I was ninety-eight yards closer to the woman on the bench.
She stared on. Most people ask how I had gotten the scar. I didn’t want her to. I didn’t want to talk about bombs. Not with her.
I said, “Show me one hand.”
She asked, “Why?”
“You don’t need two in there.”
“Then what good can it do you?”
“I don’t know,” I said. I had no real idea what I was doing. I’m not a hostage negotiator. I was just talking for the sake of it. Which is uncharacteristic. Mostly I’m a very silent person. It would be statistically very unlikely for me to die halfway through a sentence.
Maybe that’s why I was talking.
The woman moved her hands. I saw her take a solo grip inside her bag with her right and she brought her left out slowly. Small, pale, faintly ridged with veins and tendons. Middle-aged skin. Plain nails, trimmed short. No rings. Not married, not engaged to be. She turned her hand over, to show me the other side. Empty palm, red because she was hot.
“Thank you,” I said.
She laid her hand palm-down on the seat next to her and left it there, like it was nothing to do with the rest of her. Which it wasn’t, at that point. The train stopped in the darkness. I lowered my hands. The hem of my shirt fell back into place.
I said, “Now show me what’s in the bag.”
“Why?”
“I just want to see it. Whatever it is.”
She didn’t reply.
She didn’t move.
I said, “I won’t try to take it away from you. I promise. I just want to see it. I’m sure you can understand that.”
The train moved on again. Slow acceleration, no jerk, low speed. A gentle cruise into the station. A slow roll. Maybe two hundred yards, I thought.
I said, “I think I’m entitled to at least see it. Wouldn’t you agree?”
She made a face, like she didn’t understand.
She said, “I don’t see why you’re entitled to see it.”
“You don’t?”
“No.”
“Because I’m involved here. And maybe I can check it’s fixed right. For later. Because you need to do this later. Not now.”
“You said you were a cop.”
“We can work this out,” I said. “I can help you.” I glanced over my shoulder. The train was creeping along. White light up ahead. I turned back. The woman’s right hand was moving. She was juggling it into a firmer grip and slowly shaking it free of the bag, all at once.
I watched. The bag snagged on her wrist and she used her left hand to free it up. Her right hand came out.
Not a battery. No wires. No switch, no button, no plunger.
Something else entirely.
Chapter 5
The woman had a gun in her hand. She was pointing it straight at me. Low down, dead center, on a line between my groin and my navel. All kinds of necessary stuff in that region. Organs, spine, intestines, various arteries and veins. The gun was a Ruger Speed-Six. A big old .357 Magnum revolver with a short four-inch barrel, capable of blowing a hole in me big enough to see daylight through.
But overall I was a lot more cheerful than I had been a second before. Many reasons. Bombs kill people all at once, guns kill one at a time. Bombs don’t need aiming, and guns do. The Speed-Six weighs north of two pounds fully loaded. A lot of mass for a slender wrist to control. And Magnum rounds produce searing muzzle flash and punishing recoil. If she had used the gun before, she would know that. She would have what shooters call Magnum flinch. A split second before pulling the trigger her arm would clench and her eyes would close and her head would turn away. She had a decent chance of missing, even from six feet. Most handguns miss. Maybe not on the range, with ear defenders and eye protection and time and calm and nothing at stake. But in the real world, with panic and stress and the shakes and a thumping heart, handguns are all about luck, good or bad. Mine or hers.
If she missed, she wouldn’t get a second shot.
I said, “Take it easy.” Just to be making sounds. Her finger was bone-white on the trigger, but she hadn’t moved it yet. The Speed-Six is a double-action revolver, which means that the first half of the trigger’s pull moves the hammer back and rotates the cylinder. The second half drops the hammer and fires the gun. Complex mechanics, which take time. Not much, but some. I stared at her finger. Sensed the guy with the ballplayer’s eyes, watching. I guessed my back was blocking the view from farther up the car.
