by Lee Child
Their tires pattered over broken blacktop and patches of cobblestone. After the five straight blocks they came to the four-way light. Where Shevick had waited to cross. They rolled out of the old world and into the new. Flat and open terrain. Concrete and gravel. Wide sidewalks. It all looked different in the dark. The bus depot was up ahead.
“Straight on,” Reacher said.
The driver rolled through the green. They passed the depot. They tracked around, a polite distance behind the high-rent districts. Half a mile later they came to where the bus had turned off the main drag.
“Take the right,” Reacher said. “Out toward the highway.”
He saw the in-town two-lane was called Center Street. Then it widened to four lanes and was called a state route number. Then came the giant supermarket. The office parks were up ahead.
“Where the hell are we going?” the guy in the back said. “No one lives out here.”
“Why I like it,” Reacher said.
The road was smooth. Their tires hissed over it. There was no traffic up ahead. Maybe something behind them. Reacher didn’t know. He couldn’t risk a look.
He said, “Tell me again why you want to meet my wife.”
The guy in the back said, “We find it helpful.”
“How?”
“You pay back a bank loan because you’re worried about your credit score and your good name and your standing in the community. But that’s all gone for you. You’re down in the sewer. What are you worried about now? What’s going to make you pay us back?”
They passed the office parks. Still no traffic. The auto dealer was up ahead in the distance. A wire fence, ranks of dark shapes, bunting that gleamed gray in the moonlight.
“Sounds like a threat,” Reacher said.
“Daughters are good, too.”
Still no traffic.
Reacher hit the guy in the face. Out of nowhere. A sudden violent explosion of muscle. No warning at all. A pile driver, with all the speed and twist he could muster in the confined space available. The guy’s head smashed back into the window frame behind him. A mist of blood from his nose spattered the glass.
Reacher reloaded and hit the driver. Same kind of force. Same kind of result. Leaning over the seat, a clubbing roundhouse right direct to the guy’s ear, the guy’s head snapping sideways, bouncing off the glass, straight into a second jabbing right to the same ear, and a third, which turned the lights out. The guy fell forward on his steering wheel.
Reacher balled himself up in the rear foot well.
A second later the car hit the auto dealer’s fence at forty miles an hour. Reacher heard a colossal bang and a banshee screech and the airbags exploded and he was crushed against the seat back in front of him, which yielded and collapsed into the deflating airbag ahead of it, just as the car smashed into the first vehicle for sale, on the near end of the long line under the flags and the bunting. The Lincoln hit it hard, head on into its gleaming flank, and the Lincoln’s windshield shattered and its back end came up in the air, and crashed back to earth, and the engine stalled out, and the car went still and quiet, all except for a loud and furious hiss of steam under the wrecked hood.
Reacher unfolded himself and climbed up on the seat again. He had taken all the juddering impacts on the flat of his back. He felt like Shevick had looked on the sidewalk. Shaken up. Hurting all over. Regular kind of thing, or worse? He guessed regular. He moved his head, his neck, his shoulders, his legs. Nothing broken. Nothing torn. Not too bad.
The same could not be said for the other two guys. The driver had been smashed in the face by the airbag, and then in the back of the head by the other guy, who had been thrown forward from the rear compartment like a spear, right out through the shattering windshield, where he still was, folded at the waist over the crumpled hood, face down. His feet were the nearest part of him. He wasn’t moving. Neither was the driver.
Reacher forced open his door against the screech of distorted metal, and he crawled out, and he forced the door shut again after him. There was no traffic behind them. Nothing up ahead either, except dim twinkling headlights, maybe a mile in the distance. Coming toward them. A minute away, at sixty miles an hour. The vehicle the Lincoln had hit was a minivan. A Ford. It was all stoved in on the side. Bent like a banana. It had a banner in the windshield that said No Accidents. The Lincoln itself was a total mess. It was crumpled up like a concertina, all the way back to the windshield. Like a safety ad in a newspaper. Except for the guy draped on top.
The headlights up ahead were getting nearer. And now back toward town there were more. The auto dealer’s fence was burst open like a cartoon drawing. Raggedy curls of wire curved neatly out the way. As if they had been blown back by the slipstream. The gap was about eight feet wide. Basically a whole section was gone. Reacher wondered if the fence had motion sensors. Connected to a silent alarm. Connected to the police department. Maybe an insurance requirement. Certainly there was plenty of stuff to steal inside.
Time to go.
Reacher stepped through the hole in the fence, stiff and sore, bruised and battered, but functioning. He stayed away from the road. Instead he stumbled along parallel to it, through fields and vacant lots, fifty feet in the dirt, out of lateral headlight range, while cars drove by in the distance, some slow, some fast. Maybe cops. Maybe not. He skirted around the blind side of the first office park, and the second, and then he changed his angle and headed for the giant supermarket’s parking lot, aiming to walk through it and rejoin the main drag where it let out.
