by Child, Lee
She chose the Gucci heels which matched the sheath’s color and made her legs look long. Then she went down to the kitchen and ate her lunch, which was an apple and a square of reduced-fat cheese, and then she went back upstairs and brushed her teeth again and thought about makeup. Being naked under the dress and with her hair down in a natural style, the way to go was really no makeup at all, but she was prepared to admit she was just a little way past being able to get away with that, so she set out on the long haul of making herself up so she would look like she hadn’t troubled to.
It took her twenty minutes; and then she did her nails, toes too, because she felt that counted when it was likely her shoes would be coming off early. Then she dabbed her favorite perfume on, enough to be noticed without being overwhelming. Then the phone rang. It was Sheryl.
“Marilyn?” she said. “Six hours on the market, and you’ve got a nibble!”
“I have? But who? And how?”
“I know, the very first day, before you’re even listed anywhere, isn’t it wonderful? It’s a gentleman who’s relocating with his family, and he was cruising the area, getting a feel for it, and he saw your sign. He came straight over here for the particulars. Are you ready? Can I bring him right over?”
“Wow, right now? Already? This is quick, isn’t it? But yes, I guess I’m ready. Who is it, Sheryl? You think he’s a serious buyer?”
“Definitely I do, and he’s only here today. He has to go back west tonight.”
“OK, well, bring him on over, I guess. I’ll be ready.”
She realized she must have been rehearsing the whole routine, unconsciously, without really being aware of it. She moved fast, but she wasn’t flustered. She hung up the phone and ran straight down to the kitchen and switched the oven on low. Spooned a heap of coffee beans onto a saucer and placed them on the middle shelf. Shut the oven door and turned to the sink. Dropped the apple core into the waste disposal and stacked the plate in the dishwasher. Wiped the sink down with a paper towel and stood back, hands on hips, scanning the room. She walked to the window and angled the blind until the light caught the shine on the floor.
“Perfect,” she said to herself.
She ran back up the stairs and started at the top of the house. She ducked into every room, scanning, checking, adjusting flowers, angling blinds, plumping pillows. She turned lamps on everywhere. She had read that to turn them on after the buyer was already in the room was a clear message the house was gloomy. Better to have them on from the outset, which was a clear message of cheerful welcome.
She ran back down the stairs. In the family room, she opened the blind all the way to show off the pool. In the den, she turned on the reading lamps and tilted the blind almost closed, to give a dark, comfortable look. Then she ducked into the living room. Shit, Chester’s side-table was still there. right next to where his armchair had been. How could she have missed that? She grabbed it two-handed and ran with it to the basement stairs. She heard Sheryl’s car on the gravel. She opened the basement door and ran down and dumped the table and ran back up. Closed the door on it and ducked into the powder room. Straightened the guest towel and dabbed at her hair and checked herself in the mirror. God! She was wearing her silk sheath. With nothing underneath. The silk was clinging to her skin. What the hell was this poor guy going to think?
The doorbell rang. She was frozen. Did she have time to change? Of course not. They were at the door, right now, ringing the bell. A jacket or something? The doorbell rang again. She took a breath and shook her hips to loosen the fabric and walked down the hall. Took another breath and opened the door.
Sheryl beamed in at her, but Marilyn was already looking at the buyer. He was a tallish man, maybe fifty or fifty-five, gray, in a dark suit, standing side-on, looking out and back at the plantings along the driveway. She glanced down at his shoes, because Chester always said wealth and breeding shows up on the feet. These looked pretty good. Heavy Oxfords, polished to a shine. She started a smile. Was this going to be it? Sold within six hours? That would be a hell of a thing. She smiled a quick conspirator’s smile with Sheryl and turned to the man.
“Come in,” she said brightly, and held out her hand.
He turned back from the garden to face her. He stared straight at her, frankly and blatantly. She felt naked under his gaze. She practically was naked. But she found herself staring right back at him, because he was terribly burned. One side of his head was just a mass of shiny pink scars. She kept her polite smile frozen in place and kept her hand extended toward him. He paused. Brought his hand up to meet it. But it wasn’t a hand. It was a shining metal hook. Not an artificial hand, not a clever prosthetic device, just a wicked metal curve made of gleaming steel.
