by Child, Lee
The guy with the neck said, ‘Gregory.’
‘That’s his name?’
‘In English.’
Then they glanced at each other again. Different looks. Some new discussion.
‘How long have you been over here?’ Reacher asked. Because he wanted them back on track. Because answering questions eventually became a habit. Start with the easy ones, and work up to the hard ones. A basic interrogation technique. Again the two guys shared a glance, seeking each other’s permission. On the one hand, and on the other hand.
‘Eight years we have been here,’ the driver said.
‘Your English is pretty good.’
‘Thank you.’
Then the other guy’s phone rang. The guy with the neck. Also in his pocket. Equally muffled, but a different tone. A digital reproduction of an old-fashioned electric telephone bell, like in the moneylending bar, on the wall behind the fat guy, a long muted mournful peal, and then another.
‘Don’t answer it,’ Reacher said.
‘They can track us with them,’ the guy said.
‘Doesn’t matter. They can’t react quickly enough. My guess is two minutes from now all this will be over. You’ll be heading home anyway.’
A third muffled peal, and a fourth.
‘Or not,’ Reacher said. ‘Maybe two minutes from now the Albanians will have you. Either way it’s going to happen fast.’
Up ahead the Toyota slowed and pulled in at the kerb. The Lincoln stopped behind it. On a block with old brick buildings and old brick sidewalks and old bricks showing under pocked blacktop on the street. Two thirds of the buildings were closed down and boarded up, and the open third seemed to be conducting no kind of reputable business. Some dubious place east of Center. Abby had chosen well.
The phone stopped ringing.
Reacher leaned way over and turned the motor off and pulled the key. He sat back. They turned to look at him. A P7 in his left hand, and the car key in his right.
He said, ‘If your life depended on it, where would you look for Max Trulenko?’
No response. More glances. Both kinds. At first apprehensive and rock-and-a-hard-place frustrated, like before, and then different. The new discussion.
The guy with the neck said, ‘They’ll be suspicious of us. They’ll want to know how come we were brought all the way out here and then let go again.’
‘I agree, it’s a matter of perception.’
‘That’s the problem. They’ll assume we traded something.’
‘Tell them the truth.’
‘That would be suicide.’
‘A version of the truth,’ Reacher said. ‘Carefully selected and curated. Some parts redacted. But all of it still absolutely true in itself. Tell them a woman came out the door you were watching, with a bag of stuff, and she got in a car, and you followed her here. Give them any address on this block. Tell them you figured if Gregory thought the house was worth watching, he would certainly like to know where the missing occupant was currently hiding out. Be a little aw-shucks about it. You’ll get a pat on the head and a gold star for initiative.’
The driver said, ‘Not mention you at all?’
‘Always safer that way.’
More glances at each other. Looking for holes in the cover story. Not finding any. Then turning back and looking at Reacher again. The gun rock steady in his left hand, the car key tiny in his right.
He said, ‘Where would a sensible fellow start the search?’
The two guys turned to the front and glanced at each other again, still apprehensive, but then a little bolder, and bolder still, as they talked themselves into it. They weren’t being asked for facts, after all. They hadn’t been trusted with facts. Not lowly people like them. They were being asked for an opinion. That was all. Where would a sensible fellow look? Pure hypothetical speculation. Third-party commentary. Just polite conversation, really. And of course flattering, to a lowly person, that his opinion was sought at all.
Reacher watched the process. He saw the boldness build. He saw the firming of jaws, and the drawing of breaths, and the filling of lungs. Ready to talk, both physically and figuratively. But ready for something else too. Something bad. The new discussion. Some crazy idea. It was coming off them like a smell. The fault was his own. Completely. Because of the phony choice. The guy was right. And because of the question about the capo. No doubt a scary figure, capable of terrible retributions. And because of the happy conclusion to the cover story. The pat on the head and the gold star. The wrong thing to say to frustrated, ambitious people. It got them thinking. Pats on the head and gold stars were great, but better still was promotion and status, and after eight long years best of all would be finally getting out of sitting in cars watching doors. They wanted to move up the ladder. Which they knew would take more than following a girl to an address. They would need a greater achievement.
Capturing Aaron Shevick would qualify. Which was who they thought he was, obviously. They had gotten texts, the same as everyone. The description and the photograph. They hadn’t asked who he was. Most people would. They would say, who the hell are you? What do you want? But these guys had shown no curiosity at all. Because they already knew. He was a guy they got texts about. Therefore important. Therefore a prize. Therefore crazy ideas.
His own fault.
Don’t do it, he thought.
Out loud he said, ‘Don’t do it.’
The driver said, ‘Do what?’
‘Anything stupid.’
They paused a beat. He guessed they would start by telling him something true. Too hard to coordinate a lie with silent glances. It would be like a teaser. It would be something that required a couple of seconds of thought, and then the careful formulation of a follow-up question. All to make him momentarily preoccupied. To give them time to jump him. The guy with the neck would corkscrew over from the front and land with his chest on Reacher’s left arm, and his hips on Reacher’s right arm, whereupon the driver would come over the top and attack his undefended head. With his cell phone, edge on, if he had any sense, and no inhibitions about smashing up a precision piece of electronics. Which most people were willing to do, in Reacher’s experience, when their lives depended on it.
