THE PICTURE OF THE LONELY DINER
Lee Child
Jack Reacher got out of the R train at Twenty-Third Street and found the nearest stairway blocked off with plastic police tape. It was striped blue and white, tied between one handrail and the other, and it was moving in the subway wind. It said: POLICE DO NOT ENTER. Which, technically, Reacher didn’t want to do anyway. He wanted to exit. Although to exit, he would need to enter the stairwell. Which was a linguistic complexity. In which context, he sympathized with the cops. They didn’t have different kinds of tape for different kinds of situations. POLICE DO NOT ENTER IN ORDER TO EXIT was not in their inventory.
So Reacher turned around and hiked half the length of the platform to the next stairway. Which was also taped off. POLICE DO NOT ENTER. Blue and white, fluttering gently in the last of the departing train’s slipstream. Which was odd. He was prepared to believe the first stairway might have been the site of a singular peril, maybe a chunk of fallen concrete, or a buckled nose on a crucial step, or some other hazard to life and limb. But not both stairways. Not both at once. What were the odds? So maybe the sidewalk above was the problem. A whole block’s length. Maybe there had been a car wreck. Or a bus wreck. Or a suicide from a high window above. Or a drive-by shooting. Or a bomb. Maybe the sidewalk was slick with blood and littered with body parts. Or auto parts. Or both.
Reacher half-turned and looked across the track. The exit directly opposite was taped off, too. And the next, and the next. All the exits were taped off. Blue and white, POLICE DO NOT ENTER. No way out. Which was an issue. The Broadway Local was a fine line, and the Twenty-Third Street station was a fine example of its type, and Reacher had slept in far worse places many times, but he had things to do and not much time to do them in.
He walked back to the first stairway he had tried, and he ducked under the tape.
He was cautious going up the stairs, craning his neck, looking ahead, and especially looking upward, but seeing nothing untoward. No loose rebar, no fallen concrete, no damaged steps, no thin rivulets of blood, no spattered fragments of flesh on the tile.
Nothing.
He stopped on the stairs with his nose level with the Twenty-Third Street sidewalk and he scanned left and right.
Nothing.
He stepped up one stair and turned around and looked across Broadway’s humped blacktop at the Flatiron Building. His destination. He looked left and right. He saw nothing.
He saw less than nothing.
No cars. No taxis. No buses, no trucks, no scurrying panel vans with their business names hastily handwritten on their doors. No motorbikes, no Vespa scooters in pastel colors. No deliverymen on bikes from restaurants or messenger services. No skateboarders, no rollerbladers.
No pedestrians.
It was summer, close to eleven at night, and still warm. Fifth Avenue was crossing Broadway right in front of him. Dead ahead was Chelsea, behind him was Gramercy, to his left was Union Square, and to his right the Empire State Building loomed over the scene like the implacable monolith it was. He should have seen a hundred people. Or a thousand. Or ten thousand. Guys in canvas shoes and T-shirts, girls in short summer dresses, some of them strolling, some of them hustling, heading to clubs about to open their doors, or bars with the latest vodka, or midnight movies.
There should have been a whole big crowd. There should have been laughter and conversation, and shuffling feet, and the kind of hoots and yelps a happy crowd makes at eleven o’clock on a warm summer’s evening, and sirens and car horns, and the whisper of tires and the roar of engines.
There was nothing.
Reacher went back down the stairs and under the tape again. He walked underground, north, to the site of his second attempt, and this time he stepped over the tape because it was slung lower. He went up the stairs just as cautiously, but faster, now right on the street corner, with Madison Square Park ahead of him, fenced in black iron and packed with dark trees. But its gates were still open. Not that anyone was strolling in or strolling out. There was no one around. Not a soul.
He stepped up to the sidewalk and stayed close to the railing around the subway stair head. A long block to the west he saw flashing lights. Blue and red. A police cruiser was parked sideways across the street. A roadblock. DO NOT ENTER. Reacher turned and looked east. Same situation. Red and blue lights all the way over on Park Avenue. DO NOT ENTER. Twenty-Third Street was closed. As were plenty of other cross streets, no doubt, and Broadway and Fifth Avenue and Madison, too, presumably, at about Thirtieth Street.
No one around.
Reacher looked at the Flatiron Building. A narrow triangle, sharp at the front. Like a thin wedge, or a modest slice of cake. But to him it looked most like the prow of a ship. Like an immense ocean liner moving slowly toward him. Not an original thought. He knew many people felt the same way. Even with the cowcatcher glasshouse on the front ground floor, which some said ruined the effect, but which he thought added to it, because it looked like the protruding underwater bulge on the front of a supertanker, visible only when the vessel was lightly loaded.
Now he saw a person. Through two panes of the cowcatcher’s windows. A woman. She was standing on the Fifth Avenue sidewalk, staring north. She was wearing dark pants and a dark short-sleeved shirt. She had something in her right hand. Maybe a phone. Maybe a Glock 19.
