by Lee Child
So, not a cop.
Reacher walked on. He kept his own footsteps quiet and focused on the sounds behind him, forty yards back. Shorter strides, thicker soles, the slap of leather, the faint crunch of grit, the thump of a rubber three-quarter heel. This wasn’t Charlie. No way would anybody call this guy small. Not large, but definitely not small, either. And he didn’t have black hair. And this wasn’t the guy who had killed the girl. Not big enough. So, add one to the tally. Not four of them. Five of them. At least. Maybe more.
Plan?
Was this guy armed? Possibly, but only with a handgun. He hadn’t been carrying anything longer. And Reacher was sanguine about his chances as a moving target a hundred and twenty feet in front of a guy with a handgun. Handguns were across-the-room weapons, not down-the-street propositions. Average range for a successful engagement with a handgun was about twelve feet. He was ten times more distant. And he would hear the sound of the slide in the stillness. He would have time to react.
So, what was the plan? It was tempting to think about doubling back and taking the guy down. Just for fun. For retaliation. Reacher liked retaliation. Get your retaliation in first was his credo. Show them what they’re dealing with.
Maybe.
Or maybe not. Or maybe later.
He took a random turn and walked on. He kept his steps silent. He kept his pace steady. He let the guy behind him fall into the rhythm. Like hypnosis. Left, right, left, right. He forced everything out of his mind except the distant footsteps behind him. He zoomed in on them. Concentrated on them. They were there, faint but perceptible. Crunch, crunch, crunch, crunch. Left, right, left, right. Like hypnosis. He heard the sound of a cell phone being dialed. Just ten little electronic squawks, very quiet, almost inaudible, coming at him on the breeze in a random little sequence.
He walked on. Left, right, left, right. The streets were deserted. Downtown was dead after working hours were over. The city still had some way to go before it grew a vibrant urban community. That was for sure. He walked on. Heard faint sibilant whispering, forty yards behind him. The cell phone. Who are you talking to, pal? He walked on. Then he stopped on the next corner. Glanced right and turned left into a wide straight cross-street, behind the cover of a four-story building.
Then he ran. Five paces, ten, fifteen, twenty, fast and silent, across the street to the right-hand sidewalk, past the first alley he saw, into the second. He crouched back in the shadows, in a blank gray double doorway. A fire exit, maybe from a theater or a movie house. He lay down flat on his front. The guy had been used to a vertical target. Instinctively he would be looking six feet off the ground. A low shape on the floor would mean less to him.
Reacher waited. He heard footsteps on the opposite sidewalk. The guy had seen his quarry turn a tight radius from the left-hand sidewalk of one street onto the left-hand sidewalk of the next street. Therefore subconsciously he would concentrate on the left, not the right. His first thought would be to look for still-vertical shapes in the alleys and the doorways on the left.
Reacher waited. The footsteps kept on coming. Close now. Then Reacher saw the guy. He was on the left-hand sidewalk. He was moving slow. He was looking indecisive. He was glancing ahead, glancing left, glancing ahead. He had a cell phone up at his ear. He stopped. Stood still. Looked back over his right shoulder, at the doorways and the alleys on the other side of the street. Worth checking?
Yes.
The guy moved sideways and backwards like a crab, diagonally, facing the street ahead of him and searching the right-hand sidewalk all at the same time. He moved out of Reacher’s field of view like a film running in reverse. Reacher stood up silently and moved deeper into the alley into total darkness at its far end. He found a fat vertical kitchen vent and slid around behind it. Crouched on his haunches and waited.
It was a long wait. Then the footsteps came back. On the sidewalk. Into the alley. Slow, soft, careful. The guy was on his toes. No sound from the heels. Just the scrape of leather soles on grit. They rustled gently and low-level echoes of the sound came back off the alley’s walls. The guy came closer. And closer.
He came close enough to smell.
Cologne, sweat, leather. He stopped four feet from where Reacher was hidden and peered hopelessly into the darkness. Reacher thought: Another step and you’re history, pal. Just one more and it’s Game Over for you.
