Die Trying by Lee Child

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.