Blue Moon (Jack Reacher #24)(88)

“Why?”

“I want the guy distracted. He’ll watch you all the way. Partly because maybe you’re a new customer, but mostly because you’re the best-looking thing he’s seen all day. Maybe all his life. Ignore the barman, whatever he says. He’s an asshole.”

“Got it,” she said.

“You want a gun?”

“Should I?”

“Can’t hurt,” he said.

“OK,” she said.

He gave her the lounge doorman’s H&K. It looked dainty in his hand and huge in hers. She hefted it a couple of times, and stuck it in her pocket. She headed off down the alley. Reacher found the bar’s back door. It was a plain steel panel, dull and old, scarred and dented low down, by hand trucks wheeling kegs and crates. He tried the handle. It was unlocked. No doubt a city regulation. It was a fire exit, too.

Reacher slipped inside. He was at the far end of a short corridor. Restrooms to the left and right. Then a door for employees only. An office, or a storeroom. Or both. Then the end of the corridor, and the room itself, seen in reverse. The square bar now in the near right corner, the worn central track leading away, between the long rows of four-top tables. The same as before. The light was still dim and the air still smelled of spilled beer and disinfectant. This time there were five customers, once again each of them alone at separate tables, defending their drinks, looking miserable. Behind the bar was the same fat guy, now with a six-day beard, but a fresh towel thrown over his shoulder.

The pale guy was at the back table on Reacher’s left. The same as before. Luminescent in the gloom. Glittering hair. Thick white wrists, big white hands, a thick black ledger. The same black suit, the same white shirt, the same black silk necktie. The same tattoo.

Abby stepped in the street door. She stood still as it closed behind her. Performance art. Every eye was on her. She was softly backlit by the dull neon in the windows. Petite and gamine, neat and slender, dressed all in black. Short dark hair, lively dark eyes. A shy but contagious smile. A stranger, dropping by, hoping for a welcome.

She didn’t get one. All five customers looked away. But the barman didn’t. Neither did the pale guy. She set out walking and they watched her all the way.

Reacher took a step. He was six feet behind the pale guy, and six feet to the side, no doubt in the corner of his eye, but hopefully Abby was filling all of it. She kept on coming, and he took another step.

The barman called out, “Hey.”

He had been in the corner of the barman’s eye, too. Six feet behind, six feet to the side. All kinds of things happened next. Like a complex ballet. Like a triple play in baseball. The pale guy glanced back, started to get up, Reacher stepped away, toward the bar, where he grabbed the barman’s fat head in both hands, and jumped up and thrust it down and smashed it on the mahogany, like dunking a basketball from way high in the air, and he used the bounce of his landing to pivot back to the pale guy, one step, two, and he hit him with a colossal straight right, all his moving mass behind it, center of the guy’s face as he rose up from his chair, and the guy disappeared backward like he had been shot out of a cannon. He slid and sprawled on the floor, flat on his back, blood coming out of his nose and his mouth.

All five customers got up and hurried out the door. Maybe a traditional local response, in such situations. In which case Reacher applauded the habit. It left no witnesses. There were blood and teeth on the bar top, but the barman himself had fallen backward out of sight.

“I guess he didn’t watch me all the way,” Abby said.

“I told you,” Reacher said. “He’s an asshole.”

They crouched next to the pale guy and took his gun and his phone and his car key and what looked like about eight thousand dollars from his pockets. His nose was badly busted. He was breathing through his mouth. Flecks of blood were bubbling at the corners of his lips. Reacher remembered him tapping his glittering head with his bone-white finger. Some kind of a threatening implication. He thought, how the mighty are fallen.

He said, “Yes or no?”

Abby was quiet a beat.

Then she said, “Yes.”

Reacher clamped his palm over the guy’s mouth. Hard to keep it there, because it was slippery with blood. But he prevailed. The guy wasted time scrabbling for his pocket, looking for his gun, which was no longer there, and then he wasted the rest of his life drumming his heels and clawing uselessly at Reacher’s wrist. Eventually he went limp, and then still.



* * *



—

They took the pale guy’s Lincoln, because its trunk was empty. It rode much better. They drove downtown and parked on a hydrant around a corner from the Shevicks’ hotel. Abby checked the new phone. No new texts. Nothing since the conspiracy theory from Gregory.

“Was it from his own number?” Reacher asked.

Abby compared it with previous texts.

“I guess,” she said. “It isn’t the usual number.”

“We should call him again. Keep him updated.”

Abby dabbed a shortcut from the text screen and put the phone on speaker. They heard it ring. They heard it answered. Gregory said a word, short and urgent, probably not hello. Probably shoot, or yes, or what.

“Speak English,” Reacher said.

“You.”

“You just lost two more. I’m coming for you, Gregory.”