The guy turned around. Walked back to the street.
Reacher stood up and followed him, swift and silent. Tables turned. Now I’m behind you. Time to hunt the hunters.
Reacher was bigger than most human beings and in some ways quite clumsy, but he could be light on his feet when he needed to be and had always been good at covert pursuit. It was a skill born of long practice. Mostly it employed caution and anticipation. You had to know when your quarry was going to slow, stop, turn, check. And if you didn’t know, you had to err on the side of caution. Better to hide and fall ten extra yards behind than give yourself away.
The guy in the leather coat searched every alley and every doorway on both sides of the street. Not well, but adequately. He searched and he moved forward, prey to the mistake that all adequate people make: I didn’t screw up yet. He’s still somewhere up ahead. He spoke twice on his cell phone. Quietly, but with agitation obvious in the tenor of his whisper. Reacher slipped from shadow to shadow behind him, hanging well back because the bright lights at the end of the street were getting close. The guy’s searches became faster and more cursory. Hopeless and panicked, all at the same time. He made it to within twenty feet of the next turn and stopped dead and stood still.
And gave up. Just quit. He stood in the middle of the sidewalk and listened to his phone and said something in reply and then dropped his arms to his sides and all the covert rigidity went out of his body. He slumped a little and walked straight ahead, fast and big and loud and obvious like a guy with no purpose in the world except getting directly from A to B. Reacher waited long enough to be certain it wasn’t a trick. Then he followed, moving silently from shadow to shadow.
Raskin walked past the sports bar’s door and headed up the street. He could see Linsky’s car in the distance. And Chenko’s. The two Cadillacs were parked nose-to-tail at the curb, waiting for him. Waiting for the failure. Waiting for the hole in the air. Well, here I am, he thought.
But Linsky was civil about it. Mainly because to criticize one of the Zec’s appointees was to criticize the Zec himself, and nobody would dare to do that.
“He probably took a wrong turn,” Linsky said. “Maybe he didn’t intend to be on that particular street at all. He probably doubled back through the alleys. Or else went into one of them to take a leak. Delayed himself and came out behind you.”
“Did you check behind you?” Vladimir asked.
“Of course I did,” Raskin lied.
“So what now?” Chenko asked.
“I’ll call the Zec,” Linsky said.
“He’ll be royally pissed,” Vladimir said. “We nearly had the guy.”
Linsky dialed his phone. Relayed the bad news and listened to the response. Raskin watched his face. But Linsky’s face was always unreadable. A skill born of long practice, and vital necessity. And it was a short call. A short response. Indecipherable. Just faint plastic sounds in the earpiece.
Linsky clicked off.
“We keep on looking,” he said. “On a half-mile radius of where Raskin last saw him. The Zec is sending us Sokolov. He says we’re sure of success with five of us.”
“We’re sure of nothing,” Chenko said. “Except a big pain in the ass and no sleep tonight.”
Linsky held out his phone. “So call the Zec and tell him that.”
Chenko said nothing.
“Take the north, Chenko,” Linsky said to him. “Vladimir, the south. Raskin, head back east. I’ll take the west. Sokolov can fill in where we need him when he gets here.”
Raskin headed back east, the way he had come, as fast as he could. He saw the sense in the
Zec’s plan. He had last seen Reacher about fifteen minutes ago, and a furtive man moving cautiously couldn’t cover more than half a mile in fifteen minutes. So elementary logic dictated where Reacher must be. He was somewhere inside a circle a mile across. They had found him once. They could find him again.
He made it all the way down the wide straight cross-street and turned south toward the raised highway. Retracing his steps. He passed through the shadows under the highway and headed for the vacant lot on the next corner. Kept close to the wall. Made the turn.
Then the wall fell on him.
At least that was what it felt like. He was hit a staggering blow from behind and he fell to his knees and his vision went dark. Then he was hit again and his lights went out and he pitched forward on his face. Last thing he felt before he lost consciousness was a hand in his pocket, stealing his cell phone.
