His own fault.
Don’t do it, he thought.
Out loud he said, “Don’t do it.”
The driver said, “Do what?”
“Anything stupid.”
They paused a beat. He guessed they would start by telling him something true. Too hard to coordinate a lie with silent glances. It would be like a teaser. It would be something that required a couple seconds of thought, and then the careful formulation of a follow-up question. All to make him momentarily preoccupied. To give them time to jump him. The guy with the neck would corkscrew over from the front and land with his chest on Reacher’s left arm, and his hips on Reacher’s right arm, whereupon the driver would come over the top and attack his undefended head. With his cell phone, edge on, if he had any sense, and no inhibitions about smashing up a precision piece of electronics. Which most people were willing to do, in Reacher’s experience, when their lives depended on it.
Don’t do it, he thought.
Out loud he said, “Where would you look for Max Trulenko?”
The driver said, “Where he works, of course.”
Reacher put a momentarily blank look on his face, but inside he was thinking of nothing, and formulating no follow-up questions. He was just waiting. Time passed in quarter-second beats, like a racing heart, at first nothing, then still nothing, then the guy with the neck launching, hard and clumsy, his arms spearing out ahead of him, his feet thrusting, his back arching, aiming to get most of his bulk beyond the point of no return, so that even if he landed on the seat back gravity would do the rest of his work for him, dumping him into Reacher’s lap, in an undignified but equally effective manner.
He didn’t get to the point of no return.
Reacher jammed the gun against the seat back and shot the guy through the upholstery. Then he repelled the falling corpse with his elbow. Like a double tap. One, two, gunshot, elbow. The shot was loud, but not terrible. The interior of the thick Lincoln seat squab had acted like a huge suppressor. All kinds of wool and horsehair in there. All kinds of cotton batting. Natural absorption. One minor problem. Some of it had caught on fire. Plus the driver was leaning forward, leaning down, feeling under the dashboard near his shins. Then coming back up and twisting around. In his hand was a tiny pocket gun. Maybe Russian. Secured out of sight with hook and loop tape. Reacher shot him through his own seat back. It caught on fire, too. A nine-millimeter round. The muzzle hard against the padding, a massive explosion of superheated gases. Maybe never taken into account, during Lincoln’s design process.
Reacher opened the door and slid out to the sidewalk. He put the guns in his pocket. Fresh air blew inside the car and the tiny fires perked up. Not just smoldering. There were actual flames. Small, like a lady’s fingernail, dancing inside the seats.
Abby said, “What happened?”
She was standing near her own car, very still, on the sidewalk, looking in through the Lincoln’s windshield.
Reacher said, “They showed extraordinary loyalty to an organization that doesn’t seem to treat them very well.”
“You shot them?”
“Self-defense.”
“How?”
“They blinked first.”
“Are they dead?”
“We might need to give them another minute. Depends how fast they’re bleeding.”
She said, “This has never happened to me before.”
He said, “I’m sorry it had to.”
“You killed two people.”
“I warned them. I told them not to. All my cards were on the table. It was more like assisted suicide. Think of it that way.”
“Did you do it for me?” she asked. “I told you I wanted them messed up.”
“I didn’t want to do it at all,” he said. “I wanted to send them home, safe and sound. But no. They tried their best. I guess they did what I would have done. Although I hope I would have done it better.”
“What should we do about it?”
The flames were licking higher. The vinyl on the seat backs was bubbling and splitting and peeling, like skin.
Reacher said, “We should get in your car and drive away.”
“Just like that?”
“For me it’s all about the shoe on the other foot. What would they do for me? That’s what sets the bar.”
She was quiet a beat.
Then she said, “OK, get in the car.”
She drove. He sat in the passenger seat. His extra weight on that side dipped the suspension down just enough that the old Toyota’s newly falling-off fender banged against the blacktop now and then, unpredictable and irregular, like spaced-out Morse code played on a bass drum, all the way along their route.
Chapter 21
No one would dream of calling the cops about a burning car on a two-thirds abandoned block on the east side of the city. Such a thing was obviously someone else’s private business, and obviously best kept that way. But plenty of people dreamed about calling Dino’s people. Always. About anything that might be useful. But especially about news like this. It might get them ahead. It might make their names. Some of them made dangerous up-close inspections, flinching away from the heat. They saw burning bodies inside. They wrote down the license plate, before the flames consumed it.
They called Dino’s people and told them it was a Ukrainian car on fire. It was the type of Lincoln they used west of Center. As far as anyone could tell the two bodies in it were dressed in suits and ties. Which was standard practice over there. Looked like they had been shot in the back. Which was standard practice everywhere. Case closed. They were the enemy.
At which point Dino himself took over.
“Let it burn,” he said.
While it did, he called his inner council together. In back of the lumber yard. Which a few of them didn’t like, because lumber was combustible, and something somewhere was currently on fire. Maybe throwing sparks. But they all came. His right-hand man, and his other top boys. No choice.
“Did we do this?” Dino asked them.
“No,” his right-hand man said. “This is not ours.”
“Are you sure?”
“By now everyone knows about the massage parlor. Everyone knows we’re four for four, honors even, game over. We have no rogues, or mavericks, or private business. I guarantee that. I would have heard.”
“Then explain this to me.”
No one could.
“At least the practical details,” Dino said. “If not the actual meaning.”
One of his guys said, “Maybe they drove in to have a meeting. Their contact was waiting on the sidewalk. He got in the back seat to chat. But he shot them instead. Maybe threw in a burning rag.”
“What contact waiting on the sidewalk?”
“I don’t know.”
“A local person?”
“Probably.”
“One of our guys?”
“Could be.”
“Like an anonymous snitch?”
“It’s possible.”
“So anonymous we never noticed him before? So furtive he escaped our attention all these years? I don’t think so. I think such a master of tradecraft would be waiting in a coffee shop on Center Street. He would be talking to some random kid in a hoodie. He wouldn’t let two men in suits in a Town Car anywhere near him. Not within a million miles. Especially not all the way out in this part of town. He might as well publish a confession in the newspaper. So it wasn’t a meeting.”
“OK.”
“And why would he shoot them?”
“I don’t know.”
Another guy said, “Then the shooter must have been in the back seat all along. They drove out here as a threesome.”
“Therefore the shooter is one of them.”
“Has to be. You don’t let an armed man ride behind you unless you know him.”