Lee Child - Killing Floor

“Maybe Joe did,” I said. “We don’t know what he’d figured out before they got him. Anyway, right now I’m going back to Georgia. Carry on the search.”

Kelstein nodded and sighed. He looked stressed.

“Good luck, Mr. Reacher,” he said. “I hope you finish your brother’s business. Perhaps you will. He spoke of you often. He liked you, you know.”

“He spoke of me?” I said.

“Often,” the old guy said again. “He was very fond of you. He was sorry your job kept you so far away.”

For a moment I couldn’t speak. I felt unbearably guilty. Years would pass, I wouldn’t think about him. But he was thinking about me?

“He was older, but you looked after him,” he said. “That’s what Joe told me. He said you were very fierce. Very tough. I guess if Joe wanted anybody to take care of the Kliners, he’d have nominated you.”

I nodded.

“I’m out of here,” I said.

I shook his frail hand and left him with the cops in the security office.

I WAS TRYING TO FIGURE WHERE KLINER WAS GETTING HIS perfect paper, and I was trying to figure if I could get the six o’clock flight back to Atlanta if I hurried, and I was trying to ignore what Kelstein had told me about Joe speaking fondly of me. The streets were clogged and I was busy thinking about it all and scanning for an empty cab, which was why I didn’t notice two Hispanic guys strolling up to me. But what I did notice was the gun the leading guy showed me. It was a small automatic held in a small hand, concealed under one of those khaki raincoats city people carry on their arms in September.

He showed me the weapon and his partner signaled to a car waiting twenty yards away at the curb. The car lurched forward and the partner stood ready to open a door like the top-hatted guys do outside the expensive apartment houses up there. I was looking at the gun and looking at the car, making choices.

“Get into the car,” the guy with the gun said softly. “Or I’ll shoot you.”

I stood there and all that was passing through my mind was that I might miss my flight. I was trying to remember when the next non-stop left. Seven o’clock, I thought.

“In the car,” the guy said again.

I was pretty sure he wouldn’t fire the gun on the street. It was a small gun, but there was no silencer on it. It would make a hell of a noise, and it was a crowded street. The other guy’s hands were empty. He maybe had a gun in his pocket. There was just the driver in the car. Probably a gun on the seat beside him. I was unarmed. My jacket with the blackjack and the knife and the Desert Eagle was eight hundred miles away in Atlanta. Choices.

I chose not to get into the car. I just stood there in the street, gambling with my life that the guy wouldn’t shoot in public. He stood there, holding the raincoat out toward me. The car stopped next to us. His partner stood on the other side of me. They were small guys. The both of them wouldn’t have made one of me. The car waited, idling at the curb. Nobody moved. We were just frozen there like some kind of a display in a store window. Like new fashions for the fall, old army fatigues put with Burberry raincoats.

It gave the two guys a big problem. In a situation like that, there’s a split-second opportunity to carry out your threat. If you say you’re going to shoot, you’ve got to shoot. If you don’t, you’re a spent force. Your bluff is called. If you don’t shoot, you’re nothing. And the guy didn’t shoot. He just stood there, twisted up with indecision. People swirled around us on the busy sidewalk. Cars were blasting their horns at the guy stopped at the curb.

They were smart guys. Smart enough not to shoot me on a busy New York street. Smart enough to know I’d called their bluff. Smart enough to never again make a threat they weren’t going to keep. But not smart enough to walk away. They just stood there.

So I swayed backward, as if I was going to take a step away. The gun under the raincoat prodded forward at me. I tracked the movement and grabbed the little guy’s wrist with my left hand. Pulled the gun around behind me and hugged the guy close with my right arm around his shoulders. We looked like we were dancing the waltz together or we were lovers at a train station. Then I fell forward and crushed him against the car. All the time I was squeezing his wrist as hard as I could, with my nails dug in. Left-handed, but it was hurting him. My weight leaning up on him was giving him a struggle to breathe.

His partner still had his hand on the car door. His glance was darting back and forth. Then his other hand was going for his pocket. So I jackknifed my weight back and rolled around my guy’s gun hand and threw him against the car. And then I ran like hell. In five strides I was lost in the crowd. I dodged and barged my way through the mass of people. Ducked in and out of doorways and ran through shrieking and honking traffic across the streets. The two guys stayed with me for a spell, but the traffic eventually stopped them. They weren’t taking the risks I was taking.

I GOT A CAB EIGHT BLOCKS AWAY FROM WHERE I HAD started and made the six o’clock non-stop, La Guardia to Atlanta. Going back it took longer, for some reason. I was sitting there for two and a half hours. I thought about Joe all the way through the airspace above Jersey, Maryland and Virginia. Above the Carolinas and into Georgia, I thought about Roscoe. I wanted her back. I missed her like crazy.

We came down through storm clouds ten miles thick. The Atlanta evening gloom was turned to pitch black by the clouds. Looked like an enormous weather system was rolling in from somewhere. When we got off the plane, the air in the little tunnel was thick and heavy, and smelled of storm as well as kerosene.

I picked up the Bentley key from the information counter in the arrivals hall. It was in an envelope with a parking claim. I walked out to find the car. Felt a warm wind blowing out of the north. The storm was going to be a big one. I could feel the voltage building up for the lightning. I found the car in the short-term lot. The rear windows were all tinted black. The guy hadn’t gotten around to doing the front side glass or the windshield. It made the car look like something royalty might use, with a chauffeur driving them. My jacket was laid out in the trunk. I put it on and felt the reassuring weight of the weaponry in the pockets again. I got in the driver’s seat and nosed out of the lot and headed south down the highway in the dark. It was nine o’clock, Friday evening. Maybe thirty-six hours before they could start shipping the stockpile out on Sunday.

IT WAS TEN O’CLOCK WHEN I GOT BACK TO MARGRAVE. Thirty-five hours to go. I had spent the hour thinking about some stuff we had learned back in Staff College. We’d studied military philosophies, mostly written by those old Krauts who loved all that stuff. I hadn’t paid much attention, but I remember some big thing which said sooner or later, you’ve got to engage the enemy’s main force. You don’t win the war unless you do that. Sooner or later, you seek out their main force, and you take it on, and you destroy it.

I knew their main force had started with ten people. Hubble had told me that. Then there were nine, after they ditched Morrison. I knew about the two Kliners, Teale, and Baker. That left me five more names to find. I smiled to myself. Pulled off the county road into Eno’s gravel lot. Parked up on the far end of the row and got out. Stretched and yawned in the night air. The storm was holding off, but it was going to break. The air was still thick and heavy. I could still feel the voltage in the clouds. I could still feel the warm wind on my back. I got into the back of the car. Stretched out on the leather bench and went to sleep. I wanted to get an hour, hour and a half.