Reacher looked at the woman, and said, “What happened last night?”
“I let him,” she said. “He agreed one time only. So I got it over with. But now he’s back for more.”
“I’ll discuss it with him, if you like,” Reacher said. “Meanwhile you go inside now, if you want. And think no more about it.”
“Don’t you dare go inside,” the boy said. “Not without me.”
The woman looked from him to Reacher, and back again. And again, as if choosing. As if down to her last twenty bucks at the racetrack. She made her decision. She took her keys from her bag, and unlocked her door, and stepped inside, and closed her door behind her.
The boy in the sweatshirt stared first at the door, and then at Reacher. Who jerked his head toward the mouth of the alley, and said, “Run along now, kid.”
The boy stared a minute longer, apparently thinking hard. And then he went. He walked out of the alley and turned out of sight. To the right. Which made him right-handed. He would want to set up his ambush so that Reacher would walk face first into a free-swinging right hook. Which pretty much defined the location. About three feet around the corner, Reacher thought. Level with the edge of the bag shop’s window. Because of the pivot point for the right hook. Basic geometry. Fixed in space.
But not fixed in time. Speed was under Reacher’s control. The kid would be expecting a normal kind of approach, plus or minus. Maybe a little tense and urgent. Maybe a little cautious and wary. But mostly average. He would trigger the hook at the first glimpse of Reacher coming around the corner. Any kind of normal walking pace would bring it home good and solid. The kid wasn’t dumb. Possibly an athlete. Probably had decent hand to eye coordination.
Therefore nothing would be done at normal or average speed.
Reacher stopped six paces short of the corner, and waited, and waited, and then he took another pace, a slow, sliding scrape across grit and dirt, and then he paused, and waited, and took another step, slow, sliding, ominous. And then another long wait, and another slow step. He pictured the kid around the corner, tensed up, his fist cocked, holding his position. And holding. Holding too long. Getting too tensed. Getting all cramped and shaky.
Reacher took another step, long and slow. Now he was six feet from the corner. He waited. And waited. Then he launched fast, at a run, his left hand up, palm open, fingers spread like a baseball glove. He burst around the corner and saw the kid sputtering to life, confused by the change of pace, locked into slow-motion waiting, so that his triumphant right hook was so far coming out like a herky-jerky feeble squib, which Reacher caught easily in his left palm, like a soft liner to second. The kid’s fist was big, but Reacher’s open hand was bigger, so he clamped down and squeezed, not hard enough to crush the bones, but hard enough to make the kid concentrate on keeping his mouth shut, so no whines or squeals came out, which obviously he couldn’t afford, being a hell of a guy.
Then Reacher squeezed harder. Mostly as an IQ test. Which the kid failed. He used his free hand to claw at Reacher’s wrist. The wrong move. Unproductive. Always better to go straight to the source of the problem, and use your free hand to hit the squeezer in the head. Or thumb out his eye, or otherwise get his attention. But the kid didn’t. A missed opportunity. Then Reacher added a twist to the squeeze. Like turning a door knob. The kid’s elbow locked up and he dropped a shoulder to compensate, but Reacher kept on twisting, until the kid got so lopsided he had to take his hand off Reacher’s wrist and hold his whole arm straight out for balance.
Reacher said, “Want me to hit you?”
No reply.
“It’s not a difficult question,” Reacher said. “A yes or no answer will do it.”
By that point the kid was shuffling in place, trying to find a bearable position, huffing and gasping. But not squealing yet. He said, “OK, sure, I got her signals wrong. I’m sorry, man. I’ll leave her alone now.”
“What about her job?”
“I was kidding, man.”
“What about the next new waitress, down on her luck, in need of secure employment?”
The kid didn’t answer.
Reacher clamped down harder, and said, “Want me to hit you?”
The kid said, “No.”
“No means no, right? I expect they teach you that now, at your fancy university. Kind of theoretical, I guess, from your point of view. Until now.”
“Come on, man.”
“Want me to hit you?”
“No.”
Reacher hit him in the face, with a straight right, maximum force, crashing and twisting. Like a freight train. The kid’s lights went out immediately. He went slack and gravity took over. Reacher kept his left hand rock solid. All the kid’s weight fell on his own locked elbow. Reacher waited. One of two things would happen. Either the strength and elasticity in the kid’s ligaments would roll him forward, or they wouldn’t.
They didn’t. The kid’s elbow broke and his arm turned inside out. Reacher let him fall. He landed on the bricks outside the bag shop, one arm right and the other arm wrong, like a swastika. He was breathing. A little bubbly, from the blood in his throat. His nose was badly busted. Cheekbones too, maybe. Some of his teeth were out. Upper row, mostly. His dentist’s kid was going to be just fine for college.
Reacher walked away, back to his lodgings, up the winding stair and through the low door to his room, where he took a second shower and got back in bed, once again warm and damp. He punched the pillow into shape, and went back to sleep.
At which moment Patty Sundstrom woke up. A quarter past three in the morning. Once again a pulse of subconscious disquiet had forced its way through to the surface. What were the flashlights for? Why two of them? Why not one, or twelve?
The room was blissfully cool. She could smell the night air, rich, like velvet. Why pack two flashlights with twelve meals? Why pack them at all? What did flashlights have to do with food? They weren’t natural partners. No one ever said, do you want a flashlight with that? And what Shorty suggested was nonsense. No one ate lunch in the dark. Which was all it was. It was lunch, for fellow rich guys up from Boston, who wanted to feel rugged for a week. No one paying before-Labor-Day or leafpeeper rates would accept granola bars for dinner. Or breakfast. Lunch only, surely, as part of a manly outdoor fantasy. So why the flashlights? Lunch was eaten in the middle of the day. Generally speaking the sun was out. Unless the rich guys were spelunkers. In which case they would have flashlights of their own, surely. Expensive specialist items, probably strapped to their heads.
Why would flashlights be packed in a carton of food, as if they were somehow integral, like silverware or napkins would be?
Were they packed?
Maybe they were just shoved in there as afterthoughts. She kept her eyes closed and pictured the scene when they opened the box. She had slit the tape with her nail, and Shorty had lifted the flaps. What had been her impression?
Two flashlights in the box, standing on their ends, crammed in among the food.
Crammed in.
Therefore not packed as integral components. Added later.
Why?
Two flashlights for two people.
They had each been given a flashlight and six subsistence meals.
Why?
We put together some ingredients for you. Either join us at the house, or help yourselves from the box. Which was kind of phony. Which they didn’t mean.
What else didn’t they mean?
She flipped the covers back and slid out of bed. She padded over to the dresser, where the carton sat in front of the TV screen. She lifted the flaps and felt inside. The first flashlight had fallen over in the void where the first two meals had been. She lifted it out. It was big and heavy. It felt cold and hard. She pressed it against her palm and switched it on. She rolled her palm a fraction and let a sliver of light spill out. It was pink from her skin. The flashlight was a famous make. It felt like it had been machined out of a solid billet of aerospace-grade aluminum. It had a cluster of tiny LED bulbs, like an insect’s eye.