by Lee Child
She was about nineteen. No older. Maybe younger. An insurance company would have given her sixty more years to live. I figured a more accurate projection was thirty-six hours, or thirty-six minutes if things went wrong from the get-go.
She was blonde and blue-eyed, but not American. American girls have a glow, a smoothness, from many generations of plenty. This girl was different. Her ancestors had known hardship and fear. That inheritance was in her face and her body and her movements. Her eyes were wary. Her body was lean. Not the kind of lean you get from a diet, but the Darwinian kind of lean you get when your grandparents had no food, and either starved or didn’t. Her movements were fragile and tense, a little alert, a little nervous, even though on the face of it she was having as good a time as a girl could get.
She was in a New York bar, drinking beer, listening to a band, and she was in love with the guitar player. That was clear. The part of her gaze that wasn’t wary was filled with adoration, and it was all aimed in his direction. She was probably Russian. She was rich. She was alone at a table near the stage and she had a pile of ATM-fresh twenties in front of her and she was paying for each new bottle with one of them and she wasn’t asking for change. The waitresses loved her. There was a guy further back in the room, wedged on an upholstered bench, staring at her. Her bodyguard, presumably. He was a tall wide man with a shaved head and a black T-shirt under a black suit. He was a part of the reason she was drinking beer in a city bar at the age of nineteen or less. It wasn’t the kind of glossy place that had a policy about underage rich girls, either for or against. It was a scruffy dive on Bleecker Street, staffed by skinny kids trying to make tuition money, and I guessed they had looked at her and her minder and taken a snap decision against trouble and in favor of tips.
I watched her for a minute, and then I looked away. My name is Jack Reacher, and once I was a military cop, with heavy emphasis on the past tense. I have been out nearly as long as I was in. But old habits die hard. I had stepped into the bar the same way I always step anywhere, which is carefully. One thirty in the morning. I had ridden the A train to West 4th and walked south on Sixth Avenue and made the left on Bleecker and checked the sidewalks. I wanted music, but not the kind that drives large numbers of patrons outside to smoke. The smallest knot of people was next to a place with half a flight of stairs leading up to its door. There was a shiny black Mercedes sedan parked on the curb, with a driver behind the wheel. The music coming out of the place was filtered and dulled by the walls but I could hear an agile bass line and some snappy drumming. So I walked up the stairs and paid a five-dollar cover and shouldered my way inside.
Two exits. One the door I had just come through, the other indicated at the end of a long dark restroom corridor way in back. The room was narrow and about ninety feet deep. A bar on the left at the front, then some upholstered horseshoe benches, then a cluster of freestanding tables on what on other nights might have been a dance floor. Then the stage, with the band on it.
The band looked like it had been put together by accident after a misfiling incident at a talent agency. The bass player was a stout old black guy in a suit with a vest. He was plucking away at an upright bass fiddle. The drummer could have been his uncle. He was a big old guy sprawled comfortably behind a small simple kit. The singer was also a harmonica player and was older than the bass player and younger than the drummer and bigger than either one. Maybe sixty, built for comfort, not for speed.
The guitarist was completely different. He was young and white and small. Maybe twenty, maybe five feet six, maybe a hundred and thirty pounds. He had a fancy blue guitar wired to a crisp new amplifier and together the instrument and the electronics made sharp sounds full of space and echoes. The amp must have been turned up to eleven. The sound was incredibly loud. It was like the air in the room was locked solid. It had no more capacity for volume.
But the music was good. The three black guys were old pros, and the white kid knew all the notes, and when and how and in what order to play them. He was wearing a red T-shirt and black pants and white tennis shoes. He had a very serious expression on his face. He looked foreign. Maybe Russian, too.
I spent the first half of the first song checking the room, counting people, scanning faces, parsing body language. Old habits die hard. There were two guys across a table with their hands underneath it. One selling, one buying, obviously, the deal done by feel and confirmed with furtive glances. The bar staff was scamming the owner by selling store-bought beer out of an ice chest. Two out of three domestic bottles were legit, from the refrigerator cabinets, and then the third came from their own cooler. I got one of them. A wet label and a big margin. I carried the bottle to a corner seat and sat down with my back to the wall. It was at that point I saw the girl alone at her table, and her bodyguard on his bench. I guessed the Mercedes outside was theirs. I guessed Daddy was a B-grade oligarch, millions but not billions, indulging his daughter with four years at NYU and an ATM card that never stopped working.
Just two people out of eighty in the room. No big deal.