REACHER WAS AT the curb outside the sixty-story building on Wall Street ten minutes before seven o’clock. He kept the motor running and scanned a triangle that had its point on the building’s exit door and spread sideways across the plaza past the distance where somebody could get to her before he could. There was nobody inside the triangle who worried him. Nobody static, nobody watching, just a thin stream of office workers jostling out to the street, jackets over their arms, bulky briefcases in their hands. Most of them were making a left on the sidewalk, heading for the subway. Some of them were threading through the cars at the curb, looking for cabs out in the traffic stream.
The other parked cars were harmless. There was a UPS truck two places ahead, and a couple of livery vehicles with drivers standing next to them, scanning for their passengers. Innocent bustle, at the weary end of a busy day. Reacher settled back in his seat to wait, his eyes flicking left and right, ahead and behind, always returning to the revolving door.
She came out before seven, which was sooner than he expected. He saw her through the glass, in the lobby. He saw her hair, and her dress, and the flash of her legs as she skipped sideways to the exit. He wondered for a second if she had just been waiting up on her high floor. The timing was plausible. She could have seen the car from her window, gone straight to the elevator. She pushed the door and spilled out onto the plaza. He got out of the car and moved around the hood to the sidewalk and stood waiting. She was carrying the pilot’s case. She skipped through a shaft of sun and her hair lit up like a halo. Ten yards from him, she smiled.
“Hello, Reacher,” she called.
“Hello, Jodie,” he said.
She knew something. He could see it in her face. She had big news for him, but she was smiling like she was going to tease him with it.
“What?” he asked.
She smiled again and shook her head. “You first, OK?”
They sat in the car and he ran through everything the old couple had told him. Her smile faded and she turned somber. Then he gave her the leather-bound folder and left her to scan through it while he fought the traffic in a narrow counterclockwise square that left them facing south on Broadway, two blocks from her place. He pulled in at the curb outside an espresso bar. She was reading the reconnaissance report from Rutter and studying the photograph of the emaciated gray man and the Asian soldier.
“Incredible,” she said, quietly.
“Give me your keys,” he said back. “Get a coffee and I’ll walk up for you when I know your building’s OK.”
She made no objection. The photograph had shaken her up. She just went into her bag for her keys and got out of the car and skipped straight across the sidewalk and into the coffee shop. He watched her inside and then eased south down the street. He turned directly into her garage. It was a different car, and he figured if anybody was waiting down there they would hesitate long enough to give him all the advantage he would need. But the garage was quiet. Just the same group of parked vehicles, looking like they hadn’t moved all day. He put the Taurus in her slot and went up the metal stairs to the lobby. Nobody there. Nobody in the elevator, nobody in the fourth-floor hallway. Her door was undamaged. He opened it up and stepped inside. Quiet, still air. Nobody there.
He used the fir
e stairs to get back to the lobby and went out the glass doors to the street. Walked the two blocks north and ducked into the coffee shop and found her alone at a chrome table, reading Victor Hobie’s letters, an espresso untouched at her elbow.
“You going to drink that?” he asked.
She stacked the jungle photograph on top of the letters.
“This has big implications,” she said.
He took that for a no, and pulled the cup over and swallowed the coffee in one mouthful. It had cooled slightly and was wonderfully strong.
“Let’s go,” she said. She let him carry her case and took his arm for the two-block walk. He gave back her keys at the street door and they went in through the lobby together and up in the elevator in silence. She unlocked the apartment door and went inside ahead of him.
“So it’s government people after us,” she said.
He made no reply. Just shrugged off his new jacket and dropped it on the sofa under the Mondrian copy.
“Has to be,” she said.
He walked to the windows and cracked the blinds. Shafts of daylight poured in and the white room glowed.
“We’re close to the secret of these camps,” she said. “So the government is trying to silence us. CIA or somebody.”
