Ли Чайлд - Blue Moon

Plink, plink, plink .

He said, ‘All good now.’

Abby looked up at him.

She didn’t speak.

He shook pebbles of glass out of his jacket and put it on. He put the guns back in the pockets. He made a mental note: forty-four rounds remaining.

He said, ‘We should go check the back offices.’

She said, ‘Why?’

‘They might have money.’

Reacher and Abby stepped and minced around the bodies and the blood and the chemical spill, all the way to the far back corner. Ahead of them through the archway was a long narrow corridor. Doors to the left, doors to the right. First on the left was a windowless room with four laminate tables pushed together end to end. Like a boardroom. First on the right was a plain office with a desk and a chair and filing cabinets. No clue about its function. No cash in the cabinets. Nothing in the desk either, except normal office crap and a dozen cigars and a box of kitchen matches. They moved on. They found nothing of interest, until the last door on the left.

There was an outer office, and an inner office. Like a suite. Some kind of a CEO set-up. Like a commanding officer and an executive officer. The doorway between the two was piled high with bodies. There were more in the room beyond. Twelve in total. Including a guy behind a big desk, shot once in the face, and a guy in a chair, shot three times in the chest. A bizarre, static tableau. Infinitely still. Absolutely silent. It was impossible to reconstruct what had happened. It looked like everyone had shot everyone else. Some kind of unexplained rampage.

Abby stayed out of the inner office. Reacher went in. He put his hands high on the door jambs and clambered over the piled bodies. He trod on backs and necks and heads. Once inside he picked his way around behind the desk. The guy who had been shot in the face was slumped in a leather chair with wheels. Reacher moved it out the way. He checked the desk drawers. Right away in the bottom left he found a metal cash box, about the size of a family Bible, painted stern metallic colours, like something from an old-time country savings and loan. It was locked. He pulled the chair closer again and patted the dead guy’s pockets. Felt keys in the pants, right side. A decent bunch. He pulled them out, finger and thumb. Some were big, some were small. The third small key he tried opened the box.

In it was a lift-out tray at the top, with a handful of greasy ones and fives, and a scattering of nickels and dimes. Not good. But it got better. Under the tray was a banded brick of hundred dollar bills. Brand new. Unbroken. Fresh from the bank. A hundred notes. Ten thousand dollars. Close to what the Shevicks needed. Short by a grand, but better than a poke in the eye.

Reacher put the money in his pocket. He threaded his way back to the door. He climbed over the bodies again.

Abby said, ‘I want to go.’

‘Me too,’ Reacher said. ‘Just one more thing.’

He led her back to the first office they had seen. On the right, opposite the boardroom. The cigar smoker. Newly dead, Reacher assumed. But not from smoking. He took the box of kitchen matches from his desk. And paper, from everywhere he could find it. He struck a match and lit a sheet. He held it until it flamed up high. Then he dropped it in a trash basket.

Abby asked him, ‘Why?’

‘It’s never enough just to win,’ he said. ‘The other guy has got to know for sure he lost. Plus it’s safer this way. We were here. We probably left traces. Best to avoid any kind of confusion later on.’

They struck match after match and lit sheet after sheet of paper. They dropped them in every room. Grey smoke was drifting when they left the corridor. They lit the shrink wrap around the piles of boards. Reacher dropped a match in the pool of preservative, but it sputtered out immediately. Not flammable. Which made sense, in a lumber yard. But gasoline was flammable. That was for damn sure. Reacher took the gas cap off the shattered car and dropped the last sheet of burning paper down the filler neck.

Then they hustled. Thirty yards to the scooped-out kerb, seventy more to the first corner, and then they were gone.

Abby’s phone was full of missed calls from Vantresca. He said he was waiting across the street from the propped-up building with the heavy black net. He said he had been waiting there a long time. He said he didn’t know what to do next. Abby called him back. Between them they worked out a new rendezvous. He would drive in one direction, and they would walk in the other direction, and they would spot each other somewhere along the way. Before they set out again Reacher looked back the way they had come. Half a mile away there was a thread of smoke in the sky. The next time he checked it was a pillar of smoke, a mile away. Then it was a distant boiling black mass with flames dancing at the base. They heard fire truck sirens, booming and barking, more and more of them, until the faraway sound was a continuous bass wail. They heard police car sirens echoing through the east side streets.

Then Vantresca showed up in a black car. It was wide and squat and muscular. It had a chrome hood ornament, in the shape of a big cat leaping. A jaguar, presumably, for a Jaguar. It was small inside. Vantresca was driving. Hogan was next to him in the front. Barton was in the back. Only one place left. Abby had to sit in Reacher’s lap. Which was OK with him.

Hogan said, ‘Something is on fire over there.’

‘Your fault,’ Reacher said.

‘How?’

‘You pointed out that if the Ukrainians go down, the Albanians would take over the city. I didn’t want that to happen. It felt like it would be a win-lose.’

‘So what’s on fire?’

‘The Albanian HQ. It’s in the back of a lumber yard. It should burn for days.’

Hogan said nothing.

Barton said, ‘Someone else will take over.’

‘Maybe not,’ Reacher said. ‘The new commissioner will have a clean slate. Maybe it’s easier to stop new people coming in than it is to get old people out.’

Vantresca said, ‘What next?’

‘We need to find the Ukrainian nerve centre.’

‘Sure, but how?’

‘I guess we need to know exactly what it does. That might tell us what to look for. To some extent form follows function. For instance, if it was a drug lab, it would need exhaust fans, and gas and water, and so on and so forth.’

‘I don’t know what it does,’ Vantresca said.

‘Call the journalist,’ Reacher said. ‘The woman you helped. She might know. At least she might know what they’re into. If necessary we could work it out backward, about what kind of place they would need.’

‘She won’t talk to me. She was terrified.’

‘Give me her number,’ Reacher said. ‘I’ll call her.’

‘Why would she talk to you?’

‘I have a nicer personality. People talk to me all the time. Sometimes I can’t stop them.’

‘I would have to go to my office.’

‘Go to the Shevicks’ first,’ Reacher said. ‘I have something for them. Right now they need reassurance.’

Gregory pieced the story together from early word he got three separate ways, from a cop on his payroll, and a guy in the fire department who owed him money, and a secret snitch he had behind a bar on the east side. Right away he called a meeting of his inner council. They gathered together, in the office in back of the taxi dispatcher.

‘Dino is dead,’ Gregory said. ‘Jetmir is dead. Their entire inner council is dead. Their top twenty are gone, just like that. Maybe more. They are no longer an effective force. Nor will they ever be, ever again. They have no leadership prospects. Their most senior survivor is an old bruiser named Hoxha. And he was spared only because he was in the hospital. Because he can’t talk. Some leader he would make.’