by Lee Child
“It’s a rough area.”
“Compared to what? Iwo Jima?”
“Where’s that?”
“It’s an island in the Pacific.”
“Sounds nice. Does it have beaches?”
“Lots of them. What’s your name?”
“Chrissie.”
“Pleased to meet you, Chrissie. My name is Reacher.”
“First or last?”
“Only.”
“You have only one name?”
“That anyone uses.”
“So if I go to CBGB with you, do you promise to stick close by?”
Which was pretty much a do-bears-sleep-in-the-woods type of a question, in Reacher’s opinion. Is the Pope a Catholic? He said, “Sure, count on it.”
The blondes on the opposite side of the table started fidgeting with dubious body language, and immediately Reacher knew they wouldn’t come, too. Which was dead-on A-OK with him. Like a big green light. A one-on-one excursion. Like a real date. Nine o’clock in the evening, Wednesday, July 13th, New York City, and his first civilian conquest was almost upon him, like a runaway train. He could feel it coming, like an earthquake. He wondered where Chrissie’s dorm was. Close by, he guessed.
He sipped his Coke.
Chrissie said, “So let’s go, Reacher.”
—
Reacher left money on the table for four Cokes, which he guessed was the gentlemanly thing to do. He followed Chrissie out through the door, and the night heat hit him like a hammer. Chrissie, too. She held her hair away from her shoulders with the backs of her hands and he saw a damp sheen on her neck. She said, “How far is it?”
He said, “You’ve never been?”
“It’s a bad area.”
“I think we have to go east about five blocks. Past Broadway and Lafayette to the Bowery. Then about three blocks south to the corner with Bleecker.”
“It’s so hot.”
“That’s for sure.”
“Maybe we should take my car. For the AC.”
“You have a car?”
“Sure.”
“Here in the city?”
“Right there.” And she pointed, to a small hatchback car on the curb about fifty feet away. A Chevrolet Chevette, Reacher thought, maybe a year old, maybe baby blue, although it was hard to tell under the yellow street lights.
He said, “Doesn’t it cost a lot to keep a car in the city?”
She said, “Parking is free after six o’clock.”
“But what do you do with it in the daytime?”
She paused a beat, as if unraveling the layers of his question, and she said, “No, I don’t live here.”
“I thought you did. Sorry. My mistake. I figured you were at NYU.”
She shook her head and said, “Sarah Lawrence.”
“Who’s she?”
“It’s a college. Where we go. In Yonkers. North of here. Sometimes we drive down and see what’s going on. Sometimes there are NYU boys in that coffee shop.”
“So we’re both out-of-towners.”
“Not tonight,” Chrissie said.
“What are your friends going to do?”
“About what?”
“About getting home tonight.”
“I’m going to drive them,” Chrissie said. “Like always.”
Reacher said nothing.
“But they’ll wait,” Chrissie said. “That’s part of the deal.”
—
The Chevette’s air conditioner was about as lousy as the coffee shop’s, but something was better than nothing. There were a few people on Broadway, like ghosts in a ghost town, moving slow, and a few on Lafayette, slower still, and homeless people on the Bowery, waiting for the shelters to open. Chrissie parked two blocks north of the venue, on Great Jones Street, between a car with its front window broken and a car with its back window broken. But it was under a working street light, which looked to be about as good as it got, short of employing a team of armed guards, or a pack of vicious dogs, or both. And the car would have been no safer left on Washington Square, anyway. So they got out into the heat and walked to the corner through air thick enough to eat. The sky was as hot and hard as an iron roof at noontime, and it was still flickering in the north, with the kind of restless energy that promised plenty and delivered nothing.
