by Lee Child
At which point Dino himself took over.
“Let it burn,” he said.
While it did, he called his inner council together. In back of the lumber yard. Which a few of them didn’t like, because lumber was combustible, and something somewhere was currently on fire. Maybe throwing sparks. But they all came. His right-hand man, and his other top boys. No choice.
“Did we do this?” Dino asked them.
“No,” his right-hand man said. “This is not ours.”
“Are you sure?”
“By now everyone knows about the massage parlor. Everyone knows we’re four for four, honors even, game over. We have no rogues, or mavericks, or private business. I guarantee that. I would have heard.”
“Then explain this to me.”
No one could.
“At least the practical details,” Dino said. “If not the actual meaning.”
One of his guys said, “Maybe they drove in to have a meeting. Their contact was waiting on the sidewalk. He got in the back seat to chat. But he shot them instead. Maybe threw in a burning rag.”
“What contact waiting on the sidewalk?”
“I don’t know.”
“A local person?”
“Probably.”
“One of our guys?”
“Could be.”
“Like an anonymous snitch?”
“It’s possible.”
“So anonymous we never noticed him before? So furtive he escaped our attention all these years? I don’t think so. I think such a master of tradecraft would be waiting in a coffee shop on Center Street. He would be talking to some random kid in a hoodie. He wouldn’t let two men in suits in a Town Car anywhere near him. Not within a million miles. Especially not all the way out in this part of town. He might as well publish a confession in the newspaper. So it wasn’t a meeting.”
“OK.”
“And why would he shoot them?”
“I don’t know.”
Another guy said, “Then the shooter must have been in the back seat all along. They drove out here as a threesome.”
“Therefore the shooter is one of them.”
“Has to be. You don’t let an armed man ride behind you unless you know him.”
“Where is he now?”
“He got out and maybe a second car picked him up. Something anonymous. Not another Town Car. Someone would have seen it leaving.”
“How many people in the second car?”
“Two, I’m sure. They always work in pairs.”
“Therefore overall not a small operation,” Dino said. “It must have required a certain amount of resources, and planning, and coordination. And secrecy. Five guys drove out here. I assume two of them didn’t know what was about to happen.”
“I guess not.”
“But why did it happen? What was the strategic objective?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why did he set the car on fire?”
“I don’t know,” the guy said again.
Dino looked around the table.
He asked, “Do we all agree the shooter was in the back seat all along, and therefore was one of them?”
Everyone nodded, most of them gravely, as if coming to a weighty conclusion made inevitable by many hours of deliberation.
“And then after he shot the guys in the front seats, we know he set the car on fire.”
More nods, this time faster and brisker, because some things were self-evident.
“Why all that?” Dino asked.
No one answered.
No one could.
“It feels like myth and legend,” Dino said. “It feels highly symbolic. Like the Vikings burning their warriors in their boats. Like a ceremonial funeral pyre. Like a ritual sacrifice. It feels like Gregory is making an offering to us.”
“Of two of his men?” his right-hand man asked.
“The number is significant.”
“How?”
“We’re getting a new police commissioner. Gregory can’t afford to fight a war. He knows he went too far. Now he’s apologizing. He’s making peace. He knows he was in the wrong. Now he’s trying to make it right. He’s making it six for four, in our favor. As a gesture. So we don’t have to do it ourselves. He’s showing that he agrees with us. He agrees we should be ahead in the count.”
No one responded.
No one could.
Dino got up and walked out. The others heard his footsteps click through the outer office, and through the big corrugated shed. They heard his driver start his car. They heard it drive away. The yard went quiet.
At first no one spoke.
Then someone said, “An offering?”
Silence for a moment.
“You see it different?” the right-hand man asked.
“We would never do a thing like that. Therefore neither would Gregory. Why would he?”
“You think Dino is wrong?”
A huge, dangerous question.
The guy looked all around.
“I think Dino is losing it,” he said. “A Viking funeral pyre? That’s crazy talk.”
“Those are bold words.”
“Do you disagree with them?”
Silence again.
Then the right-hand man shook his head.
“No,” he said. “I don’t disagree. I don’t think it was a sacrifice or an offering.”
“Then what was it?”
“I think it was outside interference.”
“Who?”
“I think someone killed those guys here so Gregory would blame us for it. He’ll attack us, we’ll attack him back. We’ll end up destroying each other. For someone else’s benefit. So someone else can move in on both our turf. I think that might be the intention.”
“Who?” the guy asked again.
“I don’t know. But we’re going to find out. Then we’re going to kill them all. They’re completely out of line.”
“Dino wouldn’t sign off on that. He thinks it’s an offering. He thinks everything is sweetness and light now.”
“We can’t wait.”
“Are we not going to tell him?” the guy asked.
The right-hand man was quiet a beat.
Then he said, “No, not yet. He would only slow us down. This is too important.”