Until I saw two other guys.
They were a pair. Tall young white men, cheap tight leather jackets, heads shaved by blunt razors that had left nicks and scabs. More Russians, probably. Operators, no question. Connected, no doubt. Probably not the best the world has ever seen, but probably not the worst, either. They were sitting far apart from one another but their twin gazes were triangulated on the girl alone at the table. They were tense, determined, to some degree nervous. I recognized the signs. Many times I had felt the same way myself. They were about to go into action. So two B-grade oligarchs had a beef, and one was protecting his kid with drivers and bodyguards, and the other was sending guys around the world to snatch her. Then would come ransom, and extortion, and demands, and fortunes would change hands, or uranium leases, or oil rights, or coal or gas.
Business, Moscow style.
But not usually successful business. Kidnaps have a thousand different dynamics and go wrong a thousand different ways. Average life expectancy for a kidnap victim is thirty-six hours. Some survive, but most don’t. Some die right away, in the initial panic.
The girl’s pile of twenties was attracting waitresses like wasps at a picnic. And she wasn’t shooing any of them away. She was taking one fresh bottle after another. And beer is beer. She was going to have to visit the restroom, soon and often. And the restroom corridor was long and dark, and it had a street exit at the end of it.
I watched her in the gaudy reflected light, with the music shrieking and pounding all around me. The two guys watched her. Her bodyguard watched her. She watched the guitarist. He was concentrating hard, key changes and choruses, but from time to time he would lift his head and smile, mostly at the glory of being up on the stage, but twice directly at the girl. The first of those smiles was shy, and the second was a little wider.
The girl stood up. She butted the lip of her table with her thighs and shuffled out from behind it and headed for the corridor in back. I got there first. The sound from the band howled through it. The ladies’ room was halfway down. The men’s room was all the way at the end. I leaned on the wall and watched the girl walk toward me. She was up on high heels and she was wearing tight pants and her steps were short and precise. Not drunk yet. She was Russian. She put a pale palm on the restroom door and pushed. She went inside.
Less than ten seconds later the two guys stepped into the corridor. I guessed they would wait there for her. But they didn’t. They glanced at me like I was a part of the architecture and shouldered in through the ladies’ room door. One after the other. The door slammed behind them.
The music played on.
I went in after them. Every day brings something new. I had never been in a women’s bathroom before. Stalls on the right, sinks on the left. Bright light and the smell of perfume. The girl was standing near the back wall. The two guys were facing her. Their backs were to me. I said, “Hey,” but they didn’t hear. Too much noise. I caught th
em by the elbows, one in each hand. They spun around, ready to fight, but then they stopped. I am bigger than the Frigidaires they had been dreaming about back home. They stood still for a second and then pushed past me and pulled the door and headed out.
The girl looked at me for a moment with an emotion I couldn’t read and then I left her to do what she needed to do. I went back to my seat. The two guys were already back in theirs. The bodyguard was impassive. He was watching the stage. The band was finishing up. The girl was still in the bathroom.
The music stopped. The two guys got up and headed back toward the corridor. The room was suddenly crowded with people standing and moving. I headed over to the bodyguard and tapped him on the shoulder and pointed. He took no notice. He didn’t move at all, until the guitar player started backing away off the stage. Then he got up, the two movements perfectly synchronized, and I knew I had gotten it all wrong. Not an indulged daughter. An indulged son. Daddy had bought the guitar and the amp and hired backing musicians. The boy’s dream. Out of the bedroom, onto the stage. His driver at the curb, his bodyguard watching all the way. Not a team of two from his rival, but a team of three. An adoring groupie. The boy’s dream. A classic honeytrap. A last-minute tactical conference in the bathroom, and then action.
I shoved my way through to the back and got to the street well ahead of the bodyguard, just as the girl was hugging the boy and turning him through a half circle and pushing him toward the two guys. I hit the first one hard and the second one harder and got blood from his mouth all over my shirt. The two guys went down and the girl fled and then the bodyguard showed up. I made him give me his T-shirt. Bloodstains attract attention. Then I left through the front. The obvious move would have been to turn right, so I turned left, and I got the 6 train at Bleecker and Lafayette, heading north, the last-but-one car. I settled in and checked the faces. Old habits die hard.
It was snowing when Reacher got out of the bus, in a part of America where it didn’t snow often. It was late in the afternoon, and the street lights were on. People looked both excited and anxious at the unaccustomed weather. There was about six inches of slushy pack on the ground, and the flurries were coming down hard. Some folks looked itching to go sledding or snowballing, and others looked convinced the power was about to go out and vehicular transportation was about to become impossible for months. Context, Reacher thought. What was a mere sprinkle by northern standards was a big deal in the South.
