Nothing to Lose (2 page)

3

Despair’s downtown area began with a vacant lot where something had been planned maybe twenty years before but never built. Then came an old motor court, shuttered, maybe permanently abandoned. Across the street and fifty yards west was a gas station. Two pumps, both of them old. Not the kind of upright rural antiques Reacher had seen in Edward Hopper’s paintings, but still a couple of generations off the pace. There was a small hut in back with a grimy window full of quarts of oil arrayed in a pyramid. Reacher crossed the apron and stuck his head in the door. It was dark inside the hut and the air smelled of creosote and hot raw wood. There was a guy behind a counter, in worn blue overalls stained black with dirt. He was about thirty, and lean.

“Got coffee?” Reacher asked him.

“This is a gas station,” the guy said.

“Gas stations sell coffee,” Reacher said. “And water, and soda.”

“Not this one,” the guy said. “We sell gas.”

“And oil.”

“If you want it.”

“Is there a coffee shop in town?”

“There’s a restaurant.”

“Just one?”

“One is all we need.”

Reacher ducked back out to the daylight and kept on walking. A hundred yards farther west the road grew sidewalks and according to a sign on a pole changed its name to Main Street. Thirty feet later came the first developed block. It was occupied by a dour brick cube, three stories high, on the left side of the street, to the south. It might once have been a dry goods emporium. It was still some kind of a retail enterprise. Reacher could see three customers and bolts of cloth and plastic household items through its dusty ground-floor windows. Next to it was an identical three-story brick cube, and then another, and another. The downtown area seemed to be about twelve blocks square, bulked mostly to the south of Main Street. Reacher was no kind of an architectural expert, and he knew he was way west of the Mississippi, but the whole place gave him the feel of an old Connecticut factory town, or the Cincinnati riverfront. It was plain, and severe, and unadorned, and out of date. He had seen movies about small-town America in which the sets had been artfully dressed to look a little more perfect and vibrant than reality. This place was the exact opposite. It looked like a designer and a whole team of grips had worked hard to make it dowdier and gloomier than it needed to be. Traffic on the streets was light. Sedans and pick-up trucks were moving slow and lazy. None of them was newer than three years old. There were few pedestrians on the sidewalks.

Reacher made a random left turn and set about finding the promised restaurant. He quartered a dozen blocks and passed a grocery store and a barber shop and a bar and a rooming house and a faded old hotel before he found the eatery. It took up the whole ground floor of another dull brick cube. The ceiling was high and the windows were floor-to-ceiling plate glass items filling most of the walls. The place might have been an automobile showroom in the past. The floor was tiled and the tables and chairs were plain brown wood and the air smelled of boiled vegetables. There was a register station inside the door with a
Please Wait to Be Seated
sign on a short brassed pole with a heavy base. Same sign he had seen everywhere, coast to coast. Same script, same colors, same shape. He figured there was a catering supply company somewhere turning them out by the millions. He had seen identical signs in Calais, Maine, and expected to see more in San Diego, California. He stood next to the register and waited.

And waited.

There were eleven customers eating. Three couples, a three-some, and two singletons. One waitress. No front-of-house staff. Nobody at the register. Not an unusual ratio. Reacher had eaten in a thousand similar places and he knew the rhythm, subliminally. The lone waitress would soon glance over at him and nod, as if to say
I’ll be right with you.
Then she would take an order, deliver a plate, and scoot over, maybe blowing an errant strand of hair off her cheek in a gesture designed to be both an apology and an appeal for sympathy. She would collect a menu from a stack and lead him to a table and bustle away and then revisit him in strict sequence.

But she didn’t do any of that.

