by Lee Child
“I’m not a taxi dispatcher.”
“You have a car.”
“I’m not a chauffeur, either.”
“You could lend it to me.”
“How would I get it back?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you even have a license?”
“Not exactly.”
“No deal,” she said.
“OK,” Reacher said.
“What were you going to do for me?”
“Suppose an unknown suspect broke into Croselli’s place, and you got a look inside. Then the unknown suspect fled, but you were too busy securing the scene to chase him.”
“I’ve been waiting two hours for that to happen. But it hasn’t.”
“I could do it.”
“You’re sixteen years old.”
“How is that relevant?”
“Entrapment is bad enough. Entrapment with minors is probably worse.”
“Who would ever know, apart from you and me?”
“I have no way of getting you a ride out of town.”
Reacher paused a beat, and said, “Maybe we should refine the plan.”
“What plan?” Hemingway said. “We don’t have a plan.”
“Probably better if it’s not you who makes the discovery. It could look like a personal vendetta. It could give Croselli’s lawyers something to work with. Probably better if it’s not even the FBI at all. Better if it’s the NYPD. Don’t you think? An independent agency, with no ax to grind. If they discover a dope dealer and his stash in their city, then it’s out there. It can’t be denied. It is what it is. Your people will have to hush up their deal, and they’ll have to admit you were right all along, and you can turn your review procedure into a medal ceremony.”
“The NYPD is busy tonight.”
“They have a narcotics division, surely. Make the call ahead of time. Get a sense of how long they’re going to be, and we’ll try to time it exactly right. I’ll bust in, you hang back and keep an eye on things for a minute until the cops show up, and then we’ll both slip away, and you can drive me north. Meanwhile the NYPD will be building your case for you, and by the time you’re back in town your bosses will be rolling out the red carpet.”
“How far north do you want to go?”
“West Point. It’s up the river a ways.”
“I know where it is.”
“So do we have a deal?”
Hemingway didn’t answer.
* * *
Hemingway finally agreed about thirty minutes later, close to one o’clock in the morning. But the plan went wrong immediately. First they couldn’t find a working phone. They searched up and down Carmine, and they tried the corner of Seventh Avenue, and the corner of Bleecker, and Sixth Avenue, and every pay phone they found was silent. They didn’t know if it was the result of the blackout, or just the general abject state of the city. Reacher figured the phone company had its own electricity, in its own wires, so he was all in favor of carrying on the search, but Hemingway was reluctant to foray further, in case she missed something over at Croselli’s place. So she walked back to the doorway on Carmine and Reacher went on alone, across Sixth, and on the corner between Minetta Street and Minetta Lane he found a phone with a dial tone.
It was too dark to see the numbers, so he dialed by feel, zero for the operator, and he waited a long time before she answered. He asked for the NYPD’s Sixth Precinct, and waited again, even longer, before the call was picked up and a voice barked, “Yes?”
Reacher said, “I want to report illegal narcotics in the West Village.”
The voice said, “What?”
“There’s a storeroom full of drugs on Carmine just been bust open.”
“Any dead bodies?”
“No.”
“Anyone currently in the act of getting killed?”
“No.”
“Fire?”
“No.”
The voice said, “Then stop wasting my time,” and the phone went dead. Reacher hung up and hustled back, sweating, ninety degrees at one in the morning, and he relayed the news to Hemingway, who nodded in the dark and said, “We should have seen that coming. I guess they’re all hands on deck right now.”
“We might have to use your own people.”
“Forget it. They wouldn’t take my call.”
Reacher said, “Still got your little sister’s cassette recorder?”
“It’s my cassette recorder.”
“Still got it?”
“Why?”
“Maybe I can get him to boast on the tape.”
“You?”
“Same principle. You can’t let this look like a vendetta.”
“I can’t let you. You and him, face to face? I have a conscience.”
“What’s he going to do to me?”
“Beat you to death.”
“He’s a made man,” Reacher said. “He has soldiers. Which means he tells other people to do the heavy lifting. Which means he’s out of practice. He’s all hat and no cattle. He’s got nothing. We already saw that on Waverly. Any twelve-year-old in the Philippines could eat his lunch.”
“Is this a Marine Corps thing?”
“I’m not a Marine.”
“How would you get in?”
“I assume the church behind him is locked.”
“Tonight for sure. If not every night.”
“I’ll figure something out.”
“How would the military do it?”
“Marines or army?”
“Army.”
“They’d call in artillery support. Or air-to-ground.”
“Marines?”
“They’d start a fire, probably. That usually brings them out real fast.”