He walked through to the kitchen. Pulled the refrigerator door and took out a bottle of water.
“We’re in serious danger,” she said. “You don’t seem very worried about it ”
He shrugged and took a swallow of water. It was too cold. He preferred it room temperature.
“Life’s too short for worrying,” he said.
“Dad was worrying. It was making his heart worse.”
He nodded. “I know. I’m sorry.”
“So why aren’t you taking it seriously? Don’t you believe it?”
“I believe it,” he said. “I believe everything they told me.”
“And the photograph proves it, right? The place obviously exists.”
“I know it exists,” he said. “I’ve been there.”
She stared at him. “You’ve been there? When? How?”
“Not long ago,” he said. “I got just about as close as this Rutter guy got.”
“Christ, Reacher,” she said. “So what are you going to do about it?”
“I’m going to buy a gun.”
“No, we should go to the cops. Or the newspapers, maybe. The government can’t do this.”
“You wait for me here, OK?”
“Where are you going?”
“I’m going to buy a gun. Then I’ll buy us some pizza. I’ll bring it back.”
“You can’t buy a gun, not in New York City, for God’s sake. There are laws. You need ID and permits and things and you’ve got to wait five days anyway.”
“I can buy a gun anywhere,” he said. “Especially New York City. What do you want on the pizza?”
“Have you got enough money?”
“For the pizza?”
“For the gun,” she said.
“The gun will cost me less than the pizza,” he said. “Lock the door behind me, OK? And don’t open it unless you see it’s me in the spy hole.”
He left her standing in the center of the kitchen. He used the fire stairs to the lobby and stood in the bustle on the sidewalk long enough to get himself lined up with the geography. There was a pizza parlor on the block to the south. He ducked inside and ordered a large pie, half anchovies and capers, half hot pepperoni, to go in thirty minutes. Then he dodged traffic on Broadway and struck out east. He’d been in New York enough times to know what people say is true. Everything happens fast in New York. Things change fast. Fast in terms of chronology, and fast in terms of geography. One neighborhood shifts into another within a couple of blocks. Sometimes, the front of a building is a middle-class paradise, and around the back bums are sleeping in the alley. He knew a fast ten-minute walk was going to take him worlds away from Jodie’s expensive apartment block.
He found what he was looking for in the shadows under the approach to the Brooklyn Bridge. There was a messy tangle of streets crouching there, and a giant housing project sprawling to the north and east. Some ragged cluttered stores, and a basketball court with chains under the hoops instead of nets. The air was hot and damp and filled with fumes and noise. He turned a comer and stood leaning on the chain-link with the basketball noises behind him, watching two worlds collide. There was a rapid traffic flow of vehicles driving and people walking fast, and an equal quantity of cars stopped and idling and people standing around in bunches. The moving cars tacked around the stopped ones, honking and swerving, and the walking people pushed and complained and dodged into the gutter to pass the knots of loiterers. Sometimes a car would stop short and a boy would dart forward to the driver’s window. There would be a short conversation and money would change hands like a conjuring trick and the boy would dart back to a doorway and disappear. He would reappear a moment later and hustle back to the car. The driver would glance left and right and accept a small package and force back into the traffic in a burble of exhaust and a blast of horns. Then the boy would return to the sidewalk and wait.
Sometimes the trade was on foot, but the system was always the same. The boys were the cut-outs. They carried the money in and the packages out, and they were too young to go to trial. Reacher was watching them use three doorways in particular, spaced out along the block frontage. The center of the three was doing the busiest trade. About two-to-one, in terms of commercial volume. It was the eleventh building, counting up from the south corner. He pushed off the fence and turned east. There was a vacant lot ahead which gave him a glimpse of the river. The bridge soared over his head. He turned north and came up behind the buildings in a narrow alley. Scanned ahead as he walked and counted eleven fire escapes. Dropped his glance to ground level and saw a black sedan jammed into the narrow space outside the eleventh rear entrance. There was a boy of maybe nineteen sitting on the trunk lid, with a mobile phone in his hand. The back-door guard, one step up the promotion ladder from his baby brothers shuttling back and forward across the sidewalk.
