by Child, Lee
The same could not be said for the other two guys. The driver had been smashed in the face by the airbag, and then in the back of the head by the other guy, who had been thrown forward from the rear compartment like a spear, right out through the shattering windshield, where he still was, folded at the waist over the crumpled hood, face down. His feet were the nearest part of him. He wasn’t moving. Neither was the driver.
Reacher forced open his door against the screech of distorted metal, and he crawled out, and he forced the door shut again after him. There was no traffic behind them. Nothing up ahead either, except dim twinkling headlights, maybe a mile in the distance. Coming towards them. A minute away, at sixty miles an hour. The vehicle the Lincoln had hit was a minivan. A Ford. It was all stoved in on the side. Bent like a banana. It had a banner in the windshield that said No Accidents. The Lincoln itself was a total mess. It was crumpled up like a concertina, all the way back to the windshield. Like a safety ad in a newspaper. Except for the guy draped on top.
The headlights up ahead were getting nearer. And now back towards town there were more. The auto dealer’s fence was burst open like a cartoon drawing. Raggedy curls of wire curved neatly out the way. As if they had been blown back by the slipstream. The gap was about eight feet wide. Basically a whole section was gone. Reacher wondered if the fence had motion sensors. Connected to a silent alarm. Connected to the police department. Maybe an insurance requirement. Certainly there was plenty of stuff to steal inside.
Time to go.
Reacher stepped through the hole in the fence, stiff and sore, bruised and battered, but functioning. He stayed away from the road. Instead he stumbled along parallel to it, through fields and vacant lots, fifty feet in the dirt, out of lateral headlight range, while cars drove by in the distance, some slow, some fast. Maybe cops. Maybe not. He skirted around the blind side of the first office park, and the second, and then he changed his angle and headed for the giant supermarket’s parking lot, aiming to walk through it and rejoin the main drag where it let out.
Gregory got the news more or less immediately, from a janitor cleaning up in the emergency room. Part of the Ukrainian network. The guy took a smoke break and called it right in. Two of Gregory’s men, just arrived on gurneys. Lights and sirens. One bad, one worse. Both would probably die. There was talk of a car wreck out by the Ford dealer.
Gregory called his top boys together, and ten minutes later they were all assembled, around a table in the back room of the taxi company. His right-hand man said, ‘All we know for sure is earlier this evening two of our guys deployed to the bar to do an address check on one of the former customers from the Albanian credit operation.’
‘How long does an address check take?’ Gregory said. ‘They must have finished long ago. This must be something else entirely. It’s obviously separate. It can’t have been the address check itself. Because who the hell lives all the way out by the Ford dealer? No one, that’s who. So they let the guy out at his house and noted the address, maybe took a photograph, and then they headed over to the Ford dealer afterwards. Why? Must have been a reason. And why did they crash?’
‘Maybe they were chased in that direction. Or decoyed. Then bumped and run off the road. It’s pretty lonely out there at night.’
‘You think it was Dino?’
‘You got to ask, why those two in particular? Maybe they were followed from right outside the bar. Which would be appropriate. Because maybe Dino is making a point here. We stole his business. We expected some reaction, after all.’
‘After he twigged.’
‘Maybe he has now.’
‘How much of a point is he going to make?’
‘Maybe this is it,’ the guy said. ‘Two men for two men. We keep the loan business. It would be a surrender with honour. He’s a realistic man. He doesn’t have many options. He can’t start a war, with the cops watching.’
Gregory said nothing. The room went quiet. No sound at all, except muted chatter from the taxi radio in the front office. Through the closed door. Just background noise. No one paid any attention to it. If they had, they would have heard a driver calling in to say he had let out an old lady at the supermarket, and was going to use his waiting time while she shopped to earn an extra buck by driving a guy home, to the old tract houses east of downtown. The guy was on foot, but he looked reasonably civilized and he had cash money. Maybe his car had broken down. It was four miles there, and four miles back. He would be done before the old lady was even out of the bakery aisle. No harm, no foul.
At that moment Dino was getting a much earlier and incomplete snapshot of part of the news. It had taken an hour to travel up the chain. It included nothing about the car wreck. Most of the day had been spent disposing of Fisnik and his named accomplice. Reorganization had been left very late. Almost an afterthought. A replacement had been sent to the bar, to pick up on Fisnik’s business. The chosen guy had gotten there a little after eight o’clock in the evening. Immediately he had seen Ukrainian muscle in the street. Guarding the place. A Town Car, and two men. He had sneaked around to the bar’s rear fire door, and sneaked a look inside. A Ukrainian guy was sitting at Fisnik’s table in the far back corner, talking to a big guy, who looked dishevelled and poor. Obviously a customer.
At that point the chosen replacement regrouped and retreated. He phoned it in. The guy he told called another guy. Who called another guy. And so on. Because bad news travelled slowly. An hour later Dino heard about it. He called his top boys together, in the lumber yard.
He said, ‘There are two possible scenarios. Either the thing about the police commissioner’s list was true, and they opportunistically and treacherously used the disruption to muscle in on our moneylending business, or it wasn’t true, and they planned this thing all along, and in fact tricked us into clearing the way for them.’
