Tripwire by Lee Child

Jodie drove right past the building, not fast, not slow, just plausible city-street speed over the potholed road. Reacher craned his head around, getting a feel for the place. Jodie made a left and came back around the block. Reacher glimpsed a service alley running behind the row, with rusted fire escapes hanging above piles of garbage.

‘So how do we do this?’ Jodie asked him.

‘We walk right in,’ he said. ‘First thing we do is we watch his reaction. If he knows who we are, we’ll play it one way. If he doesn’t, we’ll play it another.’

She parked two spaces south of the storefront, in the shadow of a blackened brick warehouse. She locked the car and they walked north together. From the sidewalk they could make out what was behind the dirty window. There was a lame display of Army-surplus equipment, dusty old camouflage jackets and water canteens and boots. There were field radios and MRE rations and infantry helmets. Some of the stuff was already obsolete before Reacher graduated from West Point.

The door was stiff and it worked a bell when it opened. It was a crude mechanical system whereby the moving door flicked a spring that flicked the bell and made the sound. The store was deserted. There was a counter on the right with a door behind it to the garage. There was a display of clothing on a circular chrome rack and more random junk piled high on a single shelf. There was a rear door out to the alley, locked shut and alarmed. In a line next to the rear door were five padded vinyl chairs. Scattered all around the chairs were cigarette butts and empty beer bottles. The lighting was dim, but the dust of years was visible everywhere.

Reacher walked ahead of Jodie. The floor creaked under him. Two paces inside, he could see a trapdoor open beyond the counter. It was a sturdy door, made from old pine boards, hinged with brass and rubbed to a greasy shine where generations of hands had folded it back. Floor joists were visible inside the hole, and a narrow staircase built from the same old wood was leading down towards hot electric light. He could hear feet scraping on a cement cellar floor below him.

‘I’ll be right there, whoever the hell you are,’ a voice called up from the hole.

It was a man’s voice, middle-aged, suspended somewhere between surprise and bad temper. The voice of a man not expecting callers. Jodie looked at Reacher and Reacher closed his hand around the butt of the Steyr in his pocket.

A man’s head appeared at floor level, then his shoulders, then his torso, as he came on up the ladder. He was a bulky figure and had difficulty climbing out of the hole. He was dressed in faded olive fatigues. He had greasy grey hair, a ragged grey beard, a fleshy

face, small eyes. He came out on hands and knees and stood up.

‘Help you?’ he said.

Then another head and shoulders appeared behind him. And another. And another. And another. Four men stamped up the ladder from the cellar. Each one straightened and paused and looked hard at Reacher and Jodie and then stepped away to the line of chairs. They were big men, fleshy, tattooed, dressed in similar old fatigues. They sat with big arms crossed against big stomachs.

‘Help you?’ the first guy said again.

‘Are you Rutter?’ Reacher asked.

The guy nodded. There was no recognition in his eyes. Reacher glanced at the line of men on their chairs. They represented a complication he had not anticipated.

‘What do you want?’ Rutter asked.

Reacher changed his plan. Took a guess about the true nature of the store’s transactions and what was stacked up down in the cellar.

‘I want a silencer,’ he said. ‘For a Steyr GB.’

Rutter smiled, real amusement in the set of his jaw and the light in his eyes.

‘Against the law for me to sell you one, against the law for you to own one.’

The singsong way he said it was an outright confession that he had them and sold them. There was a patronizing undercurrent in the tone that said I’ve got something you want and that makes me better than you. There was no caution in his voice. No suspicion that Reacher was a cop trying to set him up. Nobody ever thought Reacher was a cop. He was too big and too rough. He didn’t have the precinct pallor or the urban

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