I said, “You’ve got no beef with me, lady. You don’t even know me. Put the gun down and talk.”
She didn’t reply. Maybe something passed across her face, but I wasn’t watching her face. I was watching her finger. It was the only part of her that interested me. And I was concentrating on the vibrations coming up through the floor. Waiting for the car to stop. My crazy fellow passenger had told me that the R142As weigh thirty-five tons each. They can do sixty-two miles an hour. Therefore their brakes are very powerful. Too powerful for finesse at low speeds. No feathering is possible. They clamp and jerk and grind. Trains often skid the last yard on locked wheels. Hence the characteristic screech as they stop.
I figured the same would apply even after our slow crawl. Maybe more so, relatively speaking. The gun was essentially a weight on the end of a pendulum. A long thin arm, two pounds of steel. When the brakes bit down, momentum would carry the gun onward. Uptown. Newton’s Law of Motion. I was ready to fight my own momentum and push off the bars the other way and jump downtown. If the gun jerked just five inches north and I jerked just five inches south I would be in the clear.
Maybe four inches would do it.
Or four and a half, for safety’s sake.
The woman asked, “Where did you get your scar?”
I didn’t answer.
“Were you gut shot?”
“Bomb,” I said.
She moved the muzzle, to her left and my right. She aimed at where the scar was hidden by the hem of my shirt.
The train rolled on. Into the station. Infinitely slow. Barely walking pace. Grand Central’s platforms are long. The lead car was heading all the way to the end. I waited for the brakes to bite. I figured there would be a nice little lurch.
We never got there.
The gun barrel moved back to my center mass. Then it moved vertical. For a split second I thought the woman was surrendering. But the barrel kept on moving. The woman raised her chin high, like a proud, obstinate gesture. She tucked the muzzle into the soft flesh beneath it. Squeezed the trigger halfway. The cylinder turned and the hammer scraped back across the nylon of her coat.
Then she pulled the trigger the rest of the way and blew her own head off.
Chapter 6
The doors didn’t open for a long time. Maybe someone had used the emergency intercom or maybe the conductor had heard the shot. But whatever, the system went into full-on lockdown mode. It was undoubtedly something they rehearsed. And the procedure made a lot of sense. Better that a crazed gunman was contained in a single car, rather than being allowed to run around all over town.
But the waiting wasn’t pleasant. The .357 Magnum round was invented in 1935. Magnum is Latin for big. Heavier bullet, and a lot more propellant charge. Technically the propellant charge does not explode. It deflagrates, which is a chemical process halfway between burning and exploding. The idea is to create a huge bubble of hot gas that accelerates the bullet down the barrel, like a pent-up spring. Normally the gas follows the bullet out of the muzzle and sets fire to the oxygen in the air close by. Hence muzzle flash. But with a hard contact shot to the head like passenger number four had chosen, the bullet makes a hole in the skin and the gas pumps itself straight in after it. It expands violently under the skin and either rips itself a huge star-shaped exit wound, or it blows all the flesh and skin right off the bone and unwraps the skull completely, like peeling a banana upside down.
That was what had happened in this case. The woman’s face was reduced to rags and ta
tters of bloody flesh hanging off shattered bone. The bullet had traveled vertically through her mouth and had dumped its massive kinetic energy in her brain pan, and the sudden huge pressure had sought relief and found it where the plates of her skull had sealed themselves way back in childhood. They had burst open again and the pressure had pasted three or four large fragments of bone all over the wall above and behind her. One way or the other her head was basically gone. But the graffiti-resistant fiberglass was doing its job. White bone and dark blood and gray tissue was running down the slick surface, not sticking, leaving thin snail trails behind. The woman’s body had collapsed into a slumped position on the bench. Her right index finger was still hooked through the trigger guard. The gun had bounced off her thigh and was resting on the seat next to her.
The sound of the shot was still ringing in my ears. Behind me I could hear muted sounds. I could smell the woman’s blood. I ducked forward and checked her bag. Empty. I unzipped her jacket and opened it up. Nothing there. Just a white cotton blouse and the stink of voided bowel and bladder.
