by Lee Child
“Are we going to make it?” the CEO asked again.
The finance director was copying large numbers onto a sheet of paper. He subtracted one from another and looked at a calendar. He shrugged.
“In theory, yes,” he said. “In practice, no.”
“No?” the CEO repeated.
“It’s the time factor,” the finance director said. “We did the right thing out at the plant, no doubt about that. Eighty percent of the people gone, saves us ninety-one percent of the payroll, because we only kept the cheap ones. But we paid them all up to the end of next month. So the cash-flow enhancement doesn’t hit us for six weeks. And in fact right now the cash flow gets much worse, because the little bastards are all out there cashing a six-week paycheck.”
The CEO sighed and nodded.
“So how much do we need?”
The finance director used the mouse and expanded a window.
“One-point-one million dollars,” he said. “For six weeks.”
“Bank?”
“Forget it,” the finance director said. “I’m over there every day kissing ass just to keep what we already owe them. I ask for more, they’ll laugh in my face.”
“Worse things could happen to you,” the CEO said.
“That’s not the point,” the finance director said. “The point is they get a sniff we’re still not healthy, they’ll call those loans. In a heartbeat.”
The CEO drummed his fingers on the rosewood and shrugged.
“I’ll sell some stock,” he said.
The finance director shook his head.
“You can’t,” he said, patiently. “You put stock in the market, the price will go through the floor. Our existing borrowing is secured on stock, and if it gets any more worthless, they’ll close us down tomorrow.”
“Shit,” the CEO said. “We’re six weeks away. I’m not going to lose all this for six lousy weeks. Not for a lousy million bucks. It’s a trivial amount.”
“A trivial amount we haven’t got.”
“Got to be somewhere we can get it.”
The finance director made no reply to that. But he was sitting there like he had something more to say.
“What?” the CEO asked him.
“I heard some talk,” he said. “Guys I know, gossiping. There’s maybe somewhere we can go. For six weeks, it might be worth it. There’s an outfit I heard about. A lender-of-last-resort type of thing.”
“On the level?”
“Apparently,” the finance director said. “Looks very respectable. Big office over in the World Trade Center. He specializes in cases like this.”
The CEO glared at the screen.
“Cases like what?”
“Like this,” the finance director repeated. “Where you’re almost home and dry, but the banks are too tight-assed to see it.”
The CEO nodded and gazed around the office. It was a beautiful place. And his own office was two floors higher, on a corner, and even more beautiful.
“OK,” he said. “Do it.”
“I can’t do it,” the finance director said. “This guy won’t deal below CEO level. You’ll have to do it.”
IT STARTED OUT a quiet night in the nude bar. A midweek evening in June, way too late for the snowbirds and the spring breakers, too early for the summer vacationers who came down to roast. Not more than maybe forty people in all night, two girls behind the bar, three girls out there dancing. Reacher was watching a woman called Crystal. He assumed that was not her real name, but he had never asked. She was the best. She earned a lot more than Reacher had ever earned as a major in the military police. She spent a percentage of her income running an old black Porsche. Reacher sometimes heard it in the early afternoons, rumbling and blatting around the blocks where he was working.
The bar was a long, narrow upstairs room with a runway and a small circular stage with a shiny chrome pole. Snaking around the runway and the stage was a line of chairs. There were mirrors everywhere, and where there weren’t, the walls were painted flat black. The whole place pulsed and pounded to loud music coming out of a half dozen speakers serious enough to drown out the roar of the air-conditioning.
Reacher was at the bar, back-to, a third of the way into the room. Near enough the door to be seen straight away, far enough into the room that people wouldn’t forget he was there. The woman called Crystal had finished her third spot and was hauling a harmless guy backstage for a twenty-buck private show when Reacher saw two men emerge at the top of the stairs. Strangers, from the north. Maybe thirty years old, bulky, pale. Menacing. Northern tough guys, in thousand-dollar suits and shined shoes. Down here in some kind of a big hurry, still dressed for their city office. They were standing at the desk, arguing about the three-buck cover charge. The girl at the desk glanced anxiously at Reacher. He slid off his stool. Walked over.
“Problem, guys?” he asked.
He had used what he called his college-kid walk. He had noticed that college boys walk with a curious tensed-up, limping motion. Especially on the beach, in their shorts. As if they were so tremendously muscle-bound they couldn’t quite make their limbs operate in the normal way. He thought it made 130-pound teenagers look pretty comical. But he had learned it made a 250-pound six-foot-five guy look pretty scary. The college-kid walk was a tool of his new trade. A tool that worked. Certainly the two guys in their thousand-dollar suits looked reasonably impressed by it.
“Problem?” he asked again.
That one word was usually enough. Most guys backed off at that point. But these two didn’t. Up close, he felt something coming off them. Some kind of a blend of menace and confidence. Some arrogance in there, maybe. A suggestion they normally got their own way. But they were far from home. Far enough south of their own turf to act a little circumspect.
“No problem, Tarzan,” the left-hand guy said.
Reacher smiled. He had been called a lot of things, but that was a new one.
