Personal (39 page)

The door handle was a grand affair, a neat Georgian style swelled up to about thirty inches tall. The lever I turned was the size of most people’s forearms. Inside I saw a lobby with black and white marble on the floor, and a chandelier the size of an apple tree.

No sign of Kott.

Which was good. It let me open the door all the way, for an unrestricted field of fire. Behind the lobby was a long section of hallway, with the staircase at the far end, which meant the part of the hallway with the busted window was on the left, at ninety degrees.

I stepped inside.

No sign of Kott.

Which meant if he had only doubled where I had tripled, he was right then staring at the broken glass, or searching room to room in the immediate vicinity, through all the pesky nooks and niches and parlours and libraries and offices and sitting rooms.

He was on my left, at ninety degrees.

I walked through the lobby to the hallway. Like any other hallway it was rectangular, much longer than it was wide, with hallway-style furniture, with doors left and right, to the kind of rooms that big houses always seemed to have. But I had been in big houses before, and Joey’s place didn’t feel like any of them. I remembered doors that looked way further apart than normal, implying huge rooms beyond, which turned out to look even bigger than expected, mostly because the walls went on and on, as if the room was saying,
You know I’m big, because my walls go on for ever
. Proportion, in other words. Joey’s place really was a regular house all swollen up in perfect lock step. The rooms were huge, but they didn’t look it, because the doors were the regular distance apart, except the doors were more than nine feet tall, more than ten with the architrave frames, so the regular distance was an optical illusion.

The marble squares on the floor would have been two feet on a side in any designer magazine, but in Joey’s house they were three. A full yard. The baseboards would have been twelve inches high in a fancy Victorian place. In Joey’s house they were a full foot and a half. A regular door knob would hit me in the thigh. Joey’s door knobs would hit me in the ribs. And so on. The net effect was I felt very small. Like I had been shrunk, by a mad scientist. Maybe the aluminium glass people would take it up next.

And I felt slow. Obviously. It took 50 per cent longer to get anywhere. Three steps from A to B was really four and a half. It was like walking through molasses. Or walking backward. Always hustling, and getting nowhere. Like going up the down escalator. Disorienting, like a whole different dimension.

I stopped what I thought was six feet from where the hallway turned. But it could have been nine. Either way I held my breath and listened. And heard nothing. No crunching of broken glass underfoot, and no opening and closing of doors. So I inched towards the corner, or three-quarter-inched, or an inch and a half, or whatever it really was. I had the Browning in my left hand, and the Glock in my right, with one in the chamber and twelve in the magazine. Five rounds expended so far, four under the Jaguar’s hood at Charlie’s house, and one into the bowling club’s subsoil, via Joey.

I figured if Kott was expecting a head to come around the corner, he would be expecting it at normal height, purely as a matter of default instinct. But what was normal? Eye level about five feet six inches from the ground, probably, which was 55 per cent of a normal room’s height. Which would translate to about eight feet three inches in Joey’s funhouse world. Which would mean Kott would be staring way over my head. But even so I played it safe. I made sure he would be staring over my head. I knelt down low and took a look at baseboard level, which because of the millwork’s exaggerated height was perfectly comfortable.

I pictured my brow and my eyes, suddenly visible, but tiny next to the extravagant moulding.

No sign of Kott.

I saw shards of glass on the marble. From the window. I saw closed doors. To parlours, and libraries, and sitting rooms. I didn’t see Kott. Was he behind a closed door? Temporarily, maybe. Or perhaps he had never moved. Perhaps he was still upstairs, in the guest accommodations, patient like snipers were, with his .50-calibre Barrett on a table, aimed directly at the door to the suite.

I thought back to the architect’s blueprint we had seen. The guest suite was in the rear left quadrant of the house. Above the kitchen wing, basically. Up the stairs, and turn right. I stood up again, and checked all four ways, and breathed in, and breathed out.

Then I started up the stairs.

FIFTY-FIVE

THE STAIRS WENT
half the way up on the left, and then turned a 180 on a half-landing, and went the rest of the way up on the right. And like everything else in the house they were regular items, but expanded in size, so I had to labour up them, stepping 50 per cent higher than normal each time, lurching forward half as far again as my muscle memory expected, to reach the next stair, and then repeating it all. Plus I was aware the back of my head was about to be visible in the upstairs hallway, through whatever kind of railings or spindles the carpenter had used. Kott could be up there, prone, with his muzzle right in line with the banister. He would get me in the back, just before I stepped up to the half-landing. At a range of about twelve feet. Which was four yards. And I wasn’t made of aluminium oxynitride.

