High Heat: A Jack Reacher Novella (7 page)

“There will be another door. Out of the yard, into the building. Might have a newer lock.”

“Then I’ll knock and rely on charm.”

“I can’t let you do this.”

“It’s the least I can do. I screwed you up before. You might have gotten something. You were going to take that slap and keep him talking.”

“He had already found the wire.”

“But he’s arrogant. He’s got an ego. He might have carried on regardless, just to taunt you.”

“That’s what I was hoping.”

“Then let me put it right.”

*     *     *

Reacher turned around and lifted his shirt and bared his back to Hemingway. He felt hot fingers scrabbling at his waistband, gapping it out, fitting the plastic box behind the elastic on his shorts. Then he felt the scrape of a wire, and her hand burrowed up his back, under his shirt, to his shoulder blade, and then on over the top, a curious vertical embrace, her breath on his neck, and then she turned him around again to face her, and her other hand went up the front of his shirt, to find the microphone, to pass it from hand to hand, and to pull it down into place. She stopped with it trapped against his chest, and she kept her hand there, flat, nothing between her palm and his skin except the small pebble of technology.

She said, “I put it in my bra. But you don’t have one.”

“Imagine that,” Reacher said.

“There’s nothing to keep it in place.”

Reacher felt an immediate film of sweat between his chest and her hand. He said, “Got a Band-Aid in your purse?”

“You’re a smart kid,” she said, and she went into a one-hand-two-elbows contortion to root through her bag, and as she craned her neck to look downward into it her forehead touched his lips, just briefly, like a kiss. Her hair was limp, but it smelled like strawberries.

She jerked her bag back up on her shoulder and held up something that crackled slightly. A Band-Aid, he assumed, still in its hygienic wrapper. He took it from her and peeled it open in the space between their faces. Then in turn she took it back from him one-handed and used it to tape the microphone in the trench between his chest muscles. She smoothed the adhesive, once, twice, and then she took her hands out from under his shirt and pulled it down into place.

She put her palm on his chest, like Croselli had put his on hers, pressing hard on the damp cotton, and she said, “He’ll find it.”

“Don’t worry,” Reacher said. “If he puts his hands on me, I’ll beat him to death.”

Hemingway said nothing.

Reacher said, “That’s a Marine Corps thing.”

*     *     *

The darkness didn’t help. It didn’t help at all. Reacher lined up on the opposite curb, like a sprinter at the start of a race, but he couldn’t exactly see where he was heading. Adjustments were going to be necessary as he ran. He took off, slow and clumsy, partly because of the dark, partly because he was a terrible runner, with long lumbering strides, and three paces out he saw the doors, and two paces out he saw the judas gate, and with one pace to go he saw its lock, and he launched his leading foot in a scything kick,
slightly across his body, and he smashed his heel as close to the small Yale circle as he could get, with all his two hundred and twenty pounds behind it, multiplied significantly by the final acceleration of his foot, and by the fact that his whole bulk was moving briskly, if not exactly fast.

But it was enough. The judas gate exploded inward, with what felt like no resistance at all, and Reacher hurtled through the resulting blank rectangle into a space so dark he could make out nothing at all. There was the feel of cobblestones under his feet, and the sour smell of garbage, and sheer dark walls rising on his left and his right and ahead.

He felt his way along the right-hand wall to the back corner of the yard, where he found a door. Ridged glass above, a panel below, a smooth steel handle, and a lock that felt newer. The glass was probably tempered and reinforced with wire. The lock was probably chased into the door and the jamb. A whole different proposition.

He waited, to see if Croselli would come down and open it himself. Which he might. He must have heard the crash of the judas gate. But he didn’t come down. Reacher waited three minutes, breathing hard, stretching his eyes wide open, willing them to see something. But they didn’t. He stepped up to the door again and traced its shape with his hands. The panel below the glass would be the weak spot. Plywood, probably, maybe three-eighths thick, painted, retained in the frame by quarter-round moldings. Reacher was wearing shoes he had bought in the London airport two deployments ago, stout British things with welts and toecaps as hard as steel. They had busted heads and kneecaps already that night. Plywood wasn’t going to be a major problem.

