Ли Чайлд - The Midnight Line

‘Your HQ was in the Pentagon, right?’

‘No, our HQ was in Rock Creek, Virginia. Some ways north and west of the Pentagon. I had the best office there for a couple of years. Was that your security question?’

‘You passed the test. Rock Creek it was. Now tell me what’s going on. You looked like you were fixing to fight these guys.’

‘So far we’re just talking,’ Reacher said. ‘I asked them something. They told me they would prefer to answer me outside in the open air. I don’t know why. Maybe they were worried about eavesdroppers.’

‘What did you ask them?’

‘Where they got this ring.’

Reacher rested his wrist on the door and opened his hand.

‘West Point,’ the cop said.

‘Sold to the pawn shop by these guys. I want to know who they got it from.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know exactly. I guess I want to know the story.’

‘These guys won’t tell you.’

‘You know them?’

‘Nothing we can prove.’

‘But?’

‘They bring stuff in from South Dakota through Minnesota. Two states away. But never enough to get the Feds interested in an interstate kind of thing. And never enough to put a South Dakota police detective on an airplane. So it’s pretty much risk-free for them.’

‘Where in South Dakota?’

‘We don’t know.’

Reacher said nothing.

The cop said, ‘You should get in the car. There are seven of them.’

‘I’ll be OK,’ Reacher said.

‘I’ll arrest you, if you like. To make it look good. But you need to be gone. Because I need to be gone. I can’t stay here my whole watch.’

‘Don’t worry about me.’

‘Maybe I should arrest you anyway.’

‘For what? Something that hasn’t happened yet?’

‘For your own safety.’

‘I could take offence,’ Reacher said. ‘You don’t seem very worried about their safety. You talk like it’s a foregone conclusion.’

‘Get in the car. Call it a tactical retreat. You can find out about the ring some other way.’

‘What other way?’

‘Then forget all about it. A buck gets ten there’s no story at all. Probably the guy came back all sad and bitter and sold the damn ring as fast as he could. To pay the rent on his trailer.’

‘Is that how it is around here?’

‘Often enough.’

‘You’re doing OK.’

‘It’s a spectrum.’

‘It wasn’t a guy. The ring is too small. It was a woman.’

‘Women live in trailers too.’

Reacher nodded. He said, ‘I agree, a buck gets ten it’s nothing. But I want to know for sure. Just in case.’

Silence for a moment. Just the engine’s whispered idle, and a breeze in the telephone wires.

‘Last chance,’ the cop said. ‘Play it smart. Get in the car.’

‘I’ll be OK,’ Reacher said again. He stepped back and straightened up. The cop shook his head in exasperation, and waited a beat, and then gave up and drove away, slowly, tyres hissing on the blacktop, exhaust fumes trailing. Reacher watched him all the way to the corner, and then he stepped back up on the sidewalk, where the black-clad semicircle re-formed around him.

THE SEVEN BIKERS resumed their previous positions, and they hunched down into their combat stances again, feet apart, hands held wide and ready. But they didn’t move. They didn’t want to. Not right away. From their point of view a new factor had been introduced. Their opponent was completely batshit crazy. He had proved it. He had been offered a graceful exit by the county cops, and he had turned it down. He had stayed to fight it out.

Why?

They didn’t know.

Reacher waited. At that point he figured Chang would be hauling her packages home. Dumping them on the kitchen counter. Assembling her ingredients. Taking a knife from a drawer. Maybe heating the stove. Dinner for one. A quiet evening. A relief, perhaps.

Still the bikers didn’t move.

Reacher said, ‘You guys having second thoughts now?’

No response.

Reacher said, ‘Answer my question and I’ll let you walk away.’

No movement.

Reacher waited.

Then eventually he said, ‘A person less patient than me might think it’s time to shit or get off the pot.’

Still no response.

Reacher smiled.

He said, ‘Then I guess I was just born lucky. This is like winning the slots in Vegas. Ding, ding, ding. I got seven big girls all in a line.’

Which got a reaction, like he wanted it to. Like he needed it to. Motion was his friend. He wanted moving mass and momentum. He wanted them raging and blundering. Which he got. They glanced among themselves, outraged, but not wanting to be the first to move, or the last, and then on some kind of unspoken signal they all jerked forward, suddenly mad as hell, all pumped up and vulnerable. Reacher put his original plan in action. It was still good. Still the obvious play. He waited until they were five feet away, and then he launched hard and smashed through the line with a horizontal elbow in his first target’s face, and then he turned immediately and launched again, no delay at all, stamping his foot to kill the old momentum and get some new, scything his elbow at the guy to the right of the sudden new gap, who turned straight into it, facing front with all kinds of urgency, meeting the blow like a head-on wreck on the highway.

Two down.

Reacher turned again and stood still. The five survivors formed up in a new semicircle. Reacher took a long step back. Simply to gauge their intentions. Which were exactly as predicted. Jimmy Rat faded backward, and the other four came on forward.

Reacher had graduated most of the specialist combat schools the army had to offer, most of them on posts inside the old Confederacy, all of them staffed by grizzled old veterans who had done things no normal person could imagine. Such schools concluded with secret notes in secret files and a lot of bruises and maybe even broken bones. The rule of thumb in such establishments, when faced with four opponents, was to make it three opponents pretty damn quickly. And then to make it two opponents just as fast, which was the win right there, the whole ball game, because obviously any graduate of any such school could not possibly have the slightest problem going one-on-two, because if he did, it would mean the instructors had done a poor job of instructing, which was of course logically impossible in the army.

Reacher called it getting his retaliation in first. The four guys were all hunched again, arms wide, bow-legged and feet apart. Maybe they thought such poses looked threatening. To Reacher they looked like a target-rich environment. He darted in and picked off the end guy on the left with a kick in the balls, and then danced away at right-angles, in line with them, where the back three couldn’t get to him without detouring around the end guy, who by that point was doubled over, retching and puking and gasping.

Reacher stepped back again. The back three came after him, making the detour, the first guy going right, the second left, the third right again. All of which gave Reacher time to slip around behind the line of bikes, to the other side. Which gave the three guys a decision to make. Obviously two would follow one way and one the other, but which one and which way? Obviously the lone guy carried the greatest risk. He was the weak point and would get hit first, and maybe hardest. Who wanted that duty?

Reacher saw Jimmy Rat watching from the sidewalk.

The three guys split up two and one, the two coming around to Reacher’s right, the lone guy from the left. Reacher moved to meet him, fast, his mind on the invisible geometry unspooling behind him, figuring he would get just shy of three seconds of pure one-on-one, before the other two arrived behind him.