was two feet shorter.
They drove it into the city. It was a long,, long way. Space
seemed infinitely available even after D.C., which wasn’t the
most crowded place in the east. They parked in a downtown
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garage and walked three blocks and Neagley found the store
she was looking for. It was an all-purpose outdoor equipment
place. It had everything from boots and compasses to zinc stuff
designed to stop you getting sunburn on your nose. They
bought a birdwatcher’s spotting scope and a hiker’s large-scale
map of central Wyoming and then they moved to the clothing
racks. They were full of the kind of stuff you could use halfway
up the Rockies and then wear around town without looking like
a complete idiot. Neagley went for a walker’s heavy-duty outfit
in greens and browns. Reacher duplicated his Atlantic City
purchases at twice the price and twice the quality. This time he
added a hat, and a pair of gloves. He dressed in the changing
cubicle. Left Joe’s last surviving suit stuffed in the garbage can.
Neagley found a pay phone on the street and stopped in the
cold long enough to make a short call. Then they went back to
the truck and she drove it out of the garage and through the
city centre towards the dubious part of town. There was a
strong smell of dog food in the air.
qhere’s a factory here,’ she said.
Reacher nodded. ‘No kidding.’
She came off a narrow street into some kind of industrial park
and nosed through a tangle of low-built metal structures. There
were linoleum dealers and brake shops and places where you
could get four snow tyres for ninety-nine bucks and other places
where you could get your steering realigned for twenty. On one
corner there was a long low workshop standing on its own in
the centre of a quarter-acre of cracked blacktop. The building
had a closed roll-up door and a hand-painted sign that read: Eddie Brown Engineering.
qhis is your guy?’ Reacher asked.
Neagley nodded. ‘What do we want?’
Reacher shrugged. ‘No point planning it to death. Something
short and something long, one of each, plus some ammunition,
I guess. That should it.’
She stopped in front of the roll-up door and hit the horn. A
guy came out of a personnel entrance and got halfway to the car
before he saw who it was. He was tall and heavy through the
neck and shoulders. He had short fair hair and an open amiable
face, but he had big hands and thick wrists and wasn’t the sort
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of guy you’d mess with on a whim. He sketched a wave and
ducked back inside and a moment later the big door starting
rolling up. Neagley drove in under it and it came back down
behind them.
On the inside the building was about half the size it should
have been, but apart from that it looked convincing. The
floor was grease-stained concrete and there were metalworkers’
lathes here and there, and drilling machines and stacks of raw
sheet metal and bundles of steel rods. But the back wall was ten
feet closer on the inside than the exterior proportions dictated.
Clearly there was a handsome-sized room concealed behind it.
q-his is Eddie Brown,’ Neagley said.
‘Not my real name,’ the big guy said.
He accessed the concealed room by pulling on a big pile of
scrap metal. It was all welded together and welded in turn to a
steel panel hidden behind it. The whole thing swung open on
silent oiled hinges like a giant three-dimensional door. The guy
calling himself Eddie Brown led them through it into a whole
different situation.
The concealed room was as clean as a hospital. It was painted
white and lined on all four sides by shelves and racks. On three
walls the shelves held handguns, some of them boxed, some of
them loose. The racks were full of long guns, rifles and carbines
and shotguns and machine guns, yards of them, all of
them neat and parallel. The air was full of the stink of gun oil.
The fourth wall was lined like a library with boxes of ammunition.