High Heat

by Lee Child

  Reacher said, “Sure.”

  “You can forget that part now, OK?”

  Reacher said, “This is nuts.”

  Hemingway said, “You hit a made man in the head. What part of that don’t you understand? That just doesn’t happen. Get used to it, kid. And right now you’re in the same room as one of his goons. Who just got off the phone.”

  “I’m sitting next to an FBI agent.”

  Hemingway said nothing in reply to that. Reacher thought: NYU. Sarah Lawrence. Hemingway had never confirmed it either way. He had asked her: How long have you been with the FBI? She had answered: Who says I am?

  He said, “Are you or are you not?”

  She said nothing.

  “It’s not real hard. It’s a yes or no answer.”

  “No,” she said. “It really isn’t.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It’s yes and no. Not yes or no.”

  Reacher paused a beat.

  “What, you’re freelancing here?” he said. “Is that it? This isn’t really your case? Which is why there was no back-up van? Which is why you were using your little sister’s tape player?”

  “It was my tape player. I’m suspended.”

  “You’re what?”

  “Medical grounds. But that’s what they always say. What it means is they took my badge, pending review.”

  “Of what?”

  “Like you said. The lawyers and the bribes and the favors. They’re weighing me in the balance. Me against all the good stuff.”

  “This was Croselli?”

  Hemingway nodded. “Right now he’s fireproof. He had the investigation shut down. I figured I might get him to boast about it, on the tape. I might have gotten something I could use. To make them take me back.”

  “Why wasn’t Croselli armed in the city?”

  “Part of the deal. They all can do what they want in every other way, but the homicide figure has to come down. Give and take. Everyone’s a winner.”

  “Does Croselli know you’re suspended?”

  “Of course he does. He made them do it.”

  “So in fact the goon in the same room as me knows it too, right? Is that what we’re saying here? He knows you’re not about to pull a badge. Or a gun. He knows you’re just a member of the public. Legally, I mean. In terms of your powers of arrest, and so on. And less than that, in terms of your credibility. As a witness against Croselli’s people, I mean.”

  “I told you to go see your brother.”

  “Don’t get all defensive. I’m not blaming you. I need to make a new plan, that’s all. I need to understand the parameters.”

  Chrissie said, “You shouldn’t have gotten involved in the first place.”

  “Why not?”

  “At Sarah Lawrence we would say it was uncomfortably gender normative behavior. It was patriarchal. It spoke to the paternalistic shape of our society.”

  “You know what they would say in the Marine Corps?”

  “What?”

  “They would point out you asked me to stick close by, because you think the Bowery is dangerous.”

  “It is dangerous. Twelve guys are about to show up and kick your butt.”

  Reacher nodded. “We should go, probably.”

  “You can’t,” Hemingway said. “The goon won’t let you. Not until the others get here.”

  “Is he armed?”

  “No. Like I said.”

  “You sure?”

  “Hundred percent.”

  “Do we agree one opponent is better than twelve?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Wait here,” Reacher said.

  Reacher walked across the dim room, as graceful as a bulked-up greyhound, with all the dumb confidence a guy gets from being six-five and two-twenty and sixteen years old. He moved on through the bar, toward the restroom corridor. He had been in relatively few bars in his life, but enough to know they were superbly weapons-rich environments. Some had pool cues, all neatly lined up in racks, and some had martini glasses, all delicate and breakable, with stems like stilettos, and some had champagne bottles, as heavy as clubs. But the CBGB bar had no pool table, and its customers were apparently indifferent to martinis and champagne. The most numerous local resource was long-neck beer bottles, of which there were plenty. Reacher collected one as he walked, and out of the corner of his eye he saw Croselli’s guy get up and follow him, no doubt worried about rear exits or bathroom windows. There was in fact a rear exit, at the end of the restroom corridor, but Reacher ignored it. Instead he stepped into the men’s room.

  Which was perhaps the single most bizarre place he had ever seen, outside of a military installation. The walls were bare brick covered in dense graffiti, and there were three wall-hung urinals and a lone sit-down toilet all exposed up on a step like a throne. There was a two-hole metal sink, and unspooled toilet rolls everywhere. No windows.

  Reacher filled his empty beer bottle with water from the faucet, for extra weight, and he wiped his palm on his T shirt, which neither dried his hand nor made his shirt appreciably wetter. But he got a decent grip on the long glass neck, and he held the bottle low down by his leg and he waited. Croselli’s guy came in seconds later. He glanced around, first amazed by the decor, then reassured by the lack of windows, which told Reacher all he really needed to know, but at sixteen he still played it by the book, so he asked anyway. He said, “Do we have a problem, you and me?”

  The guy said, “We’re waiting for Mr. Croselli. He’ll be here in a minute. Which won’t be a problem for me. But it will be for you.”

