Tripwire (25 page)

“Dad was worrying. It was making his heart worse.”

He nodded. “I know. I’m sorry.”

“So why aren’t you taking it seriously? Don’t you believe it?”

“I believe it,” he said. “I believe everything they told me.”

“And the photograph proves it, right? The place obviously exists.”

“I know it exists,” he said. “I’ve been there.”

She stared at him. “You’ve been there? When? How?”

“Not long ago,” he said. “I got just about as close as this Rutter guy got.”

“Christ, Reacher,” she said. “So what are you going to do about it?”

“I’m going to buy a gun.”

“No, we should go to the cops. Or the newspapers, maybe. The government can’t do this.”

“You wait for me here, OK?”

“Where are you going?”

“I’m going to buy a gun. Then I’ll buy us some pizza. I’ll bring it back.”

“You can’t buy a gun, not in New York City, for God’s sake. There are laws. You need ID and permits and things and you’ve got to wait five days anyway.”

“I can buy a gun anywhere,” he said. “Especially New York City. What do you want on the pizza?”

“Have you got enough money?”

“For the pizza?”

“For the gun,” she said.

“The gun will cost me less than the pizza,” he said. “Lock the door behind me, OK? And don’t open it unless you see it’s me in the spy hole.”

He left her standing in the center of the kitchen. He used the fire stairs to the lobby and stood in the bustle on the sidewalk long enough to get himself lined up with the geography. There was a pizza parlor on the block to the south. He ducked inside and ordered a large pie, half anchovies and capers, half hot pepperoni, to go in thirty minutes. Then he dodged traffic on Broadway and struck out east. He’d been in New York enough times to know what people say is true. Everything happens fast in New York. Things change fast. Fast in terms of chronology, and fast in terms of geography. One neighborhood shifts into another within a couple of blocks. Sometimes, the front of a building is a middle-class paradise, and around the back bums are sleeping in the alley. He knew a fast ten-minute walk was going to take him worlds away from Jodie’s expensive apartment block.

He found what he was looking for in the shadows under the approach to the Brooklyn Bridge. There was a messy tangle of streets crouching there, and a giant housing project sprawling to the north and east. Some ragged cluttered stores, and a basketball court with chains under the hoops instead of nets. The air was hot and damp and filled with fumes and noise. He turned a comer and stood leaning on the chain-link with the basketball noises behind him, watching two worlds collide. There was a rapid traffic flow of vehicles driving and people walking fast, and an equal quantity of cars stopped and idling and people standing around in bunches. The moving cars tacked around the stopped ones, honking and swerving, and the walking people pushed and complained and dodged into the gutter to pass the knots of loiterers. Sometimes a car would stop short and a boy would dart forward to the driver’s window. There would be a short conversation and money would change hands like a conjuring trick and the boy would dart back to a doorway and disappear. He would reappear a moment later and hustle back to the car. The driver would glance left and right and accept a small package and force back into the traffic in a burble of exhaust and a blast of horns. Then the boy would return to the sidewalk and wait.

Sometimes the trade was on foot, but the system was always the same. The boys were the cut-outs. They carried the money in and the packages out, and they were too young to go to trial. Reacher was watching them use three doorways in particular, spaced out along the block frontage. The center of the three was doing the busiest trade. About two-to-one, in terms of commercial volume. It was the eleventh building, counting up from the south corner. He pushed off the fence and turned east. There was a vacant lot ahead which gave him a glimpse of the river. The bridge soared over his head. He turned north and came up behind the buildings in a narrow alley. Scanned ahead as he walked and counted eleven fire escapes. Dropped his glance to ground level and saw a black sedan jammed into the narrow space outside the eleventh rear entrance. There was a boy of maybe nineteen sitting on the trunk lid, with a mobile phone in his hand. The back-door guard, one step up the promotion ladder from his baby brothers shuttling back and forward across the sidewalk.