“Are you the new boss now?”
“Maybe. If Dino has really lost it. Which you said first, by the way. Everyone heard you.”
“I meant no disrespect. But this is a very big step. We better be sure we know what we’re doing. Otherwise it’s a betrayal. The worst kind. He’ll kill us all.”
“Time to choose up sides,” the right-hand man said. “Time for us all to place our bets. It’s either Viking rituals or it’s some out-of-towner’s takeover bid. Which will kill us all faster than Dino could anyway.”
The guy didn’t speak for ten long seconds.
Then he said, “What should we do first?”
“Put the fire out. Haul the wreck to the crusher. Then start asking around. Two cars drove in. One was a big shiny Lincoln. Someone will remember the other one. We’ll find it, and we’ll find the guy who was in it, and we’ll make him tell us who he’s working for.”
* * *
—
At that moment Reacher was four streets away, in the front parlor of a battered row house owned by a musician named Frank Barton. Barton was Abby’s friend in the east of the city. Also present in the house was Barton’s lodger, a man named Joe Hogan, once a U.S. Marine, now also a musician. A drummer, to be exact. His kit took up half the room. Barton played the bass guitar. His stuff took up the other half. Four instruments on stands, amplifiers, giant loudspeaker cabinets. Here and there among the clutter were narrow armchairs, thinly upholst
ered with stained and threadbare fabrics. Reacher had one, Abby had one, and Barton had the third and last. Hogan sat on his drum stool. The white Toyota was parked outside the window.
Barton said, “This is crazy, man. I know those guys. I play the clubs over there. They never forget. Abby can’t go back there, ever again.”
“Unless I find Trulenko,” Reacher said.
“How will that help?”
“I think a defeat of that magnitude would change things a little.”
“How?”
Reacher didn’t answer.
Hogan said, “He means the only route to a high-value target like Trulenko will be straight through the top levels of the organization. Therefore afterward the remaining survivors will be no better than low-level drones running around like chickens with their heads cut off. The Albanians will eat them for breakfast. They’ll own the whole city. What the Ukrainians were once upon a time worried about won’t matter a damn anymore. Because the Ukrainians will all be dead.”
Once a U.S. Marine. A sound grasp of strategy.
“This is crazy,” Barton said again.
Six chances before the week is over, Reacher thought.
Chapter 22
Gregory’s right-hand man knocked on the inner office door and entered and took a seat in front of the massive desk. He ran through what he knew. Two guys had been deployed outside Abigail Gibson’s house. They were now missing. They were not answering their phones. Their car was no longer where it should be.
Gregory said, “Dino?”
“Maybe not.”
“Why?”
“Maybe this was never Dino. Not at first, anyway. We made certain assumptions. Now we need to take a fresh look at the facts. Think about the first two, who got in the wreck up at the Ford dealer. Who was their last known contact?”
“They were doing an address check.”
“On Aaron Shevick. And who was observed flirting with the waitress outside of whose house two more guys just disappeared?”
“Aaron Shevick.”
“No such thing as a coincidence.”
“Who is he?”
“Someone is paying him. To set you and Dino at each other’s throat. So that we destroy each other. So the someone can take over.”
“Who?”
“Shevick will tell us. When we find him.”
* * *
—
The Albanians hauled the smoking wreck to the crusher, and then they started asking around. The inner council. The top boys. Unused to legwork. Their question was fairly simple. Did you see a two-vehicle convoy, one of which was a Lincoln Town Car? No one lied to them. They were pretty sure about that. Folks had seen what happened to people who lied to them. Instead everyone racked their brains. But results were disappointing. Partly because the concept of the convoy was sometimes hard to grasp. During rush hour, for instance, there were no two-car convoys. There were hundred-and-two-car convoys. Anywhere downtown, at the best of times, maybe twenty-two-car. Who knew which two were the convoy in question? People didn’t want to give the wrong answer. Not when the top boys were asking.
So a different way was found, to ask the same question. It was quickly agreed that among the traffic there had been a handful of black Lincolns. Probably six in total. Three of them had been the fat-ass kind the Ukrainians drove. The top boys encouraged detailed descriptions of what had been in front of each of them, and what had been behind. There was a two-car convoy in there somewhere.
Three separate witnesses remembered a small white sedan with a hanging-off front fender. In each report it was ahead of one particular Lincoln, which seemed attentive to its lane changes and such, definitely as if following it. Coming out of the west of the city, heading east.
The two-car convoy.
The small white sedan was maybe a Honda. Or the other H. Hyundai. Or maybe Kia. Was there another new brand? Or maybe it wasn’t a new brand at all, because it was a pretty old car. Could have been a Toyota. Yes, that was it. A Toyota Corolla. Poverty spec. That was the final conclusion. All three witnesses agreed.
No one had seen it leave.
The top boys put the word out. All eyes open. An old white Toyota Corolla sedan, with a hanging-off front fender. Report back immediately.