There was no line at the door of the club, which Chrissie felt was a good thing, because it meant there would be spots to be had at the front near the stage, just in case it really was the Ramones or Blondie that night. A guy inside took their money, and they moved past him into the heat and the noise and the dark, toward the bar, which was a long low space with dim light and sweating walls and red diner stools. There were about thirty people in there, twenty-eight of them kids no older than Chrissie, plus one person Reacher already knew, and another person he was pretty sure he was going to get to know, pretty well and pretty soon. The one he knew was Jill Hemingway, still thin and blonde and nervous, still in her short summer dress. The one he felt he would get to know looked a lot like Croselli. A cousin, maybe. He was the same kind of size and shape and age, and he was wearing the same kind of clothes, which were a sweated-through suit and a shirt plastered tight against a wet and hairy belly.
Jill Hemingway saw Reacher first. But only by a second. She moved off her stool and took a step and immediately the guy in the suit started snapping his fingers and gesturing for the phone. The barkeep dumped the instrument in front of him and the guy started dialing. Hemingway pushed her way through the thin crowd and came up to Reacher face to face and said, “You idiot.”
Reacher said, “Jill, this is my friend Chrissie. Chrissie, this is Jill, who I met earlier this evening. She’s an FBI agent.”
Beside him Chrissie said, “Hi, Jill.”
Hemingway looked temporarily nonplussed and said, “Hi, Chrissie.”
Reacher said, “Are you here for the music?”
Hemingway said, “I’m here because this is one of the few places Croselli doesn’t get total cooperation. Therefore this is one of the few places I knew he would have to put a guy. So I’m here to make sure nothing happens to you.”
“How did you know I would come here?”
“You live in South Korea. What else have you heard of?”
Chrissie said, “What exactly are we talking about?”
Croselli’s guy was still on the phone.
Reacher said, “Let’s sit down.”
Hemingway said, “Let’s not. Let’s get you the hell out of here.”
Chrissie said, “What the hell is going on?”
There were tiny café tables near the deserted stage. Reacher pushed through the crowd, left shoulder, right shoulder, and sat down, his back to a corner, most of the room in front of him. Chrissie sat down next to him, hesitant, and Hemingway paced for a second, and then she gave it up and joined them. Chrissie said, “This is really freaking me out, guys. Will someone please tell me what’s going on?”
Reacher said, “I was walking down the street and I saw a guy slap Agent Hemingway in the face.”
“And?”
“I hoped my presence would discourage him from doing it again. He took offense. Turns out he’s a mobster. Jill thinks they’re measuring me for concrete shoes.”
“And you don’t?”
“Seems oversensitive to me.”
Chrissie said, “Reacher, there are whole movies about this stuff.”
Hemingway said, “She’s right. You should listen to her. You don’t know these people. You don’t understand their culture. They won’t let an outsider disrespect them. It’s a matter of pride. It’s how they do business. They won’t rest until they fix it.”
Reacher said, “In other words they’re exactly the same as the Marine Corps. I know how to deal with people like that. I’ve been doing it all my life.”
“How do you plan to deal with them?”
“By making the likely cost too high. Which it already is, frankly. They can’t do anything in here, becau
se they’d be arrested, either by you or the NYPD. Which is too high of a cost. It would mean lawyers and bribes and favors, which they won’t spend on me. I’m not worth it. I’m nobody. Croselli will get over it.”
“You can’t stay in here all night.”
“He already tried it on the street, and he didn’t get very far.”
“Ten minutes from now he’ll have six guys out front.”
“Then I’ll go out the back.”
“He’ll have six guys there, too.”
Chrissie said, “You know when I asked you to stick close by me?”
Reacher said, “Sure.”
“You can forget that part now, OK?”
Reacher said, “This is nuts.”
Hemingway said, “You hit a made man in the head. What part of that don’t you understand? That just doesn’t happen. Get used to it, kid. And right now you’re in the same room as one of his goons. Who just got off the phone.”
“I’m sitting next to an FBI agent.”
Hemingway said nothing in reply to that. Reacher thought: NYU. Sarah Lawrence. Hemingway had never confirmed it either way. He had asked her: How long have you been with the FBI? She had answered: Who says I am?
He said, “Are you or are you not?”