His right-hand man said, ‘I suppose we must hope it was the former.’
Dino was quiet for a long spell.
Then he said, ‘I’m afraid we must pretend it was the former. We have no choice. We can’t start a war. Not now. We’ll have to let them keep the moneylending business. We have no practical way to get it back. But we’ll surrender it with honour. It must be two for two. We can’t be seen to do less than that. Kill two of their men, and we’ll call it even.’
His right-hand man asked, ‘Which two?’
‘I don’t care,’ Dino said.
Then he changed his mind.
‘No, choose them carefully,’ he said. ‘Let’s try to find an advantage.’
NINE
Reacher got out of the taxi at the Shevick house and walked up the narrow concrete path. The door opened before he could ring the bell. Shevick stood there, with the light behind him and his phone in his hand.
‘The money came through an hour ago,’ he said. ‘Thank you.’
‘Welcome,’ Reacher said.
‘You’re late. We thought maybe you weren’t coming back.’
‘I had to take a minor detour.’
‘Where?’
‘Let’s go inside,’ Reacher said. ‘We need to talk.’
This time they used the living room. The photographs on the wall, the amputated television. The Shevicks took the armchairs, and Reacher sat on the loveseat.
He said, ‘It happened pretty much like it happened with you and Fisnik. Except the guy snapped my picture. Which might be a good thing, in the end. Your name, my face. A little confusion never hurts. But if I was a real client, I wouldn’t have liked it. Not one little bit. It would have felt like a bony finger on my shoulder. It would have made me feel vulnerable. Then I got outside and there was more. Two guys, who wanted to drive me home, to see where I lived, and who I lived with. My wife, if I had one. Which was another bony finger. Maybe a whole bony hand.’
‘What happened?’
‘The three of us negotiated a different arrangement. Not linked in any way to your name or address. In fact fairly confusing as to exactly what took place. I w
anted an element of mystery about it. Their bosses will suspect a message, but they won’t be sure who from. They’ll think the Albanians, most likely. Not you, certainly.’
‘What happened to the men?’
‘They were part of the message. As in, this is America. Don’t send an asshole who last time out was seventh on the undercard in some basement fight club in Kiev. At least take it seriously. Show some respect.’
‘They saw your face.’
‘They won’t remember. They had an accident. They got all banged up. Their memories will be missing an hour or two. Retrograde amnesia, they call it. Fairly common, after physical trauma. If they don’t die first, that is.’
‘So everything’s OK?’
‘Not really,’ Reacher said.
‘What else?’
‘These are not reasonable people.’
‘We know.’
‘How are you going to pay their money back?’
They didn’t answer.
‘You need twenty-five grand, a week from right now. You can’t be late. They showed me pictures too. Fisnik’s can’t have been worse. You need some kind of a plan.’
Shevick said, ‘A week is a long time.’
‘Not really,’ Reacher said again.
Mrs Shevick said, ‘Something good might happen.’
Nothing more.
Reacher said, ‘You really need to tell me what it is you’re waiting for.’
It was about their daughter, inevitably. Mrs Shevick’s gaze roamed the pictures on the wall as she told the story. Their daughter’s name was Margaret, shortened since childhood to Meg. She had been a bright, happy infant, full of charm and energy. She loved other children. She loved kindergarten. She loved elementary school. She loved to read and write and draw. She smiled and chattered all the time. She could persuade anyone to do anything. She could have sold ice to the Eskimos, her mother said.
She loved middle school just as much, and junior high, and high school. She was popular. Everyone liked her. She put on plays and sang in the choir and ran track and swam. She got her diploma, but she didn’t go to college. Her book learning was good, but not her main strength. She was a people person. She needed to be out and about, smiling, chatting, charming folks. Bending them to her will, if truth be told. She liked a purpose.
She got an entry-level job in the spokesperson business, and she bounced around town from one PR office to another, doing whatever the local establishments had a budget for. She worked hard, and made her name, and got promoted, and by the time she was thirty she was making more than her dad ever had as a machinist. Ten years later, at forty, she was still doing well, but she felt her trajectory had slowed. Her acceleration had been blunted. She could see her ceiling above her. She would sit at her desk and think, is this it?
No, she decided. She wanted one last big score. Bigger than big. She was in the wrong place, she knew. She would have to move. San Francisco, probably, where the tech money was. Where complicated things needed explaining. Sooner or later she would have to go there. Or New York. But she dithered. Time passed. Then, amazingly, San Francisco came to her. In a manner of speaking. Later she learned there was a perpetual ongoing game, stoked up by real estate people and tech sector accountants, in which the prize was to guess correctly about where the next-but-one Silicon Valley would be. In order to get in early. For some reason her hometown checked all the secret boxes. Regenerating, the right kind of people, the right buildings, and power, and internet speed. The first advance scouts were already sniffing around.
