Lee Child - [Jack Reacher 01-16]

by Jack Reacher Series (epub)

  Then I stared at the screen. I wasn’t entirely sure how e-mail worked. Was it instantaneous communication, like a phone call? Or would my reply wait somewhere in limbo before it got to her? I assumed she would be watching for it. I assumed she and Eliot would be spelling each other around the clock.

  Ninety seconds later the screen announced You’ve Got Mail! again. I smiled. This might work. This time her message was longer. Only twenty-one words, but I had to scroll down the tiny screen to read it all. It said: We’ll work the maps, thanks. Prints show 2 bodyguards in our custody are ex-army. All under control here. You? Progress?

  I hit reply and typed hired, probably. Then I thought for a second and pictured Quinn and Teresa Daniel in my mind and added otherwise no progress yet. Then I thought some more and typed re 2 bodyguards ask MP Powell quote 10-29, 10-30, 10-24, 10-36 unquote from me specifically. Then I hit send now. I watched the machine announce Your message has been sent and looked away at the darkness outside the window and hoped Powell’s generation still spoke the same language mine did. 10-29, 10-30, 10-24, and 10-36 were four standard Military Police radio codes that meant nothing much in themselves. 10-29 stood for weak signal. It was a procedural complaint about failing equipment. 10-30 meant I am requesting nonemergency assistance. 10-24 meant suspicious person. 10-36 meant please forward my messages. The 10-30 nonemergency call meant the whole string would attract no attention from anybody. It would be recorded and filed somewhere and ignored for the rest of history. But taken together the string was a kind of underground jargon. At least it used to be, way back when I was in uniform. The weak signal part meant keep this quiet and under the radar. The request for nonemergency assistance backed it up: keep this away from the hot files. Suspicious person was self-explanatory. Please forward my messages meant put me in the loop. So if Powell was on the ball he would understand the whole thing to mean check these guys out on the quiet and give me the skinny. And I hoped he was on the ball, because he owed me. He owed me big time. He had sold me out. My guess was he would be looking for ways to make it up to me.

  I looked back at the tiny screen: You’ve Got Mail! It was Duffy, saying OK, be fast. I replied trying and switched off and nailed the device back into the heel of my shoe. Then I checked the window.

  It was a standard two-part sliding thing. The bottom casement would slide upward in front of the top casement. There was no insect screen. The paint on the inside was thin and neat. The paint on the outside was thick and sloppy from where it had been continually redone to beat the climate. There was a brass catch. It was an ancient thing. There was no modern security. I slipped the catch and pushed the window up. It caught on the thick paint. But it moved. I got it open about five inches and cold sea air blew in on me. I bent down and looked for alarm pads. There weren’t any. I heaved it all the way up and examined the whole of the frame. There was no sign of any security system at all. It was understandable. The window was fifty feet up above the rocks and the ocean. And the house itself was unreachable because of the high wall and the water.

  I leaned out the window and looked down. I could see where I had been standing when Duke fired the bullet. I stayed half-in and half-out of the window for about five minutes, leaning on my elbows, staring at the black ocean, smelling the salt air, and thinking about the bullet. I had pulled the trigger six times. It would have made a hell of a mess. My head would have exploded. The rugs would have been ruined and the oak paneling would have splintered. I yawned. The thinking and the sea air were making me sleepy. I ducked back inside and slammed the casement down and went to bed.

  I was already up and showered and dressed when I heard Duke unlock the door at six-fifteen the next morning, day twelve, Wednesday, Elizabeth Beck’s birthday. I had already checked my e-mail. There were no messages. None at all. I wasn’t worried. I spent ten quiet minutes at the window. The dawn was right there in front of me and the sea was gray and oily and subdued. The tide was out. Rocks were exposed. Pools had formed here and there. I could see birds on the shore. They were black guillemots. Their spring feathers were coming in. Gray was changing to black. They had bright red feet. I could see cormorants and black-backed gulls wheeling in the distance. Herring gulls swooping low, searching for breakfast.