She said nothing.
“It’s not real hard. It’s a yes or no answer.”
“No,” she said. “It really isn’t.”
“What does that mean?”
“It’s yes and no. Not yes or no.”
Reacher paused a beat.
“What, you’re freelancing here?” he said. “Is that it? This isn’t really your case? Which is why there was no backup van? Which is why you were using your little sister’s tape player?”
“It was my tape player. I’m suspended.”
“You’re what?”
“Medical grounds. But that’s what they always say. What it means is they took my badge, pending review.”
“Of what?”
“Like you said. The lawyers and the bribes and the favors. They’re weighing me in the balance. Me against all the good stuff.”
“This was Croselli?”
Hemingway nodded. “Right now he’s fireproof. He had the investigation shut down. I figured I might get him to boast about it, on the tape. I might have gotten something I could use. To make them take me back.”
“Why wasn’t Croselli armed in the city?”
“Part of the deal. They all can do what they want in every other way, but the homicide figure has to come down. Give and take. Everyone’s a winner.”
“Does Croselli know you’re suspended?”
“Of course he does. He made them do it.”
“So in fact the goon in the same room as me knows it, too, right? Is that what we’re saying here? He knows you’re not about to pull a badge. Or a gun. He knows you’re just a member of the public. Legally, I mean. In terms of your powers of arrest, and so on. And less than that, in terms of your credibility. As a witness against Croselli’s people, I mean.”
“I told you to go see your brother.”
“Don’t get all defensive. I’m not blaming you. I need to make a new plan, that’s all. I need to understand the parameters.”
Chrissie said, “You shouldn’t have gotten involved in the first place.”
“Why not?”
“At Sarah Lawrence we would say it was uncomfortably gender normative behavior. It was patriarchal. It spoke to the paternalistic shape of our society.”
“You know what they would say in the Marine Corps?”
“What?”
“They would point out you asked me to stick close by, because you think the Bowery is dangerous.”
“It is dangerous. Twelve guys are about to show up and kick your butt.”
Reacher nodded. “We should go, probably.”
“You can’t,” Hemingway said. “The goon won’t let you. Not until the others get here.”
“Is he armed?”
“No. Like I said.”
“You sure?”
“Hundred percent.”
“Do we agree one opponent is better than twelve?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Wait here,” Reacher said.
—
Reacher walked across the dim room, as graceful as a bulked-up greyhound, with all the dumb confidence a guy gets from being six-five and two-twenty and sixteen years old. He moved on through the bar, toward the restroom corridor. He had been in relatively few bars in his life, but enough to know they were superbly weapons-rich environments. Some had pool cues, all neatly lined up in racks, and some had martini glasses, all delicate and breakable, with stems like stilettos, and some had champagne bottles, as heavy as clubs. But the CBGB bar had no pool table, and its customers were apparently indifferent to martinis and champagne. The most numerous local resource was long-neck beer bottles, of which there were plenty. Reacher collected one as he walked, and out of the corner of his eye he saw Croselli’s guy get up and follow him, no doubt worried about rear exits or bathroom windows. There was in fact a rear exit, at the end of the restroom corridor, but Reacher ignored it. Instead he stepped into the men’s room.
Which was perhaps the single most bizarre place he had ever seen, outside of a military installation. The walls were bare brick covered in dense graffiti, and there were three wall-hung urinals and a lone sit-down toilet all exposed up on a step like a throne. There was a two-hole metal sink, and unspooled toilet rolls everywhere. No windows.
Reacher filled his empty beer bottle with water from the faucet, for extra weight, and he wiped his palm on his T-shirt, which neither dried his hand nor made his shirt appreciably wetter. But he got a decent grip on the long glass neck, and he held the bottle low down by his leg and he waited. Croselli’s guy came in seconds later. He glanced around, first amazed by the decor, then reassured by the lack of windows, which told Reacher all he really needed to know, but at sixteen he still played it by the book, so he asked anyway. He said, “Do we have a problem, you and me?”
