Blue Moon (Jack Reacher #24)(62)

Reacher and Abby stepped out the bedroom door, to the upstairs hallway. Below them in the kitchen there was no sound. Just some kind of silent tension, hissing and crackling off the tile. Reacher pictured worried glances, Barton to Hogan, Hogan to Barton.

Abby whispered, “We should go down there and help them out.”

“We can’t,” Reacher said. “If that guy sees us here, we can’t let him leave.”

“Why not?”

“He would report back. This address would be blown forever. Barton could get all kinds of problems in the future. They would stop him playing their clubs, for sure. Hogan, too. Same boat. They got to eat.”

Then he paused.

Abby said, “What do you mean, can’t let him leave?”

“There are a number of options.”

“You mean take him prisoner?”

“Maybe this house has a cellar.”

“What are the other options?”

“There’s a range. I’m pretty much a whatever works kind of guy.”

Abby said, “I guess this is my fault. I shouldn’t have left the paper.”

“You were defending me. It was nice of you.”

“Still a mistake.”

“Spilled milk,” Reacher said. “Move on. Don’t waste mental energy.”

Below them the conversation started up again.

They heard the guy ask, “Are you learning a new language?”

No answer.

“Probably better not to start with Albanian. And probably better not to start with this particular word. It’s kind of subtle. It has a bunch of meanings. Country people use it. I guess originally it’s an old folk word, from long ago. It’s quite rare now. Not used often.”

No response.

“Why did you write it on a scrap of paper?”

No reply.

“Actually I don’t think you did. I think this is a woman’s handwriting. I told you, I have experience in these matters. I was a police detective in Tirana. I like to keep abreast of relevant data. Especially concerning my new country. The woman who wrote this word is too young to have learned formal cursive penmanship in school. She’s less than forty.”

No answer.

“Perhaps she’s your friend, who came to dinner. Because the paper was left on the table among the cartons of food. In what they call the same archaeological layer. Which means they were deposited at the same time.”

Hogan said nothing.

The guy asked, “Is your friend who came to dinner less than forty?”

Hogan said, “She’s about thirty, I guess.”

“And she came over for Chinese food and a little wine.”

No answer.

“And maybe some weed, and some gossip about people you both know, and then some serious conversation, about your lives, and the state of the world.”

“I suppose,” Hogan said.

“In the middle of which she suddenly jumped up and found a scrap of paper and wrote a single rare and subtle word in a foreign language completely unknown to most Americans. Can you explain that to me?”

“She’s a smart person. Maybe she was talking about something. Maybe it was the exact right word, if it’s so rare and subtle. Smart people do that. They use foreign words. Maybe she wrote it down for me. So I could look it up later.”

“Possible,” the guy said. “Some other time, I might have shrugged my shoulders and let it go at that. Stranger things have happened. Except I don’t like coincidences. Especially not four all at once. First coincidence is she wasn’t here alone. She had a male partner. Second coincidence is, I’ve seen that rare word a lot in the last twelve hours. In text messages on my phone. Contained in descriptions of our male fugitive. Like I said at the beginning, a man and a woman. I said she’s small and dark, and he’s big and ugly.”

Upstairs in the hallway Abby whispered, “This is going to turn bad.”

Like a waitress smelling a bar fight coming.

“Probably,” Reacher said.

Below them they heard the guy say, “The third coincidence is that a phone with copies of those same messages on it was stolen last night. At one point recently it was switched on for twenty minutes. No calls were made or received. But twenty minutes is long enough to read plenty of texts. Long enough to note down the hard words to work on later.”

Hogan said, “Lighten up, man. No one had a stolen phone.”

“The fourth coincidence is that the stolen phone was stolen by the big ugly guy in the description. We know that for sure. We got a full report. The guy was acting alone at the time, but he is known to associate with a small dark-haired woman. Who was undoubtedly your dinner guest, because she wrote the word on the paper. Undoubtedly she copied it from the stolen phone. Because how else would she know that word? Why else would she be interested in that word right now?”

“I don’t know, man,” Hogan said. “Maybe we’re talking about different people.”

“He went out and stole the phone and brought it back to her. Did she instruct him to, ahead of time? Is she his boss? Did she send him on a mission?”

“I have no clue what you’re talking about, man.”

“Then you better get a clue,” the guy said. “You have been caught harboring enemies of the community. Doesn’t reflect well on you.”