“Three bucks to come in,” he said. “Or it’s free to go back downstairs.”
“We just want to speak with somebody,” the right-hand guy said.
Accents, from both of them. From somewhere in New York. Reacher shrugged.
“We don’t do too much speaking in here,” he said. “Music’s too loud.”
“What’s your name?” the left-hand guy asked.
Reacher smiled again.
“Tarzan,” he said.
“We’re looking for a guy called Reacher,” the guy said back. “Jack Reacher. You know him?”
Reacher shook his head.
“Never heard of him,” he said.
“So we need to talk to the girls,” the guy said. “We were told they might know him.”
Reacher shook his head again.
“They don’t,” he said.
The right-hand guy was looking past Reacher’s shoulder into the long, narrow room. He was glancing at the girls behind the bar. He was figuring Reacher for the only security on duty.
“OK, Tarzan, step aside,” he said. “We’re coming in now.”
“Can you read?” Reacher asked him. “Big words and all?”
He pointed up at a sign hanging above the desk. Big Day-Glo letters on a black background. It read Management Reserves the Right to Refuse Admission.
“I’m management,” Reacher said. “I’m refusing you admission.”
The guy glanced between the sign and Reacher’s face.
“You want a translation?” Reacher asked him. “Words of one syllable? It means I’m the boss and you can’t come in.”
“Save it, Tarzan,” the guy said.
Reacher let him get level, shoulder to shoulder on his way past. Then he raised his left hand and caught the guy’s elbow. He straightened the joint with his palm and dug his fingers into the soft nerves at the bottom of the guy’s tricep. It’s like getting a continuous pounding on the funny bone. The guy was jumping around like he was getting flooded with electricity.
“Downstairs,” Reacher said softl
y.
The other guy was busy calculating the odds. Reacher saw him doing it and figured full and fair disclosure was called for. He held his right hand up, eye level, to confirm it was free and ready for activity. It was a huge hand, brown, callused from the shovel handle, and the guy got the message. He shrugged and started down the stairs. Reacher straight-armed his pal after him.
“We’ll see you again,” the guy said.
“Bring all your friends,” Reacher called down. “Three bucks each to get in.”
He started back into the room. The dancer called Crystal was standing right there behind him.
“What did they want?” she asked.
He shrugged.
“Looking for somebody.”
“Somebody called Reacher?”
He nodded.
“Second time today,” she said. “There was an old guy in here before. He paid the three bucks. You want to go after them? Check them out?”
He hesitated. She swept his shirt off the barstool and handed it to him.
“Go for it,” she said. “We’re OK in here for a spell. Quiet night.”
He took the shirt. Pulled the sleeves right side out.
“Thanks, Crystal, he said.”
He put the shirt on and buttoned it. Headed for the stairs.
“You’re welcome, Reacher,” she called after him.
He spun around, but she was already walking back toward the stage. He looked blankly at the desk girl and headed down to the street.
KEY WEST AT eleven in the evening is about as lively as it gets. Some people are halfway through their night, others are just starting out. Duval is the main street, running the length of the island east to west, bathed in light and noise. Reacher wasn’t worried about the guys waiting for him on Duval. Too crowded. If they had revenge on their minds, they’d pick a quieter location. Of which there was a fair choice. Off Duval, especially to the north, it gets quiet quickly. The town is miniature. The blocks are tiny. A short stroll takes you twenty blocks up into what Reacher thought of as the suburbs, where he dug pools into the tiny yards behind the small houses. The street lighting gets haphazard and the bar noise fades into the heavy buzz of nighttime insects. The smell of beer and smoke is replaced by the heavy stink of tropical plants blooming and rotting in the gardens.
He walked a sort of spiral through the darkness. Nobody around. He walked in the middle of the road. Anybody hiding in a doorway, he wanted to give them ten or fifteen feet of open space to cover. He wasn’t worried about getting shot at. The guys had no guns. Their suits proved it. Too tight to conceal weapons. And the suits meant they’d come south in a hurry. Flown down. No easy way to get on a plane with a gun in your pocket.
He gave it up after a mile or so. A tiny town, but still big enough for a couple of guys to lose themselves in. He turned left along the edge of the graveyard and headed back toward the noise. There was a guy on the sidewalk against the chain-link fence. Sprawled out and inert. Not an unusual sight in Key West, but there was something wrong. And something familiar. The wrong thing was the guy’s arm. It was trapped under his body. The shoulder nerves would be shrieking hard enough to cut through however drunk or stoned the guy was. The familiar thing was the pale gleam of an old beige jacket. The top half of the guy was light, the bottom half was dark. Beige jacket, gray pants. Reacher paused and glanced around. Stepped near. Crouched down.
It was Costello. His face was pounded to pulp. Masked in blood. There were crusty brown rivulets all over the triangle of blue-white city skin showing through at the neck of his shirt. Reacher felt for the pulse behind the ear. Nothing. He touched the skin with the back of his hand. Cool. No rigor, but then it was a hot night. The guy was dead maybe an hour.