I found the emergency panel and called through to the conductor myself. I said, “Suicide by gunshot. Last-but-one car. It’s all over now. We’re secure. No further threat.” I didn’t want to wait until the NYPD assembled SWAT teams and body armor and rifles and came in all stealthy. That could take a long time.
I didn’t get a reply from the conductor. But a minute later his voice came through the train PA. He said, “Passengers are advised that the doors will remain closed for a few minutes due to an evolving incident.” He spoke slowly. He was probably reading from a card. His voice was shaky. Not at all like the smooth tones of the Bloomberg anchors.
I took a last look around the car and sat down three feet from the headless corpse and waited.
Whole episodes of TV cop shows could have run before the real-life cops even arrived. DNA could have been extracted and analyzed, matches could have been made, perpetrators could have been hunted and caught and tried and sentenced. But eventually six officers came down the stairs. They were in caps and vests and they had drawn their weapons. NYPD patrolmen on the night shift, probably out of the 14th Precinct on West 35th Street, the famous Midtown South. They ran along the platform and started checking the train from the front. I got up again and watched through the windows above the couplers, down the whole length of the train, like peering into a long lit-up stainless-steel tunnel. The view got murky farther down, due to dirt and green impurities in the layers of glass. But I could see the cops opening doors car by car, checking, clearing, turning the passengers out and hustling them upstairs to the street. It was a lightly loaded night train and it didn’t take long for them to reach us. They checked through the windows and saw the body and the gun and tensed up. The doors hissed open and they swarmed onboard, two through each set of doors. We all raised our hands, like a reflex.
One cop blocked each of the doorways and the other three moved straight toward the dead woman. They stopped and stood off about six feet. Didn’t check for a pulse or any other sign of life. Didn’t hold a mirror under her nose, to check for breathing. Partly because it was obvious she wasn’t breathing, and partly because she didn’t have a nose. The cartilage had torn away, leaving jagged splinters of bone between where the internal pressure had popped her eyeballs out.
A big cop with sergeant’s stripes turned around. He had gone a little pale but was otherwise well into a pretty good impersonation of just another night’s work. He asked, “Who saw what happened here?”
There was silence at the front of the car. The Hispanic woman, the man in the NBA shirt, and the African lady. They were all sitting tight and saying nothing. Point eight: a rigid stare ahead. They were all doing it. If I can’t see you, you can’t see me. The guy in the golf shirt said nothing. So I said, “She took the gun out of her bag and shot herself.”
“Just like that?”
“More or less.”
“Why?”
“How would I know?”
“Where and when?”
“On the run-in to the station. Whenever that was.”
The guy processed the information. Suicide by gunshot. The subway was the NYPD’s responsibility. The deceleration zone between 41st and 42nd was the 14th Precinct’s turf. His case. No question. He nodded. Said, “OK, please all of you exit the car and wait on the platform. We’ll need names and addresses and statements from you.”
Then he keyed his collar microphone and was answered by a loud blast of static. He answered that in turn with a long stream of codes and numbers. I guessed he was calling for paramedics and an ambulance. After that it would be up to the transportation people to get the car unhooked and cleaned and the schedule back on track. Not difficult, I thought. There was plenty of time before the morning rush hour.
We got out into a gathering crowd on the platform. Transport cops, more regular cops arriving, subway workers clustering all around, Grand Central personnel showing up. Five minutes later an FDNY paramedic crew clattered down the stairs with a gurney. They came through the barrier and stepped on the train and the first-response cops stepped off. I didn’t see what happened after that because the cops started moving through the crowd, looking around, making ready to find a passenger each and walk them away for further inquiries. The big sergeant came for me. I had answered his questions on the train. Therefore he made me first in line. He led me deep into the station and put me in a hot stale white-tiled room that could have been part of the transport police facility. He sat me down alone in a wooden chair and asked me for my name.