  I waited until Duke’s footsteps had receded and went downstairs and walked into the kitchen and met the giant from the gatehouse face-to-face. He was standing at the sink, drinking water from a glass. He had probably just swallowed his steroid pills. He was a very big guy. I stand six feet five inches tall and I have to center myself quite carefully to walk through a standard thirty-inch doorway. This guy was at least six inches taller than me and probably ten inches wider across the shoulders. He probably outweighed me by two hundred pounds. Maybe by more. I got that core shudder I get when I’m next to a guy big enough to make me feel small. The world seems to tilt a little.

  “Duke is in the gym,” the guy said.

  “There’s a gym?” I said.

  “Downstairs,” he said. His voice was light and high-pitched. He must have been gobbling steroids like candy for years. His eyes were dull and his skin was bad. He was somewhere in his middle thirties, greasy blond, dressed in a muscle shirt and sweatpants. His arms were bigger than my legs. He looked like a cartoon.

  “We work out before breakfast,” he said.

  “Fine,” I said. “Go right ahead.”

  “You too.”

  “I never work out,” I said.

  “Duke’s expecting you. You work here, you work out.”

  I glanced at my watch. Six twenty-five in the morning. Time ticking away.

  “What’s your name?” I asked.

  He didn’t answer. Just looked at me like I was setting some kind of a trap for him. That’s another problem with steroids. Too many of them can rewire your head. And this guy’s head didn’t look like it had started from a very positive place to begin with. He looked mean and stupid. No better way to put it. And not a good combination. There was something in his face. I didn’t like him. I was oh-for-two, as far as liking my new colleagues went.

  “It’s not a difficult question,” I said.

  “Paulie,” he said.

  I nodded. “Pleased to meet you, Paulie. I’m Reacher.”

  “I know,” he said. “You were in the army.”

  “You got a problem with that?”

  “I don’t like officers.”

  I nodded. They had checked. They knew what rank I had held. They had some kind of access.

  “Why not?” I asked. “Did you fail the OCS exam?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Let’s go find Duke,” I said.

  He put his glass of water down and led me out to a back hallway and through a door to a set of wooden cellar stairs. There was a whole basement under the house. It must have been blasted out of solid rock. The walls were raw stone patched and smoothed with concrete. The air was a little damp and musty. There were naked lightbulbs hanging in wire cages close to the ceiling. There were numerous rooms. One was a good-sized space with white paint all over it. The floor was covered with white linoleum. There was a smell of old sweat. There was an exercise bicycle and a treadmill and a weights machine. There was a heavy bag hanging from a ceiling joist. There was a speed bag near it. Boxing gloves on a shelf. There were dumbbells stored in wall racks. There were free weights stacked loose on the floor next to a bench. Duke was standing right next to it. He was wearing his dark suit. He looked tired, like he had been up all night. He hadn’t showered. His hair was a mess and his suit was creased and wrinkled, especially low down on the back of the coat.

  Paulie went straight into some kind of a complicated stretching routine. He was so muscle-bound that his legs and arms had limited articulation. He couldn’t touch his shoulders with his fingers. His biceps were too big. I looked at the weights machine. It had all kinds of handles and bars and grips. It had strong black cables that led through pulleys to a tall stack of lead plates. You would have to be able
to lift about five hundred pounds to move them all.

  “You working out?” I said to Duke.

  “None of your business,” he replied.

  “Me either,” I said.

  Paulie turned his giant neck and glanced at me. Then he lay down on his back on the bench and shuffled around until his shoulders were positioned underneath a bar resting on a stand. The bar had a bunch of weights on either end. He grunted a bit and wrapped his hands around the bar and flicked his tongue in and out like he was preparing for a major effort. Then he pressed upward and lifted the bar off the stand. The bar bent and wobbled. There was so much weight on it that it curved way down at the ends, like old film of Russian weight-lifters at the Olympics. He grunted again and heaved it up until his arms were locked straight. He held it like that for a second and then crashed it back into the stand. He turned his head and looked straight at me, like I was supposed to be impressed. I was, and I wasn’t. It was a lot of weight, and he had a lot of muscle. But steroid muscle is dumb muscle. It looks real good, and if you want to pit it against dead weight it works just fine. But it’s slow and heavy and tires you out just carrying it around.

