Lee Child - Bad Luck and Trouble

Which Reacher couldn’t afford to do.

Because the clock in his head had ticked around to the two-hour mark. He got up on his elbows and pulled out his phone and dialed Dixon ’s cell.

More than a hundred yards away, Lamaison answered the call. Reacher kept his thumb over the phone’s bright LCD window. He wanted to preserve his night vision and he didn’t want the searchers to look up and see a tiny disembodied face bathed in a distant blue glow. He spoke as normally as he dared.

“We’re stuck on the 210,” he said. “There’s a stalled car up ahead.”

“Bullshit,” Lamaison said. “You’re right here in the neighborhood. You’ve been throwing gasoline bombs over my fence.” His voice was loud and angry. Over the cellular circuits it came through edgy and penetrating. A little grating and distorted. Reacher slipped the pad of his index finger over the earpiece perforations and glanced up at the searchers. They were a hundred and twenty yards away. They hadn’t reacted.

“What bombs?” he said, into the phone.

“You heard me.”

“We’re on the freeway. I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Bullshit, Reacher. You’re right here. You started a fire. But it was pathetic. It took them all of five minutes to put it out. I’m sure you saw them do it.”

Eight minutes, actually , Reacher thought. Give me some damn credit . But he said nothing. Just watched his pair of searchers. They were a hundred and ten yards away.

“The deal is off,” Lamaison said.

“Wait,” Reacher said. “I’m still thinking about the deal. But I’m not an idiot. I want a proof of life. You could have shot them already.”

“They’re still alive.”

“Prove it.”

“How?”

“I’ll call you when we’re through this traffic. You can bring them to the gate.”

“No way. They stay where they are.”

“Then we can’t do business.”

Lamaison said, “I’ll ask them a question for you.”

The searchers were ninety yards away.

“What question?” Reacher said.

“Think of a question only they can answer. We’ll ask them and call you back.”

“I’ll call you back,” Reacher said. “I don’t answer the phone when I’m driving.”

“You’re not driving. What’s the question?”

Reacher said, “Ask them who they were with before they joined the 110th MP.” Then he clicked the phone off and put it back in his pocket.

The searchers were about seventy yards away. Reacher crawled another twenty yards inward, slow and cautious, parallel with the fence. The searchers managed another ten yards while he was doing it. Now they were forty yards away, coming on slowly, five feet apart, scuffing the grass, peering outward at the fence, checking for breaches.

Reacher saw light at the front of the main building. The door, opening. A tall shape stepped out. Parker, probably. He closed the door behind him and hustled around the near gable wall and headed for the distant shack thirty yards away. He unlocked the door and went in and less than a minute later he came back out and locked up again.

The prison , Reacher thought. Thank you .

The searchers were twenty yards away. Eighteen and a quarter meters, sixty feet, 720 inches, one-point-one-three percent of a mile. Reacher shuffled ahead a little and closed the gap. The searchers stumbled on. Now they were ten yards ahead, on a diagonal, maybe eight yards to Reacher’s left.

His phone vibrated in his pocket.

He hauled it out and cupped it in his hand. The caller ID said Dixon, which meant Lamaison. The answers to his question, recently relayed by Parker.

I said I’d call you , Reacher thought. Can’t talk now .

He jammed the phone back in his pocket and waited. The searchers were almost dead level with him, eight yards to his left. They moved on. Reacher squirmed around, a silent half-circle on the ground. The searchers walked on. Reacher completed the circle. Now he was behind them. He got silently to his feet. Took short quiet strides, stepping high to keep his soles from brushing the grass with telltale rustles. He fell in behind the two guys, ten feet back, then eight, then six, centered exactly between them. They were a decent size. Maybe six-two, two-ten, pale and meaty. Blue suits, white shirts, crew cuts. Broad shoulders, thick necks.

He hit the first guy with a massive straight right, dead-center in the back of the neck, two hundred and fifty pounds and days of rage behind the blow. The guy’s neck snapped forward and his skull snapped back and bounced straight off Reacher’s fist and smashed forward again until his chin smacked his chest. Whiplash. Like a crash test dummy rear-ended by a speeding truck. The guy went straight down in a heap and his buddy turned toward him in shock and Reacher danced through a short shuffle step and headbutted him full in the face. He knew it was a great one by the sound alone. Bone, gristle, muscle, flesh, the unmistakable crunch of serious damage. The guy stayed vertical but unconscious for a second and then went down flat.

Reacher rolled the first guy on his back and sat on his chest and pinched his nose with one hand and blocked his mouth with his other palm. Then he waited until the guy suffocated. It didn’t take long. Less than a minute. Then he did the same thing with the other guy. Another minute.

Then he checked their pockets. The first guy had a cell phone and a gun and a wallet full of cash money and credit cards. Reacher took the gun and the cash money, left the cell phone and the credit cards. The gun was a SIG P226, nine-millimeter. The cash money was a little less than two hundred dollars. The second guy had another phone, another SIG, another wallet.

Plus Dave O’Donnell’s ceramic knuckleduster.

It was right there in his jacket pocket. Either a reward for good work at the hospital takedown, or a stolen souvenir. Spoils of war. Reacher put it in his own pocket and jammed the SIGs in his waistband and the cash in his back pocket. Then he wiped his hands on the second guy’s jacket and crawled away, low and fast, peering into the dark where he imagined Neagley to be. He had heard nothing from that direction. Nothing at all. But he wasn’t worried. Neagley against two guys in the dark was about as reliable as the sun setting in the west.

He found another broad dip in the grass and lay down on his elbows and pulled out his phone. Called Dixon ’s number.

“Where the hell were you?” Lamaison asked him.

“I told you,” Reacher said. “I don’t pick up when I’m driving.”

“You’re not driving.”

“So why didn’t I pick up?”

“Whatever,” Lamaison said. “Where are you now?”

“Close by.”

“Before the 110th Dixon says she was with the 53rd MP and O’Donnell says he was with the 131st.”

“OK,” Reacher said. “I’ll call you back in ten. When we arrive.”

He clicked off and sat up cross-legged in the dirt. He had his proof-of-life answers. Only problem was, neither one of them was even remotely true.

Reacher crawled south through the grass, looking for Neagley in the dark. He made it through fifty fast yards and found a corpse instead. He blundered right into it, hands and then knees. It was a man, cooling fast. Blue suit, white shirt. Broken neck.

“Neagley?” he whispered.

“Here,” she whispered back.

She was twenty feet away, lying on her side, propped up on one elbow.

“You OK?” he asked.

“Feeling good.”

“Was there another one?”

“Behind you,” she said. “To your right.”

Reacher turned. Same kind of guy, same kind of suit, same kind of shirt.