Ли Чайлд: Blue Moon

The second in the new sequence showed the same couple with a baby in their arms. It grew up in leaps and bounds, left to right across the next row down, into a toddler, then a girl about four, then six, then eight, while above her the Shevicks cycled through 1970s hairstyles, big and bushy, above tight tank tops and puffy sleeves.

The next row down showed the same girl become a teenager, then a high-school graduate, then a young woman. Then a woman who got older as the Kodak got newer. She would be nearly fifty now, Reacher figured. Whatever that generation was called. The early kids of the early boomers. Got to be called something. Everyone else was.

‘There you are,’ Mrs Shevick said, behind him.

‘I was admiring your photographs,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ she said.

‘You have a daughter.’

‘Yes,’ she said again.

Then Shevick himself came in. The blood had been cleaned off his lip. His scrapes were shiny with some kind of a yellow potion. His hair was brushed.

He said, ‘Let’s eat.’

There was a small table in the kitchen, with contoured aluminium edges, and a laminate top now dulled and faded by decades of time and wiping, but once bright and sparkly and atomic. There were three matching vinyl chairs. Maybe all bought way back when Maria Shevick was a little girl. For her first grown-up dinners. Knife and fork and please and thank you. Now many years later she told Reacher and her husband to sit down, and she put the sandwiches from the deli bag on china plates, and the chips in china bowls, and the sodas in cloudy glass tumblers. She brought cloth napkins. She sat down. She looked at Reacher.

‘You must think us very foolish,’ she said. ‘To have gotten ourselves in this situation.’

‘Not really,’ Reacher said. ‘Very unlucky, perhaps. Or very desperate. I’m sure this situation is a last resort. You sold your TV. Plus many other things, no doubt. I assume you took out a loan on the house. But it wasn’t enough. You had to find alternative arrangements.’

‘Yes,’ she said.

‘I’m sure there were good reasons.’

‘Yes,’ she said again.

She said nothing more. She and her husband ate slowly, one small bite at a time, one chip, one sip of soda. As if savouring the novelty. Or worrying about indigestion. The kitchen was quiet. No passing traffic, no street sounds, no commotion. There was old subway tile on the walls, and wallpaper where there wasn’t, with flowers on it, like Mrs Shevick’s mother’s dress, in the very first photograph, but paler and less boldly delineated. The floor was linoleum, pitted long ago by stiletto heels, now rubbed almost smooth again. The appliances had been replaced, maybe back when Nixon was president. But Reacher figured the countertops were still original. They were pale yellow laminate, with fine wavy lines that looked like heartbeats on a hospital machine.

Mrs Shevick finished her sandwich. She drained her soda. She dabbed up the last fragments of her potato chips on a dampened fingertip. She pressed her napkin to her lips. She looked at Reacher.

She said, ‘Thank you.’

He said, ‘You’re welcome.’

‘You think Fisnik can’t ask for another thousand dollars.’

‘In the sense of shouldn’t. I guess that’s different from won’t.’

‘I think we’ll have to pay.’

‘I’m happy to go discuss it with the guy. On your behalf. If you like. I could make a number of arguments.’

‘And I’m sure you would be convincing. But my husband told me you’re only passing through. You won’t be here tomorrow. We will. It’s probably safer to pay.’

Aaron Shevick said, ‘We don’t have it.’

His wife didn’t answer. She twisted the rings on her finger. Maybe subconsciously. She had a slim gold wedding band, and a token diamond next to it. She was thinking about the pawn shop, Reacher figured. Probably near the bus depot, on a cheap street. But she would need more than a wedding band and a small solitaire, for a thousand bucks. Maybe she still had her mother’s stuff, upstairs in a drawer. Maybe there had been random inheritances, from old aunts and uncles, pins and pendants and retirement watches.

She said, ‘We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. Maybe he’ll be reasonable. Maybe he won’t ask for it.’

Her husband said, ‘These are not reasonable people.’

Reacher asked him, ‘Do you have direct evidence of that?’

‘Only indirect evidence,’ Shevick said. ‘Fisnik explained the various penalties to me, right back at the beginning. He had photographs on his phone, and a short video. I was made to watch it. As a consequence, we have never been late with a payment. Until now.’

‘Did you think about going to the police?’

‘Of course we thought about it. But it was a contract voluntarily entered into. We borrowed their money. We accepted their terms. One of which was no police. I had been shown the punishment, on Fisnik’s phone. Overall we thought it was too much of a risk.’

‘Probably wise,’ Reacher said, although he didn’t really mean it. He figured what Fisnik needed was a punch in the throat, not contractual respect. Maybe followed by slamming him face down on the tabletop, way in the far back corner. But then, Reacher wasn’t either seventy or stooped or starving. Probably wise.

Mrs Shevick said, ‘We’ll know where we stand at six o’clock.’

They avoided the subject for the rest of the afternoon. Some kind of unspoken agreement. Instead they swapped biographies, like regular polite conversation. Mrs Shevick had indeed inherited the house from her parents, who had bought it sight unseen through the GI Bill, all caught up in the crazy postwar land rush towards the middle class. She herself had been born a year later, like the lawn showed in the photograph, and she had grown up there, and then her parents died and she met her husband all in the same year. He was a machine tool operator, very skilled, raised nearby. An essential occupation, so he was never drafted for Vietnam. They had a daughter within a year, just the same as her parents had, and the daughter grew up there, the second generation to do so. She did well in school, and got a job. Never married, no grandchildren, but hey. Reacher noticed their tone changed the nearer the story got to the present day. It got bleaker, and strangled, as if there were things they couldn’t say.

The clock in his head hit five. A mile was fifteen minutes for him, and twenty for most other people, but at Shevick’s pace it was going to be close to the full hour.

‘It’s time,’ he said. ‘Let’s go.’

Once again Reacher helped Shevick down the far kerb, and across the street, and up the near kerb, and across the sidewalk to the door. Once again he went in first. For the same reason. An unknown guy coming in immediately before a target was ten times less subconsciously connected than an unknown guy coming in immediately after. Human nature. Mostly bullshit, but sometimes it rang a bell.

The same fat guy was behind the bar. There were now nine other customers. Two pairs, and five singletons alone at separate tables. One of the singletons had been in the same spot six hours previously. Another was a woman about eighty years old. She was cradling a glass full of clear liquid. Probably not water.

There was a guy at the four-top in the far back corner.

He was a big slab of a man, maybe forty years old, so pale he looked luminescent in the gloom. He had pale eyes, and pale eyelashes, and pale eyebrows. He had hair the colour of corn silk, buzzed so short it glittered. He had thick white wrists resting on the edge of the table, and big white hands resting on a large black ledger. He wore a black suit, a white shirt, and a black silk tie. He had a tattoo coming up out of the neck of the shirt. Some kind of writing. A foreign alphabet. Not Russian. Something else.