“You can’t do that.”
“I’m not a Marine,” Reacher said again. He looked across the street. The second-story windows were dark, obviously. Which meant Croselli could be right there, watching. But without seeing much. A man in a dark room watching a lit street had an advantage. A man in a dark room watching a dark street might as well have saved himself the eyestrain.
Reacher crossed the dark street, to the double doors. He put his fingertips on them. They felt like sandpaper. Fifty-year-old paint, plus fifty years of smoke and grime and dust. He tapped, first with his fingernails, then gently with his knuckles. The wood felt old and thick and solid, like it had been shipped a hundred years before, from some ancient forest out west. He slid his palms across the surface, until he found the judas gate. Same paint, same grime, same wood. He felt for the hinges, and didn’t find any. He felt for the lock, and rubbed it with his thumb. It seemed to be a small round Yale, worn brass, probably as old as the paint.
He headed back to Hemingway. He said, “The doors are probably two or three inches thick, and the judas gate is all of a piece. All quality lumber, probably hard as a rock by now.”
“Then maybe the army way is the only way.”
“Maybe not. The judas gate opens inward. The lock is an old Yale, put in maybe fifty years ago. I’m guessing they didn’t chase out a void in the door. Not in wood that hard. Not back then. People weren’t so uptight about security. I bet the lock is surface-mounted on the back. Like an old house. The tongue is in a little surface-mounted box. Two screws, is all.”
“There will be another door. Out of the yard, into the building. Might have a newer lock.”
“Then I’ll knock and rely on charm.”
“I can’t let you do this.”
“It’s the least I can do. I screwed you up before. You might have gotten something. You were going to take that slap and keep him talking.”
“He had already found the wire.”
“But he’s arrogant. He’s got an ego. He might have carried on regardless, just to taunt you.”
“That’s what I was hoping.”
“Then let me put it right.”
* * *
Reacher turned around and lifted his shirt and bared his back to Hemingway. He fel
t hot fingers scrabbling at his waistband, gapping it out, fitting the plastic box behind the elastic on his shorts. Then he felt the scrape of a wire, and her hand burrowed up his back, under his shirt, to his shoulder blade, and then on over the top, a curious vertical embrace, her breath on his neck, and then she turned him around again to face her, and her other hand went up the front of his shirt, to find the microphone, to pass it from hand to hand, and to pull it down into place. She stopped with it trapped against his chest, and she kept her hand there, flat, nothing between her palm and his skin except the small pebble of technology.
She said, “I put it in my bra. But you don’t have one.”
“Imagine that,” Reacher said.
“There’s nothing to keep it in place.”
Reacher felt an immediate film of sweat between his chest and her hand. He said, “Got a Band-Aid in your purse?”
“You’re a smart kid,” she said, and she went into a one-hand-two-elbows contortion to root through her bag, and as she craned her neck to look downward into it her forehead touched his lips, just briefly, like a kiss. Her hair was limp, but it smelled like strawberries.
She jerked her bag back up on her shoulder and held up something that crackled slightly. A Band-Aid, he assumed, still in its hygienic wrapper. He took it from her and peeled it open in the space between their faces. Then in turn she took it back from him one-handed and used it to tape the microphone in the trench between his chest muscles. She smoothed the adhesive, once, twice, and then she took her hands out from under his shirt and pulled it down into place.
She put her palm on his chest, like Croselli had put his on hers, pressing hard on the damp cotton, and she said, “He’ll find it.”
“Don’t worry,” Reacher said. “If he puts his hands on me, I’ll beat him to death.”
Hemingway said nothing.
Reacher said, “That’s a Marine Corps thing.”
* * *
The darkness didn’t help. It didn’t help at all. Reacher lined up on the opposite curb, like a sprinter at the start of a race, but he couldn’t exactly see where he was heading. Adjustments were going to be necessary as he ran. He took off, slow and clumsy, partly because of the dark, partly because he was a terrible runner, with long lumbering strides, and three paces out he saw the doors, and two paces out he saw the judas gate, and with one pace to go he saw its lock, and he launched his leading foot in a scything kick, slightly across his body, and he smashed his heel as close to the small Yale circle as he could get, with all his two hundred and twenty pounds behind it, multiplied significantly by the final acceleration of his foot, and by the fact that his whole bulk was moving briskly, if not exactly fast.
But it was enough. The judas gate exploded inward, with what felt like no resistance at all, and Reacher hurtled through the resulting blank rectangle into a space so dark he could make out nothing at all. There was the feel of cobblestones under his feet, and the sour smell of garbage, and sheer dark walls rising on his left and his right and ahead.