Meg got a friend-of-a-friend introduction to a guy who knew a guy, who arranged an interview with the founder of a brand new venture. They met in a downtown coffee shop. He was a twenty-five-year-old fresh off the plane from California. Some kind of a foreign-born computer genius, with some new thing to do with medical software and apps on people’s phones. Mrs Shevick admitted she had never been exactly sure what the product was, except she knew it was the type of thing that made folks rich.
Meg was offered the job. Senior Vice President for Communications and Local Affairs. It was a fledgling ink-not-dry start-up company, so the salary wasn’t great. Not much more than she was already making. But there was a whole giant package of benefits. Stock options, a huge pension plan, a gold-plated health plan, a European coupé to drive. Plus weird San Francisco stuff like free pizza and candy and massages. She liked all of it. But the stock options were by far the biggest deal. One day she could be a billionaire. Literally. That was how these things happened.
At first it went pretty well. Meg did great work keeping the drums beating, and two or three times in the first year it looked like they might make it to the top of the hill. But they didn’t. Not quite. The second year was the same. Still glossy and glamorous and cutting edge and the next big thing, but nothing actually happened. The third year was worse. Investors got nervous. The cash spigot was turned way down. But they hung in, lean and mean. They rented two floors of their building. No more pizza or candy. The massage tables were folded up and put away. They worked harder than ever, side by side in cramped quarters, still determined, still confident.
Then Meg got cancer.
Or, more accurately, she found out she’d had cancer for about the last six months. She had been too busy for doctor visits. She thought the weight she was losing was from working too hard. But no. It was a bad diagnosis. It was a virulent type, and it was fairly advanced. The only ray of hope was a bunch of new treatments. They were exotic and expensive, but their trials had been promising. They seemed to work. Their success rate was climbing. No other option, the doctors said. Calendars were cleared, and Meg was booked in for her first session the very next morning.
Which was when the problems started.
Mrs Shevick said, ‘There was a glitch with her insurance. Her account number wouldn’t run. She was prepping for chemo, and people were running in and out asking her full name and date of birth and Social Security number. It was a nightmare. They had the insurance company on the phone, and no one knew what was going on. They could see her history and they knew she was a customer. But the code wouldn’t authorize. It threw up an error message. They said it was just a computer thing. No big deal. They said it would be fixed the next day. But the hospital said we couldn’t wait. They had us sign a form. It said we would cover the bill if the insurance didn’t come through. They said it was just a technicality. They said computer things happened all the time. They said everything would get straightened out.’
‘I’m guessing everything didn’t,’ Reacher said.
‘The weekend came along, which was two more sessions, and then it was Monday, and then we found out.’
‘Found out what?’ Reacher asked, although he felt he could guess.
Mrs Shevick shook her head and sighed and flapped her hand in front of her face, as if she couldn’t form the words. As if she was all done talking. Her husband leaned forward, with his elbows on his knees, and he continued the tale.
‘Their third year,’ he said. ‘When their investors got nervous. It was even worse than they knew. It was worse than anyone knew. The boss was keeping secrets. From everyone, Meg included. Behind the scenes the whole thing was falling apart. He wasn’t paying the bills. Not a dime. He didn’t renew the company health plan. He didn’t pay the premium. He just ignored it. Meg’s number wouldn’t run because the policy was cancelled. On her fourth day of treatment we found out she was uninsured.’
‘Not her fault,’ Reacher said. ‘Surely. It was some kind of fraud or breach of contract. There must be a remedy.’
‘There are two,’ Shevick said. ‘One is a government no-fault fund, and the other is an insurance industry no-fault fund, both of them set up for this specific reason. Naturally we ran straight to them. Right away they got to work on how to apportion responsibility between them, and as soon as that’s done they’re going to refund everything we’ve spent so far, and then take care of everything else going forward. We expect a decision any day.�
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‘But you can’t pause Meg’s treatment.’
‘She needs so much. Two or three sessions a day. Chemo, radiation, care and feeding, all kinds of scans, all kinds of lab work. She can’t get welfare. Technically she’s still employed, technically with a decent salary. No one in the press is interested. Where’s the story? Kid needs something, parents willing to pay. Where’s the punchline? Maybe we shouldn’t have signed that paper. Maybe other doors would have opened. But we did sign the paper. Too late now. Obviously the hospital wants to get paid. This is not emergency room stuff. It can’t be written off. Their machines cost a million dollars. They have to buy actual physical crystals of radioactive stuff. They want the money in advance. It’s what happens in cases like these. Cash on the barrelhead. Nothing happens before. Nothing we can do about it. All we can do is hang in until someone else steps up. Could be tomorrow morning. We have seven chances before the week is over.’
‘You need a lawyer,’ Reacher said.
‘Can’t afford one.’
‘There’s probably an important principle in there somewhere. You could probably get one pro bono.’
‘We have three of that kind already,’ Shevick said. ‘They’re working on the public interest aspect. Bunch of kids. They’re poorer than we are.’
‘Seven chances before the week is over,’ Reacher said. ‘Sounds like a country song.’
‘It’s all we got.’
‘I guess it almost qualifies as a plan.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Do you have a plan B?’
‘Not as such.’
‘You could try lying low. I’ll be long gone. The photograph they took will be no good to them.’
‘You’ll be gone?’