  So Reacher swung the bottle, the water kept in by centrifugal force, and it caught the guy high on the cheekbone and rocked him back, whereupon Reacher whipped the bottle down again and smashed it on the lip of a urinal, glass and water flying everywhere, and he jabbed the jagged broken circle into the guy’s thigh, to bring his hands down, and then again into his face, with a twist, flesh tearing and blood flowing, and then he dropped the bottle and shoved the guy in the chest, to bounce him off the wall, and as he came back toward him he dropped a solid head butt straight to the guy’s nose. Which was game over, right there, helped a little by the way the guy’s head bounced off the urinal on his way to the floor, which all made a conclusive little head-injury trifecta, bone, porcelain, tile, good night and good luck.

  Reacher breathed in, and breathed out, and then he checked the view in the busted mirror above the sink. He had diluted smears of the guy’s blood on his forehead. He rinsed them off with lukewarm water and shook like a dog and headed back through the bar into the main room. Jill Hemingway and Chrissie were on their feet in the middle of the dance floor. He nodded them toward the exit. They set off toward him and he waited to fall into step. Hemingway said, “Where’s the goon?”

  Reacher said, “He had an accident.”

  “Jesus.”

  They hustled on, through the bar one more time, into the lobby corridor, fast and hot.

  Too late.

  They got within ten feet of the street door, and then it opened wide and four big guys in sweated-through suits stepped in, followed by Croselli himself. All five of them stopped, and Reacher stopped, and behind him Chrissie and Jill Hemingway stopped, eight people all in a strung-out, single-file standoff, in a hot narrow corridor with perspiration running down the bare brick walls.

  From the far end of the line Croselli said, “We meet again, kid.”

  Then the lights went out.

  * * *

  Reacher couldn’t tell if his eyes were open or closed. The darkness was total and profound, like the next stop after nothing. And the darkness was completely silent, way down at some deep primeval level, all the low subliminal hum of modern life suddenly gone, leaving nothing in its place except blind human shufflings and a kind of whispered eerie keening that seemed to come up from ageless rocks below. From the twentieth century to the Stone Age, at the flick of a switch.

  From behind him Reacher heard Ch
rissie’s voice say, “Reacher?”

  “Stand still,” he said.

  “OK.”

  “Now turn around.”

  “OK.”

  He heard her feet on the floor, shuffling. He searched his last retained visual memory for where the first of Croselli’s guys had stopped. The middle of the corridor, facing dead ahead, maybe five feet away. He planted his left foot and kicked out with his right, hard, blindly, aiming groin-high into the pitch-black emptiness ahead. But he hit something lower, making contact a jarring split second before he expected. A kneecap, maybe. Which was fine. Either way the first of Croselli’s guys was about to fall down, and the other three were about to trip over him.

  Reacher spun around and felt for Chrissie’s back, and he put his right arm around her shoulders, and with his left hand he found Hemingway, and he half pulled and half pushed them back the way they had come, to the bar, where a feeble battery-powered safety light had clicked on. Which meant it hadn’t been the flick of a switch. The whole building had lost power.

  He found the restroom corridor and pushed Chrissie ahead of him and pulled Hemingway behind him, to the rear door, and they barged through it, out to the street.

  Which was way too dark.

  They hustled onward anyway, fast, out in the heat again, muscle memory and instinct compelling them to put some distance between the door and themselves, compelling them to seek the shadows, but it was all shadows. The Bowery was a pitch-dark and sullen ditch, long and straight both ways, bordered by pitch-dark and sullen buildings, uniformly massive and gloomy, their unlit bulk for once darker than the night sky. The skyline sentinels forty blocks north and south weren’t there at all, except in a negative sense, because at the bottom of the sky there were dead fingers where inert buildings were blocking the glow of starlight behind thin cloud.

  “The whole city is out,” Hemingway said.

  “Listen,” Reacher said.

  “To what?”

  “Exactly. The sound of a billion electric motors not running. And a billion electric circuits switched off.”

  Chrissie said, “This is unbelievable.”

  Hemingway said, “There’s going to be trouble. Give it an hour or so, and there’s going to be rioting, and arson, and a whole lot of looting. So you two, right now, head north as far and as fast as you can. Do not go east or west. Do not use the tunnels. Do not stop until you’re north of 14th Street.”

  Reacher said, “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to work.”

  “You’re suspended.”

  “I can’t stand by and do nothing. And you have to get your friend back where you found her. I think those are our basic obligations.” And then she ran, south toward Houston Street, and was lost in the dark within seconds.

  * * *

  The street light on Great Jones was no longer working, but the blue Chevette was still under it, gray and formless in the dark, as yet unmolested. Chrissie opened it up, and they got in, and she started the motor and put it in gear. She didn’t turn on the lights, which Reacher understood. Disturbing the massive darkness didn’t seem right. Or possible, even. The great city felt stunned and passive, an immense organism laid low, implacable and indifferent to tiny scurrying humans. Of which there was a growing number within view. Windows were opening, and folks on lower floors were walking downstairs and coming out, standing near their doors and peering about, full of wonder and apprehension. The heat was still way up there. It wasn’t cooling down at all. A hundred degrees, maybe more, clamping down and now smug and settled and supreme, unchallenged by fans or air conditioning or any other kind of manmade mediation.

