by Lee Child
The football player smiled and took the flashlight out of his hand and held it under his chin and made a face, like a Halloween lantern. He said, “Good work, doc,” and turned away and used the beam up and down and side to side to paint his way back into the house. The doctor followed, using the same lit memories a second later. The football player said, “Go back in the dining room now,” and shone the beam ahead, showing the doctor the way. The doctor went back to the table and the football player said, “All of you stay right where you are, and don’t move a muscle,” and then he closed the door on them.
His partner said, “So what now?”
The guy with the flashlight said, “We need to know if Reacher is awake or asleep.”
“We hit him pretty hard.”
“Best guess?”
“What’s yours?”
The guy with the flashlight didn’t answer. He stepped back down the hallway to the basement door. He pounded on it with the flat of his hand. He called, “Reacher, turn the power back on, or something bad is going to happen up here.”
No response.
Silence.
The guy with the flashlight hit the door again and said, “I’m not kidding, Reacher. Turn the damn power back on.”
No response.
Silence.
The other guy asked again, “So what now?”
The guy with the flashlight said, “Go get the doctor’s wife.” He aimed the beam at the dining room door and his partner went in and came back out holding the doctor’s wife by the elbow. The guy with the flashlight said, “Scream.”
She said, “What?”
“Scream, or I’ll make you.”
She paused a beat and blinked in the light of the beam, and then she screamed, long and high and loud. Then she stopped and dead silence came back and the guy with the flashlight hammered on the basement door again and called, “You hear that, asshole?”
No response.
Silence.
The guy with the flashlight jerked the beam back toward the dining room and his partner led the doctor’s wife back down the hallway and pushed her inside and closed the door on her again. He said, “So?”
The guy with the flashlight said, “We wait for daylight.”
“That’s four hours away.”
“You got a better idea?”
“We could call the mothership.”
“They’ll just tell us to handle it.”
“I’m not going down there. Not with him.”
“Me either.”
“So what do we do?”
“We wait him out. He thinks he’s smart, but he isn’t. We can sit in the dark. Anyone can. It ain’t exactly rocket science.”
They followed the dancing beam back to the living room and sat side by side on the sofa with the old Remington propped between them. They clicked off the flashlight, to save the battery, and the room went pitch-dark again, and cold, and silent.
Mahmeini’s man walked parallel with the driveway for a hundred yards and then came up against a length of fence that ran south directly across his path. It defined the lower left-hand part of the cross-bar of the hollow T that was the Duncans’ compound. It was made of five-inch rails, all of them a little gnarled and warped, but easy enough to climb. He got over it without any difficulty and paused for a second with the three pick-up trucks and the Mazda parked to his left, and the southernmost house straight in front of him. The center house was the only one that was dark. The southernmost and the northernmost houses both had light in them, faint and a little secondhand, as if only back rooms were in use and stray illumination was finding its way out to the front windows through internal passageways and open doors. There was the smell of woodsmoke in the air. But no sound, not even talking. Mahmeini’s man hesitated, choosing, deciding, making up his mind. Left or right?
Cassano and Mancini came on the compound from the rear, out of the dark and dormant field, and they stopped on the far side of the fence opposite the center house, which was Jonas’s, as far as they knew. It was closed up and dark, but both its neighbors had light in their kitchen windows, spilling out in bright bars across the weedy backyard gravel. The gravel was matted down into the dirt, but it was still marginally noisy, Cassano knew. He had walked across it earlier in the day, to find undisturbed locations for his phone calls to Rossi. Their best play would be to stay on the wrong side of the fence, in the last of the field, and then head directly for their chosen point of entry. That would reduce the sound of their approach to a minimum. But which would be their chosen point of entry? Left or right? Jasper’s place, or Jacob’s?
All four Duncans were in Jasper’s basement, hunting through old cartons for more veterinary anesthetic. The last of the hog dope had been used on Seth’s nose, and his busted hand was going to need something stronger anyway. Two fingers were already swollen so hard the skin was fit to burst. Jasper figured he had something designed for horses, and he planned to find it and flood Seth’s wrist joint with it. He was no anatomist, but he figured the affected nerves had to pass through there somewhere. Where else could they go?
Seth was not complaining at the delay. Jasper figured he was taking it very well. He was growing up. He had been petulant after the broken nose, but now he was standing tall. Because he had captured his assailant all by himself, obviously. And because he was planning what to do with the guy next. The glow of achievement and the prospect of revenge were anesthetics all by themselves.
Jonas asked, “Is this it?” He was holding up a round pint bottle made of brown glass. Its label was stained and covered in long technical words, some of them Latin. Jasper squinted across the dim space and said, “Good man. You found it.”
Then they heard footsteps on the floor above their heads.