Reacher pushed off the subway railing and crossed the street. Against the light, technically, but there was no traffic. It was like walking through a ghost town. Like being the last human on earth. Apart from the woman on Fifth Avenue. Whom he headed straight for. He aimed at the point of the cowcatcher. His heels were loud in the silence. The cowcatcher had a triangular iron frame, a miniature version of the shape it was backing up against, like a tiny sailboat trying to outrun the liner chasing it. The frame was painted green, like moss, and it had gingerbread curlicues here and there, and what wasn’t metal was glass, whole panels of it, as long as cars, and tall, from above a person’s head to his knees.
The woman saw him coming.
She turned in his direction but backed off, as if to draw him toward her. Reacher understood. She wanted to pull him south into the shadows. He rounded the point of the cowcatcher.
It was a phone in her hand, not a gun.
She said, “Who are you?”
He said, “Who’s asking?”
She turned her back and then straightened again, one fast fluid movement, like a fake-out on the basketball court, but enough for him to see FBI in yellow letters on the back of her shirt.
“Now answer my question,” she said.
“I’m just a guy.”
“Doing what?”
“Looking at this building.”
“The Flatiron?”
“No, this part in front. The glass part.”
“Why?”
Reacher said, “Have I been asleep for a long time?”
The woman said, “Meaning what?”
“Did some crazy old colonel stage a coup d’état? Are we living in a police state now? I must have blinked and missed it.”
“I’m a federal agent. I’m entitled to ask for your name and ID.”
“My name is Jack Reacher. No middle initial. I have a passport in my pocket. You want me to take it out?”
“Very slowly.”
So he did, very slowly. He used scissored fingers, like a pickpocket, and drew out the slim blue booklet and held it away from his body, long enough for her to register what it was, and then he passed it to her, and she opened it.
She said, “Why were you born in Berlin?”
He said, “I had no control over my mother’s movements. I was just a fetus at the time.”
“Why was she in Berlin?”
“Becau
se my father was. We were a Marine family. She said I was nearly born on a plane.”
“Are you a Marine?”
“I’m unemployed at the moment.”
“After being what?”
“Unemployed for many previous moments.”
“After being what?”
“Army.”
“Branch?”
“Military Police.”
She handed back the passport.
She said, “Rank?”
He said, “Does it matter?”
“I’m entitled to ask.”
She was looking past his shoulder.
He said, “I was terminal at major.”
“Is that good or bad?”
“Bad, mostly. If I had been any good at being a major, they would have made me stay.”
She didn’t reply.
He said, “What about you?”
“What about me?”
“Rank?”
“Special Agent in Charge.”
“Are you in charge tonight?”
“Yes, I am.”
“Outstanding.”
She said, “Where did you come from?”
He said, “The subway.”
“Was there police tape?”
“I don’t recall.”
“You broke through it.”
“Check the First Amendment. I’m pretty sure I’m allowed to walk around where I want. Isn’t that part of what makes America great?”
“You’re in the way.”
“Of what?”
She was still looking past his shoulder.
She said, “I can’t tell you.”
“Then you should have told the train not to stop. Tape isn’t enough.”
“I didn’t have time.”
“Because?”
“I can’t tell you.”
Reacher said nothing.
The woman said, “What’s your interest in the glass part of this building?”
Reacher said, “I’m thinking of putting in a bid as a window washer. Might get me back on my feet.”
“Lying to a federal agent is a felony.”
“A million people every day look in these windows. Have you asked them?”
“I’m asking you.”
Reacher said, “I think Edward Hopper painted Nighthawks here.”
“Which is what?”
“A painting. Quite famous. Looking in through a diner’s windows, late at night, at the lonely people inside.”
“I never heard of a diner called Nighthawks. Not here.”
“The night hawks were the people. The diner was called Phillies.”
“I never heard of a diner here called anything.”
“I don’t think there was one.”
“You just said there was.”
“I think Hopper saw this place, and he made it a diner in his head. Or a lunch counter, at least. The shape is exactly the same. Looked at from right where we’re standing now.”
“I think I know that picture. Three people, isn’t it?”
“Plus the counter man. He’s kind of bent over, doing something in the well. There are two coffee urns behind him.”
“First there’s a couple, close but not touching, and then one lonely guy all by himself. With his back to us. In a hat.”
“All the men wear hats.”
“The woman is a redhead. She looks sad. It’s the loneliest picture I’ve ever seen.”
Reacher looked through the real-life glass. Easy to imagine bright fluorescent light in there, pinning people like searchlight beams, exposing them in a merciless way to the dark streets all around. Except the streets all around were empty, so there was no one to see.
In the painting, and in real life, too.
He said, “What have I walked into?”
The woman said, “You’re to stand still, right where you are, and don’t move until I tell you to.”
“Or what?”
“Or you’ll go to prison for interfering with a national security operation.”
“Or you’ll get fired for continuing with a national security operation after it suddenly got a civilian in the way.”
“The operation isn’t here. It’s in the park.”
She looked diagonally across the wide junction, three major thoroughfares all meeting, at the mass of trees beyond.
He said, “What have I walked into?”
She said, “I can’t tell you.”
“I’m sure I’ve heard worse.”