He felt his way along the right-hand wall to the back corner of the yard, where he found a door. Ridged glass above, a panel below, a smooth steel handle, and a lock that felt newer. The glass was probably tempered and reinforced with wire. The lock was probably chased into the door and the jamb. A whole different proposition.
He waited, to see if Croselli would come down and open it himself. Which he might. He must have heard the crash of the judas gate. But he didn’t come down. Reacher waited three minutes, breathing hard, stretching his eyes wide open, willing them to see something. But they didn’t. He stepped up to the door again and traced its shape with his hands. The panel below the glass would be the weak spot. Plywood, probably, maybe three-eighths thick, painted, retained in the frame by quarter-round moldings. Reacher was wearing shoes he had bought in the London airport two deployments ago, stout British things with welts and toecaps as hard as steel. They had busted heads and kneecaps already that night. Plywood wasn’t going to be a major problem.
He stepped back and poked forward with his toe to fix his target in his mind. Then he kicked out, bang, bang, concentrating on the corners of the panel, viciously and noisily, until the wood splintered and the moldings came loose.
Then he stopped and listened.
No sound from inside the building.
Which was a bitch. Reacher would have preferred to meet Croselli face to face on the ground floor. He didn’t relish heading up a flight of stairs toward an alert opponent at the top.
He waited some more.
No sound.
He squatted down with his back against the doorframe and punched out the panel with his elbow, until it folded inward, like a miniature door itself, hinged on a few surviving nails. Then he twisted around and put his arm and his shoulder through the hole and reached up and scrabbled for the knob. Which he found easily enough. He had arms like a gorilla. Every childhood photograph of him featured six inches of bare wrist, at the end of every sleeve.
The door opened and he struggled upright and backed off a yard, just in case. But there was no sound inside. Croselli didn’t come out. There was nothing to see. Just darkness. The inside air smelled hot and stale.
Reacher stepped in, to what felt like a narrow lobby with a tiled floor. He slid his feet ahead, one after the other, and he felt a bottom stair. There was a handrail on the left. The opposite wall was less than three feet away. It was painted, and it was damp with condensation.
Reacher went up the stairs, his right hand out in front of him, his left holding the handrail. There was a yard-wide half landing, and then the stairs doglegged and continued upward. At the top was dusty superheated air and a six-by-three upstairs lobby with a sticky carpet and a door at each end. A front room, and a back room.
Under the back room door was a bar of faint warm light.
Reacher stared at it, like a thirsty man in the desert might stare at a cold drink. It was a candle, probably. It was the first manmade light he had seen in more than three hours.
He put his hand under his shirt at the back and pushed the button Hemingway had showed him. It’s red, she had said, which hadn’t helped, because he didn’t have eyes in the back of his head, and it was pitch dark anyway. So he had learned it by feel. He tapped his chest, so that a thump could mark the start of the recording. Then he put his hand on the doorknob.
* * *
Reacher twisted the knob and pushed the door, one, two, fast and hard, and he stepped into a room lit by a guttering candle. The flame danced in the rush of air. The room was a twenty-by-twenty space with a dark window in the back wall, and a row of old-fashioned safes on the left, like something out of a black-and-white Western movie about bank robbers, and on the right there was a row of file cabinets and a desk, and sitting at the desk in a leather reclining chair was Croselli. The chair was pushed out and turned sideways, so that he was sitting face-on to the door.
He had a gun in his hand.
It was a Colt M1911, a .45 automatic, standard military issue for sixty-six years, hence the model number. It looked a little scratched and battered. It was all lit up by the candle, which was on the desk, welded to a china plate by a pool of its own wax. A standard household item, a few cents at the hardware store, but it felt as bright as the sun.
Croselli said, “You.”
Reacher said nothing.
Croselli had shed his jacket and pulled down his tie, but his shirt was still wet. He said, “I was expecting Hemingway. What are you tonight, her knight in shining armor? Is she sending a boy to do a man’s job?”
Is he armed? Reacher had asked. Not in the city, Hemingway had said. He can’t afford to be. Not applicable inside his own premises, apparently. Which was a bitch. Reacher looked at the row of safes. There were six of them, shoulder to shoulder, each one about a yard wide and six feet tall. They had keyholes, not combination locks. The door on the far end was wide open, and the void behind it was empty. Their armory, Reacher guessed. For dire emergencies.
Like that very night. Clearly Croselli’s soldiers were all armed, all out on the street, all insuring protection.
“You have a gun,” Reacher said, for the tape.
“I’m defending my property,” Croselli said.