* * *
—
Gregory got the news more or less immediately, from a janitor cleaning up in the emergency room. Part of the Ukrainian network. The guy took a smoke break and called it right in. Two of Gregory’s men, just arrived on gurneys. Lights and sirens. One bad, one worse. Both would probably die. There was talk of a car wreck out by the Ford dealer.
Gregory called his top boys together, and ten minutes later they were all assembled, around a table in the back room of the taxi company. His right-hand man said, “All we know for sure is earlier this evening two of our guys deployed to the bar to do an address check on one of the former customers from the Albanian credit operation.”
“How long does an address check take?” Gregory said. “They must have finished long ago. This must be something else entirely. It’s obviously separate. It can’t have been the address check itself. Because who the hell lives all the way out by the Ford dealer? No one, that’s who. So they let the guy out at his house and noted the address, maybe took a photograph, and then they headed over to the Ford dealer afterward. Why? Must have been a reason. And why did they crash?”
“Maybe they were chased in that direction. Or decoyed. Then bumped and run off the road. It’s pretty lonely out there at night.”
“You think it was Dino?”
“You got to ask, why those two in particular? Maybe they were followed from right outside the bar. Which would be appropriate. Because maybe Dino is making a point here. We stole his business. We expected some reaction, after all.”
“After he twigged.”
“Maybe he has now.”
“How much of a point is he going to make?”
“Maybe this is it,” the guy said. “Two men for two men. We keep the loan business. It would be a surrender with honor. He’s a realistic man. He doesn’t have many options. He can’t start a war, with the cops watching.”
Gregory said nothing. The room went quiet. No sound at all, except muted chatter from the taxi radio in the front office. Through the closed door. Just background noise. No one paid any attention to it. If they had, they would have heard a driver calling in to say he had let out an old lady at the supermarket, and was going to use his waiting time while she shopped to earn an extra buck, by driving a guy home, to the old tract houses east of downtown. The guy was on foot, but
he looked reasonably civilized and he had cash money. Maybe his car had broken down. It was four miles there, and four miles back. He would be done before the old lady was even out of the bakery aisle. No harm, no foul.
* * *
—
At that moment Dino was getting a much earlier and incomplete snapshot of part of the news. It had taken an hour to travel up the chain. It included nothing about the car wreck. Most of the day had been spent disposing of Fisnik and his named accomplice. Reorganization had been left very late. Almost an afterthought. A replacement had been sent to the bar, to pick up on Fisnik’s business. The chosen guy had gotten there a little after eight o’clock in the evening. Immediately he had seen Ukrainian muscle in the street. Guarding the place. A Town Car, and two men. He had snuck around to the bar’s rear fire door, and snuck a look inside. A Ukrainian guy was sitting at Fisnik’s table in the far back corner, talking to a big guy, who looked disheveled and poor. Obviously a customer.
At that point the chosen replacement regrouped and retreated. He phoned it in. The guy he told called another guy. Who called another guy. And so on. Because bad news traveled slowly. An hour later Dino heard about it. He called his top boys together, in the lumber yard.
He said, “There are two possible scenarios. Either the thing about the police commissioner’s list was true, and they opportunistically and treacherously used the disruption to muscle in on our moneylending business, or it wasn’t true, and they planned this thing all along, and in fact tricked us into clearing the way for them.”
His right-hand man said, “I suppose we must hope it was the former.”
Dino was quiet for a long spell.
Then he said, “I’m afraid we must pretend it was the former. We have no choice. We can’t start a war. Not now. We’ll have to let them keep the moneylending business. We have no practical way to get it back. But we’ll surrender it with honor. It must be two for two. We can’t be seen to do less than that. Kill two of their men, and we’ll call it even.”
His right-hand man asked, “Which two?”
“I don’t care,” Dino said.
Then he changed his mind.
“No, choose them carefully,” he said. “Let’s try to find an advantage.”
Chapter 9
Reacher got out of the taxi at the Shevick house and walked up the narrow concrete path. The door opened before he could ring the bell. Shevick stood there, with the light behind him and his phone in his hand.
“The money came through an hour ago,” he said. “Thank you.”
“Welcome,” Reacher said.
“You’re late. We thought maybe you weren’t coming back.”
“I had to take a minor detour.”
“Where?”
“Let’s go inside,” Reacher said. “We need to talk.”
This time they used the living room. The photographs on the wall, the amputated television. The Shevicks took the armchairs, and Reacher sat on the loveseat.
He said, “It happened pretty much like it happened with you and Fisnik. Except the guy snapped my picture. Which might be a good thing, in the end. Your name, my face. A little confusion never hurts. But if I was a real client, I wouldn’t have liked it. Not one little bit. It would have felt like a bony finger on my shoulder. It would have made me feel vulnerable. Then I got outside and there was more. Two guys, who wanted to drive me home, to see where I lived, and who I lived with. My wife, if I had one. Which was another bony finger. Maybe a whole bony hand.”
“What happened?”