  “Can you bench-press four hundred pounds?” he called. He was a little out of breath.

  “Never tried,” I said.

  “Want to try now?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Wimpy little guy like you, it could build you up.”

  “I’m officer class,” I said. “I don’t need building up. I want some four-hundred-pound weight bench-pressed, I just find some big stupid ape and tell him to do it for me.”

  He glowered at me. I ignored him and looked at the heavy bag. It was a standard piece of gym equipment. Not new. I pushed it with my palm and set it swinging gently on its chain. Duke was watching me. Then he was glancing at Paulie. He had picked up on some vibe I hadn’t. I pushed the bag again. We had used heavy bags extensively in hand-to-hand combat training. We would be wearing dress uniforms to simulate street clothes and we used the bags to learn how to kick. I once split a heavy bag with the edge of my heel, years ago. The sand dumped right out on the floor. I figured that would impress Paulie. But I wasn’t going to try it again. The e-mail thing was hidden in my heel and I didn’t want to damage it. I made an absurd mental note to tell Duffy she should have put it in the left shoe instead. But then, she was left-handed. Maybe she had thought she was doing the right thing all along.

  “I don’t like you,” Paulie called. He was looking straight at me, so I assumed he was talking to me. His eyes were small. His skin glittered. He was a walking chemical imbalance. Exotic compounds were leaking from his pores.

  “We should arm wrestle,” he said.

  “What?”

  “We should arm wrestle,” he said again. He came up right next to me, light and quiet on his feet. He towered over me. He practically blotted out the light. He smelled of sharp acrid sweat.

  “I don’t want to arm wrestle,” I said. I saw Duke watching me. Then I glanced at Paulie’s hands. They were clenched into fists, but they weren’t huge. And steroids don’t do anything for a person’s hands, unless they exercise them, and most people don’t think to do that.

  “Pussy,” he said.

  I said nothing.

  “Pussy,” he said again.

  “What’s in it for the winner?” I asked.

  “Satisfaction,” he said.

  “OK.”

  “OK what?”

  “OK, let’s do it,” I said.

  He seemed surprised, but he moved back to the weights bench fast enough. I took my jacket off and folded it over the exercise bicycle. Unbuttoned my right cuff and rolled my sleeve up to my shoulder. My arm looked very thin next to his. But my hand was a shade bigger. My fingers were longer. And what little muscle I had in comparison to him came from pure genetics, not out of some pharmacist’s bottle.

  We knelt down facing each other across the bench and planted our elbows. His forearm was a little longer than mine, which was going to put a kink in his wrist, which was going to help me. We slapped our palms together and gripped. His hand felt cold and damp to me. Duke took up station at the head of the bench, like a referee.

  “Go,” he said.

  I cheated from the first moment. The aim of arm wrestling is to use the strength in your arm and shoulder to rotate your hand downward, taking your opponent’s hand with it, to the mat. I had no chance of doing that. Not against this guy. No chance at all. It was going to be all I could do to keep my own hand in place. So I didn’t even try to win. I just squeezed. A million years of evolution have given us an opposable thumb, which means it can work against the other four fingers like a pincer. I got his knuckles lined up and squeezed them mercilessly. And I have very strong hands. I concentrated on keeping my arm upright. Stared into his eyes and squeezed his hand until I felt his knuckles start to crush. Then I squeezed harder. And harder. He didn’t give up. He was immensely strong. He kept the pressure on. I was sweating and breathing hard, just trying not to lose. We held it like that for a whole minute, straining and quivering in the silence. I squeezed harder. I let the pain build up in his hand. Watched it register in his face. Then I squeezed harder still. That’s what gets them. They think it’s already gotten as bad as it’s going to get, and then it gets worse. And then worse still, like a ratchet. Worse and worse, like there’s an infinite universe of agony ahead of them, stepping up and up and up, remorselessly, like a machine. They start concentrating on their own distress. And then the decision starts flickering in their eyes. They know I’m cheating, but they realize they can’t do anything about it. They can’t look up helplessly and say he’s hurting me! It’s not fair! That makes them the pussy, not me. And they can’t face that. So they swallow it. They swallow it and they start worrying about whether it’s going to get any worse. And it is. For sure. There’s plenty more to come. There’s always more to come. I stared into Paulie’s eyes and squeezed harder. Sweat was making his skin slick, so my hand was moving easily over his, tighter and tighter. There were no friction burns to distract him. The pain was all right there in his knuckles.