Don’t do it, he thought.
Out loud he said, ‘Where would you look for Max Trulenko?’
The driver said, ‘Where he works, of course.’
Reacher put a momentarily blank look on his face, but inside he was thinking of nothing, and formulating no follow-up questions. He was just waiting. Time passed in quarter-second beats, like a racing heart, at first nothing, then still nothing, then the guy with the neck launching, hard and clumsy, his arms spearing out ahead of him, his feet thrusting, his back arching, aiming to get most of his bulk beyond the point of no return, so that even if he landed on the seat back gravity would do the rest of his work for him, dumping him into Reacher’s lap, in an undignified but equally effective manner.
He didn’t get to the point of no return.
Reacher jammed the gun against the seat back and shot the guy through the upholstery. Then he repelled the falling corpse with his elbow. Like a double tap. One, two, gunshot, elbow. The shot was loud, but not terrible. The interior of the thick Lincoln seat squab had acted like a huge suppressor. All kinds of wool and horsehair in there. All kinds of cotton batting. Natural absorption. One minor problem. Some of it had caught on fire. Plus the driver was leaning forward, leaning down, feeling under the dashboard near his shins. Then coming back up and twisting around. In his hand was a tiny pocket gun. Maybe Russian. Secured out of sight with hook and loop tape. Reacher shot him through his own seat back. It caught on fire too. A nine-millimetre round. The muzzle hard against the padding, a massive explosion of superheated gases. Maybe never taken into account, during Lincoln’s design process.
Reacher opened the door and slid out to the sidewalk. He put the guns in his pocket. Fresh air blew inside the car and the tiny fires perked up. Not just smoulderi
ng. There were actual flames. Small, like a lady’s fingernail, dancing inside the seats.
Abby said, ‘What happened?’
She was standing near her own car, very still, on the sidewalk, looking in through the Lincoln’s windshield.
Reacher said, ‘They showed extraordinary loyalty to an organization that doesn’t seem to treat them very well.’
‘You shot them?’
‘Self-defence.’
‘How?’
‘They blinked first.’
‘Are they dead?’
‘We might need to give them another minute. Depends how fast they’re bleeding.’
She said, ‘This has never happened to me before.’
He said, ‘I’m sorry it had to.’
‘You killed two people.’
‘I warned them. I told them not to. All my cards were on the table. It was more like assisted suicide. Think of it that way.’
‘Did you do it for me?’ she asked. ‘I told you I wanted them messed up.’
‘I didn’t want to do it at all,’ he said. ‘I wanted to send them home, safe and sound. But no. They tried their best. I guess they did what I would have done. Although I hope I would have done it better.’
‘What should we do about it?’
The flames were licking higher. The vinyl on the seat backs was bubbling and splitting and peeling, like skin.
Reacher said, ‘We should get in your car and drive away.’
‘Just like that?’
‘For me it’s all about the shoe on the other foot. What would they do for me? That’s what sets the bar.’
She was quiet a beat.
Then she said, ‘OK, get in the car.’
She drove. He sat in the passenger seat. His extra weight on that side dipped the suspension down just enough that the old Toyota’s newly falling-off fender banged against the blacktop now and then, unpredictable and irregular, like spaced-out Morse code played on a bass drum, all the way along their route.
TWENTY-ONE
No one would dream of calling the cops about a burning car on a two-thirds abandoned block on the east side of the city. Such a thing was obviously someone else’s private business, and obviously best kept that way. But plenty of people dreamed about calling Dino’s people. Always. About anything that might be useful. But especially about news like this. It might get them ahead. It might make their names. Some of them made dangerous up-close inspections, flinching away from the heat. They saw burning bodies inside. They wrote down the licence plate, before the flames consumed it.
They called Dino’s people and told them it was a Ukrainian car on fire. It was the type of Lincoln they used west of Center. As far as anyone could tell the two bodies in it were dressed in suits and ties. Which was standard practice over there. Looked like they had been shot in the back. Which was standard practice everywhere. Case closed. They were the enemy.
At which point Dino himself took over.
‘Let it burn,’ he said.
While it did, he called his inner council together. In back of the lumber yard. Which a few of them didn’t like, because lumber was combustible, and something somewhere was currently on fire. Maybe throwing sparks. But they all came. His right-hand man, and his other top boys. No choice.
‘Did we do this?’ Dino asked them.
‘No,’ his right-hand man said. ‘This is not ours.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘By now everyone knows about the massage parlour. Everyone knows we’re four for four, honours even, game over. We have no rogues, or mavericks, or private business. I guarantee that. I would have heard.’
‘Then explain this to me.’
No one could.
‘At least the practical details,’ Dino said. ‘If not the actual meaning.’
