tumbling through his gut like a bullet. The army surgeon who patched
Reacher up told him afterward he was lucky. He told him a real bullet
in the gut would have felt much worse. That was the echo Reacher was
hearing. And he was paying a whole lot of attention to it, because
thirteen years later he was standing there with a handgun pointing
straight at his stomach. From a range of about an inch and a half.
The handgun was a nine-millimeter automatic. It was brand new. It was
oiled. It was held low, lined up right on his old scar. The guy
holding it looked more or less like he knew what he was doing. The
safety mechanism was released. There was no visible tremor in the
muzzle. No tension. The trigger finger was ready to go to work.
Reacher could see that. He was concentrating hard on that trigger
finger.
He was standing next to a woman. He was holding her arm. He had never
seen her before. She was staring at an identical nine-millimeter
pointed at her own gut. Her guy was more tensed up than his. Her guy
looked uneasy. He looked worried. His gun was trembling with tension.
His fingernails were chewed. A nervous, jumpy guy. The four of them
were standing there on the street, three of them still like statues and
the fourth hopping slightly from foot to foot.
They were in Chicago. Center of the city, a busy sidewalk, a Monday,
last day of June. Broad daylight, bright summer sunshine. The whole
situation had materialized in a split second. It had happened in a way
which couldn’t have been choreographed in a million years. Reacher had
been walking down the street, going nowhere, not fast, not slow. He
had been about to pass the exit door of a storefront dry-cleaner’s. The
door had opened up in his face and an old metal walking cane had
clattered out on the sidewalk right in front of him. He’d glanced up
to see a woman in the doorway. She was about to drop an armful of nine
dry-cleaning bags. She was some way short of thirty, expensively
dressed, dark, attractive, self-assured. She had some kind of a bad
leg. Some kind of an injury. Reacher could see from her awkward
posture it was causing her pain. She’d thrown him a would-you-mind
look and he’d thrown her a no-problem look and scooped up the metal
cane. He’d taken the nine bags from her with one hand and given her
the cane with the other. He’d flicked the bags up over his shoulder
and felt the nine wire hangers bite into his ringer. She had planted
the cane on the sidewalk and eased her forearm into the curved-metal
clip. He had offered his hand. She had paused. Then she had nodded
in an embarrassed fashion and he had taken her arm and waited a beat,
feeling helpful but awkward. Then they had turned together to move
away. Reacher had figured he would maybe stroll a few steps with her
until she was steady on her feet. Then he would let her arm go and
hand back her garments. But he’d turned straight into the two guys
with the nine-millimeter automatics.
The four of them stood there, face to face in pairs. Like four people
eating together in a tight booth in a diner. The two guys with the
guns were white, well fed, vaguely military, vaguely alike. Medium
height, short brown hair. Big hands, muscular. Big, obvious faces,
bland pink features. Tense expressions, hard eyes. The nervous guy
was smaller, like he burned up his energy worrying. They both wore
checked shirts and poplin windbreakers. They stood there, pressed
together. Reacher was a lot taller than the other three. He could see
all around them, over their heads. He stood there, surprised, with the
woman’s dry-cleaning slung over his shoulder. The woman was leaning on
her crutch, just staring, silent. The two men were pointing the guns.
Close in. Reacher felt they’d all been standing like that for a long
time. But he knew that feeling was deceptive. It probably hadn’t been
more than a second and a half.