Lee Child - Bad Luck and Trouble

Easy , Reacher thought.

He pulled most of Neagley’s wad from his pocket and fanned the bills out and butted them back together and dropped them on the counter from enough of a height to produce a good solid sound. Used money in decent quantities was heavier than most people thought. Paper, ink, dirt, grease. The proprietor held his vision together long enough to take a good long look at it and then he said, “Help you?”

“I’m sure you can,” Reacher said. “I just had a civics lesson down the street. Seems that if a person wants to buy himself four pistols he has to jump through all kinds of hoops.”

“You got that right,” the guy said, and pointed behind him with his thumb. There was a gun dealer’s license on the wall, framed and hung just the same as the first guy’s.

“Any way around those hoops?” Reacher asked. “Or under them, or over them?”

“No,” the guy said. “Hoops is hoops.” Then he smiled, like he had said something exceptionally profound. For a second Reacher thought about taking him by the neck and using his head to break the glass in the cabinet. Then the guy looked down at the money again and said, “I got to obey the California statutes.” But he said it in a certain way and his eyes hit a sweet spot of focus and Reacher knew something good was coming.

“You a lawyer?” the guy asked.

“Do I look like a lawyer?” Reacher asked back.

“I talked to one once,” the guy said.

Many times more than once , Reacher thought. Mostly in locked rooms where the table and chairs are bolted to the floor .

“There’s a provision,” the guy said. “In the statutes.”

“Is there?” Reacher asked.

“A technicality,” the guy said. It took him a couple of tries before he got the whole word out. He had trouble with the harsh consonants. “Me or you or anybody can’t sell or give a gun to someone else without all the formalities.”

“But?”

“Me or you or anybody is entitled to loan one out. A temporary and infrequent loan lasting less than thirty days is OK.”

“Is that right?” Reacher said.

“It’s in the statute.”

“Interesting.”

“Like between family members,” the guy said. “Husband to wife, father to daughter.”

“I can see that.”

“Or like between friends,” the guy said. “A friend can loan a gun to a friend, thirty days, temporary.”

“Are we friends?” Reacher asked.

“We could be,” the guy said.

Reacher asked, “What kind of things do friends do for one another?”

The guy said, “Maybe they loan each other things. Like one loans out a gun, and the other loans out some money.”

“But only temporarily,” Reacher said. “Thirty days.”

“Loans can go bad. Sometimes you just have to write them off. It’s a risk. People move away, they fall out. You can never tell with friends.”

Reacher left the money where it was. Stepped away to the wired glass cabinet. There was some junk in there. But some good stuff, too. About fifty-fifty revolvers and automatics. The automatics were about two-thirds cheap and one-third premium brands. The premium brands ran about one-in-four nine-millimeter.

Total choice, thirteen suitable pistols. From a stock of about three hundred. Four and a third percent. Worse than his breakfast calculation, by a factor of close to two.

Seven of the suitable pistols were Glocks. Clearly they had been fashionable once, but weren’t anymore. One of them was a 19. The other six were 17s. In terms of visual condition they ranged from good to mint.

“Suppose you loaned me four Glocks,” Reacher said.

“Suppose I didn’t,” the guy said.

Reacher turned around. The money was gone from the counter. Reacher had expected that. There was a gun in the guy’s hand. Reacher had not expected that.

We’re old, we’re slow, and we’re rusty , Neagley had said. We’re a million miles from what we used to be .

Roger that , Reacher thought.

The gun was a Colt Python. Blued carbon steel, walnut grips,.357 Magnum, eight-inch barrel. Not the biggest revolver in the world, but not very far from it. Certainly it wasn’t the smallest revolver in the world. And it was maybe one of the most accurate.

“That isn’t very friendly,” Reacher said.

“We ain’t friends,” the guy said.

“It’s also kind of dumb,” Reacher said. “I’m in a very bad mood right now.”

“Suck it up. And keep your hands where I can see them.”

Reacher paused, and then he raised his hands, halfway, palms out, fingers spread, unthreatening. The guy said, “Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on your way out.”

The store was narrow. Reacher was all the way in back. The guy was behind the counter, a third of the way to the door. The aisle was cramped. The sunlight was bright in the window.

The guy said, “Leave the building, Elvis.”

Reacher stood still for a moment. Listened hard. Glanced left, glanced right, checked behind him. There was a door in the back left corner. Probably just a bathroom. Not an office. There was paperwork piled behind the counter. Nobody piles paperwork behind the counter if they have a separate room for it. Therefore the guy was alone. No partner, no backup.

No more surprises.

Reacher put the kind of look on his face that he had seen in Vegas. The rueful loser. It was worth a try, you got to be in it to win it . Then he kept his hands up at his shoulders and stepped forward. One pace. Two. Three. His fourth pace put him directly level with the guy. Just the width of the counter between them. Reacher was facing the door. The guy was ninety degrees to his left. The counter was maybe thirty inches deep. Two and a half feet.

Reacher’s left arm moved, straight out sideways from the shoulder.

The boxer Muhammad Ali’s reach was reckoned to be about forty inches and his hands were once timed at an average eighty miles an hour as they moved through it. Reacher was no Ali. Not even close. Especially not on his weaker side. His left hand moved at about sixty miles an hour, maximum. That was all. But sixty miles an hour was the same thing as a mile a minute, which was the same thing as eighty-eight feet per second. Which meant that Reacher’s left hand took a little less than thirty-thousandths of a second to cross the counter. And halfway through its travel it bunched into a fist.

And thirty-thousandths of a second was way too brief an interval for the guy to pull the Python’s trigger. Any revolver is a complex mechanical system and one as big as the Python is heavier in its action than most. Not very susceptible to accidental discharge. The guy’s finger didn’t even tighten. He took Reacher’s fist in his face before his brain had even registered that it was moving. Reacher was a lot slower than Muhammad Ali but his arms were a lot longer. Which meant that the guy’s head accelerated through a whole extra foot and a half before Reacher’s arm was fully extended. And then the guy’s head kept on accelerating. It kept on accelerating right until it crashed against the wall behind the counter and shattered the glass over the gun dealer’s license.

At that point it stopped accelerating and started a slow downward slide to the floor.

Reacher was over the counter before the guy had even settled. He kicked the Python away and used his heel to break the guy’s fingers. Both hands. Necessary in a weapons-rich environment, and faster than tying wrists. Then he reclaimed Neagley’s cash from the guy’s pocket and found his keys. Vaulted back over the counter and stepped to the back of the store and opened the wired glass cabinet. Took all seven Glocks and pulled a suitcase out of a display of used luggage and piled the guns inside. Then he wiped his fingerprints off the keys and his palm prints off the counter and headed outside to the sunshine.