by Lee Child
He waited, to see if Croselli would come down and open it himself. Which he might. He must have heard the crash of the judas gate. But he didn’t come down. Reacher waited three minutes, breathing hard, stretching his eyes wide open, willing them to see something. But they didn’t. He stepped up to the door again and traced its shape with his hands. The panel below the glass would be the weak spot. Plywood, probably, maybe three-eighths thick, painted, retained in the frame by quarter-round moldings. Reacher was wearing shoes he had bought in the London airport two deployments ago, stout British things with welts and toecaps as hard as steel. They had busted heads and kneecaps already that night. Plywood wasn’t going to be a major problem.
He stepped back and poked forward with his toe to fix his target in his mind. Then he kicked out, bang, bang, concentrating on the corners of the panel, viciously and noisily, until the wood splintered and the moldings came loose.
Then he stopped and listened.
No sound from inside the building.
Which was a bitch. Reacher would have preferred to meet Croselli face to face on the ground floor. He didn’t relish heading up a flight of stairs toward an alert opponent at the top.
He waited some more.
No sound.
He squatted down with his back against the doorframe and punched out the panel with his elbow, until it folded inward, like a miniature door itself, hinged on a few surviving nails. Then he twisted around and put his arm and his shoulder through the hole and reached up and scrabbled for the knob. Which he found easily enough. He had arms like a gorilla. Every childhood photograph of him featured six inches of bare wrist, at the end of every sleeve.
The door opened and he struggled upright and backed off a yard, just in case. But there was no sound inside. Croselli didn’t come out. There was nothing to see. Just darkness. The inside air smelled hot and stale.
Reacher stepped in, to what felt like a narrow lobby with a tiled floor. He slid his feet ahead, one after the other, and he felt a bottom stair. There was a handrail on the left. The opposite wall was less than three feet away. It was painted, and it was damp with condensation.
Reacher went up the stairs, his right hand out in front of him, his left holding the handrail. There was a yard-wide half landing, and then the stairs doglegged and continued upward. At the top was dusty superheated air and a six-by-three upstairs lobby with a sticky carpet and a door at each end. A front room, and a back room.
Under the back room door was a bar of faint warm light.
Reacher stared at it, like a thirsty man in the desert might stare at a cold drink. It was a candle, probably. It was the first manmade light he had seen in more than three hours.
He put his hand under his shirt at the back and pushed the button Hemingway had showed him. It’s red, she had said, which hadn’t helped, because he didn’t have eyes in the back of his head, and it was pitch dark anyway. So he had learned it by feel. He tapped his chest, so that a thump could mark the start of the recording. Then he put his hand on the doorknob.
* * *
Reacher twisted the knob and pushed the door, one, two, fast and hard, and he stepped into a room lit by a guttering candle. The flame danced in the rush of air. The room was a twenty-by-twenty space with a dark window in the back wall, and a row of old-fashioned safes on the left, like something out of a black-and-white Western movie about bank robbers, and on the right there was a row of file cabinets and a desk, and sitting at the desk in a leather reclining chair was Croselli. The chair was pushed out and turned sideways, so that he was sitting face-on to the door.
He had a gun in his hand.
It was a Colt M1911, a .45 automatic, standard military issue for sixty-six years, hence the model number. It looked a little scratched and battered. It was all lit up by the candle, which was on the desk, welded to a china plate by a pool of its own wax. A standard household item, a few cents at the hardware store, but it felt as bright as the sun.
Croselli said, “You.”
Reacher said nothing.
Croselli had shed his jacket and pulled down his tie, but his shirt was still wet. He said, “I was expecting Hemingway. What are you tonight, her knight in shining armor? Is she sending a boy to do a man’s job?”
Is he armed? Reacher had asked. Not in the city, Hemingway had said. He can’t afford to be. Not applicable inside his own premises, apparently. Which was a bitch. Reacher looked at the row of safes. There were six of them, shoulder to shoulder, each one about a yard wide and six feet tall. They had keyholes, not combination locks. The door on the far end was wide open, and the void behind it was empty. Their armory, Reacher guessed. For dire emergencies. Like that very night. Clearly Croselli’s soldiers were all armed, all out on the street, all insuring protection.
“You have a gun,” Reacher said, for the tape.
“I’m defending my property,” Croselli said.
“This is your place?”
“I’m not a common burglar.”
Reacher took a step. The Colt’s muzzle rose a degree, to track him. Reacher asked, “Is your name on the title?”
“I’m not that stupid.”
“Then this isn’t your place.”
“Only technically. Believe me, kid, everything you see here is mine.”
“What’s in the safes?”
“Inventory.”
“Yours?”
“I already told you.”
“I need to hear it in short simple words.”
“Why?”
“We could do business.”
“Business?”
“That’s what I said.”
“You and me?”
“If you’re smart,” Reacher said.
“You broke down my door.”
“Would you have let me in, if I had knocked?”
“What kind of business could we do, you and I?”
“You’re using the New Jersey Turnpike and the Holland Tunnel. Which means you’re getting supplied out of Miami, all the way up I-95. Which means you’re paying over the odds, and you’re losing some to unreliable mules, and you’re losing some to routine New Jersey State Police patrols. I could help you with all of that.”