Reacher headed back under the highway with the cell phone warm in his hand. He leaned his shoulder against a concrete pillar as wide as a motel room and slid around it until his body was in the shadow and his hands were in the light from a lamp on a pole far above him. He took out the torn card with Emerson’s numbers on it and dialed his cell.
“Yes?” Emerson said.
“Guess who?” Reacher said.
“This isn’t a game, Reacher.”
“Only because you’re losing.”
Emerson said nothing.
“How easy am I to find?” Reacher asked.
No reply.
“Got a pen and paper?”
“Of course I do.”
“So listen up,” Reacher said. “And take notes.” He recited the plate numbers from the two Cadillacs. “My guess is one of those cars was in the garage before Friday, leaving the cone. You should trace the plates, check the tapes, ask some questions. You’ll find some kind of an organization with at least six men. I heard some names. Raskin and Sokolov, who seem to be low-level guys. Then Chenko and Vladimir. Vladimir looks good for the guy who killed the girl. He’s as big as a house. Then there’s some kind of a lieutenant whose name I didn’t get. He’s about sixty and has an old spinal injury. He talked to his boss and referred to him as the Zec.”
“Those are Russian names.”
“You think?”
“Except Zec. What kind of a name is Zec?”
“It’s not Zec. It’s the Zec. It’s a word. A word, being used as a name.”
“What does it mean?”
“Look it up. Read some history books.”
There was a pause. The sound of writing.
“You should come in,” Emerson said. “Talk to me face-to-face.”
“Not yet,” Reacher said. “Do your job and I’ll think about it.”
“I am doing my job. I’m hunting a fugitive. You killed that girl. Not some guy whose name you claim you heard, as big as a house.”
“One more thing,” Reacher said. “I think the guy called Chenko also goes by the name of Charlie and is James Barr’s friend.”
“Why?”
“The description. Small guy, dark, with black hair that sticks up like a brush.”
“James Barr has got a Russian friend? Not according to our inquiries.”
“Like I said, do your job.”
“We’re doing it. Nobody mentioned a Russian friend.”
“He sounds American. I think he was involved with what happened on Friday, which means maybe this whole crew was involved.”
“Involved how?”
“I don’t know. But I plan to find out. I’ll call you tomorrow.”
“You’ll be in jail tomorrow.”
“Like I’m in jail now? Dream on, Emerson.”
“Where are you?”
“Close by,” Reacher said. “Sleep well, Detective.”
He clicked the phone off and put Emerson’s number back in his pocket and took out Helen Rodin’s. Dialed it and moved around the concrete pillar into deep shadow.
“Yes?” Helen Rodin said.
“This is Reacher.”
“Are you OK? The cop is right outside my door now.”
“Suits me,” Reacher said. “Suits him too, I expect. He’s probably getting forty bucks an hour for the overtime.”
“They put your face on the six o’clock news. It’s a big story.”
“Don’t worry about me.”
“Where are you?”
“Free and clear. Making progress. I saw Charlie. I gave Emerson his plate number. Are you making progress?”
“Not really. All I’ve got is five random names. No reason I can see why anybody told James Barr to shoot any one of them.”
“You need Franklin. You need research.”
“I can’t afford Franklin.”
“I want you to find that address in Kentucky for me.”
“Kentucky?”
“Where James Barr went to shoot.”
Reacher heard her juggle the phone and flip through paper. Then she came back and read out an address. It meant nothing to Reacher. A road, a town, a state, a zip.
“What’s Kentucky got to do with anything?” Helen asked.
Reacher heard a car on the street. Close by, to his left, fat tires rolling slow. He slid around the pillar and looked. A PD prowl car, crawling, lights off. Two cops in the front, craning their necks, looking right, looking left.
“Got to go,” he said. He clicked the phone off and put it on the ground at the base of the pillar. Emerson’s caller ID would have trapped the number and any cell phone’s physical location could be tracked by the recognition pulse that it sends to the network, once every fifteen seconds, regular as clockwork. So Reacher left the phone in the dirt and headed west, forty feet below the raised roadbed.
