by Lee Child
“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 drawers. 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 if 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 toward town, and took the left that led them into the east side hinterland, through the original city blocks, and out toward 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 neighbor’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 neighbor. 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 percent, 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 neighborhood 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 gray 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 neighbor’s front yard.
Chapter 32
It was too dark to tell whether the landscaping was nice, but by smell and feel and inadvertent physical contact they coul
d tell it was conventionally planted, with the normal kind of stuff in the normal kind of places. At first underfoot was a lawn of tough, springy grass, maybe some new hybrid strain, slick and cold with nighttime 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 it. 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 gray nighttime 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 maneuver that left him on his back in a flowerbed, but also left the fence still standing.
They carried the groceries to the kitchen door, and tapped on the glass. Heart attack time, potentially, for the Shevicks, but they survived. There was a little gasping and fluttering of fingers and fanning for breath, and a little embarrassment about bathrobes, but they got over it fast enough. They stared at the grocery sacks with a mixture of emotions on their faces. Shame and lost pride and empty stomachs. Reacher got them to make coffee. Abby packed their refrigerator and stacked their shelves.
Maria Shevick said, “We’re up because we got a call from the hospital. It’s an around-the-clock operation, obviously. We told them they should call anytime, night or day. It’s in our notes, I expect. They called to say they want to do another scan, first thing tomorrow morning. They’re still excited.”
“If we pay,” Aaron Shevick said.
“How much this time?” Reacher asked.
“Eleven thousand.”
“When?”
“We need it by close of business today.”
“I guess you already looked under the sofa cushions.”
“I found a button. From a pair of my pants. It was missing eight years. Maria sewed it back on.”
“It’s still early in the day,” Reacher said. “There are still a lot of hours to go, before the close of business.”
“We were going to skip it this time around,” Aaron said. “After all, what will it tell us? If it’s good news, it will make us happy, of course, but that’s self-indulgence, not medicine. If it’s bad news, we don’t want to know anyway. So we weren’t sure exactly what we would be getting, for our eleven thousand dollars. But then the doctors said they need to know the extent of the progress. They said they need to calibrate a new dosage based on what they find. Either up or down. With a certain amount of timing and precision. They said anything else would be perilous.”
“How do you normally pay them?”
“With a bank wire.”
“Do they take cash?”
“Why?”
“Cash is usually the quickest thing to rustle up, when time is running short.”
“From where?”
“Every day presents different opportunities. Worst case scenario, we could sell their car. Maybe up at the Ford dealer. I heard their used lot needs inventory.”
“Yes, they take cash,” Shevick said. “Like a casino. They have a line of tellers behind bulletproof glass.”
“OK,” Reacher said. “Good to know.”
He stepped out to the darkened hallway, and lined up at a distance with a front window. He looked out to the street. The Lincoln was still there. The same one. Big and black, now dewed over and inert. Two vague shapes in it. Heads and shoulders, slumped down in the gloom. Guns under their arms, no doubt. Wallets in their pockets, almost certainly. Probably stuffed with cash, if they were anything like their opposite number from Tirana. Probably hundreds of dollars. But probably not eleven thousand.
He stepped back to the kitchen. Maria Shevick gave him a cup of coffee. His first of the day. She asked them to stay for breakfast. She would fix it. They could all eat together, like a party. Reacher wanted to say no. The food was for the old folks themselves, not random guests. Plus he wanted to get out of there before the sun came up. While it was still dark. It was likely to be a busy day. There was a lot to do. But the breakfast idea seemed to mean something to the Shevicks, and Abby was OK with it, so he said yes. Much later he wondered exactly how much different the day would have turned out, if he hadn’t. But he didn’t think about it for long. Spilled milk. Wasted energy. Move on.
* * *
—
Maria Shevick grilled bacon and fried eggs and made toast and brewed a second pot of coffee. Aaron tottered in with the stool from their bedroom dressing table, to make a fourth seat. Maria was right. In the end the meal turned into a party. Like a secret in the dark. Abby told a joke about a guy with cancer. For a beat it could have gone either way. But her performer’s instinct was sure and true. After a second of silence Aaron and Maria burst out laughing, hard, their shoulders heaving, on and on, some kind of pent-up relief coming out, some kind of catharsis. Maria slapped her hand on the table, so hard her coffee spilled, and Aaron drummed his feet on the floor, so hard he hurt his knee again.
Reacher watched the sun come up. The sky went gray, then gold. The yard out the window took shape. Vague forms loomed out of the dark. The fence. The distant hump of the back-to-back neighbor’s asphalt roof.
“Who lives there?” he asked. “Whose yard did we walk through?”
“Actually it’s the woman who told us about Fisnik,” Aaron said. “She told us the story about the other neighbor’s nephew’s wife’s cousin borrowing money from a gangster in a bar. I have a feeling she went to see him herself, a little later. She got her car fixed all of a sudden. No other visible means of support.”
Maria made a third pot of coffee. Reacher thought, what the hell. The sun was already over the horizon. He stayed in his seat and drank his share. Then somehow t
he conversation came back to money, and suddenly everyone seemed to hear the same clock ticking. The close of business, getting nearer.
“Except cash is good all night long,” Reacher said. “Right? The close of business thing is about the bank wires only. As long as they have a teller open, we’re good until the moment they put her on the gurney.”
“From where?” Aaron said again. “Eleven thousand is a lot of sofa cushions.”
“Hope for the best,” Reacher said.
He and Abby left the way they had come, this time with empty hands, and in the late dawn light, therefore faster, but not much easier. The fence was still difficult. The fold-back section was still stiff and noisy.
Their car was gone.
Chapter 33
The black Chrysler, with its low roof, and its high waistline, and its shallow windows, and its closed trunk lid. No longer there. The space at the curb was empty.
Abby said, “The guy got out.”
“I don’t see how he could,” Reacher said.
“Then what happened?”
“My fault,” Reacher said. “I got it ass backward. About the public response. The woman looked out the window and saw a gangster car and didn’t get nervous. She called gangster HQ instead. Maybe she’s obliged to. Maybe it was part of her deal with Fisnik. When she got her car fixed. They claim to have eyes everywhere. Maybe that’s how. So she called them and they came right over, and they checked it out.”
“Did they open the trunk?”
“Operationally we have to assume they did. Equally we have to assume the guy is still functioning. Which puts Barton and Hogan in immediate danger. They’re probably fast asleep right now. You better call them.”
“If they’re asleep their phones will be off.”
“Try anyway.”
She did.
Their phones were off.
“That language guy,” Reacher said. “The tanker. Did you get his number?”
“Vantresca?”
“Yes.”
