“You INS?” the guy asked.
Reacher smiled. “Mislaid your green cards?”
ifu/t/u/w (piin*(
251
The brothers said nothing.
“I’m not INS,” Reacher said. “I told you, I’m not anything. I’m nobody. Just a guy who wants an answer. You tell me the answer, you can stay here as long as you want, enjoy the benefits of American civilization. But I’m getting impatient. Those shoes aren’t going to do it forever.”
“Shoes?”
“I don’t want to hit a guy wearing slippers like that.”
There was silence.
“New Jersey,” the older brother said. “Through the Lincoln Tunnel, there’s a roadhouse set back where Route 3 meets the Turnpike.”
“What’s it called?”
“I don’t know,” the guy said. “Somebody’s Bar, is all I know. Mac something, like Irish.”
“Who did you see in there?”
“Guy called Bob.”
“Bob what?”
“Bob, I don’t know. We didn’t exchange business cards or anything. Petrosian just told us Bob.”
“A soldier?”
“I guess. I mean, he wasn’t in uniform or nothing. But he had real short hair.”
“How does it go down?”
“You go in the bar, you find him, you give him the cash, he takes you in the parking lot and gives you the stuff out of the trunk of his car.”
“A Cadillac,” the other guy said. “An old DeVille, some dark color.”
“How many times?”
“Three.”
“What stuff?”
“Berettas. Twelve each trip.”
“What time of day?”
“Evening time, around eight o’clock.”
“You have to call him ahead?”
The younger brother shook his head.
“He’s always in theie by eight o’clock,” he said. “That’s what Petrosian told us.”
Reacher nodded.
“So what does Bob look like?” he asked.
“Like you,” the older brother said. “Big and mean.”
^WMHA^iee
(1
••/
]i(f law provides that a narcotics conviction can be accompanied by confiscation of assets, which means that the DEA in New York City ends up with more automobiles than it can possibly ever need, so it loans out the surplus to other law enforcement agencies, including the FBI. The FBI uses those vehicles when it needs some anonymous transport that doesn’t look like government-issue. Or when it needs to preserve some respectable distance between itself and some unspecified activity taking place. Therefore James Cozo withdrew the Bureau’s sedan and the services of its driver and tossed Harper the keys to a black one-year-old Nissan Maxima currently parked in the back row of the underground lot.
“Have fun,” he said again.
Harper drove. It was the first time she had driven in New York City, and she was nervous about it. She threaded around a couple of blocks and headed south on Fifth and motored slowly, with the taxis plunging and darting and honking around her.
“OK, what now?” she said.
Now we waste some time, Reacher thought.
“Bob’s not around until eight,” he said. “We’ve got the whole afternoon to kill.”
“I feel like we should be doing something.”
“No rush,” Reacher said. “We’ve got three weeks.”
“So what do we do?”
“First we eat,” Reacher said. “I missed breakfast.”
* * *
faituty (filing 253
You’re happy to miss breakfast because you need to be sure. The way you predict it, it’s going to be a straight twelve-hour/twelve-hour split between the local police department and the Bureau, with changeovers at eight in the evening and eight in the morning. You saw it happen at eight in the evening yesterday, so now you’re back bright and early to see it happen again at eight this morning. Missing a crummy
| help-yourself-in-the-lobby motel breakfast is a small price to pay for that kind of
certainty. So is the long, long drive into position. You’re not dumb enough to rent a room anywhere close by.
|H And you’re not dumb enough to take a direct route, either. You wind your way
through the mountains and leave your car on a gravel turnout a half-mile from your
[B spot. The car is safe enough there. The only reason they built the turnout in the first
11 place is that assholes are always leaving their cars there while they go watching eagles
or scrambling over rocks or hiking up and down. A rental car parked neatly on the
gravel is as invisible as the ski bags on the airport carousel. Just part of the scenery.