Lee Child: Personal

Sudden silence in the bedroom.

I stepped to one side, in case he fired through the wood.

He didn’t.

How do you make them come out of there voluntarily? No one knows. No one ever has . Normally I would have stood with my back against the wall and eased the door open, arm’s length and out of sight, but Joey’s doors were too wide for that. So like the neat little guy I was in that new environment, I dodged forward, twisted the knob, kicked the door, dodged back, and aimed.

And fired. And hit John Kott in the centre of the forehead. Except I didn’t. It was a mirror on the side wall. The gunshot roared and silvered glass sheeted down, and then the world went quiet again, and from inside the room Kott said, ‘What happened to forgetting about me and going our separate ways?’

I hadn’t heard his voice for sixteen years, but it was him. The slow Ozark accent, the querulous pitch, the aggrieved tone.

I said, ‘You didn’t answer me.’

‘Not worth answering.’

‘Who is in there with you?’

‘Step inside and take a look.’

I called up the blueprint in my head again. I said, ‘You’re on the second floor of a very tall house. I’m at the only door out. I just fired a gun in London. Five minutes from now you’ll have five thousand cops outside. You’ll survive about three weeks without food. And then what will you do?’

He said, ‘The cops won’t come.’

I said, ‘You think?’

‘Bennett will tell them it was one of his.’

‘What do you know about Bennett?’

‘I know plenty about Bennett.’

‘Who is in there with you?’

‘I could have showed you in the mirror, except you bust it. You’re going to have to come on in.’

I backed away a step and called over my shoulder. ‘Bennett? You down there still?’

No answer.

‘Nice? Are you there?’

No answer.

I stepped back to the bedroom door and said, ‘I guess you know Joey is no longer with us. And you know his guys ran away. So I can stay here as long as I need to. You’ll still starve to death, even if the cops don’t come.’

‘And then you’ll have more innocent blood on your hands. Because I ain’t in here alone. But I guess you know that, right?’

And then he muttered something, not to me, maybe tell him, kid , and I heard the woman’s voice again, still inarticulate, this time not a frustrated gasp, but a muffled scream. She was gagged. And if she was gagged, she was tied up, too.

The woman screamed again.

I said, ‘Is that supposed to impress me?’

Kott said, ‘I would hope.’

‘What am I, a social worker?’

The scream came again, a third time, long and loud, but muffled by the gag. It tailed off into a bubbling sob, full of pain and hurt and misery and indignity.

Kott said, ‘I got to say, it’s impressing the hell out of me, at least.’

The blueprint said the room was about thirty feet by thirty, with a bathroom to the left and a dressing room to the right. I stood exactly where I had stood before, and looked into the mirror, which showed me nothing, just rough-stained wood not meant to be seen, but when it was still glass it had shown me Kott. My angle was pretty tight, therefore his angle was pretty tight. They had to be equal. High-school physics. Basic optics. Probably the head of the bed was right next to me, on the other side of the wall, and a bed was a logical place to put a woman, bound and gagged. In which case Kott was sitting on the end of the bed, probably. Which all made sense until I re-checked the angles, and figured the end of the bed would put him too close to me. Unequal. Not possible. Then I remembered Joey’s bed was probably nine feet long, maybe ten, and it all made sense again.

I took a step. I knew nothing about domestic hardware or any kind of construction, but I had eyes and a memory, and I figured every door hinge I had ever seen had a barrel about half an inch across, which made Joey’s barrels three-quarters of an inch, and a hinge was shaped to suit its task, which was to jack the door out of its frame, and swing it open. Simple math said the crack between the door and the jamb on the hinge side would maximize when the door was open exactly ninety degrees. Which would be a little over an inch, in Joey’s case. But the door wasn’t open ninety degrees. It was open about thirty degrees. Maybe a couple more. Which meant the crack was a hair over a third of an inch. Which in foreign weights and measures was about ten millimetres wide.

And a nine-millimetre Parabellum was nine millimetres wide.

I KEPT MY eye back from the crack, like a sniper keeps his eye back from the scope, because I didn’t want Kott to sense a sudden subliminal darkening, or hear the huff of breath through a narrow channel. He was sitting on the end of the bed, half turned to face the door. He was easily sixteen years older. He had lines around his eyes, and lines around his mouth. He was all ground down, and all wised up. He was wearing brown pants and a brown shirt, cheap items, like I might have chosen. His hands were resting easy in his lap. He had a gun. A Browning High Power. The local favourite.

Next to him on the bed was a naked woman. I didn’t know her. Her skin was white and her hair was yellow. She could have been anywhere between eighteen and forty. Her arms were twisted behind her and bound at the wrists. Her ankles were tied. She had a rag in her mouth.

Her arms were twisted with the insides of her elbows facing outward, and they were not a pretty sight. Green and yellow bruises, and scars, and clots of old blood.

Kott picked up a syringe and showed it to her, and then moved it near her elbow. She twisted her neck and watched, eyes wide. Kott touched the needle to her skin. She watched, and watched, and hoped, and hoped.

Kott moved the needle away again.

The woman slumped and gasped the same frustrated gasp I had heard before. Anguish, disappointment, and pain. She needed to get something. But she couldn’t .

I stepped back one long pace, staying exactly in line, and I put my own Browning in my back pocket, and I stood feet apart, and I raised the Glock two-handed, an easy, natural motion I had made a thousand times before, and I fired through the crack, at the real John Kott, not his reflection. But I hit him just the same, in the centre of his forehead. Fifteen feet. An eightieth of a second. I saw a neat black entry hole, instantly there, and then equally instantly the back of his skull blew off, which was anything but neat, and the roar of the shot rolled up my arms to my ears, and Kott just sat there, still as a statue, and sat, and sat, and then finally he toppled sideways and fell off the bed.

I didn’t check Kott’s condition. He had fallen on his face and I could see the inside of his brain. Which told me enough. Instead I went straight for his pockets and found a phone just like mine. Then I untied the woman’s ankles, and her wrists, and I pulled the rag out of her mouth, and I half turned to look for a robe or a sheet or a towel to cover her with, whereupon she shoved me out the way and grabbed the needle and stuck it in her arm.

She closed her eyes and pressed the plunger, slowly, slowly, all the way there.

She waited.

Then she made sounds I hadn’t heard from her before, a hum of contentment, a sleepy giggle, a yawn of pure happiness.

She stood up, slow and dazed, a little wobbly.

She said, ‘I want to leave here.’

She sounded foreign. Eastern European. From Latvia or Estonia, probably. Her accent shortened certain syllables. At first I thought she had said, I want to live here .

Maybe she had.

I said, ‘Take the needle out of your arm.’