Ten minutes later he was opposite the back of the black glass tower, in the shadows under the highway, facing the vehicle ramp. There was an empty cop car parked on the curb. It looked still and cold. Settled. Like it had been there for a spell. The guy outside Helen’s door, Reacher thought. He crossed the street and walked down the ramp. Into the underground garage. The concrete was all painted dirty white and there were fluorescent tubes blazing every fifteen feet. There were pools of light and pools of darkness. Reacher felt like he was walking out of the wings across a succession of brightly-lit stages. The ceiling was low. There were fat square pillars holding up the building. The service core was in the center. The whole space was cold and silent and about forty yards deep and maybe three times as wide.
Forty yards deep.
Just like the new extension on First Street. Reacher stepped over and put his back against the front wall. Walked all the way across to the back wall. Thirty-five paces. He turned like a swimmer at the end of a lap and walked back. Thirty-five paces. He crossed diagonally to the far corner. The garage was dark back there. He threaded between two NBC vans and found the blue Ford Mustang he guessed belonged to Ann Yanni. It was clean and shiny. Recently waxed. It had small windows, because of the convertible top. A raked windshield. Tinted glass.
He tried the passenger door. Locked. He moved around the hood and tried the driver’s door. The handle moved. Unlocked. He glanced around and opened the door.
No alarm.
He reached inside and touched the unlock button. There was a triple thunk as both door locks and the trunk lock unlatched. He closed the driver’s door and stepped back to the trunk. The spare tire was under the floor. Nested inside the wheel were the jack and a length of metal pipe that both worked the jack and undid the wheel nuts. He took the pipe out and closed the trunk. Stepped around to the passenger side and opened the door and got inside the car.
The interior smelled of perfume and coffee. He opened the glove box and found a stack of road maps and a small leather folder the size of a purse diary. Inside the folder were an insurance slip and an auto registration, both made out to Ms. Janine Lorna Ann Yanni at a local Indiana address. He put the folder away again and closed the glove box. Found the right levers and lowered his seat as far as it would go. He reclined
the back all the way, which wasn’t far. Then he moved the whole seat backward to give himself as much legroom as he could get. He untucked his shirt and rested the pipe in his lap and lay back in the seat. Stretched. He had about three hours to wait. He tried to sleep. Sleep when you can was the old army rule.
First thing Emerson did was contact the phone company. He confirmed that the number his caller ID had caught was a cell phone. The service contract was written out to a business operating under the name Specialized Services of Indiana. Emerson tasked a first-year detective to track the business and told the phone company to track the phone. Initial progress was mixed. Specialized Services of Indiana dead-ended because it was owned by an offshore trust in Bermuda and had no local address. But the phone company reported that the cell phone was stationary and was showing up on three cells at once, which meant it had to be in the downtown area and would be easy to triangulate.
Rosemary Barr sweet-talked her way past the Board of Corrections desk on the sixth floor of the hospital and was granted an out-of-hours visit with her brother. But when she got to his room she found he was deeply asleep. Her sweet talk was wasted. She sat for thirty minutes but James didn’t wake up. She watched the monitors. His heartbeat was strong and regular. His breathing was fine. He was still handcuffed and his head was still clamped but his body was perfectly still. She checked his chart, to make sure he was being properly cared for. She saw the doctor’s scribbled note: possible early-onset PA? She had no idea what that meant, and late in the evening she couldn’t find anyone willing to explain it to her.
The phone company marked the cell phone’s location on a large-scale city map and faxed it to Emerson. Emerson tore it out of the machine and spent five minutes trying to make sense of it. He was expecting to find the three arrows meeting at a hotel, or a bar, or a restaurant. Instead they met on a vacant lot under the raised highway. He had a brief image in his mind of Reacher sleeping rough in a cardboard box. Then he concluded that the phone was abandoned, which was confirmed ten minutes later by the patrol car he sent out to check.