“How?”
“I bring stuff in direct from the Far East. On military planes. No scrutiny. My dad’s a Marine officer.”
“What kind of stuff?”
“Anything you want.”
“What kind of price, kid?”
“Show me what you’ve got and tell me what you paid. Then I’ll break your heart.”
“You hurt two of my men.”
Reacher said, “I hope so. I need you to understand. You do not mess with me.” He took another step. The Colt’s muzzle rose another degree. Reacher said, “Are you buying from Martinez?”
“I never heard of Martinez.”
“Then you’re way over the odds already. Who are you buying from?”
“The Medellin boys.”
“I could save you forty percent.”
Croselli said, “I think you’re full of shit. I think this is a Hemingway stunt.”
“You shut her down.”
“For which I paid good money. For which I expected a durable result. Anything else is liable to make me angry.”
“This has nothing to do with Hemingway.”
“Pull up your shirt.”
“Why?”
“I want to see the wire. Before I shoot you.”
Reacher thought: unregistered guns, a deceptive real estate title, a straight-up reference to the Medellin cartel out of Colombia, and a straight-up reference to bribery. The tape had enough. He took a deep, deep breath and put his hands on the hem of his T shirt. Then he jerked forward from the waist and blew out the candle.
* * *
The room went from softly glowing to blacker than the Earl of Hell’s winter coat all in a split second, and Reacher blundered straight ahead, forcing passage between Croselli’s chair and the desk, and Croselli whipped the Colt aroun
d in the same general direction and fired. But he missed by a mile, and the muzzle flash backlit him perfectly, like a photographer’s strobe, so Reacher picked his spot and slammed a straight right into the back of his neck, right where soft turns to hard, and Croselli pitched head first out of the chair and landed on his knees. Reacher groped for the chair and lifted it high by the armrests and slammed it down on Croselli’s back. He heard the sound of steel on linoleum as the Colt skittered away, and he brushed the chair aside and groped and patted blindly until he found the collar of Croselli’s shirt, which he bunched in his left hand while he pounded away with his right, short roundhouse punches to the side of Croselli’s head, his ear, his jaw, one, two, three, four, vicious clubbing blows, until he felt the steam go out of the guy, whereupon he reached forward and grabbed the guy’s wrists and yanked them up behind his back, high and painful, and he clamped them together in his left hand, human handcuffs, a party trick perfected years before, enabled by the freakish strength in his fingers, from which no one had ever escaped, not even his brother, who was of equal size, or his father, who was smaller but stronger. He hauled Croselli to his feet and slapped at his pants pockets until he heard the jingle of keys. Croselli got his second wind and started struggling hard, so Reacher turned him a little sideways and quieted him down again with a pile-driver jab to the kidney.
Then he fished out the keys and held them in his right hand, and he asked, “Where’s your book of matches?”
Croselli said, “You’re going to die, kid.”
“Obviously,” Reacher said. “No one lives forever.”
“I mean tonight, kid.”
Reacher separated a key by feel and pressed the point high on Croselli’s cheek. He said, “If so, you won’t see it happen. I’ll take your eyes out first.”
“Matches in the desk drawer,” Croselli said.
Reacher turned him again and slammed a short right to his stomach, to fold him over and keep him preoccupied, and he walked him bent over and puking to the desk, and he used his free hand to rattle open the drawers, and to root around, all by feel. There was all kinds of stuff in the drawers. Staplers, pens, rolls of Scotch tape, some in dispensers, pencils, paper clips. And a book of matches, a little limp and damp.
Using a matchbook one-handed was practically impossible, so Reacher turned Croselli toward the window wall, let go of his wrists, and shoved him hard, and used the resulting few undisturbed seconds to detach a match and strike it, all fizzing and flaring in the dark, and to light the candle with it once again, by which time Croselli was shaping up for a charge, so Reacher stepped toward him and dropped him with a right to the solar plexus, just as the room bloomed back to its former cozy glow.
A solar plexus was worth at least a minute, Reacher thought, and he used that minute to cross the room and pick up the Colt, and to dump its magazine, and to eject the shell from its chamber, and to pick up the chair, and to set it back on its casters, and to turn it just so, and to find the Scotch tape, and to pick the guy up, and to dump him in the chair, and to start taping his wrists to the frame.
Scotch tape was weaker than duct tape, but Reacher made up for it with length, around and around, right hand, left hand, until the guy looked like he had two broken wrists, in casts made of some kind of new see-through yellowish plaster. Then came his ankles. In all Reacher used six whole rolls of tape, and after that there was no way the guy was moving.
Then Hemingway came in the door.
She looked at the candle first, and then at Croselli.
Reacher said, “He admits on tape everything here is his.”
She said, “I heard a gunshot.”
“He missed. It was about twenty degrees off on the port side.”
“I was worried.”
“It’s the godfather who should worry. This is a made man.”
“What did he say on the tape?”
“Take it out of my pants and listen for yourself.”