One of his guys said, ‘Maybe they drove in to have a meeting. Their contact was waiting on the sidewalk. He got in the back seat to chat. But he shot them instead. Maybe threw in a burning rag.’
‘What contact waiting on the sidewalk?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘A local person?’
‘Probably.’
‘One of our guys?’
‘Could be.’
‘Like an anonymous snitch?’
‘It’s possible.’
‘So anonymous we never noticed him before? So furtive he escaped our attention all these years? I don’t think so. I think such a master of tradecraft would be waiting in a coffee shop on Center Street. He would be talking to some random kid in a hoodie. He wouldn’t let two men in suits in a Town Car anywhere near him. Not within a million miles. Especially not all the way out in this part of town. He might as well publish a confession in the newspaper. So it wasn’t a meeting.’
‘OK.’
‘And why would he shoot them?’
‘I don’t know.’
Another guy said, ‘Then the shooter must have been in the back seat all along. They drove out here as a threesome.’
‘Therefore the shooter is one of them.’
‘Has to be. You don’t let an armed man ride behind you unless you know him.’
‘Where is he now?’
‘He got out and maybe a second car picked him up. Something anonymous. Not another Town Car. Someone would have seen it leaving.’
‘How many people in the second car?’
‘Two, I’m sure. They always work in pairs.’
‘Therefore overall not a small operation,’ Dino said. ‘It must have required a certain amount of resources, and planning, and coordination. And secrecy. Five guys drove out here. I assume two of them didn’t know what was about to happen.’
‘I guess not.’
‘But why did it happen? What was the strategic objective?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Why did he set the car on fire?’
‘I don’t know,’ the guy said again.
Dino looked around the table.
He asked, ‘Do we all agree the shooter was in the back seat all along, and therefore was one of them?’
Everyone nodded, most of them gravely, as if coming to a weighty conclusion made inevitable by many hours of deliberation.
‘And then after he shot the guys in the front seats, we know he set the car on fire.’
More nods, this time faster and brisker, because some things were self-evident.
‘Why all that?’ Dino asked.
No one answered.
No one could.
‘It feels like myth and legend,’ Dino said. ‘It feels highly symbolic. Like the Vikings burning their warriors in their boats. Like a ceremonial funeral pyre. Like a ritual sacrifice. It feels like Gregory is making an offering to us.’
‘Of two of his men?’ his right-hand man asked.
‘The number is significant.’
‘How?’
‘We’re getting a new police commissioner. Gregory can’t afford to fight a war. He knows he went too far. Now he’s apologizing. He’s making peace. He knows he was in the wrong. Now he’s trying to make it right. He’s making it six for four, in our favour. As a gesture. So we don’t have to do it ourselves. He’s showing that he agrees with us. He agrees we should be ahead in the count.’
No one responded.
No one could.
Dino got up and walked out. The others heard his footsteps click through the outer office, and through the big corrugated shed. They heard his driver start his car. They heard it drive away. The yard went quiet.
At first no one spoke.
Then someone said, ‘An offering?’
Silence for a moment.
‘You see it different?’ the right-hand man asked.
‘We would never do a thing like that. Therefore neither would Gregory. Why would he?’
‘You think Dino is wrong?’
A huge, dangerous question.
The guy looked all around.
‘I think Dino is losing it,’ he said. ‘A Viking funeral pyre? That’s crazy talk.�
��
‘Those are bold words.’
‘Do you disagree with them?’
Silence again.
Then the right-hand man shook his head.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t disagree. I don’t think it was a sacrifice or an offering.’
‘Then what was it?’
‘I think it was outside interference.’
‘Who?’
‘I think someone killed those guys here so Gregory would blame us for it. He’ll attack us, we’ll attack him back. We’ll end up destroying each other. For someone else’s benefit. So someone else can move in on both our turf. I think that might be the intention.’
‘Who?’ the guy asked again.
‘I don’t know. But we’re going to find out. Then we’re going to kill them all. They’re completely out of line.’
‘Dino wouldn’t sign off on that. He thinks it’s an offering. He thinks everything is sweetness and light now.’
‘We can’t wait.’
‘Are we not going to tell him?’ the guy asked.
The right-hand man was quiet a beat.
Then he said, ‘No, not yet. He would only slow us down. This is too important.’
‘Are you the new boss now?’
‘Maybe. If Dino has really lost it. Which you said first, by the way. Everyone heard you.’
‘I meant no disrespect. But this is a very big step. We better be sure we know what we’re doing. Otherwise it’s a betrayal. The worst kind. He’ll kill us all.’
‘Time to choose up sides,’ the right-hand man said. ‘Time for us all to place our bets. It’s either Viking rituals or it’s some out-of-towner’s takeover bid. Which will kill us all faster than Dino could anyway.’
The guy didn’t speak for ten long seconds.
Then he said, ‘What should we do first?’
‘Put the fire out. Haul the wreck to the crusher. Then start asking around. Two cars drove in. One was a big shiny Lincoln. Someone will remember the other one. We’ll find it, and we’ll find the guy who was in it, and we’ll make him tell us who he’s working for.’