  Great Jones Street was one-way west, and they crossed Lafayette and Broadway, and continued on West Third, Chrissie driving slow and tentative, not much faster than walking pace, a dark car in the dark, one of very few about. Maybe drivers had felt compelled to pull over, as part of the general paralysis. The traffic lights were all out. Each new block was newly weird, still and silent, blank and gray, absolutely unlit. They turned north on LaGuardia Place, and went counterclockwise around the bottom right-hand corner of Washington Square, back to the coffee shop. Chrissie parked where she had before, and they got out into the soupy air and the silence.

  The coffee shop was dark, obviously, with nothing to see behind its dusty glass window. The air conditioner above the door was silent. And the door was locked. Reacher and Chrissie cupped their hands and pressed them to the glass and peered through, and saw nothing except vague black shapes in the dark. No staff. No customers. Maybe a health board thing. If the refrigerators went out, maybe they had to abandon ship.

  Reacher said, “Where will your friends have gone?”

  Chrissie said, “No idea.”

  “You said there was a plan.”

  “If one of us gets lucky, we meet back here at midnight.”

  “I’m sorry you didn’t get luckier.”

  “I feel OK now.”

  “We’re still south of 14th Street.”

  “They won’t find you in the dark, surely.”

  “Will we find your friends in the dark?”

  “Why would we want to? They’ll get back by midnight. Until then we should hang out and experience this. Don’t you think? This is pretty amazing.”

  And it was. There was a hugeness to it. Not just a room or a building or a block, but the entire city, slumped inert and defeated all around them, as if it was ruined, as if it was dead, like a relic from the past. And maybe it was more than just the city. There was no glow on any horizon. Nothing from across either river, nothing from the south, nothing from the north. Maybe the whole Northeast was out. Maybe all of America. Or the whole world. People were always talking about secret weapons. Maybe someone had pulled a trigger.

  Chrissie said, “Let’s go look at the Empire State Building. We may never see it like this again.”

  Reacher said, “OK.”

  “In the car.”

  “OK.”

  They went up University, and used Ninth Street across to Sixth Avenue, where they turned north. Sixth Avenue was nothing at all. Just a long black hole, and then a small rectangle of night sky where it ended at Central Park. There were a few cars on it. All were moving slow. Most had their lights off. Like the Chevette. Instinctive, somehow. A shared assumption. Crowd behavior. Reacher caught a sudden whiff of fear. Hide in the dark. Don’t stand out. Don’t be seen.

  Herald Square had people in it. Where Broadway cut across, at 34th Street. Most of them were out in the middle of the triangle, away from the buildings, trying to see the sky. Some of them were formed up in moving bunches, like sports fans leaving the stadium after a win, with the same kind of boisterous energy. But Macy’s windows were all intact. So far.

  They kept going all the way to West 38th, crawling past the dead traffic lights and the cross streets, unsure every time whether they should yield or keep on going, but it turned out there was no real danger of either fender benders or confrontation, because everyone was moving slow and acting deferential, all after you, no, after you. Clearly the spirit so far was cooperation. On the roads, at least. Reacher wondered how long it would last.

  They went east on 38th and turned on Fifth four blocks north of the Empire State. Nothing to see. Just a broad dark base, like both sides of every other block, and then nothing above. Just spectral darkness. They parked on the Fifth Avenue curb, on the block north of 34th Street, and got out for a closer look. Thirty-fourth was a double-wide street, with a clear view east and west, dark all the way, except for an orange glow in the far distance above what must have been Brooklyn. Fires were burning there.

  “It’s starting,” Reacher said.

  They heard a cop car coming north on Madison, and they saw it cross the six-lane width of 34th Street one block over. Its lights looked amazingly bright. It drove on out of sight, and the night went quiet again. Chrissie said, “Why did the power go out?”

  “Don’t know,” Reacher said. “O
verload from all the AC, or a lightning strike somewhere. Or the electromagnetic pulse from a nuclear explosion. Or maybe someone didn’t pay the bill.”

  “Nuclear explosion?”

  “It’s a known side effect. But I don’t think it happened. We’d have seen the flash. And depending where it was, we’d have been burned to a crisp.”

  “What kind of military are you?”

  “No kind at all. My dad’s a Marine, and my brother is going to be an army officer, but that’s them, not me.”

  “What are you going to be?”

  “I have no idea. Probably not a lawyer.”

  “Do you think your FBI friend was right about riots and looting?”

  “Maybe not so much in Manhattan.”