Which she did. Reacher felt the hot quick fingers again, and the weird embrace, under his shirt, as the microphone was passed from hand to hand. Then she clicked and waited and clicked again, and a thin tinny version of Croselli’s voice filled the room, taking responsibility for everything in it, admitting to the Medellin connection, admitting to the bribe, and hinting at the size of it.
She said, “You have his keys?”
Reacher said, “Right here in my hand.”
“Open the safe doors.”
Which he did, starting next to the empty armory, working away from the window, until all of the safes stood open. All of them were full of smooth-packed plastic-wrapped bricks, some brown or green in color, most white or yellow.
She said, “Can you get his keys back in his pocket?”
He did, and said, “What next?”
“Does his phone work?”
He tried it, and said, “Yes.”
She gave him a number and said, “It’s our internal credible threat hotline.”
He called it in, the exact address, without giving his name, and then the call ended, and she said, “Their response time will be more than five minutes but less than ten.”
She put her plastic cassette recorder on the floor near Croselli’s feet. She said, “We should go. My car is not close.”
Reacher said, “Is this enough?”
She said, “More than enough. Medellin is toxic. And the evidence is right here. It’s a photograph, Reacher. This is a photogenic prosecution. It doesn’t matter who he bribed. No one is ever going to say a word against this one. It’s a tidal wave.”
“One last thing,” Reacher said, and he turned back to Croselli, and he said, “Slapping women is not permitted. You’re supposed to be a man, not a pussy.”
Croselli said nothing.
Reacher raised his hand. “How would you like it?”
Croselli said, “You wouldn’t hit a guy tied to a chair.”
Reacher said, “Watch me,” and slapped the guy in the face, hard, a real crack, wet or not, and the chair went up on its side legs, and balanced, and balanced, and tottered, and then thumped down on its side, with its casters spinning and Croselli’s head bouncing around like a pinball.
Then they hit the bricks, and Hemingway’s prediction of five-to-ten came true, in that they saw hurrying cars about six minutes out, and then a pair of heavy trucks. A lot of firepower. And why not, for a credible threat?
* * *
Hemingway’s car was four blocks away, on Sullivan. It was the mid-blue Granada Reacher had seen before, with the vinyl roof and the toothy grille. He said, “You sure this gets you off the hook?”
She said, “Count on it, kid. Being right afterward is a wonderful thing.”
“Then give me a ride out of town.”
“I should stay.”
“Give them time to grieve. Give them time to figure out how it’s really their own idea. I’ve seen this shit before. All organizations are the same. You need to lay low for a day. You need to be out of the spotlight.”
“West Point?”
“Take the Thruway and the Tappan Zee.”
“How long will I be gone?”
“They’re going to roll out the red carpet, Jill. Just give them time to find it first.”
* * *
They drove a long, long time in the dark, and then they hit neighborhoods with power, with traffic lights and street lights and the occasional lit room. Billboards were bright, and the familiar nighttime background of orange diamonds on black velvet lay all around.
Hemingway said, “I have to stop and call.”
Reacher said, “Call who?”
“The office.”
“Why?”
“I have to know whether it worked.”
“I’m sure it did.”
“I have to know.”
“So stop. We could get a cup of coffee.”
“It’s a hundred degrees.”
“Got to be less than ninety now.”
“Still too hot for coffee.
” She pulled over to the right-hand lane, and then she took an exit road to what Reacher imagined was a superpower version of the standard type of highway facility, with multiple restrooms, and gas big enough for trucks, and motel rooms for weary drivers, and not just something to eat, but a restaurant big enough to feed Syracuse. And payphones. There was a long line, right outside the restaurant’s extensive and brightly-lit windows. Hemingway used one, and hung up smiling, and said, “It’s working. Croselli has been arrested.”
He asked, “How’s the whale?”
She said, “The whale is gone.”
She looked dazed for a second, and then she got a big smile on her face, and they hugged, with some kind of relief and ecstasy in her tight embrace. Reacher felt bony ribs, and the flutter of her heart. It was beating fast.
Then she moved to another phone and dialed another number, and she gave her name, and she dictated a long report about a confirmed sighting of the Son of Sam, made by what she called a confidential informant, who had what she called extensive military experience.
Then she hung up again and said, “This will sound crazy, but I really want to rent a room just to take a shower.”
Reacher said, “Doesn’t sound crazy to me.”
“Does it matter what time you get there?”
“Not within a shower or two.”
“So let’s do it.”
“Both of us?”
“It’s a mutual benefit.”
“Who goes first?”
“I go first.”
“OK,” Reacher said.
She paid at the motel office, a visible wad of bills, what Reacher figured must be the whole-night rate, and she came back with a key, to room 15, which was located way in back, the last cabin before the woods. Reacher said, “Do you want me to wait in the car?”
Hemingway said, “You can wait in the room.”
So they went in together, and found a hot stale space, with the usual features. Hemingway checked the bathroom, and came out with a bunch of towels, and said, “These are yours,” and then she went back in and closed the door.
Reacher waited on the bed until she came out again much later, all hot and pink and wrapped in towels. She said, “Your turn,” and she crossed the room, a little unsteady on her feet, as if overcome by steam, or exhaustion.