He stepped back and poked forward with his toe to fix his target in his mind. Then he kicked out,
bang, bang
, concentrating on the corners of the panel, viciously and noisily, until the wood splintered and the moldings came loose.

Then he stopped and listened.

No sound from inside the building.

Which was a bitch. Reacher would have preferred to meet Croselli face to face on the ground floor. He didn’t relish heading up a flight of stairs toward an alert opponent at
the top.

He waited some more.

No sound.

He squatted down with his back against the doorframe and punched out the panel with his elbow, until it folded inward, like a miniature door itself, hinged on a few surviving nails. Then he twisted around and put his arm and his shoulder through the hole and reached up and scrabbled for the knob. Which he found easily enough. He had arms like a gorilla. Every childhood photograph of him featured six inches of bare wrist, at the end of every sleeve.

The door opened and he struggled upright and backed off a yard, just in case. But there was no sound inside. Croselli didn’t come out. There was nothing to see. Just darkness. The inside air smelled hot and stale.

Reacher stepped in, to what felt like a narrow lobby with a tiled floor. He slid his feet ahead, one after the other, and he felt a bottom stair. There was a handrail on the left. The opposite wall was less than three feet away. It was painted, and it was damp with condensation.

Reacher went up the stairs, his right hand out in front of him, his left holding the handrail. There was a yard-wide half landing, and then the stairs doglegged and continued upward. At the top was dusty superheated air and a six-by-three upstairs lobby with a sticky carpet and a door at each end. A front room, and a back room.

Under the back room door was a bar of faint warm light.

Reacher stared at it, like a thirsty man in the desert might stare at a cold drink. It was a candle, probably. It was the first manmade light he had seen in more than three hours.

He put his hand under his shirt at the back and pushed the button Hemingway had showed him.
It’s red
, she had said, which hadn’t helped, because he didn’t have eyes in the back of his head, and it was pitch dark anyway. So he had learned it by feel. He tapped his chest, so that a thump could mark the start of the recording. Then he put his hand on the doorknob.

*     *     *

Reacher twisted the knob and pushed the door, one, two, fast and hard, and he stepped into a room lit by a guttering candle. The flame danced in the rush of air. The room was a twenty-by-twenty space with a dark window in the back wall, and a row of old-fashioned safes on the left, like something out of a black-and-white Western movie about bank robbers, and on the right there was a row of file cabinets and a desk, and sitting at the desk in a leather reclining chair was Croselli. The chair was pushed out and turned sideways, so that he was sitting face-on to the door.

He had a gun in his hand.

It was a Colt M1911, a .45 automatic, standard military issue for sixty-six years, hence the model number. It looked a little scratched and battered. It was all lit up by the candle, which was on the desk, welded to a china plate by a pool of its own wax. A standard household item, a few cents at the hardware store, but it felt as bright as the sun.

Croselli said, “You.”

Reacher said nothing.

Croselli had shed his jacket and pulled down his tie, but his shirt was still wet. He said, “I was expecting Hemingway. What are you tonight, her knight in shining armor? Is she sending a boy to do a man’s job?”

Is he armed?
Reacher had asked.
Not in the city
, Hemingway had said.
He can’t afford to be
. Not applicable inside his own premises, apparently. Which was a bitch. Reacher looked at the row of safes. There were six of them, shoulder to shoulder, each one about a yard wide and six feet tall. They had keyholes, not combination locks. The door on the far end was wide open, and the void behind it was empty. Their armory, Reacher guessed. For dire emergencies. Like that very night. Clearly Croselli’s soldiers were all armed, all out on the street, all insuring protection.

“You have a gun,” Reacher said, for the tape.

“I’m defending my property,” Croselli said.

“This is your place?”

“I’m not a common burglar.”

Reacher took a step. The Colt’s muzzle rose a degree, to track him. Reacher asked, “Is your name on the title?”

“I’m not that stupid.”

“Then this isn’t your place.”

“Only technically. Believe me, kid, everything you see here is mine.”

“What’s in the safes?”

“Inventory.”

“Yours?”