There was nobody else around. The boy was on his own. Reacher stepped into the alley. The way to do it is to walk fast and focus on something way beyond your target. Make the guy feel like he’s got nothing to do with anything. Reacher made a show of checking his watch and glancing far ahead into the distance. He hustled along, almost running. At the last minute, he dropped his gaze to the car, like he was suddenly dragged back into the present by the obstacle. The boy was watching him. Reacher dodged left, where he knew the angle of the car wouldn’t let him through. He pulled up in exasperation and dodged right, turning with the pent-up fury of a hurrying man balked by a nuisance. He swung his left arm with the turn and hit the kid square in the side of the head. The kid toppled and he hit him again, right-handed, just a short-arm jab, relatively gentle. No reason to put him in the hospital.

He let him fall off the trunk lid unaided, to see how far away he’d put him. A conscious person will always break his fall. This kid didn’t. He hit the alley floor with a dusty thump. Reacher rolled him over and checked his pockets. There was a gun in there, but it wasn’t the sort of thing he was going to bear home in triumph. It was a Chinese.22, some imitation of a Soviet imitation of something that was probably useless to start with. He pitched it out of reach under the car.

He knew the back door of the tenement would be unlocked, because that’s the point of a back door when you’re doing a roaring trade about 150 yards south of Police Plaza. They come in the front, you need to be able to get out the back without fumbling for the key. He inched it open with his toe and stood gazing into the gloom. There was an inner door off the back hallway, leading to the right, into a room with a light on inside. It was about ten paces away.

No point in waiting. They weren’t about to take a dinner break. He walked ahead ten paces and stopped at the door. The building stank of decay and sweat and urine. It was quiet. An abandoned building. He listened. There was a low voice inside the room. Then an answer to it. Two people, minimum.

Swinging the door open and standing and taking stock of the scene inside is not the way to do it. The guy who pauses even for a millisecond is the guy who dies earlier than his classmates. Reacher’s guess was the tenement was maybe fifteen feet wide, of which three were represented by the hallway he was standing in. So he aimed to be the other twelve feet into the room before they even knew he was there. They would still be looking at the door, wondering who else was coming in after him.

He took a breath and burst through the door like it wasn’t there at all. It crashed back against the hinge and he was across the room in two huge strides. Dim light. A single electric bulb. Two men. Packages on the table. Money on the table. A handgun on the table. He hit the first guy a wide swinging roundhouse blow square on the temple. The guy fell sideways and Reacher drove through him with a knee in the gut on his way back to the second man, who was coming up out of his chair with his eyes wide and his mouth open in shock. Reacher aimed high and smacked him with a forearm smash exactly horizontal between his eyebrows and his hairline. Do it hard enough, and the guy goes down for an hour, but his skull stays in one piece. This was supposed to be a shopping trip, not an execution.

He stood still and listened through the door. Nothing. The guy in the alley was sleeping and the noise on the street was occupying the kids on the sidewalk. He glanced at the table and glanced away again, because the handgun lying there was a Colt Detective Special. A six-shot,.38-caliber revolver in blued steel with black plastic grips. Stubby little two-inch barrel. No good at all. Nowhere near the sort of thing he was looking for. The short barrel was a drawback, and the caliber was a disappointment. He remembered a Louisiana cop he’d met, a police captain from some small jurisdiction out in the bayou. The guy had come to the military police for firearms advice and Reacher had been detailed to deal with him. The guy had all kinds of tales of woe about the.38-caliber revolvers his men were using. He said
you just can’t rely on them to put a guy down, not if he’s coming at you all pumped up on angel dust.
He told a story about a suicide. The guy needed five shots to the head with a.38 to put himself away. Reacher had been impressed by the guy’s unhappy face and he had decided then and there to stay away from.38s, which was a policy he was not about to change now. So he turned his back on the table and stood still and listened again. Nothing. He squatted next to the guy he’d hit in the head and started through his jacket.

The busiest dealers make the most money, and the most money buys the best toys, which was why he was in this building, and not in one of the slower rivals up or down the street. He found exactly what he wanted in the guy’s left-hand inner pocket. Something a whole lot better than a puny.38 Detective Special. It was a big black automatic, a Steyr GB, a handsome nine-millimeter which had been a big favorite of his Special Forces friends through most of his career. He pulled it out and checked it over. The magazine had all eighteen shells in it and the chamber smelled like it had never been fired. He pulled the trigger and watched the mechanism move. Then he reassembled the gun and jammed it under his belt in the small of his back and smiled. Stayed down next to the unconscious guy and whispered, “I’ll buy your Steyr for a buck. Just shake your head if you’ve got a problem with that, OK?”