Chapter 47
Jacob was first up the cellar stairs. His initial thought was that a football player was checking in, but the floors in their houses were typical of old-style construction in rural America, built of boards cut from the hearts of old pines, thick and dense and heavy, capable of transmitting noise but not detail. So it was not possible to say who was in the house by sound alone. He saw no one in the hallway, but when he got to the kitchen he found a man in there, standing still, small and wiry, dark and dead-eyed, rumpled, not very clean, wearing a buttoned shirt without a tie, holding a knife in his left hand and a gun in his right. The knife was held low, but the gun was pointing straight at the center of Jacob’s chest.
Jacob stood still.
The man put his knife on the kitchen table and raised his forefinger to his lips.
Jacob made no sound.
Behind him his son and his brothers crowded into the kitchen, too soon to be stopped. The man moved the muzzle of his gun, left and right, back and forth. The four Duncans lined up, shoulder to shoulder. The man turned his wrist and moved the muzzle down and up, down and up, patting the air with it. No one moved.
The man said, “Get on your knees.”
Jacob asked, “Who are you?”
The man said, “You killed my friend.”
“I didn’t.”
“One of you Duncans did.”
“We didn’t. We don’t even know who you are.”
“Get on your knees.”
“Who are you?”
The little man picked up his knife again and asked, “Which one of you is Seth?”
Seth Duncan paused a beat and then raised his good hand, like a kid in class.
The little man said, “You killed my friend and you put his body in the trunk of your Cadillac.”
Jacob said, “No, Reacher stole that car this afternoon. It was him.”
“Reacher doesn’t exist.”
“He does. He broke my son’s nose. And his hand.”
The gun didn’t move, but the little man turned his head and looked at Seth. The aluminum splint, the swollen fingers. Jacob said, “We haven’t left here all day. But Reacher was at the Marriott. This afternoon and this evening. We know that. He left the Cadillac
there.”
“Where is he now?”
“We’re not sure. Close by, we think.”
“How did he get back?”
“Perhaps he took your rental car. Did your friend have the key?”
The little man didn’t answer.
Jacob asked, “Who are you?”
“I represent Mahmeini.”
“We don’t know who that is.”
“He buys your merchandise from Safir.”
“We don’t know anyone of that name either. We sell to an Italian gentleman in Las Vegas, name of Mr. Rossi, and after that we have no further interest.”
“You’re trying to cut everyone out.”
“We’re not. We’re trying to get our shipment home, that’s all.”
“Where is it?”
“On its way. But we can’t bring it in until Reacher is down.”
“Why not?”
“You know why not. This kind of business can’t be done in public. You should be helping us, not pointing guns at us.”
The little man didn’t answer.
Jacob said, “Put the gun away, and let’s all sit down and talk. We’re all on the same side here.”
The little man kept the gun straight and level and said, “Safir’s men are dead too.”
“Reacher,” Jacob said. “He’s on the loose.”
“What about Rossi’s boys?”
“We haven’t seen them recently.”
“Really?”
“I swear.”
The little man was quiet for a long moment. Then he said, “OK. Things change. Life moves on, for all of us. From now on you will sell direct to Mahmeini.”
Jacob Duncan said, “Our arrangement is with Mr. Rossi.”
The little man said, “Not anymore.”
Jacob Duncan didn’t answer.
Cassano and Mancini opted to try Jacob Duncan’s place first. A logical choice, given that Jacob was clearly the head of the family. They backed off the fence a couple of paces and walked parallel with it to a spot opposite Jacob’s kitchen window. The bar of yellow light coming out of it laid a bright rectangle on the gravel, but it fell six feet short of the base of the fence. They climbed the fence and skirted the rectangle, moving quietly across the gravel, Cassano to the right, Mancini to the left, and then they flattened themselves against the back wall of the house and peered in.
No one there.
Mancini eased open the door and Cassano went in ahead of him. The house was silent. No sound at all. No one awake, no one asleep. Cassano and Mancini had searched plenty of places, plenty of times, and they knew what to listen for.
They slipped back out to the yard and retraced their steps. They climbed back into the field and walked north in the dark and lined up again opposite Jasper’s window. They climbed the fence, staying out of the light. They flattened themselves against the wall and peered inside.
Not what they expected.
Not even close.
There was only one Iranian, not two. There was no happy conversation. No smiles. No bourbon toasts. Instead, Mahmeini’s man was standing there with a gun in one hand and a knife in the other, and all four Duncans were cowering away from him. The glass in the window was wavy and thin in places, and Jacob Duncan’s urgent voice was faintly audible.
Jacob Duncan was saying, “We have been in business a long time, sir, based on trust and loyalty, and we can’t change things now. Our arrangement is with Mr. Rossi, and Mr. Rossi alone. Perhaps he can sell direct to you, in the future, now that Mr. Safir seems to be out of the picture. Perhaps that might be of advantage. But that’s all we can offer, not that such a thing is even ours to offer.”
