Blue Moon

“We were going to skip it this time around,” Aaron said. “After all, what will it tell us? If it’s good news, it will make us happy, of course, but that’s self-indulgence, not medicine. If it’s bad news, we don’t want to know anyway. So we weren’t sure exactly what we would be getting, for our eleven thousand dollars. But then the doctors said they need to know the extent of the progress. They said they need to calibrate a new dosage based on what they find. Either up or down. With a certain amount of timing and precision. They said anything else would be perilous.”

“How do you normally pay them?”

“With a bank wire.”

“Do they take cash?”

“Why?”

“Cash is usually the quickest thing to rustle up, when time is running short.”

“From where?”

“Every day presents different opportunities. Worst case scenario, we could sell their car. Maybe up at the Ford dealer. I heard their used lot needs inventory.”

“Yes, they take cash,” Shevick said. “Like a casino. They have a line of tellers behind bulletproof glass.”

“OK,” Reacher said. “Good to know.”

He stepped out to the darkened hallway, and lined up at a distance with a front window. He looked out to the street. The Lincoln was still there. The same one. Big and black, now dewed over and inert. Two vague shapes in it. Heads and shoulders, slumped down in the gloom. Guns under their arms, no doubt. Wallets in their pockets, almost certainly. Probably stuffed with cash, if they were anything like their opposite number from Tirana. Probably hundreds of dollars. But probably not eleven thousand.

He stepped back to the kitchen. Maria Shevick gave him a cup of coffee. His first of the day. She asked them to stay for breakfast. She would fix it. They could all eat together, like a party. Reacher wanted to say no. The food was for the old folks themselves, not random guests. Plus he wanted to get out of there before the sun came up. While it was still dark. It was likely to be a busy day. There was a lot to do. But the breakfast idea seemed to mean something to the Shevicks, and Abby was OK with it, so he said yes. Much later he wondered exactly how much different the day would have turned out, if he hadn’t. But he didn’t think about it for long. Spilled milk. Wasted energy. Move on.

—

Maria Shevick grilled bacon and fried eggs and made toast and brewed a second pot of coffee. Aaron tottered in with the stool from their bedroom dressing table, to make a fourth seat. Maria was right. In the end the meal turned into a party. Like a secret in the dark. Abby told a joke about a guy with cancer. For a beat it could have gone either way. But her performer’s instinct was sure and true. After a second of silence Aaron and Maria burst out laughing, hard, their shoulders heaving, on and on, some kind of pent-up relief coming out, some kind of catharsis. Maria slapped her hand on the table, so hard her coffee spilled, and Aaron drummed his feet on the floor, so hard he hurt his knee again.

Reacher watched the sun come up. The sky went gray, then gold. The yard out the window took shape. Vague forms loomed out of the dark. The fence. The distant hump of the back-to-back neighbor’s asphalt roof.

“Who lives there?” he asked. “Whose yard did we walk through?”

“Actually it’s the woman who told us about Fisnik,” Aaron said. “She told us the story about the other neighbor’s nephew’s wife’s cousin borrowing money from a gangster in a bar. I have a feeling she went to see him herself, a little later. She got her car fixed all of a sudden. No other visible means of support.”

Maria made a third pot of coffee. Reacher thought, what the hell. The sun was already over the horizon. He stayed in his seat and drank his share. Then somehow the conversation came back to money, and suddenly everyone seemed to hear the same clock ticking. The close of business, getting nearer.

“Except cash is good all night long,” Reacher said. “Right? The close of business thing is about the bank wires only. As long as they have a teller open, we’re good until the moment they put her on the gurney.”

“From where?” Aaron said again. “Eleven thousand is a lot of sofa cushions.”

“Hope for the best,” Reacher said.

He and Abby left the way they had come, this time with empty hands, and in the late dawn light, therefore faster, but not much easier. The fence was still difficult. The fold-back section was still stiff and noisy.

Their car was gone.

Chapter 33

The black Chrysler, with its low roof, and its high waistline, and its shallow windows, and its closed trunk lid. No longer there. The space at the curb was empty.

Abby said, “The guy got out.”

“I don’t see how he could,” Reacher said.

“Then what happened?”