* * *
—
By that point it was late in the afternoon, which was a respectable time for musicians to start their day. Hogan warmed up with a steady 4/4 beat, hi-hat working, ride cymbal ticking. Barton plugged in a battered Fender and turned on his amp, buzzing and humming. He laid down a line, looping and sinuous, staying firmly in the pocket with the kick drum, coming home on the two and the four, launching again on the one of the new measure. Reacher and Abby listened for a spell, and then went to find the guest room.
It was upstairs at the front of the house, a small space over the street door, with a round window made of wavy glass that could have been a hundred years old. The Toyota was directly below. The bed was a queen. The night table was an old guitar amplifier tipped up on its end. There was no closet. There was a row of brass hooks instead, screwed to the wall. The thump of the drums and the bass roared up through the floor.
“Not as nice as your place,” Reacher said. “I’m sorry.”
Abby didn’t answer.
Reacher said, “I asked the guys in the Lincoln where Trulenko was. They didn’t know. So then I asked their opinion about a smart first place to look. They said where he works.”
“Does he work?”
“Got to admit, I hadn’t thought of it that way.”
“Maybe in exchange for hiding him. Maybe there’s no money left after all. Maybe he’s working his passage.”
“That would be a drag,” Reacher said.
“Why else would he work?”
“Maybe he was getting bored.”
“Possible.”
“What kind of work would he do?”
“Nothing physical,” Abby said. “He looked like a pretty small guy. His picture was in the paper all the time. He was young but his hair was going and he wore eyeglasses. He won’t be breaking rocks in a quarry. He’ll be in an office somewhere. Organizing data systems or something. That’s what he was good at. His new product was an app on your phone that linked your vital signs direct to your doctor. In real time, just in case. Or something like that. Or maybe your watch linked to your phone, and then to the doctor. No one really understood it. But anyway, Trulenko is a desk guy. A thinker.”
“So he’s in an office somewhere on the west side of the city. With accommodations either very close by, or integrated. With security. Maybe an underground bunker. With a single bottleneck entrance, heavily defended. No one gets in or out except for known and trusted faces.”
“Therefore you can’t get near him.”
“I agree there will be an element of challenge.”
“More like impossible.”
“No such word.”
“How big of a place would it be?”
“I don’t know,” Reacher said. “A couple dozen people, maybe. Or more. Or less. Some kind of nerve center. Where they send all the texts. You said they were good with technology.”
“There can’t be many suitable locations.”
“See?” Reacher said. “We’re making progress already.”
“No point, if the money is gone.”
“His employers will have some. I never met a poor gangster.”
“The Shevicks can’t sue Trulenko’s new-found employers. They had nothing to do with it. It’s not their fault.”
“By that point the spirit of the law might feel more important than the letter.”
“You would steal it?”
Reacher moved to the window and looked down.
“The capo over there is a guy named Gregory,” he said. “I would ask him to co
nsider it a charitable donation. For a hard-luck story I heard about. I could deploy a number of arguments. I’m sure he would agree. And if he’s profiting from Trulenko’s labor in some way, then it’s almost the same thing as taking Trulenko’s own money anyway.”
Abby got a faraway look in her eyes, and she put her hand up to her cheek, as if automatically.
“I heard of Gregory,” she said. “Never met him. Never even saw him.”
“How did you hear about him?”
She didn’t answer. Just shook her head.
He said, “What happened to you?”
“Who says anything did?”
“You just saw two dead bodies. Now I’m talking about threatening people and stealing their money. I’m that kind of guy. We’re standing by a queen bed. Most women would be edging out the door by now. You’re not. You really, really don’t like these people. Must be a reason.”
“Maybe I really like you.”
“I live in hope,” Reacher said. “But I’m realistic.”
“I’ll tell you later,” she said. “Maybe.”
“OK.”
“What now?”
“We should go get your bag. And we should go move your car. I don’t want it parked right outside. They already saw it at the Shevick house. Someone else might have seen it driving in today. We should go put it somewhere random. Always safer that way.”
“How long will we have to live like this?”
“I live like this all the time. I would have been pushing up daisies long ago if I didn’t.”
“Frank said I can’t ever go home again.”
“And Hogan saw how you could.”
“If you get Trulenko.”
“Six chances before the week is over.”
They went downstairs again into the deep bass groove, and onward out to the car. Abby wrestled her bag off the rear seat and hauled it back to the hallway. They closed the door on it and got in the car. It started the second time and dragged its fender on the tight turn out of its boxed-in slot. They drove a random zigzag route, through different parts of the neighborhood, some of them shabbily residential, some of them commercial, including two full blocks dedicated to the construction trade, including an electrical warehouse, and a plumbing warehouse, and a lumber yard. Then came progressive stages of decay, all the way to abandoned blocks just like the place where the Lincoln had burned.