Blue Moon (Jack Reacher #24)(50)

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Three blocks from Barton’s house, Reacher took off his jacket, and folded it into a square, and rolled the square into a tube, and stuffed the tube inside a rusted mailbox outside a one-story office building with boarded-up windows and fire damage on the siding. He walked the rest of the way in his T-shirt only. The nighttime air was cool. It was still springtime. The full weight of summer was yet to come.

Hogan was waiting for him in Barton’s hallway. The drummer. Once a U.S. Marine. Now enjoying patterns he alone controlled.

“You OK?” he asked.

“Were you worried about me?” Reacher said.

“Professionally curious.”

“I wasn’t playing a gig with the Rolling Stones.”

“My previous profession.”

“Objective achieved,” Reacher said.

“Which was what exactly?”

“I wanted a Ukrainian phone. Apparently they text each other a lot. I figured I could look back and see where they’re up to with this. Maybe they mention Trulenko. Maybe I could make them panic, and make them move him. That would be the time of maximum opportunity.”

Abby came down the stairs. Still dressed.

She said, “Hey.”

Reacher said, “Hey back.”

“I heard all that. Good plan. Except won’t they just kill the phone remotely? You won’t hear from them, and they won’t hear from you.”

“I chose the guy I took it from pretty carefully. He was relatively competent. Therefore relatively trusted. Maybe relatively senior. Therefore relatively reluctant to fess up that I took his lunch money. I left him a little embarrassed. He won’t report anything in a hurry. It’s a pride thing. I think I have a few hours, at least.”

“OK, good plan, except nothing.”

“Except I’m not great with phones. There might be menus. All kinds of buttons to press. I might delete something by mistake.”

“OK, show me.”

“And even if I don’t delete them by mistake, the texts are probably in Ukrainian. Which I can’t read without the internet. And I’m really not great with computers.”

“That would be the second step. We would need to start with the phone. Show me.”

“I didn’t bring it here,” Reacher said. “The guy in the Lincoln claimed they could be traced. I don’t want someone knocking on the door five minutes from now.”

“So where is it?”

“I hid it three blocks from here. I figured that was safe enough. Pi times the radius squared. They would have to search nearly a thirty-block circle. They wouldn’t even try.”

Abby said, “OK, let’s go take a look.”

“I also got an Albanian phone. Kind of accidentally. But in the end the same kind of deal. I want to read it. Maybe I can figure out what they’re mad with me about.”

“Are they mad with you?”

“They sent a guy after me. They want to know who I am.”

“That could be normal. You’re a new face in town. They like to know things.”

“Maybe.”

Hogan said, “There’s a guy you should talk to.”

Reacher said, “What guy?”

“He comes to gigs sometimes. A dogface, just like you.”

“Army?”

“Stands for, aren’t really Marines yet.”

“Like Marine stands for muscles are requested, intelligence not expected.”

“This guy I’m talking about speaks a bunch of old Commie languages. He was a company commander late on in the Cold War. Also he knows what’s going on here in town. He could be helpful. Or at least useful. With the languages especially. You can’t rely on a computer translation. Not for a thing like this. I could call him, if you like.”

“You know him well?”

“He’s solid. Good taste in music.”

“Do you trust him?”

“As much as I trust any dogface who doesn’t play the drums.”

“OK,” Reacher said. “Call him. Can’t hurt.”

He and Abby stepped out to the nighttime stillness, and Hogan stayed behind, in the half-lit hallway, dialing his phone.





Chapter 25


Reacher and Abby covered the three block distance via a roundabout route. Obviously if the phones were truly traceable, they might have already been discovered, in what was clearly a temporary stash, in which case surveillance might have been set up against their eventual retrieval. Better to play it safe. Or as safe as possible, which wasn’t very. There were shadows and alleys and deep doorways and two out of every three street lights were busted. There was plenty of habitat for hidden nighttime watchers.

Reacher saw the rusty mailbox up ahead. The middle of the next block. He said, “Pretend we’re having some kind of a deep conversation, and when we get level with the mailbox we stop to make an especially big point.”

“OK,” Abby said. “Then what?”

“Then we ignore the mailbox completely and we move on. But at that point very quietly. We glide away.”

“An actual pretend conversation? Or just moving our lips, like a silent movie?”

“Maybe whispered. Like we’re dealing with secret information.”