Reacher walked through the neighbor’s front yard and wrenched open the fold-back section of fence. He walked through the neighbor’s back yard. To the rickety back fence. Which was either the neighbor’s, or the Shevicks’, or shared. He had no great desire to climb it again. So he kicked it down. If it was the Shevicks’, then Trulenko could buy them a new one. If it was the neighbor’s, then tough shit, for being an informer. If it was shared, then fifty-fifty on each of the above.
He walked through the Shevicks’ back yard, past the spot where the photographs had been taken, to their kitchen door. He knocked gently on the glass. No response. He knocked again, a little louder. Still no response.
He tried the handle. Locked, from the inside. He looked in through the window. Nothing to see. No people. Just the heart-monitor countertops and the atomic table and the vinyl chairs. He tracked along, past the photography spot, to the next window in line. Their bedroom. No one in it. Just a made bed and a closed closet door.
But an open room door. Beyond which he saw a moving shadow out in the hallway. A complicated two-headed, four-legged shape. One half tall, the other half short. Slight movement, like a halfhearted struggle and an easy restraint.
Reacher put his hand in his pocket. Chose a fresh Glock. Seventeen rounds, plus one in the chamber. He hustled back to the kitchen door. He took a breath, and another, and backhanded his elbow through the glass, and snaked his hand in and turned the lock, one smooth movement, and he stepped inside. Noisy, obviously, which meant right on time a head stuck in, around the door to the hallway, to find out what the hell was going on. A pale face, pale eyes, fair hair. Black suit coat, white shirt, black silk necktie. Reacher aimed an inch below the knot of the tie, but he was a fair man, so he didn’t fire until he saw a hand with a gun swing into clear air, on a fast arc a yard below the face, whereupon he pulled the trigger and blew a hole in the guy big enough to stick his thumb in. The round went through and through and punched into the far wall beyond. The guy went down vertically, like a cut puppet.
The roar of the shot died away.
Silence from the hallway.
Then a faint muffled whimper, like a weak old person trying to scream, with a strong man’s hand clamped over his mouth. Or her mouth. Then the scrape of a shoe, hopeless, going nowhere. Token resistance. The dead guy was leaking blood on the parquet. It was soaking into the seams. A mess. Reacher found himself figuring a couple of yards would need to be replaced. Trulenko could pay for it. Plus spackle, for the bullet hole in the wall. And paint. Plus new glass for the kitchen door. All good.
Silence from the hallway. Reacher backed away to the outside door. The obvious play was to split up, into two squads, and send one out a back entrance, and around the building. He stepped over the broken glass and out to the yard. He turned right, and right, and right again. He paused a beat at the front of the house. He saw the Lincoln, parked on the street, with no one in it. No sign of the Jaguar. Not yet. He traced its route in his head. North to the next major cross street, west to the main drag, south to their usual turn, and then into the development, with its narrow streets and its tight right-angle corners. Five minutes, maybe. Six maximum. They wouldn’t get lost. Abby knew the way.
He moved along the front of the house, on the grass a yard from the wall, because of the foundation plantings. He looked in the hallway window at a shallow angle. Saw a second guy with a pale face and a black suit. He had his meaty left palm clamped over Maria Shevick’s mouth. In his right hand he held a gun, with its muzzle jammed hard against the side of her head. Another H&K P7, steely and delicate. His finger was tight on the trigger. Aaron Shevick was standing a yard away, rigid, wide eyed, plainly terrified. His lips were clamped. Clearly he had been told to keep quiet. Clearly he wasn’t about to risk disobedience. Not with a gun to his wife’s head.
Reacher checked the end of the cul-de-sac again. Still no Jaguar. The guy holding Maria was staring inward at the kitchen door. Waiting for whoever was in there to come on out. Directly into a classic standoff. Drop the gun or I’ll shoot the old lady. Except the guy couldn’t shoot the old lady, because a split second after he pulled the trigger he would get his own head blown off. A classic standoff. A permanent triangle. The threat vectors would go around and around forever, like a feedback loop, howling and screaming.
Reacher worked out the angles. The guy was a head taller than Maria Shevick. In a literal sense. He was holding her against him, her back to his front, with the clamped left hand, and the top of her head fit neatly under his chin. Then came his own head. At that point Reacher was looking at it from the side. A slabby white cheek, a small pink ear, buzzed fair hair glittering over ridges of bone. He was over thirty, but maybe not yet forty. Was he senior enough to know where their nerve center was? That was Reacher’s main question.
And the answer was no, he thought. Like before. We’re guys who sit in cars and watch doors. You think they would tell folks like us where Trulenko is? The guy was no use.
Unfortunate.
Especially for him.
Reacher dropped to the ground and elbowed-and-toed his way to the narrow concrete path, and over it, and beyond it. The front door was standing open. The guy was still staring at the kitchen. Still waiting. Reacher squirmed around until his angle of view through the open door was a quarter circle different than his oblique glance in through the window. Now he was looking at the back of the guy’s head. A wide white neck, tight rolls of hard flesh, the glittering buzz cut over lumps of bone. He was looking at it all from a very low angle. He was prone on the ground, outside at grade level, below the step, below the threshold, below the hallway floor. He was aiming the Glock at a steep upward angle. At a point where the guy’s spine met his skull. Which was as high as he dared to go. He wanted the round to dig in, not crease off. Which happened, sometimes, with shallow angles. Some people had skulls like concrete.
He counted to three, and breathed out, long and slow.
He pulled the trigger. The guy’s head cracked open like a dropped watermelon and the bullet came out the top of his skull and lodged in the ceiling directly above him. The air was instantly full of pink and purple mist. Instant brain death. Messy, but necessary, with a finger hard on a trigger. The only safe way. Medically proven.
The guy fell away from behind Maria Shevick like she was shucking off a big winter coat and letting it float to the floor. She was left standing alone, a yard from her husband, both of them mute and rigid. The crash of the shot died away to silence. The pink mist drifted down, infinitely slow.
Then the Jaguar showed up.
* * *
—
Reacher’s plan had been to present the hotel idea as a fun adventure, and then to top it off by handing over the ten grand in hundreds, all crisp and new and sweet smelling. It didn’t work out that way. Maria Shevick had blood and bone fragments in her hair. Aaron was shaky. He was an inch away from losing it. Vantresca took them out and sat them in the back of his Jaguar. Abby packed a bag for them. She went from room to room, grabbing up what she thought they would need. Reacher and Hogan carried the bodies out and put them in the Lincoln’s trunk, less their money, their guns, and their phones. Familiar work, by that point. Reacher gave Vantresca cash from Gezim Hoxha’s potato-shaped wallet, to pay for the Shevicks’ hotel room. Vantresca said he would drive them there and check them in. He would ride upstairs with them and settle them down. Reacher said the other four would stay behind and deal with the Lincoln.