The guy said, “We’re waiting for Mr. Croselli. He’ll be here in a minute. Which won’t be a problem for me. But it will be for you.”
So Reacher swung the bottle, the water kept in by centrifugal force, and it caught the guy high on the cheekbone and rocked him back, whereupon Reacher whipped the bottle down again and smashed it on the lip of a urinal, glass and water flying everywhere, and he jabbed the jagged broken circle into the guy’s thigh, to bring his hands down, and then again into his face, with a twist, flesh tearing and blood flowing, and then he dropped the bottle and shoved the guy in the chest, to bounce him off the wall, and as he came back toward him he dropped a solid head butt straight to the guy’s nose. Which was game over, right there, helped a little by the way the guy’s head bounced off the urinal on his way to the floor, which all made a conclusive little head-injury trifecta, bone, porcelain, tile, good night and good luck.
Reacher breathed in, and breathed out, and then he checked the view in the busted mirror above the sink. He had diluted smears of the guy’s blood on his forehead. He rinsed them off with lukewarm water and shook like a dog and headed back through the bar into the main room. Jill Hemingway and Chrissie were on their feet in the middle of the dance floor. He nodded them toward the exit. They set off toward him and he waited to fall into step. Hemingway said, “Where’s the goon?”
Reacher said, “He had an accident.”
“Jesus.”
They hustled on, through the bar one more time, into the lobby corridor, fast and hot.
Too late.
They got within ten feet of the street door, and then it opened wide and four big guys in sweated-through suits stepped in, followed by Croselli himself. All five of them stopped, and Reacher stopped, and behind him Chrissie and Jill Hemingway stopped, eight people all in a strung-out, single-file standoff, in a hot narrow corridor with perspiration running down the bare brick walls.
From the far en
d of the line Croselli said, “We meet again, kid.”
Then the lights went out.
—
Reacher couldn’t tell if his eyes were open or closed. The darkness was total and profound, like the next stop after nothing. And the darkness was completely silent, way down at some deep primeval level, all the low subliminal hum of modern life suddenly gone, leaving nothing in its place except blind human shufflings and a kind of whispered eerie keening that seemed to come up from ageless rocks below. From the twentieth century to the Stone Age, at the flick of a switch.
From behind him Reacher heard Chrissie’s voice say, “Reacher?”
“Stand still,” he said.
“OK.”
“Now turn around.”
“OK.”
He heard her feet on the floor, shuffling. He searched his last retained visual memory for where the first of Croselli’s guys had stopped. The middle of the corridor, facing dead ahead, maybe five feet away. He planted his left foot and kicked out with his right, hard, blindly, aiming groin-high into the pitch-black emptiness ahead. But he hit something lower, making contact a jarring split second before he expected. A kneecap, maybe. Which was fine. Either way the first of Croselli’s guys was about to fall down, and the other three were about to trip over him.
Reacher spun around and felt for Chrissie’s back, and he put his right arm around her shoulders, and with his left hand he found Hemingway, and he half pulled and half pushed them back the way they had come, to the bar, where a feeble battery-powered safety light had clicked on. Which meant it hadn’t been the flick of a switch. The whole building had lost power.
He found the restroom corridor and pushed Chrissie ahead of him and pulled Hemingway behind him, to the rear door, and they barged through it, out to the street.
Which was way too dark.
They hustled onward anyway, fast, out in the heat again, muscle memory and instinct compelling them to put some distance between the door and themselves, compelling them to seek the shadows, but it was all shadows. The Bowery was a pitch-dark and sullen ditch, long and straight both ways, bordered by pitch-dark and sullen buildings, uniformly massive and gloomy, their unlit bulk for once darker than the night sky. The skyline sentinels forty blocks north and south weren’t there at all, except in a negative sense, because at the bottom of the sky there were dead fingers where inert buildings were blocking the glow of starlight behind thin cloud.