He asked, “What would the Marine Corps do?”
“Bazooka,” Hogan said. “Best way into any building. Pull the trigger, step through the smoking hole.”
“Suppose you didn’t have a bazooka.”
“Obviously we’ll have to kick the door down. But we better get it done first time. They got a dozen guys within range of a holler for help. We can’t get hung up back here.”
“Did they teach you kicking down doors in the Corps?”
“No, they gave us bazookas.”
“Force equals mass times acceleration. Take a running start, stamp your foot flat through the door.”
“I’m doing this?”
“Below the handle.”
“I thought it was above the handle.”
“Nearest the keyhole. That’s where the tongue of the lock is. That’s where the most amount of wood has been chiseled out of the frame. Hence where it’s weakest. That’s what you’re looking for. It’s always the frame that breaks. Never the door.”
“Now?”
“We’ll be right behind you.”
Hogan backed off, perpendicular to the door, ten or twelve feet, and he lined up and rocked back and forth, and then he launched, with the kind of grim bouncy focus Reacher had seen on TV, from high jumpers going for the record. He was a musician and a younger man, with physical rhythm and grace and energy, which was why Reacher was making him do the job. The decision paid off big time. Hogan flowed in and jumped up and twisted in mid air and smashed his heel below the handle, like a short-order cook stamping on a roach, hard and snappy and perfectly timed. The door crashed back and Hogan stutter-stepped through and stumbled inside, all windmilling arms and momentum, and then Reacher crowded in after him, and then Abby, into a short dark hallway, toward a half-glass door with Private written on it backward in gold.
There was no reason to stop. No real possibility, either. Hogan burst through the half-glass door, followed by Reacher, followed by Abby, into the shop itself, behind the counter, right by the register, in front of which was a small weasel-like guy, turning to face them, full of shock and surprise. Hogan hit him in the chest with a lowered shoulder, which bounced him off the counter straight into Reacher, who caught him, and spun him around, and touched an H&K to the side of his head. He wasn’t sure which one. He had chosen blind. But no matter. By that point he knew all of them worked.
Abby took the guy’s gun. Hogan found his daily ledger. A big book, handwritten. Maybe a city regulation. Maybe just pawnbroker tradition. Hogan slid his finger up a bunch of lines.
“Here it is,” he said. “Maria Shevick, wedding bands, small solitaires, a watch with a broken crystal. Eighty dollars.”
Reacher asked the guy, “Where is that stuff?”
The guy said, “I could get it for you.”
“You think eighty bucks was fair?”
“Fair is what the market will bear. It depends how desperate people are.”
“How desperate are you right now?” Reacher asked.
“I could certainly get that stuff for you.”
“What else?”
“I could maybe add a couple of pieces. Something nice. Maybe bigger diamonds.”
“You got money?”
“Sure I do, yes, of course.”
“How much?”
“Probably five grand. You can have it all.”
“I know we can,” Reacher said. “That goes without saying. We can take what we want. But that’s the least of your worries. Because this is about more than just a mean transaction. You ran across the street and ratted the old lady out. You caused no end of trouble. Why was that?”
“Are you from Kiev?”
“No,” Reacher said. “But I had their chicken once. It was pretty good.”
“What do you want from me?”
“Gregory is going down. We need to decide if you’re going down with him.”
“I get a text, I got to respond. No choice. Those are the terms, man.”
“What terms?”
“This was my store once. He took it from me. He made me lease it back. There are unwritten conditions.”
“You got to run across the street.”
“No choice.”
“What’s it like over there?”
“Like?” the guy said.
“The layout,” Reacher said.
“You go in a hallway on the left. There’s a door on the right to the taxi room. It’s a real operation. But you go straight on, to the back. There’s a conference room. You walk through it, to another corridor, in the opposite back corner. That’s how you get to the offices. The last one is Danilo’s. You go through Danilo’s office to get to Gregory’s office.”
“How often do you go over there?”
“Only when I have to.”
“You work for them, but you don’t want to.”
“That’s the truth of it.”
“Everyone says that.”
“I’m sure they do. But I mean it.”
Reacher said nothing.
Abby said, “No.”
Hogan said, “No.”
Reacher said, “Go get the stuff we talked about.”
The guy went and got it. The wedding bands, the small solitaires, the broken watch. He put them all in an envelope. Reacher put the envelope in his pocket. Plus all the cash from the register. About five grand. Hopefully the merest drop in the bucket, pretty soon, but Reacher liked cash. He always had. He liked the heft, and the deadness. Hogan roamed the store’s shelves and tore the cords off all the dusty old stereo items, and he tied the guy up with them, secure, uncomfortable, but survivable. Eventually someone would find him and let him go. What happened after that would be up to him.
They left the guy on the floor behind the counter. They stepped out to the well of the store. They looked out the dusty front windows, at the taxi dispatcher across the street.
Chapter 44
They managed to scope out the whole of the block by staying back in the pawn shop, back in the shadows, traversing side to side, peering out at oblique angles. There were two guys on the sidewalk outside the taxi office door, and two guys some distance away on the left-hand street corner, and two guys the same distance away on the right. Six men visible. Plus probably the same again inside. At least. Maybe two in the hallway the pawnbroker had described, plus two in the conference room, plus two at the mouth of the corridor that led onward to the offices. Each of which was no doubt occupied by a made man with a gun in his pocket and a spare in a drawer.
Not good. What the military academies would call a tactical challenge. A head-on assault against a numerically superior opponent in a tightly constrained battle space. Added to which, the guys from the street corners would fold into the action from the rear. Bad guys in front, bad guys behind, no body armor, no grenades, no automatic weapons, no shotguns, no flamethrower.
Reacher said, “I guess the real question is whether Gregory trusts Danilo.”
“Does that matter?” Hogan said.
“Why wouldn’t he?” Abby asked.
“Two reasons,” Reacher said. “First, he trusts no one. You don’t get to be Gregory by trusting people. He’s a snake, so he assumes everyone else is a snake. And second, Danilo is by far his biggest threat. The second in command. The leader in waiting. It’s on the news every night. The generals get deposed, and the colonels take over.”
“Does this help us?”
“You have to go through Danilo’s office to get to Gregory’s office.”
“That’s normal,” Hogan said. “Everyone does it that way. That’s how a chief of staff operates.”
“Think about it in reverse. In order to leave his own office, Gregory has to walk through Danilo’s office. And he’s paranoid, with good reason. And with good results. He’s still alive. In his head this is not necessarily like a CEO in a movie, saying goodnight to his secretary, and calling her sweetheart. This is like walking into a death trap. This is assassination squads behind the desk. Or maybe even worse, this is a blockade, until he accedes to their demands. Maybe they’ll let him step down, with his dignity intact.”