She glanced over. Didn’t nod. Just looked at him for a long second and then looked away. Carried on with what she was doing. Which by that point wasn’t much. She had all her eleven customers pacified. She was just making work. She was stopping by tables and asking if everything was all right and refilling coffee cups that were less than an inch down from the rim. Reacher turned and checked the door glass to see if he had missed an opening-hours sign. To see if the place was about to close up. It wasn’t. He checked his reflection, to see if he was committing a social outrage with the way he was dressed. He wasn’t. He was wearing dark gray pants and a matching dark gray shirt, both bought two days before in a janitorial surplus store in Kansas. Janitorial supply stores were his latest discovery. Plain, strong, well-made clothing at reasonable prices. Perfect. His hair was short and tidy. He had shaved the previous morning. His fly was zipped.

He turned back to wait.

Customers turned to look at him, one after the other. They appraised him quite openly and then looked away. The waitress made another slow circuit of the room, looking everywhere except at him. He stood still, running the situation through a mental database and trying to understand it. Then he lost patience with it and stepped past the sign and moved into the room and sat down alone at a table for four. He scraped his chair in and made himself comfortable. The waitress watched him do it, and then she headed for the kitchen.

She didn’t come out again.

Reacher sat and waited. The room was silent. No talking. No sounds at all, except for the quiet metallic clash of silverware on plates and the smack of people chewing and the ceramic click of cups being lowered carefully into saucers and the wooden creak of chair legs under shifting bodies. Those tiny noises rose up and echoed around the vast tiled space until they seemed overwhelmingly loud.

Nothing happened for close to ten minutes.

Then an old crew-cab pick-up truck slid to a stop on the curb outside the door. There was a second’s pause and four guys climbed out and stood together on the sidewalk outside the restaurant’s door. They grouped themselves into a tight little formation and paused another beat and came inside. They paused again and scanned the room and found their target. They headed straight for Reacher’s table. Three of them sat down in the empty chairs and the fourth stood at the head of the table, blocking Reacher’s exit.

4

The four guys were each a useful size. The shortest was probably an inch under six feet and the lightest was maybe an ounce over two hundred pounds. They all had walnut knuckles and thick wrists and knotted forearms. Two of them had broken noses and none of them had all their teeth. They all looked pale and vaguely unhealthy. They were all grimy, with ingrained gray dirt in the folds of their skin that glittered and shone like metal. They were all dressed in canvas work shirts with their sleeves rolled to their elbows. They were all somewhere between thirty and forty. And they all looked like trouble.

“I don’t want company,” Reacher said. “I prefer to eat alone.”

The guy standing at the head of the table was the biggest of the four, by maybe an inch and ten pounds. He said, “You’re not going to eat at all.”

Reacher said, “I’m not?”

“Not here, anyway.”

“I heard this was the only show in town.”

“It is.”

“Well, then.”

“You need to get going.”

“Going?”

“Out of here.”

“Out of where?”

“Out of this restaurant.”

“You want to tell me why?”

“We don’t like strangers.”

“Me either,” Reacher said. “But I need to eat somewhere. Otherwise I’ll get all wasted and skinny like you four.”

“Funny man.”

“Just calling it like it is,” Reacher said. He put his forearms on the table. He had thirty pounds and three inches on the big guy, and more than that on the other three. And he was willing to bet he had a little more experience and a little less inhibition than any one of them. Or than all of them put together. But ultimately, if it came to it, it was going to be his two hundred and fifty pounds against their cumulative nine hundred. Not great odds. But Reacher hated turning back.

The guy who was standing said, “We don’t want you here.”

Reacher said, “You’re confusing me with someone who gives a shit what you want.”

“You won’t get served in here.”

“You could order for me.”

“And then what?”

“Then I could eat your lunch.”

“Funny man,” the guy said again. “You need to leave now.”

“Why?”

“Just leave now.”

Reacher asked, “You guys got names?”

“Not for you to know. And you need to leave.”

“You want me to leave, I’ll need to hear it from the owner. Not from you.”

