“So you working tonight?” the waitress asked.
Reacher laughed. He was earning money for doing a fitness regime most people would pay a fortune for at any shiny city gymnasium, and now he was headed for his evening job, which was something else he got paid for that most men would gladly do for free. He was the bouncer in the nude bar Costello had mentioned. On Duval. He sat in there all night with no shirt on, looking tough, drinking free drinks and making sure the naked women didn’t get hassled. Then somebody gave him fifty bucks for it.
“It’s a chore,” he said. “But somebody’s got to do it, I guess.”
The girl laughed with him, and he paid his check and headed back to the street.
FIFTEEN HUNDRED MILES to the north, just below Wall Street in New York City, the chief executive officer took the elevator down two floors to the finance director’s suite. The two men went into the inner office together and sat side by side behind the desk. It was the kind of expensive office and expensive desk that get specified and paid for when times are good and then sit there like a sullen reproach when times turn bad. It was a high-floor office, dark rosewood all over the place, cream linen window blinds, brass accents, a huge slab of a desk, an Italian table light, a big computer that had cost more than it needed to. The computer was glowing and waiting for a password. The CEO typed it in and hit ENTER and the screen redrew into a spreadsheet. It was the only spreadsheet that told the truth about the company. That was why it was protected by a password.
“Are we going to make it?” the CEO asked.
That day had been D-Day. D stood for downsizing. Their human resources manager out at the manufacturing plant on Long Island had been busy since eight o’clock that morning. His secretary had rustled up a long line of chairs in the corridor outside his office, and the chairs had been filled with a long line of people. The people had waited most of the day, shuffling up one place every five minutes, then shuffling off the end of the line into the human resources manager’s office for a five-minute interview that terminated their livelihoods, thank you and good-bye.
“Are we going to make it?” the CEO asked again.
The finance director was copying large numbers onto a sheet of paper. He subtracted one from another and looked at a calendar. He shrugged.
“In theory, yes,” he said. “In practice, no.”
“No?” the CEO repeated.
“It’s the time factor,” the finance director said. “We did the right thing out at the plant, no doubt about that. Eighty percent of the people gone, saves us ninety-one percent of the payroll, because we only kept the cheap ones. But we paid them all up to the end of next month. So the cash-flow enhancement doesn’t hit us for six weeks. And in fact right now the cash flow gets much worse, because the little bastards are all out there cashing a six-week paycheck.”
The CEO sighed and nodded.
“So how much do we need?”
The finance director used the mouse and expanded a window.
“One-point-one million dollars,” he said. “For six weeks.”
“Bank?”
“Forget it,” the finance director said. “I’m over there every day kissing ass just to keep what we already owe them. I ask for more, they’ll laugh in my face.”
“Worse things could happen to you,” the CEO said.
“That’s not the point,” the finance director said. “The point is they get a sniff we’re still not healthy, they’ll call those loans. In a heartbeat.”
The CEO drummed his fingers on the rosewood and shrugged.
“I’ll sell some stock,” he said.
The finance director shook his head.
“You can’t,” he said, patiently. “You put stock in the market, the price will go through the floor. Our existing borrowing is secured on stock, and if it gets any more worthless, they’ll close us down tomorrow.”
“Shit,” the CEO said. “We’re six weeks away. I’m not going to lose all this for six lousy weeks. Not for a lousy million bucks. It’s a trivial amount.”
“A trivial amount we haven’t got.”
“Got to be somewhere we can get it.”
The finance director made no reply to that. But he was sitting there like he had something more to say.
“What?” the CEO asked him.
“I heard some talk,” he said. “Guys I know, gossiping. There’s maybe somewhere we can go. For six weeks, it might be worth it. There’s an outfit I heard about. A lender-of-last-resort type of thing.”
“On the level?”
“Apparently,” the finance director said. “Looks very respectable. Big office over in the World Trade Center. He specializes in cases like this.”
The CEO glared at the screen.
“Cases like what?”
“Like this,” the finance director repeated. “Where you’re almost home and dry, but the banks are too tight-assed to see it.”
The CEO nodded and gazed around the office. It was a beautiful place. And his own office was two floors higher, on a comer, and even more beautiful.
“OK,” he said. “Do it.”
“I can’t do it,” the finance director said. “This guy won’t deal below CEO level. You’ll have to do it.”
IT STARTED OUT a quiet night in the nude bar. A midweek evening in June, way too late for the snowbirds and the spring breakers, too early for the summer vacationers who came down to roast. Not more than maybe forty people in all night, two girls behind the bar, three girls out there dancing. Reacher was watching a woman called Crystal. He assumed that was not her real name, but he had never asked. She was the best. She earned a lot more than Reacher had ever earned as a major in the military police. She spent a percentage of her income running an old black Porsche. Reacher sometimes heard it in the early afternoons, rumbling and blatting around the blocks where he was working.
The bar was a long, narrow upstairs room with a runway and a small circular stage with a shiny chrome pole. Snaking around the runway and the stage was a line of chairs. There were mirrors everywhere, and where there weren’t, the walls were painted flat black. The whole place pulsed and pounded to loud music coming out of a half dozen speakers serious enough to drown out the roar of the air-conditioning.
Reacher was at the bar, back-to, a third of the way into the room. Near enough the door to be seen straight away, far enough into the room that people wouldn’t forget he was there. The woman called Crystal had finished her third spot and was hauling a harmless guy backstage for a twenty-buck private show when Reacher saw two men emerge at the top of the stairs. Strangers, from the north. Maybe thirty years old, bulky, pale. Menacing. Northern tough guys, in thousand-dollar suits and shined shoes. Down here in some kind of a big hurry, still dressed for their city office. They were standing at the desk, arguing about the three-buck cover charge. The girl at the desk glanced anxiously at Reacher. He slid off his stool. Walked over.
“Problem, guys?” he asked.
He had used what he called his college-kid walk. He had noticed that college boys walk with a curious tensed-up, limping motion. Especially on the beach, in their shorts. As if they were so tremendously muscle-bound they couldn’t quite make their limbs operate in the normal way. He thought it made 130-pound teenagers look pretty comical. But he had learned it made a 250-pound six-foot-five guy look pretty scary. The college-kid walk was a tool of his new trade. A tool that worked. Certainly the two guys in their thousand-dollar suits looked reasonably impressed by it.
“Problem?” he asked again.
That one word was usually enough. Most guys backed off at that point. But these two didn’t. Up close, he felt something coming off them. Some kind of a blend of menace and confidence. Some arrogance in there, maybe. A suggestion they normally got their own way. But they were far from home. Far enough south of their own turf to act a little circumspect.