He checked inside the jacket. The overloaded wallet was gone. Then he saw the hands. The fingertips had been sliced off. All ten of them. Quick efficient angled cuts, with something neat and sharp. Not a scalpel. A broader blade. Maybe a linoleum knife.
2
“’IT’S MY FAULT,“ Reacher said.
Crystal shook her head.
“You didn’t kill the guy,” she said.
Then she looked up at him, sharply. “Did you?”
“I got him killed,” Reacher said. “Is there a difference?”
The bar had closed at one o’clock and they were side by side on two chairs next to the empty stage. The lights were off and there was no music. No sound at all, except the hum of the air-conditioning running at quarter speed, sucking the stale smoke and sweat out into the still, night air of the Keys.
“I should have told him,” Reacher said. “I should have just told him sure, I’m Jack Reacher. Then he’d have told me whatever he had to tell me, and he’d be back home by now, and I could have just ignored it all anyway. I’d be no worse off, and he’d still be alive.”
Crystal was dressed in a white T-shirt. Nothing else. It was a long T-shirt, but not quite long enough. Reacher was not looking at her.
“Why do you care?” she asked.
It was a Keys question. Not callous, just mystified at his concern about a stranger down from another country. He looked at her.
“I feel responsible,” he said.
“No, you feel guilty,” she said.
He nodded.
“Well, you shouldn’t,” she said. “You didn’t kill him.”
“Is there a difference?” he asked again.
“Of course there is,” she said. “Who was he?”
“A private detective,” he said. “Looking for me.”
“Why?”
He shook his head.
“No idea,” he said.
“Were those other guys with him?”
He shook his head again.
“No,” he said. “Those other guys killed him.”
She looked at him, startled. “They did?”
“That’s my guess,” he said. “They weren’t with him, that’s for sure. They were younger and richer than he was. Dressed like that? Those suits? Didn’t look like his subordinates. Anyway, he struck me as a loner. So the two of them were working for somebody else. Probably told to follow him down here, find out what the hell he was doing. He must have stepped on some toes up north, given somebody a problem. So he was tailed down here. They caught up with him, beat out of him who he was looking for. So then they came looking, too.”
“They killed him to get your name?”
“Looks that way,” he said.
“Are you going to tell the cops?”
Another Keys question. Involving the cops with anything was a matter for long and serious debate. He shook his head for the third time.
“No,” he said.
“They’ll trace him, then they’ll be looking for you, too.”
“Not right away,” he said. “There’s no ID on the body. And no fingerprints, either. Could be weeks before they even find out who he was.”
“So what are you going to do?”
“I’m going to find Mrs. Jacob,” he said. “The client. She’s looking for me.”
“You know her?”
“No, but I want to find her.”
“Why?”
He shrugged.
“I need to know what’s going on,” he said.
“Why?” she asked again.
He stood up and looked at her in a mirror on the wall. He was suddenly very restless. Suddenly more than ready to get right back to reality.
“You know why,” he said to her. “The guy was killed because of something to do with me, so that makes me involved, OK?”
She stretched a long, bare leg onto the chair he had just vacated. Pondered his feeling of involvement like it was some kind of an obscure hobby. Legitimate, but strange, like folk dancing.
“OK, so how?” she asked.
“I’ll go to his office,” he said. “Maybe he had a secretary. At least there’ll be records there. Phone numbers, addresses, client agreements. This Mrs. Jacob was probably his latest case. She’ll probably be to
p of the pile.”
“So where’s his office?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “New York somewhere, according to the way he sounded. I know his name, I know he was an ex-cop. An ex-cop called Costello, about sixty years old. Can’t be too hard to find.”
“He was an ex-cop?” she asked. “Why?”
“Most private dicks are, right?” he said. “They retire early and poor, they hang out a shingle, they set up as one-man bands, divorce and missing persons. And that thing about my bank? He knew all the details. No way to do that, except through a favor from an old buddy still on the job.”
She smiled, slightly interested. Stepped over and joined him near the bar. Stood next to him, close, her hip against his thigh.
“How do you know all this complicated stuff?”
He listened to the rush of the air through the extractors.
“I was an investigator myself,” he said. “Military police. Thirteen years. I was pretty good at it. I’m not just a pretty face.”
“You’re not even a pretty face,” she said back. “Don’t flatter yourself. When do you start?”
He looked around in the darkness.
“Right now, I guess. Certain to be an early flight out of Miami.”
She smiled again. This time, warily.
“And how are you going to get to Miami?” she asked. “This time of night?”
He smiled back at her. Confidently.
“You’re going to drive me,” he said.
“Do I have time to get dressed?”
“Just shoes,” he said.
He walked her around to the garage where her old Porsche was hidden. He rolled the door open and she slid into the car and fired it up. She drove him the half mile north to his motel, taking it slowly, waiting until the oil warmed through. The big tires banged on broken pavement and thumped into potholes. She eased to a stop opposite his neon lobby and waited, the motor running fast against the choke. He opened his door, and then he closed it again, gently.