  “Enough,” Duke called. “It’s a tie.”

  I didn’t loosen my grip. Paulie didn’t back off with the pressure. His arm was as solid as a tree.

  “I said enough,” Duke called. “You assholes have got work to do.”

  I raised my elbow up high so he couldn’t surprise me with a last-second effort. He looked away and dragged his arm off the bench. We let go of each other. His hand was marked vivid red and white. The ball of my thumb felt like it was on fire. He pushed himself off his knees and stood up and walked straight out of the room. I heard his heavy tread on the wooden staircase.

  “That was real stupid,” Duke said. “You just made another enemy.”

  I was out of breath. “What, I was supposed to lose?”

  “It would have been better.”

  “Not my way.”

  “Then you’re stupid,” he said.

  “You’re head of security,” I said. “You should tell him to act his age.”

  “Not that easy.”

  “So get rid of him.”

  “That’s not easy either.”

  I stood up slowly. Rolled my sleeve down and buttoned my cuff. Glanced at my watch. Nearly seven in the morning. Time ticking away.

  “What am I doing today?” I asked.

  “Driving a truck,” Duke said. “You can drive a truck, right?”

  I nodded, because I couldn’t say no. I had been driving a truck when I rescued Richard Beck.

  “I need to shower again,” I said. “And I need some clean clothes.”

  “Tell the maid,” he said. He was tired. “What am I, your damn valet?”

  He watched me for a second and headed for the stairs and left me all alone in the basement. I stood and stretched and panted and shook my hand loose from the wrist to ease the strain. Then I retrieved my jacket and went looking for Teresa Daniel. Theoretically she c
ould be locked up somewhere down there. But I didn’t find her. The basement was a warren of spaces carved and blasted out of the rock. Most of them were self-explanatory. There was a furnace room filled with a roaring boiler and a bunch of pipes. There was a laundry room, with a big washing machine sitting high on a wooden table, so it would drain by gravity into a pipe that ran out through the wall at knee height. There were storage areas. There were two locked rooms. Their doors were solid. I listened hard but heard nothing from inside them. I knocked gently and got no response.

  I headed back upstairs and met Richard Beck and his mother in the ground-floor hallway. Richard had washed his hair and parted it low on the right and swept it sideways so it hung down thickly on the left, to hide his missing ear. It looked like the thing old guys do to hide the fact they’re going bald on top. The ambivalence was still there in his face. He looked comfortable in the dark safety of his house, but I could see he also felt a little trapped. He looked pleased enough to see me. Not just because I had saved his ass, but maybe because I was a random representation of the outside world, too.

  “Happy birthday, Mrs. Beck,” I said.

  She smiled at me, like she was flattered that I’d remembered. She looked better than she had the day before. She was easily ten years older than me, but I might have paid her some attention if we’d met somewhere by chance, like a bar or a club or on a long train ride.

  “You’ll be with us for a while,” she said. Then it seemed to dawn on her why I would be with them for a while. I was hiding out there because I had killed a cop. She looked confused and glanced away and moved on through the hallway. Richard went with her and looked back at me, once, over his shoulder. I found the kitchen again. Paulie wasn’t there. Zachary Beck was waiting for me instead.

  “What weapons did they have?” he asked. “The guys in the Toyota?”

  “They had Uzis,” I said. Stick to the truth, like all good scam artists. “And a grenade.”