“I already told you.”

“I need to hear it in short simple words.”

“Why?”

“We could do business.”

“Business?”

“That’s what I said.”

“You and me?”

“If you’re smart,” Reacher said.

“You broke down my door.”

“Would you have let me in, if I had knocked?”

“What kind of business could we do, you and I?”

“You’re using the New Jersey Turnpike and the Holland Tunnel. Which means you’re getting supplied out of Miami, all the way up I-95. Which means you’re paying over the odds, and you’re losing some to unreliable mules, and you’re losing some to routine New Jersey State Police patrols. I could help you with all of that.”

“How?”

“I bring stuff in direct from the Far East. On military planes. No scrutiny. My dad’s a Marine officer.”

“What kind of stuff?”

“Anything you want.”

“What kind of price, kid?”

“Show me what you’ve got and tell me what you paid. Then I’ll break your heart.”

“You hurt two of my men.”

Reacher said, “I hope so. I need you to understand. You do not mess with me.” He took another step. The Colt’s muzzle rose another degree. Reacher said, “Are you buying from Martinez?”

“I never heard of Martinez.”

“Then you’re way over the odds already. Who are you buying from?”

“The Medellin boys.”

“I could save you forty percent.”

Croselli said, “I think you’re full of shit. I think this is a Hemingway stunt.”

“You shut her down.”

“For which I paid good money. For which I expected a durable result. Anything else is liable to make me angry.”

“This has nothing to do with Hemingway.”

“Pull up your shirt.”

“Why?”

“I want to see the wire. Before I shoot you.”

Reacher thought:
unregistered guns, a deceptive real estate title, a straight-up reference to the Medellin cartel out of Colombia, and a straight-up reference to bribery
. The tape had enough. He took a deep, deep breath and put his hands on the hem of his T shirt. Then he jerked forward from the waist and blew out the candle.

*     *     *

The room went from softly glowing to blacker than the Earl of Hell’s winter coat all in a split second, and Reacher blundered straight ahead, forcing passage between Croselli’s chair and the desk, and Croselli whipped the Colt around in the same general direction
and fired. But he missed by a mile, and the muzzle flash backlit him perfectly, like a photographer’s strobe, so Reacher picked his spot and slammed a straight right into the back of his neck, right where soft turns to hard, and Croselli pitched head first out of the chair and landed on his knees. Reacher groped for the chair and lifted it high by the armrests and slammed it down on Croselli’s back. He heard the sound of steel on linoleum as the Colt skittered away, and he brushed the chair aside and groped and patted blindly until he found the collar of Croselli’s shirt, which he bunched in his left hand while he pounded away with his right, short roundhouse punches to the side of Croselli’s head, his ear, his jaw,
one, two, three, four
, vicious clubbing blows, until he felt the steam go out of the guy, whereupon he reached forward and grabbed the guy’s wrists and yanked them up behind his back, high and painful, and he clamped them together in his left hand, human handcuffs, a party trick perfected years before, enabled by the freakish strength in his fingers, from which no one had ever escaped, not even his brother, who was of equal size, or his father, who was smaller but stronger. He hauled Croselli to his feet and slapped at his pants pockets until he heard the jingle of keys. Croselli got his second wind and started struggling hard, so Reacher turned him a little sideways and quieted him down again with a pile-driver jab to the kidney.

Then he fished out the keys and held them in his right hand, and he asked, “Where’s your book of matches?”

Croselli said, “You’re going to die, kid.”

“Obviously,” Reacher said. “No one lives forever.”

“I mean tonight, kid.”

Reacher separated a key by feel and pressed the point high on Croselli’s cheek. He said, “If so, you won’t see it happen. I’ll take your eyes out first.”

“Matches in the desk drawer,” Croselli said.

Reacher turned him again and slammed a short right to his stomach, to fold him over and keep him preoccupied, and he walked him bent over and puking to the desk, and he used his free hand to rattle open the drawers, and to root around, all by feel. There was all kinds of stuff in the drawers. Staplers, pens, rolls of Scotch tape, some in dispensers,
pencils, paper clips. And a book of matches, a little limp and damp.