“Jack Reacher,” I said.
He wrote it down and didn’t speak again. Just hung around in the doorway and watched me. And waited. For a detective to show up, I guessed.
Chapter 7
The detective who showed up was a woman and she came alone. She was wearing pants and a gray short-sleeve shirt. Maybe silk, maybe man-made. Shiny, anyway. It was untucked and I guessed the tails were hiding her gun and her cuffs and whatever else she was carrying. Inside the shirt she was small and slim. Above the shirt she had dark hair tied back and a small oval face. No jewelry. Not even a wedding band. She was somewhere in her late thirties. Maybe forty. An attractive woman. I liked her immediately. She looked relaxed and friendly. She showed me her gold shield and handed me her business card. It had numbers on it for her office and her cell. It had an NYPD e-mail address. She said the name on it out loud for me. The name was Theresa Lee, with the t and the h pronounced together, like the or theme or therapy. Theresa. She wasn’t Asian. Maybe the Lee came from an old marriage or was an Ellis Island version of Leigh, or some other longer and more complicated name. Or maybe she was descended from Robert E.
She said, “Can you tell me exactly what happened?”
She spoke softly, with raised eyebrows and in a breathy voice brimming with care and consideration, like her primary concern was my own post-traumatic stress. Can you tell me? Can you? Like, can you bear to relive it? I smiled, briefly. Midtown South was down to low single-digit homicides per year, and even if she had dealt with all of them by herself since the first day she came on the job, I had still seen many more corpses than she had. By a big multiple. The woman on the train hadn’t been the most pleasant of them, but she had been a very long way from the worst.
So I told her exactly what had happened, all the way up from Bleecker Street, all the way through the eleven-point list, my tentative approach, the fractured conversation, the gun, the suicide.
Theresa Lee wanted to talk about the list.
“We have a copy,” she said. “It’s supposed to be confidential.”
“It’s been out in the world for twenty years,” I said. “Everyone has a copy. It’s hardly confidential.”
“Where did you see it?”
“In Israel,” I said. “Just after it was written.”
“How?”
So I ran through my résumé for her. The abridged version. The U.S. Army, thirteen years a military polic
eman, the elite 110th investigative unit, service all over the world, plus detached duty here and there, as and when ordered. Then the Soviet collapse, the peace dividend, the smaller defense budget, suddenly getting cut loose.
“Officer or enlisted man?” she asked.
“Final rank of major,” I said.
“And now?”
“I’m retired.”
“You’re young to be retired.”
“I figured I should enjoy it while I can.”
“And are you?”
“Never better.”
“What were you doing tonight? Down there in the Village?”
“Music,” I said. “Those blues clubs on Bleecker.”
“And where were you headed on the 6 train?”
“I was going to get a room somewhere or head over to the Port Authority to get a bus.”
“To where?”
“Wherever.”
“Short visit?”
“The best kind.”
“Where do you live?”
“Nowhere. My year is one short visit after another.”
“Where’s your luggage?”
“I don’t have any.”
Most people ask follow-up questions after that, but Theresa Lee didn’t. Instead her eyes changed focus again and she said, “I’m not happy that the list was wrong. I thought it was supposed to be definitive.” She spoke inclusively, cop to cop, as if my old job made a difference to her.
“It was only half-wrong,” I said. “The suicide part was right.”
“I suppose so,” she said. “The signs would be the same, I guess. But it was still a false positive.”
“Better than a false negative.”
“I suppose so,” she said again.
I asked, “Do we know who she was?”
“Not yet. But we’ll find out. They tell me they found keys and a wallet at the scene. They’ll probably be definitive. But what was up with the winter jacket?”
I said, “I have no idea.”
She went quiet, like she was profoundly disappointed. I said, “These things are always works in progress. Personally I think we should add a twelfth point to the women’s list, too. If a woman bomber takes off her head scarf, there’s going to be a suntan clue, the same as the men.”
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