walking. Didn’t worry about putting his back against the rail.
The two men walked on and stopped eight feet in front of
him and faced him head on. Reacher flexed his fingers by his
side, to test how cold they were. Eight feet was an interesting
choice of distance. It meant they were going to talk before they
tangled. He flexed his toes and, ran some muscle tension up
through his calves, his thighs, his back, his shoulders. Moved
his head side to side and then back a little, to loosen his neck.
He breathed in through his nose. The wind was on his back.
The guy on the left took his hands out of his pockets. No
gloves. And either he had bad arthritis or he was holding rolls
of quarters in both palms.
‘We got a message for you,’ he said.
Reacher glanced at the pier rail and the ocean beyond. The
sea was grey and roiled. Probably freezing. Throwing them in
would be close to homicide.
‘From that club manager?’ he asked.
‘From his people, yeah.’
‘He’s got people?’
25
I’his is Atlantic City,’ the guy said. ‘Stands to reason he’s got
people.’
Reacher nodded. ‘So let me guess. I’m supposed to get out of
town, skedaddle, beat it, get lost, never come back, never
darken your door again, forget I was ever here.’
‘You’re on the ball today.’
‘I can read minds,’ Reacher said. ‘I used to work a fairground
booth. Right next to the bearded lady. Weren’t you guys there
too? Three booths along? The World’s Ugliest Twins?’
The guy on the right took his hands out of his pockets.
He had the same neuralgic pain in his knuckles, or else a
couple more rolls of quarters. Reacher smiled. He liked rolls of
quarters. Good old-fashioned technology. And they implied the
absence of firearms. Nobody clutches rolls of coins if they’ve
got a gun in their pocket.
‘We don’t want to hurt you,’ the guy on the right said.
‘But you got to go,’ the guy on the left said. ‘We don’t need
people interfering in this town’s economic procedures.’
‘So take the easy way out,’ the guy on the right said. ‘Let us
walk you to the bus depot. Or the old folk could wind up getting
hurt, too. And not just financially.’
Reacher heard an absurd voice in his head: straight from his
childhood, his mother saying please .don’t fight when you’re
wearing new clothes. Then he heard a boot-camp unarmed
combat instructor saying hit them fast, hit them hard, and hit
them a lot. He flexed his shoulders inside his coat. Suddenly felt
very grateful to the woman in the store for making him take
the bigger size. He gazed at the two guys, exactly nothing in
his eyes except a little amusement and a lot of absolute self
confidence. He moved a little to his left, and they rotated with
him. He moved a little closer to them, tightening the triangle.
He raised his hand and smoothed his hair where the wind was
disturbing it.
‘Better just to walk way now,’ he said.
They didn’t, like he knew they wouldn’t. They responded to
the challenge by crowding in towards him, imperceptibly, just
a fractional muscle movement that eased their body weight
forward rather than backward. They need to be laid up for a
week, he thought. Cheekbones, probably. A sharp blow, depressed
26
fractures, maybe temporary loss of consciousness, bad headaches.
Nothing too severe. He waited until the wind gusted again and
raised his right hand and swept his hair back behind his left
ear. Then he kept his hand there, with his elbow poised high,
like a thought had just struck him.
‘Can you guys swim?’ he asked.
It would have taken superhuman self-control not to glance at
the ocean. They weren’t superhuman. They turned their heads
like robots. He clubbed the right-hand guy in the face with his
raised elbow and cocked it again and hit the left-hand guy as
his head snapped back towards the sound of his buddy’s bones
breaking. They went down on the boards together and their
rolls of quarters split open and coins rolled everywhere and