“We can arrange that.” The guy who was standing nodded to one of the guys in the seats, who scraped his chair back and got up and headed for the kitchen. A long minute later he came back out with a man in a stained apron. The man in the apron was wiping his hands on a dish towel and didn’t look particularly worried or perturbed. He walked up to Reacher’s table and said, “I want you to leave my restaurant.”

“Why?” Reacher asked.

“I don’t need to explain myself.”

“You the owner?”

“Yes, I am.”

Reacher said, “I’ll leave when I’ve had a cup of coffee.”

“You’ll leave now.”

“Black, no sugar.”

“I don’t want trouble.”

“You already got trouble. If I get a cup of coffee, I’ll walk out of here. If I don’t get a cup of coffee, these guys can try to throw me out, and you’ll spend the rest of the day cleaning blood off the floor and all day tomorrow shopping for new chairs and tables.”

The guy in the apron said nothing.

Reacher said, “Black, no sugar.”

The guy in the apron stood still for a long moment and then headed back to the kitchen. A minute later the waitress came out with a single cup balanced on a saucer. She carried it across the room and set it down in front of Reacher, hard enough to slop some of the contents out of the cup and into the saucer.

“Enjoy,” she said.

Reacher lifted the cup and wiped the base on his sleeve. Set the cup down on the table and emptied the saucer into it. Set the cup back on the saucer and squared it in front of him. Then he raised it again and took a sip.

Not bad,
he thought. A little weak, a little stewed, but at heart it was a decent commercial product. Better than most diners, worse than most franchise places. Right in the middle of the curve. The cup was a porcelain monstrosity with a lip about three-eighths of an inch thick. It was cooling the drink too fast. Too wide, too shallow, too much mass. Reacher was no big fan of fine china, but he believed a receptacle ought to serve its contents.

The four guys were still clustered all around. Two sitting, two standing now. Reacher ignored them and drank, slowly at first, and then faster as the coffee grew cold. He drained the cup and set it back on the saucer. Pushed it away, slowly and carefully, until it was exactly centered on the table. Then he moved his left arm fast and went for his pocket. The four guys jumped. Reacher came out with a dollar bill and flattened it and trapped it under the saucer.

“So let’s go,” he said.

The guy standing at the head of the table moved out of the way. Reacher scraped his chair back and stood up. Eleven customers watched him do it. He pushed his chair in neatly and stepped around the head of the table and headed for the door. He sensed the four guys behind him. Heard their boots on the tile. They were forming up in single file, threading between tables, stepping past the sign and the register. The room was silent.

Reacher pushed the door and stepped outside to the street. The air was cool, but the sun was out. The sidewalk was concrete, cast in five-by-five squares. The squares were separated by inch-wide expansion joints. The joints were filled with black compound.

Reacher turned left and took four steps until he was clear of the parked pick-up and then he stopped and turned back, with the afternoon sun behind him. The four guys formed up in front of him, with the sun in their eyes. The guy who had stood at the head of the table said, “Now you need to get out.”

Reacher said, “I am out.”

“Out of town.”

Reacher said nothing.

The guy said, “Make a left, and then Main Street is four blocks up. When you get there, turn either left or right, west or east. We don’t care which. Just keep on walking.”

Reacher asked, “You still do that here?”

“Do what?”

“Run people out of town.”

“You bet we do.”

“You want to tell me why you do?”

“We don’t have to tell you why we do.”

Reacher said, “I just got here.”

“So?”

“So I’m staying.”

The guy on the end of the line pushed his rolled cuffs above his elbows and took a step forward. Broken nose, missing teeth. Reacher glanced at the guy’s wrists. The width of a person’s wrists was the only failsafe indicator of a person’s raw strength. This guy’s were wider than a long-stemmed rose, narrower than a two-by-four. Closer to the two-by-four than the rose.

Reacher said, “You’re picking on the wrong man.”

The guy who had been doing all the talking said, “You think?”

Reacher nodded. “I have to warn you. I promised my mother, a long time ago. She said I had to give folks a chance to walk away.”

“You a momma’s boy?”