There was nobody else around. The boy was on his own. Reacher stepped into the alley. The way to do it is to walk fast and focus on something way beyond your target. Make the guy feel like he’s got nothing to do with anything. Reacher made a show of checking his watch and glancing far ahead into the distance. He hustled along, almost running. At the last minute, he dropped his gaze to the car, like he was suddenly dragged back into the present by the obstacle. The boy was watching him. Reacher dodged left, where he knew the angle of the car wouldn’t let him through. He pulled up in exasperation and dodged right, turning with the pent-up fury of a hurrying man balked by a nuisance. He swung his left arm with the turn and hit the kid square in the side of the head. The kid toppled and he hit him again, right-handed, just a short-arm jab, relatively gentle. No reason to put him in the hospital.
He let him fall off the trunk lid unaided, to see how far away he’d put him. A conscious person will always break his fall. This kid didn’t. He hit the alley floor with a dusty thump. Reacher rolled him over and checked his pockets. There was a gun in there, but it wasn’t the sort of thing he was going to bear home in triumph. It was a Chinese .22, some imitation of a Soviet imitation of something that was probably useless to start with. He pitched it out of reach under the car.
He knew the back door of the tenement would be unlocked, because that’s the point of a back door when you’re doing a roaring trade about 150 yards south of Police Plaza. They come in the front, you need to be able to get out the back without fumbling for the key. He inched it open with his toe and stood gazing into the gloom. There was an inner door off the back hallway, leading to the right, into a room with a light on inside. It was about ten paces away.
No point in waiting. They weren’t about to take a dinner break. He walked ahead ten paces and stopped at the door. The building stank of decay and sweat and urine. It was quiet. An abandoned building. He li
stened. There was a low voice inside the room. Then an answer to it. Two people, minimum.
Swinging the door open and standing and taking stock of the scene inside is not the way to do it. The guy who pauses even for a millisecond is the guy who dies earlier than his classmates. Reacher’s guess was the tenement was maybe fifteen feet wide, of which three were represented by the hallway he was standing in. So he aimed to be the other twelve feet into the room before they even knew he was there. They would still be looking at the door, wondering who else was coming in after him.
He took a breath and burst through the door like it wasn’t there at all. It crashed back against the hinge and he was across the room in two huge strides. Dim light. A single electric bulb. Two men. Packages on the table. Money on the table. A handgun on the table. He hit the first guy a wide swinging roundhouse blow square on the temple. The guy fell sideways and Reacher drove through him with a knee in the gut on his way back to the second man, who was coming up out of his chair with his eyes wide and his mouth open in shock. Reacher aimed high and smacked him with a forearm smash exactly horizontal between his eyebrows and his hairline. Do it hard enough, and the guy goes down for an hour, but his skull stays in one piece. This was supposed to be a shopping trip, not an execution.
He stood still and listened through the door. Nothing. The guy in the alley was sleeping and the noise on the street was occupying the kids on the sidewalk. He glanced at the table and glanced away again, because the handgun lying there was a Colt Detective Special. A six-shot, .38-caliber revolver in blued steel with black plastic grips. Stubby little two-inch barrel. No good at all. Nowhere near the sort of thing he was looking for. The short barrel was a drawback, and the caliber was a disappointment. He remembered a Louisiana cop he’d met, a police captain from some small jurisdiction out in the bayou. The guy had come to the military police for firearms advice and Reacher had been detailed to deal with him. The guy had all kinds of tales of woe about the .38-caliber revolvers his men were using. He said you just can’t rely on them to put a guy down, not if he’s coming at you all pumped up on angel dust. He told a story about a suicide. The guy needed five shots to the head with a .38 to put himself away. Reacher had been impressed by the guy’s unhappy face and he had decided then and there to stay away from .38s, which was a policy he was not about to change now. So he turned his back on the table and stood still and listened again. Nothing. He squatted next to the guy he’d hit in the head and started through his jacket.