“Military police, right?”
“Like the FBI, but on a much lower budget.”
“We have a target in the park. Sitting on a bench all alone. Waiting for a contact who isn’t coming.”
“Who is he?”
“A bad apple.”
“From your barrel?”
She nodded. “One of us.”
“Is he armed?”
“He’s never armed.”
“Why isn’t his contact coming?”
“He died an hour ago in a hit-and-run accident. The driver didn’t stop. No one got the plate.”
“There’s a big surprise.”
“He turned out to be Russian. The State Department had to inform their consulate. Which turned out to be where the guy worked. Purely by coincidence.”
“Your guy was talking to the Russians? Do people still do that?”
“More and more. And it’s getting more and more important all the time. People say we’re headed back to the 1980s. But they’re wrong. We’re headed back to the 1930s.”
“So, your guy ain’t going to win employee of the month.”
She didn’t answer.
He said, “Where are you going to take him?”
She paused a beat. She said, “All that’s classified.”
“All that? All what? He can’t be going to multiple destinations.”
She didn’t answer.
Now he paused a beat.
He said, “Is he headed for the destination you want?”
She didn’t answer.
“Is he?”
She said, “No.”
“Because of suits higher up?”
“As always.”
“Are you married?”
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
“Are you?”
“I’m hanging in there.”
“So you’re the redhead.”
“And?”
“I’m the guy in the hat with his back to us, all alone.”
“Meaning, what?”
“Meaning, I’m going to take a walk. Like a First Amendment thing. Meaning, you’re going to stay here. Like a smart tactical thing.”
And he turned and moved away before she had a chance to object. He rounded the tip of the cowcatcher and headed diagonally across the heart of the complex junction, moving fast, not breaking stride at the curbs and the painted lines, ignoring the DON’T WALK signs, not slowing at all, and finally straight into the park itself, by its southwest gate. Ahead was a dry fountain and a closed-up burger stall. Curving left was the main center path, clearly following some kind of a design scheme that featured large ovals, like running tracks.
There were dim fancy lights on poles, and the Times Square glow was bouncing off the clouds like a magnesium flare. Reacher could see pretty well, but all he saw were empty benches, at least at the start of the curve. More came into sight as he walked, but they too stayed empty, all the way to the far tip of the oval, where there was another dry fountain, and a children’s playground, and finally the continuation of the path itself, curving down the other side of the oval, back toward the near tip. And it had benches, too.
And one of them was occupied.
By a big guy, all pink and fleshy, maybe fifty years old, in a dark suit. Pouchy face and thinning hair. A guy who looked like his life had passed him by.
Reacher stepped close and the guy looked up, and then he looked away, but Reacher sat down next to him anyway. He said, “Boris or Vladimir or whatever his name w
as isn’t coming. You’re busted. They know you’re not armed, but they’ve gone ahead and cleared about twenty square blocks, which means they’re going to shoot you. You’re about to be executed. But not while I’m here. Not with witnesses. And as it happens, the SAC isn’t happy with it. But she’s getting pressure from above.”
The guy said, “So?”
Reacher said, “So, here’s my good deed of the day. If you want to turn yourself in to her, I’ll walk with you. Every step of the way. You can tell her what you know, and you can get three squares a day in prison for the rest of your life.”
The guy didn’t answer.
Reacher said, “But maybe you don’t want to go to prison for the rest of your life. Maybe you’re ashamed. Maybe suicide by cop is better. Who am I to judge? So my super-good deed of the day is to walk away if you tell me to. Your choice.”
The guy said, “Then walk away.”
“You sure?”
“I can’t face it.”
“Why did you do it?”
“To be somebody.”
“What kind of stuff could you tell the SAC?”
“Nothing important. Damage assessment is their main priority. But they already know what I had access to, so they already know what I told them.”
“And you’ve got nothing worthwhile to add?”
“Not a thing. I don’t know anything. My contacts aren’t stupid. They know this can happen.”
“Okay,” Reacher said. “I’ll walk away.”
And he did, out of the park in its northeast corner, where he heard faint radio chatter in the shadows announcing his departure, and a deserted block up Madison Avenue, where he waited against the limestone base of a substantial building. Four minutes later he heard suppressed handguns, eleven or twelve rounds expended, a volley of thudding percussions like phone books slammed on desks. Then he heard nothing more.
He pushed off the wall and walked north on Madison, imagining himself back at the lunch counter, his hat in place, his elbows drawn in, nursing a new secret in a life already full of old secrets.
LEE CHILD was fired and on the dole when he hatched a harebrained scheme to write a best-selling novel, thus saving his family from ruin. Killing Floor was an immediate success and launched the series, which has grown in sales and impact with every new installment. His series hero, Jack Reacher, besides being fictional, is a kind-hearted soul who allows Lee lots of spare time for reading, listening to music, the Yankees, and Aston Villa. Visit LeeChild.com for info about the novels, short stories, the movie Jack Reacher, and more—or find Lee on Facebook.com/LeeChildOfficial, Twitter.com/LeeChildReacher, and YouTube.com/leechildjackreacher.
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