He sloshed his way across the sidewalk to a humped patch of what he guessed was grass. Like a village green, with a flagpole, which had a frozen and matted Stars and Stripes hanging limply from it. The town was a mile from the interstate highway, and knew it. It was all gas stations and fast food and inns and motels. A pit stop, nothing more, all geared to what random travelers wanted. Especially that day. Already cars were pulling off and splashing through the downtown slush, searching for a place to stay an unexpected night. Anything to avoid certain death in the raging blizzard ahead.
Context, Reacher thought again. And melodrama. He figured he better snag a room before the panic turned into a rush. He had seen news video from time to time, of stranded travelers sprawled in motel lobbies. No room at the inn.
Which made him remember it was Christmas Eve. December twenty-fourth.
He chose the cheapest-looking place, which was a falling-down motel next to a Shell station big enough for eighteen-wheel trucks. It was a twelve-room dump with ten already taken, which made Reacher think maybe the rush had already started. The place could have been no one’s first choice. It wasn’t The Ritz. That was for sure.
He paid cash and got a key and walked along the row to his room, all hunched under his collar to ward off the blowing snow. Ten rooms had cars parked outside, all rimed with snow and streaked with salt, all with plates from states to the south, all laden with luggage and packages. Families, Reacher guessed, aiming to get together for the holidays, their journeys interrupted, their plans ruined, their gifts undelivered.
He unlocked his door and stepped into his room, which looked adequate in every respect. There was a bed and a bathroom. Even a chair. He shook meltwater off his shoes and sat down, and watched the flurries through a fogged window, as they whirled through yellow halos of vapor light. He figured drivers would be chickening out in waves. But they would look for accommodation first, not food, which meant the diners wouldn’t crowd out for another couple of hours. He switched on the bedside light and took a paperback book from his pocket.
—
Ninety minutes later he was in a diner, waiting for a cheeseburger. The place was filling up and service was slow. There was a kind of manic energy in the room, from a lot of forced high spirits. Folks were trying to convince themselves they were having an adventure. Eventually his food came and he ate. The place got more and more crowded. People were coming in and just standing there, somehow defeated. The motels were full, Reacher realized. No more room at the inn. People were eyeing the diner floor. Like in the news footage. He ordered peach pie and black coffee, and settled in to wait for it.
—
He walked back to the motel pretty late in the evening. The snow was still coming down, but lighter. Tomorrow would be a better day. He turned in at the motel office and stopped short, to avoid walking straight into a very pregnant woman. She was with a guy, huddled aimlessly, and she had been crying.
An idling car stood by, an old three-door, rimed with snow and streaked with salt, and full of luggage and packages.
No room at the inn.
Reacher said, “Are you guys OK?”
The man said nothing, and the woman said, “Not exactly.”
“Can’t get a room?”
“The whole town is full.”
“Should have kept on going,” Reacher said. “The weather is letting up.”
“I made him pull off. I was worried.”
“So what do you plan to do?”
The woman didn’t answer, and the man said, “I guess we’ll sleep in the car.”
“You’ll freeze.”
“What choice do we have?”
Reacher said, “When is the baby due?”
“Soon.”
Reacher said, “I’ll trade.”
“What for what?”
“I’ll sleep in your car, and you can have my room.”
“We can’t let you do that.”
“I’ve slept in cars before. But never while pregnant. I imagine that wouldn’t be easy.”
Neither the man or the woman spoke. Reacher took his key out of his pocket and said, “Take it or leave it.”
The woman said, “You’ll freeze.”
“I’ll be just fine.”
And then they all stood around for a minute more, shuffling in the cold, but soon enough the woman took the key, and she and her partner crabbed away to the room, a little embarrassed but basically very happy, wanting to look back but not letting themselves. Reacher called a happy Christmas after them, and they turned and wished him the same. Then they went inside, and Reacher turned away.
He didn’t sleep in their car. He walked over to the Shell station instead, and found a guy with a tanker with five thousand gallons of milk in it. Which had a use-by date. And the weather was clearing. The guy was willing to go for it, and Reacher went with him.
Jack Reacher got out of the R train at 23rd 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, and 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. 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 23rd Street station was a fine example of its type, and Reacher had many times slept in far worse places, 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 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 23rd 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.