Blue Moon (Jack Reacher #24)(44)

“We can’t wait.”

“Are we not going to tell him?” the guy asked.

The right-hand man was quiet a beat.

Then he said, “No, not yet. He would only slow us down. This is too important.”

“Are you the new boss now?”

“Maybe. If Dino has really lost it. Which you said first, by the way. Everyone heard you.”

“I meant no disrespect. But this is a very big step. We better be sure we know what we’re doing. Otherwise it’s a betrayal. The worst kind. He’ll kill us all.”

“Time to choose up sides,” the right-hand man said. “Time for us all to place our bets. It’s either Viking rituals or it’s some out-of-towner’s takeover bid. Which will kill us all faster than Dino could anyway.”

The guy didn’t speak for ten long seconds.

Then he said, “What should we do first?”

“Put the fire out. Haul the wreck to the crusher. Then start asking around. Two cars drove in. One was a big shiny Lincoln. Someone will remember the other one. We’ll find it, and we’ll find the guy who was in it, and we’ll make him tell us who he’s working for.”



* * *



—

At that moment Reacher was four streets away, in the front parlor of a battered row house owned by a musician named Frank Barton. Barton was Abby’s friend in the east of the city. Also present in the house was Barton’s lodger, a man named Joe Hogan, once a U.S. Marine, now also a musician. A drummer, to be exact. His kit took up half the room. Barton played the bass guitar. His stuff took up the other half. Four instruments on stands, amplifiers, giant loudspeaker cabinets. Here and there among the clutter were narrow armchairs, thinly upholstered with stained and threadbare fabrics. Reacher had one, Abby had one, and Barton had the third and last. Hogan sat on his drum stool. The white Toyota was parked outside the window.

Barton said, “This is crazy, man. I know those guys. I play the clubs over there. They never forget. Abby can’t go back there, ever again.”

“Unless I find Trulenko,” Reacher said.

“How will that help?”

“I think a defeat of that magnitude would change things a little.”

“How?”

Reacher didn’t answer.

Hogan said, “He means the only route to a high-value target like Trulenko will be straight through the top levels of the organization. Therefore afterward the remaining survivors will be no better than low-level drones running around like chickens with their heads cut off. The Albanians will eat them for breakfast. They’ll own the whole city. What the Ukrainians were once upon a time worried about won’t matter a damn anymore. Because the Ukrainians will all be dead.”

Once a U.S. Marine. A sound grasp of strategy.

“This is crazy,” Barton said again.

Six chances before the week is over, Reacher thought.





Chapter 22


Gregory’s right-hand man knocked on the inner office door and entered and took a seat in front of the massive desk. He ran through what he knew. Two guys had been deployed outside Abigail Gibson’s house. They were now missing. They were not answering their phones. Their car was no longer where it should be.

Gregory said, “Dino?”

“Maybe not.”

“Why?”

“Maybe this was never Dino. Not at first, anyway. We made certain assumptions. Now we need to take a fresh look at the facts. Think about the first two, who got in the wreck up at the Ford dealer. Who was their last known contact?”

“They were doing an address check.”

“On Aaron Shevick. And who was observed flirting with the waitress outside of whose house two more guys just disappeared?”

“Aaron Shevick.”

“No such thing as a coincidence.”

“Who is he?”

“Someone is paying him. To set you and Dino at each other’s throat. So that we destroy each other. So the someone can take over.”

“Who?”

“Shevick will tell us. When we find him.”



* * *



—

The Albanians hauled the smoking wreck to the crusher, and then they started asking around. The inner council. The top boys. Unused to legwork. Their question was fairly simple. Did you see a two-vehicle convoy, one of which was a Lincoln Town Car? No one lied to them. They were pretty sure about that. Folks had seen what happened to people who lied to them. Instead everyone racked their brains. But results were disappointing. Partly because the concept of the convoy was sometimes hard to grasp. During rush hour, for instance, there were no two-car convoys. There were hundred-and-two-car convoys. Anywhere downtown, at the best of times, maybe twenty-two-car. Who knew which two were the convoy in question? People didn’t want to give the wrong answer. Not when the top boys were asking.

So a different way was found, to ask the same question. It was quickly agreed that among the traffic there had been a handful of black Lincolns. Probably six in total. Three of them had been the fat-ass kind the Ukrainians drove. The top boys encouraged detailed descriptions of what had been in front of each of them, and what had been behind. There was a two-car convoy in there somewhere.

Three separate witnesses remembered a small white sedan with a hanging-off front fender. In each report it was ahead of one particular Lincoln, which seemed attentive to its lane changes and such, definitely as if following it. Coming out of the west of the city, heading east.