Ли Чайлд - No Middle Name

But Reacher had seen what it was.

It was a white office envelope, fat with cash.

Protection money, presumably.

The guy on the stool stayed where he was and finished his drink, ostentatiously slowly, rubbing it in. He had the power. He was the man. Except he wasn’t. He was an underling. He was muscle. That was all. Reacher knew how these things worked. He had seen them before. He knew the envelope would go straight to some shadowy figure at the top of the chain, and the guy on the stool would get a cut, like a wage.

The waitress came back and asked if Reacher wanted a third go-round with the Rolling Rock. Reacher said no, and asked, ‘What happens now?’

‘About what?’

‘You know about what.’

The woman shrugged, like a secret shame had been exposed, and she said, ‘We stay in business another week. We don’t get smashed up or burned out.’

‘How long has this been going on?’

‘A year.’

‘Has anything been done about it?’

‘Not by me. I like my face the way it is.’

‘Me too,’ Reacher said.

She smiled at him.

Reacher said, ‘The owner could do something. There are laws.’

‘Not unless something happens. The cops say they need to see someone beaten. Or worse. Or the place in flames.’

‘What’s the guy’s name?’

‘Does it matter?’

‘Who does he work for?’

She pincered her finger and thumb and pretended to zipper her mouth.

‘I like my face the way it is,’ she said again. ‘And I have kids.’

She collected his empty bottle and headed back to her station. The big guy on the stool finished his drink and put his glass on the bar. He didn’t pay, and the barman didn’t ask him to. He stood up and walked to the door, through a channel suddenly clear of people.

Reacher slid out of his chair and followed. First Street was dark, all except for a yellow light on a pole about a block away. The guy from the stool was fifteen feet ahead. Upright and mobile he looked to be about six-two and two-ten. Not small, but smaller than Reacher. Younger, but almost certainly dumber. And less skilled, and less experienced, and more inhibited. Reacher was sure of that. He had yet to meet the man who outranked him in those categories.

He called out, ‘Hey.’

The guy from the stool stopped and turned around, surprised.

Reacher walked up to him and said, ‘I think you’ve got something that doesn’t belong to you. I’m sure it was just a mistake. So I want to give you the chance to make it right.’

‘Get lost,’ the guy said, but he said it without the final few per cent of conviction. He wasn’t the total king of the jungle. Not right then and there.

Reacher asked, ‘How many more calls do you have tonight?’

‘Butt out, pal. This ain’t your business.’

‘So whose business is it?’

‘Get lost,’ the guy said again.

‘It’s all about free will,’ Reacher said. ‘It’s all about making choices. You want to know what yours are?’

‘What?’

‘You can tell me his name now, or you can tell me after I break your legs.’

‘Whose name?’

‘The guy you picked up the money for.’

Reacher watched his eyes. Waited for the decision. There were three possibilities. The guy would run, fight, or talk. He hoped the guy wouldn’t run, because then he would have to run after him, and he hated running. He didn’t expect the guy to talk, because of ego and self-image. Therefore the guy would have to fight. Or try to.

And Reacher was right. The guy fought, or tried to. He lunged forward and swung his left fist downward, like a sweep, as if there was a knife in it. An attempt at a distraction, nothing more. Next would come a big straight right, maybe a little overhand. But Reacher wasn’t about to wait for it. He had learned to fight a long time ago, in hot dusty outposts in the Pacific, and cold damp alleys in Europe, and hardscrabble towns in the South, against resentful local youth and tribal military kids, and then his techniques had been broken down and built back up by the army, and he had learned the golden rule: get your retaliation in first .

He stepped in close, falling forward, and threw a heavy elbow at the guy’s face. Usually better to target the throat, but Reacher wanted the guy talking afterwards, not choking to death on a smashed larynx, so he went for the upper lip, just below the nose, accelerating hard, which would break teeth and bone, which would make the subsequent conversation a little garbled, but at least the guy wouldn’t be struck mute. The blow landed and the guy’s head snapped back and his knees went weak and he sat down on his ass, right there on the sidewalk, eyes all over the place, blood all over his nose and his mouth.

Reacher was a brawler by nature, and a brawler’s dream is to have the other guy on the floor, ready for the winning kick to the head, but he held back, because he wanted a name. He said, ‘Last chance, my friend.’

The guy from the stool said, ‘Kubota.’

Garbled. Missing teeth, and blood, and swellings.

Reacher said, ‘Spell it for me.’

Which the guy did, fast and obedient. Not the king of the jungle any more. Which Reacher was happy about. Because human legs are hard to break. Big physical efforts are required. He asked, ‘Where will I find Mr Kubota?’

And the guy told him.

At that point Reacher stopped talking and took a breath and put his head back on the hospital pillow.

I said, ‘And then what?’

He said, ‘Enough for tonight. I’m tired.’

‘I need to know.’

‘Come back tomorrow.’

‘Did you find Kubota?’

No answer.

I said, ‘Was there a confrontation?’

No answer.

‘Did Kubota shoot you?’

Reacher said nothing. And then the doctor came in. The same woman, with the threads of silver in her hair. She told me she was terminating the interview immediately, on medical grounds. Which was frustrating, but not fatal. I had plenty of valuable data. I left the building with visions of a major score in my head. A protection racket, busted, on my very first day in the department. Priceless. Women have to work twice as hard, to get half the credit.

I went straight back to the station house. Unpaid, but I would have paid them. I found a thick file on Kubota. Lots of leads, lots of hours, but we never had enough to get a warrant. Now we did, big time. We had gun crime. We had his victim, right there in the hospital. Eyewitness testimony. And possibly even the bullet itself, in a stainless steel dish somewhere.

Solid gold.

The night judge agreed with me. He signed off on a big boilerplate warrant and I put a team together. Plenty of uniforms, cars, heavy weapons, three other detectives, all senior to me, but I was leading them. My case. An unwritten rule.

We executed the warrant at midnight, which was legal-speak for busting down Kubota’s door, and knocking him over, and bouncing his head off the tile a couple of times. We found the guy from the bar in a back room, in a bad way. Like he had been run over by a truck. I had him taken to a different hospital, under guard.

Then the uniforms hauled Kubota away to a holding cell and I and my three detective partners spent most of the rest of the night going through his place like we were looking for a tiny flake of chrome off the world’s smallest needle in the world’s biggest haystack.

His place was a treasure trove.

We found grocery sacks full of unexplained cash, and thirty different bank accounts, and notebooks and ledgers and diaries and maps. It was clear from our first glance the guy was making serious money from a hundred different establishments. According to his notes in the last six months three places had tried to resist, and we called in the dates and matched them to three unexplained arson attacks. We found temporary interruptions in two sets of payments, and when we checked the dates with the city’s hospitals we found one broken leg and one slashed face. We had everything.