Then he smiled again and stood up. Peeled a dollar bill off his roll and left it weighted down on the tabletop under the Detective Special. Stepped back to the hallway. All quiet. He made the ten paces to the back and came out into the light. Checked left and right up and down the alley and stepped over to the parked sedan. Opened the driver’s door and found the lever and popped the trunk. There was a black nylon sports bag in there, empty. A small cardboard box of nine-millimeter reloads under a tangle of red and black jump leads. He put the ammunition in the bag and walked away with it. The pizza was waiting for him when he arrived back on Broadway.

IT WAS SUDDEN. It happened without warning. As soon as they were inside and the door was closed, the man hit Sheryl, a vicious backhand blow to the face with whatever was inside his empty sleeve. Marilyn was frozen with shock. She saw the man twisting violently and the hook swinging through its glittering arc and she heard the wet crunch as his arm hit Sheryl’s face and she clamped both hands over her mouth as if it were somehow vitally important she didn’t scream. She saw the man spinning back toward her and reaching up under his right armpit and coming out with a gun in his left hand. She saw Sheryl going over backward and sprawling on the rug, right where it was still damp from the steam cleaning. She saw the gun arcing at her along the exact same radius he had used before, but in the reverse direction, coming straight at her. The gun was made of dark metal, gray, dewed with oil. It was dull, but it shone. It stopped level with her chest, and she stared down at its color, and all she could think was:
that’s what they mean when they say gunmetal.

“Step closer,” the man said.

She was paralyzed. Her hands were clamped to her face and her eyes were open so wide she thought the skin on her face would tear.

“Closer,” the man said again.

She stared down at Sheryl. She was struggling up on her elbows. Her eyes were crossed and blood was running from her nose. Her top lip was swelling and the blood was dripping off her chin. Her knees were up and her skirt was rucked. She could see her panty hose change from thin to thick at the top. Her breathing was ragged. Then her elbows gave way again and slid forward and her knees splayed out. Her head hit the floor with a soft thump and rolled sideways.

“Step closer,” the man said.

She stared at his face. It was rigid. The scars looked like hard plastic. One eye was hooded under an eyelid as thick and coarse as a thumb. The other was cold and unblinking. She stared at the gun. It was a foot away from her chest. Not moving. The hand that held it was smooth. The nails were manicured. She stepped forward a quarter step.

“Closer.”

She slid her feet forward until the gun was touching the fabric of her dress. She felt the hardness and the coldness of the gray metal through the thin silk.

“Closer.”

She stared at him. His face was a foot away from hers. On the left the skin was gray and lined. The good eye was webbed with lines. The right eye blinked. The eyelid was slow and heavy. It went down, then up, deliberately, like a machine. She leaned forward an inch. The gun pressed into her breast.

“Closer.”

She moved her feet. He answered with matching pressure on the gun. The metal was pressing hard into the softness of her flesh. It was crushing her breast. The silk was yielding into a deep crater. It was pulling her nipple sideways. It was hurting her. The man raised his right arm. The hook. He held it up in front of her eyes. It was a plain steel curve, rubbed and polished until it shone. He rotated it slowly, with an awkward movement of his forearm. She heard leather inside his sleeve. The tip of the hook was machined to a point. He rotated the tip away and laid the flat of the curve against her forehead. She flinched. It was cold. He scraped it down her forehead and traced the curve of her nose. In under her nose. He pressed it against her top lip. Brought it down and in and pressed until her mouth opened. He tapped it gently against her teeth. It caught on her bottom lip, because her lip was dry. He dragged her lip down with the steel until the soft rubbery flesh pulled free. He traced over the curve of her chin. Down under her chin to her throat. Up again an inch, and back, under the shelf of her jaw, until he was forcing her head up with the strength in his shoulder. He stared into her eyes.