Personal (Jack Reacher, #19)(95)

One guy brought his hands up like a boxer, pretty high, so I hit him in the gut, which was a better close-quarters blow anyway, a tight body shot, no extension required. The other guy crowded in like he was going for a bear hug, which would have been a reasonable move, but he didn’t get all the way there, because however crowded the quarters, there was always room for a head butt, which cracked in right on target, an inch of backswing, and a lot of fast-twitch muscle. He went down and I turned back to the guy I had hit in the gut and I popped a knee under his chin, and he went down, by which time we were about three seconds into it, and certainly noisy, but I wasn’t worried about Joey rushing in, partly because Joey couldn’t rush in, not through any kind of a normal doorway, and partly because even if he did, I wouldn’t worry about him immediately.

Because I knew something about Joey.

Bennett was doing OK. He had a thumb in his guy’s eye, and his other hand was crushing the guy’s throat. In the active sense of the word. His fingertips were right in behind the guy’s larynx, squeezing and tearing. They didn’t rule the world by being nice. That was for damn sure. I picked up the flashlight and waited until Bennett’s guy hit the deck, and then I searched the floor and under coats and came back with our original three handguns, plus four identical Browning High Power Model 1935s, from Joey’s guys. The Brownings were all recent, with the ambidextrous safeties. Up for safe, down for fire. They were all fully loaded. But their chambers were empty. We had been safer than I thought. We shared them around, one each, and I took the magazine out of the fourth and gave it to Nice to put in her pocket.

I said, ‘Let’s go find Joey.’

I turned and headed for the door, but Bennett caught my arm and said, ‘We can’t just walk out there. Especially not with a flashlight. We’d be sitting ducks.’

I said, ‘Let’s not overthink this whole thing.’

Bennett glanced at Nice, in mute appeal, like he thought I was crazy.

She said, ‘I’m sure we’ll be fine.’

I smiled. She had seen it too. Probably from the thing with the pill bottle.

I said, ‘Joey is not armed. That’s one thing we can be sure of.’

Bennett said, ‘How can we?’

‘Because we know in his whole adult life Joey has never fired a handgun, or a long gun, or a shotgun, or a BB gun, or any other kind of a gun.’

‘How do we know that?’

‘Because no trigger guard on earth is big enough for his finger. He couldn’t get it in there. No way, no how. He hasn’t touched a trigger since he was maybe seven years old. And I bet even then it was a tight squeeze. He’s out there, right now, in the lot, unarmed, and we’ve got a hundred and four rounds of live ammunition and a flashlight.’





FIFTY-ONE


CASEY NICE HAD the flashlight. I had a gun in each hand, mainly because by that point I was short on pockets. Bennett was behind us, ranging left and right, watching our rear, watching our flanks. Nice flicked the flashlight beam from side to side, very fast, painting the night air, lighting things up like a stroboscope, letting our persistence of vision fill in the gaps.

No sign of Joey. Not at first. The beam reached a good long way down the yard-wide footpath, and he wasn’t there. And he would have been, still, if he was making a run for it. Because it wouldn’t have been much of a run. He would have had to take the path sideways, at a shuffle, which would have been slow. We checked the far corner, where I had waited for Bennett, and he wasn’t there. We checked the opposite corner. Not there.

We stood still and listened. No sound. The yellow glow was still there in the sky, but the houses all around us were darker. Lights were going out. People were going to bed. Their children were already in bed. Pretty soon we would be completely boxed in by sleeping people. Here and there I saw the blue flicker of some night owl’s television, a movie, perhaps, or soccer, or a documentary feature, which I hoped was illuminating in the educational sense, because it certainly wasn’t in the physical sense. We were hunting a giant in the dark.

And getting nowhere, until I did fourth what I should have done first, which was to put myself in his shoes, to think like him, to be him, just for a moment. What would I have done? No gun, bodyguards down, driver too far away to summon, a sideways skip down the alley too slow. Not that I needed to run, and not that I needed support. I could do fine by myself. I was Little Joey Green, and I had been all my life.

But I liked an audience.

Of which there was a shortage, at that particular moment. The lawn bowling World Series was not currently under way. All around us people were closing their drapes and closing their eyes. There was only one place Joey might find an audience. Possibly. An audience of one, admittedly, but committed. An ally, maybe even a friend already, and a fellow professional, Joey might like to think.

John Kott might be watching, through the night-vision binoculars.

Or through a night-vision scope.

I made a sign and Casey Nice killed the light, and we inched around to the far back corner of the hut, which put us level with the windows, which meant we were within a degree or two of the same view we had gotten before, through the binoculars, from where we had seen the whole fine square of lawn, which we saw again, but this time with Little Joey in the middle of it, the giant all alone under the yellow night-time sky, dancing, swinging his hips, shuffling his feet, waving his arms, and jerking his head from side to side.