A third muffled peal, and a fourth.
“Or not,” Reacher said. “Maybe two minutes from now the Albanians will have you. Either way it’s going to happen fast.”
Up ahead the Toyota slowed and pulled in at the curb. The Lincoln stopped behind it. On a block with old brick buildings and old brick sidewalks and old bricks showing under pocked blacktop on the street. Two thirds of the buildings were closed down and boarded up, and the open third seemed to be conducting no kind of reputable business. Some dubious place east of Center. Abby had chosen well.
The phone stopped ringing.
Reacher leaned way over and turned the motor off and pulled the key. He sat back. They turned to look at him. A P7 in his left hand, and the car key in his right.
He said, “If your life depended on it, where would you look for Max Trulenko?”
No response. More glances. Both kinds. At first apprehensive and rock-and-a-hard-place frustrated, like before, and then different. The new discussion.
The guy with the neck said, “They’ll be suspicious of us. They’ll want to know how come we were brought all the way out here and then let go again.”
“I agree, it’s a matter of perception.”
“That’s the problem. They’ll assume we traded something.”
“Tell them the truth.”
“That would be suicide.”
“A version of the truth,” Reacher said. “Carefully selected and curated. Some parts redacted. But all of it still absolutely true in itself. Tell them a woman came out the door you were watching, with a bag of stuff, and she got in a car, and you followed her here. Give them any address on this block. Tell them you figured if Gregory thought the house was worth watching, he would certainly like to know where the missing occupant was currently hiding out. Be a little aw-shucks about it. You’ll get a pat on the head and a gold star for initiative.”
The driver said, “Not mention you at all?”
“Always safer that way.”
More glances at each other. Looking for holes in the cover story. Not finding any. Then turning back and looking at Reacher again. The gun rock steady in his left hand, the car key tiny in his right.
He said, “Where would a sensible fellow start the search?”
The two guys turned to the front and glanced at each other again, still apprehensive, but then a little bolder, and bolder still, as they talked themselves into it. They weren’t being asked for facts, after all. They hadn’t been trusted with facts. Not lowly people like them. They were being asked for an opinion. That was all. Where would a sensible fellow look? Pure hypothetical speculation. Third-party commentary. Just polite conversation, really. And of course flattering, to a lowly person, that his opinion was sought at all.
Reacher watched the process. He saw the boldness build. He saw the firming of jaws, and the drawing of breaths, and the filling of lungs. Ready to talk, both physically and figuratively. But ready for something else, too. Something bad. The new discussion. Some crazy idea. It was coming off them like a smell. The fault was his own. Completely. Because of the phony choice. The guy was right. And because of the question about the capo. No doubt a scary figure, capable of terrible retributions. And because of the happy conclusion to the cover story. The pat on the head and the gold star. The wrong thing to say to frustrated, ambitious people. It got them thinking. Pats on the head and gold stars were great, but better still was promotion and status, and after eight long years best of all would be finally getting out of sitting in cars watching doors. They wanted to move up the ladder. Which they knew would take more than following a girl to an address. They would need a greater achievement.
Capturing Aaron Shevick would qualify. Which was who they thought he was, obviously. They had gotten texts, the same as everyone. The description and the photograph. They hadn’t asked who he was. Most people would. They would say, who the hell are you? What do you want? But these guys had shown no curiosity at all. Because they already knew. He was a guy they got texts about. Therefore important. Therefore a prize. Therefore crazy ideas.
His own fault.
Don’t do it, he thought.
Out loud he said, “Don’t do it.”
The driver said, “Do what?”
“Anything stupid.”
They paused a beat. He guessed they would start by telling him something true. Too hard to coordinate a lie with silent glances. It would be like a teaser. It would be something that required a couple seconds of thought, and then the careful formulation of a follow-up question. All to make him momentarily preoccupied. To give them time to jump him. The guy with the neck would corkscrew over from the front and land with his chest on Reacher’s left arm, and his hips on Reacher’s right arm, whereupon the driver would come over the top and attack his undefended head. With his cell phone, edge on, if he had any sense, and no inhibitions about smashing up a precision piece of electronics. Which most people were willing to do, in Reacher’s experience, when their lives depended on it.
Don’t do it, he thought.
Out loud he said, “Where would you look for Max Trulenko?”
The driver said, “Where he works, of course.”
Reacher put a momentarily blank look on his face, but inside he was thinking of nothing, and formulating no follow-up questions. He was just waiting. Time passed in quarter-second beats, like a racing heart, at first nothing, then still nothing, then the guy with the neck launching, hard and clumsy, his arms spearing out ahead of him, his feet thrusting, his back arching, aiming to get most of his bulk beyond the point of no return, so that even if he landed on the seat back gravity would do the rest of his work for him, dumping him into Reacher’s lap, in an undignified but equally effective manner.
He didn’t get to the point of no return.
Reacher jammed the gun against the seat back and shot the guy through the upholstery. Then he repelled the falling corpse with his elbow. Like a double tap. One, two, gunshot, elbow. The shot was loud, but not terrible. The interior of the thick Lincoln seat squab had acted like a huge suppressor. All kinds of wool and horsehair in there. All kinds of cotton batting. Natural absorption. One minor problem. Some of it had caught on fire. Plus the driver was leaning forward, leaning down, feeling under the dashboard near his shins. Then coming back up and twisting around. In his hand was a tiny pocket gun. Maybe Russian. Secured out of sight with hook and loop tape. Reacher shot him through his own seat back. It caught on fire, too. A nine-millimeter round. The muzzle hard against the padding, a massive explosion of superheated gases. Maybe never taken into account, during Lincoln’s design process.
Reacher opened the door and slid out to the sidewalk. He put the guns in his pocket. Fresh air blew inside the car and the tiny fires perked up. Not just smoldering. There were actual flames. Small, like a lady’s fingernail, dancing inside the seats.