“The three of us negotiated a different arrangement. Not linked in any way to your name or address. In fact fairly confusing as to exactly what took place. I wanted an element of mystery about it. Their bosses will suspect a message, but they won’t be sure who from. They’ll think the Albanians, most likely. Not you, certainly.”
“What happened to the men?”
“They were part of the message. As in, this is America. Don’t send an asshole who last time out was seventh on the undercard in some basement fight club in Kiev. At least take it seriously. Show some respect.”
“They saw your face.”
“They won’t remember. They had an accident. They got all banged up. Their memories will be missing an hour or two. Retrograde amnesia, they call it. Fairly common, after physical trauma. If they don’t die first, that is.”
“So everything’s OK?”
“Not really,” Reacher said.
“What else?”
“These are not reasonable people.”
“We know.”
“How are you going to pay their money back?”
They didn’t answer.
“You need twenty-five grand, a week from right now. You can’t be late. They showed me pictures, too. Fisnik’s can’t have been worse. You need some kind of a plan.”
Shevick said, “A week is a long time.”
“Not really,” Reacher said again.
Mrs. Shevick said, “Something good might happen.”
Nothing more.
Reacher said, “You really need to tell me what it is you’re waiting for.”
* * *
—
It was about their daughter, inevitably. Mrs. Shevick’s gaze roamed the pictures on the wall as she told the story. Their daughter’s name was Margaret, shortened since childhood to Meg. She had been a bright, happy infant, full of charm and energy. She loved other children. She loved kindergarten. She loved elementary school. She loved to read and write and draw. She smiled and chattered all the time. She could persuade anyone to do anything. She could have sold ice to the Eskimos, her mother said.
She loved middle school just as much, and junior high, and high school. She was popular. Everyone liked her. She put on plays and sang in the choir and ran track and swam. She got her diploma, but she didn’t go to college. Her book learning was good, but not her main strength. She was a people person. She needed to be out and about, smiling, chatting, charming folks. Bending them to her will, if truth be told. She liked a purpose.
She got an entry-level job in the spokesperson business, and she bounced around town from one PR office to another, doing whatever the local establishments had a budget for. She worked hard, and made her name, and got promoted, and by the time she was thirty she was making more than her dad ever had as a machinist. Ten years later, at forty, she was still doing well, but she felt her trajectory had slowed. Her acceleration had been blunted. She could see her ceiling above her. She would sit at her desk and think, is this it?
No, she decided. She wanted one last big score. Bigger than big. She was in the wrong place, she knew. She would have to move. San Francisco, probably, where the tech money was. Where complicated things needed explaining. Sooner or later she would have to go there. Or New York. But she dithered. Time passed. Then, amazingly, San Francisco came to her. In a manner of speaking. Later she learned there was a perpetual ongoing game, stoked up by real estate people and tech sector accountants, in which the prize was to guess correctly about where the next-but-one Silicon Valley would be. In order to get in early. For some reason her hometown checked all the secret boxes. Regenerating, the right kind of people, the right buildings, and power, and internet speed. The first advance scouts were already sniffing around.
Meg got a friend-of-a-friend introduction to a guy who knew a guy, who arranged an interview with the founder of a brand new venture. They met in a downtown coffee shop. He was a twenty-five-year-old fresh off the plane from California. Some kind of a foreign-born computer genius, with some new thing to do with medical software and apps on people’s phones. Mrs. Shevick admitted she had never been exactly sure what the product was, except she knew it was the type of thing that made folks rich.
Meg was offered the job. Senior Vice President for Communications and Local Affairs. It was a fledgling ink-not
-dry start-up company, so the salary wasn’t great. Not much more than she was already making. But there was a whole giant package of benefits. Stock options, a huge pension plan, a gold plated health plan, a European coupe to drive. Plus weird San Francisco stuff like free pizza and candy and massages. She liked all of it. But the stock options were by far the biggest deal. One day she could be a billionaire. Literally. That was how these things happened.
At first it went pretty well. Meg did great work keeping the drums beating, and two or three times in the first year it looked like they might make it to the top of the hill. But they didn’t. Not quite. The second year was the same. Still glossy and glamorous and cutting edge and the next big thing, but nothing actually happened. The third year was worse. Investors got nervous. The cash spigot was turned way down. But they hung in, lean and mean. They rented two floors of their building. No more pizza or candy. The massage tables were folded up and put away. They worked harder than ever, side by side in cramped quarters, still determined, still confident.
Then Meg got cancer.
Or, more accurately, she found out she’d had cancer for about the last six months. She had been too busy for doctor visits. She thought the weight she was losing was from working too hard. But no. It was a bad diagnosis. It was a virulent type, and it was fairly advanced. The only ray of hope was a bunch of new treatments. They were exotic and expensive, but their trials had been promising. They seemed to work. Their success rate was climbing. No other option, the doctors said. Calendars were cleared, and Meg was booked in for her first session the very next morning.
Which was when the problems started.