable. Maybe they’re fast asleep. I think it’s safe enough.’
‘What time is it?’ Abby asked.
‘Just past twenty after five.’
‘I was thinking about that line I told you, about doing something that scares you, every day. Except it’s only twenty past five in the morning, and I’m already on my second thing.’
‘This one doesn’t count,’ Reacher said. ‘This one is a walk in the park. Maybe literally. Maybe their landscaping is nice.’
‘Also on the subject of twenty past five in the morning, surely the Shevicks won’t be up yet.’
‘They might be. I can’t imagine they’re sleeping well at the moment. If I’m wrong and they are sleeping well, you can wake them up. You can call them on your phone when we get there. You can tell them we’re right outside their kitchen window. Tell them not to turn on any lights at the front of the house. An undisturbed visit is what we want.’
They got out of the car and stood for a second in the silence. The night was grey and the air was damp with mist. Still no noise from the trunk. No kicking, no banging, no yelling. Nothing. They hauled the grocery bags off the rear bench and divided them up. Two and two for Reacher, one and one for Abby. Neither one of them overburdened or lopsided. Good to go.
They stepped into the neighbour’s front yard.
THIRTY-TWO
It was too dark to tell whether the landscaping was nice, but by smell and feel and inadvertent physical contact they could tell it was conventionally planted, with the normal kinds of stuff in the normal kinds of places. At first underfoot was a lawn of tough, springy grass, maybe some new hybrid strain, slick and cold with night-time damp. Then came a crunchy area, some kind of broken slate or shale, maybe a path, maybe a mulch, and beyond it came spiky and coniferous foundation plantings, that scratched loudly at the grocery bags as they brushed by.
Then came the fold-back section of fence, which judging by the state of the lawn got hauled open and shut at least once every couple of weeks, all season long. Even so, it was stiff and noisy. At one point early in its travel it let out a wood-on-wood sound somewhere between a yelp and a bark and a shriek and a groan. Brief, but loud.
They waited.
No reaction.
No dog.
They squeezed through the gap they had opened, shuffling sideways, groceries leading, groceries following. They walked through the back yard. Up ahead in the gloom was the back fence. Which was also the Shevicks’ back fence. In reverse. A mirror image. Theoretically. If they were in the right place.
‘We’re good,’ Abby whispered. ‘This is i
t. Has to be. Can’t go wrong. Like counting squares on a chessboard.’
Reacher stood up tall on tiptoe and looked over the fence. He saw a grey night-time view of the back of a ranch house with pale siding and an asphalt roof. The same but different. But the right place. He recognized it by the way part of the lawn met the back wall of the house. It was the spot where the family photographs had been taken. The GI and the girl in the hoop skirt, with raw dirt at their feet, the same couple on a year-old lawn with a baby, the same couple eight years later with eight-year-old Maria Shevick, on grass by then lush and thick. Same patch of lawn. Same length of wall.
The kitchen light was on.
‘They’re up,’ Reacher said.
Climbing the fence was difficult, because it was in poor condition. The rational approach would have been to bust through it, or kick it down. Which they ruled out on ethical grounds. Instead they spent more than half their climbing energy fighting for equilibrium, trying to keep their weight vertical, not out to the side. They wobbled back and forth like a circus act. They sensed a point beyond which the whole thing would collapse, like a long rotten rippling curtain, maybe the whole width of the yard. Abby went first, and made it, and Reacher passed her the six grocery bags, one at a time, laboriously, hoisting each one high over the fence, and then letting it down as low as he could, the top of the cedar board digging into the crook of his elbow, until it was low enough for her to reach up and safely take.
Then came his turn to climb. He was twice as heavy and three times as clumsy. The fence swayed and yawed a yard one way, then a yard the other. But he got it stabilized and held it steady, and then kind of rolled off, in an inelegant manoeuvre that left him on his back in a flowerbed, but also left the fence still standing.