The little man said, “Mahmeini won’t take half a pie when the whole thing is on the table.”
“But it isn’t on the table. I repeat, we deal with Mr. Rossi only.”
“Do you really?” the little man asked. He changed his position and stood sideways, and raised his arm level with his shoulder, and closed one eye, and tracked the gun slowly and mechanically back and forth, left and right along the line of men, like a great battleship turret traversing, pausing first on Seth, then on Jasper, then on Jonas, then on Jacob, and then back again, to Jonas, to Jasper, to Seth, and then back again once more. Finally the gun came to rest aimed square at Jonas. Right between his eyes. The little man’s finger whitened on the trigger.
Then simultaneously the window and the little man’s head exploded, and the crowded room filled with powdered glass and smoke and the massive barking roar of a .45 gunshot, and blood and bone and brain slapped and spattered against the far wall, and the little man fell to the floor, and first Mancini and then Cassano stepped in from the yard.
After less than an hour the two football players were thoroughly bored with sitting in the dark. And not just bored, either, but unsettled and a little anxious, too, and irritated, and exasperated, and humiliated, because they were very aware that they were being beaten on a minute-to-minute basis, and being beaten on any basis did not come easy to them. They were not submissive people. They never came second. They were the big dogs, and being denied heat and light and NFL highlights was both insulting and totally inappropriate.
One said, “We have a shotgun, damn it.”
The other said, “It’s a big basement. He could be anywhere.”
“We have a flashlight.”
“Pretty weak.”
“Maybe he’s still unconscious. It could be an actual fault, and we’re sitting here like idiots.”
“He has to be awake by now.”
“So what if he is? He’s one guy, and we have a shotgun and a flashlight.”
“He was a soldier.”
“That doesn’t give him magic powers.”
“How would we do it?”
“We could tape the flashlight to the shotgun barrel. Go down, single file, like they do in the movies. We’d see him before he sees us.”
“We’re not supposed to kill him. Seth wants to do that himself, later.”
“We could aim low. Wound him in the legs.”
“Or make him surrender. That would be better. And he’d have to, wouldn’t he? With the shotgun and all? We could tape him up, with the tape we use for the flashlight. Then he couldn’t mess with the power again. We should have done that in the first place.”
“We don’t have any tape, for either thing.”
“Let’s look in the garage. If we find some tape, we’ll think about doing it.”
They found some tape. They followed the flashlight beam through the hallway, through the kitchen, through the mud room, all the way to the garage, and right there on the workbench was a fat new roll of silver duct tape, still wrapped up, fresh from the store. They carried it back with them, not really sure if they were pleased or not. But they had promised themselves in a way, so they pulled off the plastic wrap and picked at the end of the tape and unwound a short length. They tried the flashlight against the shotgun barrel, working in the dim light of reflections off the walls. The flashlight fit pretty well, ahead of the forestock, and underslung because of the front sight above the muzzle, and jutting out a little because of its length. The plastic lens was about an inch in front of the gun. Satisfactory. But to get it secure they were going to have to wrap tape right over the thumb switch, which was a point of no return, of sorts. If they were going to do that, then they were going to have to act. No point in leaving the light burning and running the battery down all for nothing.
One asked, “Well?”
Three hours before daylight. Boredom, irritation, exasperation, humiliation.
The other said, “Let’s do it.”
He propped the gun across his knees and held the flashlight in place. The other guy juggled the roll of tape, making sticky tearing noises, winding it around and around, like he was binding broken ribs with a bandage, until the whole assembly was fat and mummified. He ducked his head and bit off a nine-inch tail and pressed it down securely, and then he squeezed everything hard be
tween his palms, and smoothed the edges of the tape with his fingers. The first guy lifted the gun off his knees and swung it left and right and up and down. The flashlight stayed solidly in place, its beam moving faithfully with the muzzle.
“OK,” he said. “Cool. We’re good to go. The light is like a laser sight. Can’t miss.”
The other guy said, “Remember, aim low. If you see him, jerk the barrel down and fire at his feet.”
“If he doesn’t surrender first.”
“Exactly. First choice is to immobilize him. But if he moves, shoot him.”
“Where will he be?”
“Could be anywhere. Probably out of sight at the bottom of the stairs. Or hiding behind the water heater. It’s big enough.”
They followed the light out to the hallway and stopped near the basement door. The guy with the gun said, “You open it and step back and then get behind me. I’ll go down slowly and I’ll move the light around as much as I can. Tell me if you see him. We need to talk each other through this.”
“OK,” the other guy said. He put his hand on the knob. “We sure about this?”
“I’m ready.”
“OK, on three. Your count.”
The guy with the gun said, “One.”
Then “Two.”
The other guy said, “Wait. He could be right behind the door.”
“At the top of the stairs?”