Blue Moon

Another step. And another. Then the guy on Reacher’s right, who had been the driver, kept on coming, but the other guy stopped. The passenger. A wheel play. Like sheepdogs. They wanted to get one of them around and behind, to press Reacher and Abby toward the other one, toward the far sidewalk, toward the three-story wall, where they would finally run out of room. An obvious, instinctive tactic.

Which depended on Reacher and Abby first staying where they were, and then rotating meekly in place, and then stumbling backward.

Not going to happen.

“Abby, take a step back,” Reacher said. “With me.”

He stepped back. She stepped back. The driver’s geometry was distorted. His envelope was enlarged. Now he had further to go.

“Again,” Reacher said.

He stepped back. She stepped back.

“Stand still,” the driver said. “Or I’ll shoot.”

Reacher thought, will you? It was one of life’s great questions. The guy had all the same structural inhibitions as Reacher himself. The dozens of squad cars, with their lights flashing and their sirens going. The news helicopters and the cell phone video. The paperwork. The hours in the room with the cop. Which would produce an uncertain outcome for the guy. Inevitable. Could go either way. There were no guarantees. Don’t frighten the voters. There was a new police commissioner on the way. Plus the guy had professional obligations to consider. There were questions to be answered. They thought Reacher was an outside agitator. We want to know who you are. There would be bonus points for his capture still able to talk. There would be punishments for his delivery dead or comatose or mortally wounded. Because the dead and the comatose couldn’t talk, and the mortally wounded didn’t last long enough to talk, when they brought out the spoons, and the electric saws, and the smoothing irons, and the cordless power tools, or whatever other grotesque procedures were favored east of Center. So would the guy shoot? Unlikely, Reacher thought. Probably not. But always possible. Was he prepared to bet his life on it? Probably yes. He had before. He had gambled and won. Ten thousand generations later his instincts were still working. He had walked away, and lived to tell the tale. In any case he was fundamentally indifferent. No one lived forever.

But was he prepared to bet Abby’s life on it?

The driver said, “Show me your hands.”

Which would be game over. The point of no return, right there. Which was getting close anyway. The geometry had gone bad. The driver and the passenger had gotten about sixty degrees apart. They were well positioned for enfilade fire. The likely sequence of events was easy to predict. Reacher would shoot through his pocket and hit the driver. One down. No problem. But then the sixty-degree turn toward the passenger would be slow and clumsy, because his hand would be still all snagged up inside his pocket, which would give the passenger time to fire, maybe two or three rounds, which would either hit Abby, or Reacher himself, or both, or miss altogether. Almost certainly the lattermost, he thought, in the real world. The guy was already jumpy. By then he would be startled and panicked. Most handgun rounds missed their target under the best of circumstances.

But would he bet Abby’s life on that?

“Show me your hands,” the driver said again.

Abby said, “Reacher?”

Ten thousand generations said stay alive and see what the next minute brings.

Reacher took his hands out of his pockets.

“Take your jacket off,” the driver said. “I can see the weight from here.”

Reacher took his jacket off. He dropped it on the blacktop. The guns in the pockets bumped and clanked. The Ukrainian H&Ks, the Albanian Glocks. His entire arsenal.

Almost.

The driver said, “Now get in the car.”

The passenger backed up to the Chrysler. Reacher thought he was going to open the rear door for them, like a guy outside a fancy hotel. But he didn’t. He opened the trunk instead.

“Good enough for Gezim Hoxha,” the driver said.

Abby said, “Reacher?”

“We’ll be OK,” he said.

“How?”

He didn’t answer. He got in first, crossways, on his side in a U shape, and then Abby got in the space he was leaving in front of him, curled on her side in a fetal position, like they were spooning in bed. Except they weren’t. The passenger closed the lid with a cheap metal clang. The world went dark. No luminous handle. Removed.

—

At that moment Dino was on the phone to Jetmir. A summons, to a meeting in Dino’s office, right then, immediately. Clearly there was something on Dino’s mind. Jetmir got there inside three minutes and sat down in front of the desk. Dino was looking at his phone. At the long sequence of texts about Gezim Hoxha, found half dead in the trunk of his car, next to an old housing development.

“Hoxha and I go back a long way,” Dino said. “I knew him when he was a cop in Tirana. He busted me once. He was the meanest bastard in Albania. I liked him. He was a solid guy. Why I gave him a job here.”