“She liked to see fair play.”

“There are four of us. One of you.”

Reacher’s hands were down by his sides, relaxed, gently curled. His feet were apart, securely planted. He could feel the hard concrete through the soles of his shoes. It was textured. It had been brushed with a yard broom just before it dried, ten years earlier. He folded the fingers of his left hand flat against his palm. Raised the hand, very slowly. Brought it level with his shoulder, palm out. The four guys stared at it. The way his fingers were folded made them think he was hiding something.
But what?
He snapped his fingers open.
Nothing there.
In the same split second he moved sideways and heaved his right fist up like a convulsion and caught the guy who had stepped forward with a colossal uppercut to the jaw. The guy had been breathing through his mouth because of his broken nose and the massive impact snapped his jaw shut and lifted him up off the ground and dumped him back down in a vertical heap on the sidewalk. Like a puppet with the strings cut. Unconscious before he got halfway there.

“Now there are only three of you,” Reacher said. “Still one of me.”

They weren’t total amateurs. They reacted pretty well and pretty fast. They sprang back and apart into a wide defensive semicircle and crouched, fists ready.

Reacher said, “You can still walk away.”

The guy who had been doing the talking said, “You got lucky.”

“Only suckers get sucker punched.”

“Won’t happen twice.”

Reacher said nothing.

The guy said, “Get out of town. You can’t take us three-on-one.”

“Try me.”

“Can’t be done. Not now.”

Reacher nodded. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe one of you will stay on your feet long enough to get to me.”

“You can count on it.”

“But the question you need to ask is, which one of you will it be? Right now you’ve got no way of knowing. One of you will be driving the other three to the hospital for a six-month stay. You want me out of town bad enough to take those odds?”

Nobody spoke. Stalemate. Reacher rehearsed his next moves. A right-footed kick to the groin of the guy on his left, spin back with an elbow to the head for the guy in the middle, duck under the inevitable roundhouse swing incoming from the guy on the right, let him follow through, put an elbow in his kidney. One, two, three, no fundamental problem. Maybe a little cleanup afterward, more feet and elbows. Main difficulty would be limiting the damage. Careful restraint would be required. It was always wiser to stay on the right side of the line, closer to brawling than homicide.

In the distance beyond the three guys Reacher could see people going about their lawful business on the sidewalks. He could see cars and trucks driving slow on the streets, pausing at four-way stops, moving on.

Then he saw one particular car blow straight through a four-way and head in his direction. A Crown Victoria, white and gold, black push bars on the front, a light bar on the roof, antennas on the trunk lid. A shield on the door, with
DPD
scrolled across it.
Despair Police Department.
A heavyset cop in a tan jacket visible behind the glass.

“Behind you,” Reacher said. “The cavalry is here.” But he didn’t move. And he kept his eyes on the three guys. The cop’s arrival didn’t necessarily guarantee anything. Not yet. The three guys looked mad enough to move straight from a verbal warning to an actual assault charge. Maybe they already had so many they figured one more wouldn’t make any difference.
Small towns.
In Reacher’s experience they all had a lunatic fringe.

The Crown Vic braked hard in the gutter. The door swung open. The driver took a riot gun from a holster between the seats. Climbed out. Pumped the gun and held it diagonally across his chest. He was a big guy. White, maybe forty. Black hair. Wide neck. Tan jacket, brown pants, black shoes, a groove in his forehead from a Smokey the Bear hat that was presumably now resting on his passenger seat. He stood behind the three guys and looked around. Surveyed the scene.
Not exactly rocket science,
Reacher thought.
Three guys surrounding a fourth? We’re not discussing the weather here.

The cop said, “Back off now.” Deep voice. Authoritative. The three guys stepped backward. The cop stepped forward. They swapped their relative positions. Now the three guys were behind the cop. The cop moved his gun. Pointed it straight at Reacher’s chest.

“You’re under arrest,” he said.