So I hugged the wall, and went up backward, until I could see the second-floor hallway for myself. It was empty. No sign of Kott. I hustled the rest of the way and found myself in what looked like a repeat of the downstairs hallway, except the floor was carpet, not marble. Carpet as wide as a new-mown prairie. I saw a bunch of doors, all of them nine feet tall. A corridor, with more doors. All closed. Two on the left, two on the right, and one dead ahead, in the end wall. Which was the guest suite, I figured. I would be walking straight towards it.

But the advantage of walking straight towards it through a giant’s house was I had plenty of wiggle room. Normally an upstairs hallway would be a narrow field of fire. But 50 per cent extra gave me the chance to stay well off the centre line. Because maybe Kott had something rigged. His gun, pre-aimed, locked down, ready to fire through the wood. Maybe there was an infra-red beam. Or maybe he had X-ray glasses.

But I made it to the end wall, safe, and I pressed myself alongside his door, and I flipped the Browning barrel-first in my hand, and I used it to knock.

I said, ‘Kott? Are you in there?’

No answer.

I knocked again, louder.

I said, ‘Kott? Open the door.’

Which I figured he might. Ballistically it was already open. Either one of us could have fired straight through it. In his case he could have fired straight through anything. If he wanted to aim based purely on sound alone, he could. The walls and the floors didn’t exist for him. He was living in a transparent house.

But he would want to watch. Surely. A guy who put a picture on his wall, last thing he saw at night, first thing he saw in the morning, he would want to watch me take the bullet. He would want to see me fall down. He had probably pictured it every day in yoga class.
Visualize your success
. He had waited sixteen years. He might open the door.

I said, ‘Kott, we should talk first.’

No answer.

I said, ‘No harm, no foul. You forget about me, I’ll forget about you. We can go our separate ways. You should get over yourself. No need to make a whole big thing out of it. I sent plenty of guys to prison and no one else got so mad about it.’

I heard a creak, and for a second I thought it was the door, but it was in the other direction, at the top of the stairs. In the corner of my eye I saw a child flit by. Real fast. Up the stairs and across the hallway and out of sight. A small boy, I thought. How could Bennett not have told me? Where was the mother? What the hell was going on?

I eased my finger off the Glock’s trigger.

Then the back of my brain said, not a child. Not chubby or bony or elastic. But stiff, and worn, and tense like an adult. A small man, maybe five-seven, running past a balustrade five feet high, in front of baseboards a foot and a half tall, under fifteen-foot ceilings.

Not a small boy.

John Kott.

I tried to call up the architect’s blueprint in my mind. I wanted to see the details. The upstairs hallway ran front to back, from the top of the stairs to a feature window above the front door, and also side to side, towards the guest suite in one direction, where I was, and the other way too, towards a huge master bedroom. Kott hadn’t come my way, and I figured he wouldn’t hang out by the feature window. Why would he? Therefore he was in Joey’s bedroom.

Below me I heard a voice. Bennett, in the downstairs hallway. He called out, ‘Reacher? You OK up there?’

I called back, ‘Get out of here, Bennett. No reason for you to be involved.’

I listened for a reply, but I heard nothing more.

I tried the guest suite’s door. It was unlocked. I stepped inside. I looked around. I had seen similar places in hotels, but smaller. Living accommodations, all self-contained. A short private hallway, a powder room, a kitchenette, a living room, with two bedrooms, one to the left and one to the right, both with their own separate bathrooms. The left-hand bedroom was unoccupied. The right-hand bedroom had Kott’s stuff in it. Of which there wasn’t much. A bedroll and a backpack, Nice had guessed, back in Arkansas, and she had been more or less correct. The bedroll was a sleeping bag, and the backpack was a duffel bag, made of scuffed black leather, full of T-shirts and underwear and ammunition.

The ammunition was all either nine-millimetre Parabellum, or .50-calibre match grade. Big visual difference. The handgun rounds looked small and dainty. Like jewellery. The rifle rounds looked like cannon shells from a combat airplane. The cartridge cases alone were four inches long.

I checked everywhere I could think of, and I didn’t find a handgun.

But I found the rifle.

It was under Kott’s bed, in a custom case. A Barrett Light Fifty, the real deal, more than five feet long, close to thirty pounds scoped and loaded. From Tennessee. The price of a used sedan, right there. I kicked the scope out of alignment, which is all I had time to do, and then I hustled back to the hallway.

The blueprint said I had to walk thirty feet, and turn right, and walk twenty feet, and turn left, into some kind of a three-sided anteroom ahead of the bedroom itself. On the plan it would be called a niche or a nook, no doubt. The bedroom door was in the wall facing the hallway. I kept the Browning in my left hand and the Glock in my right, like an old-time gunfighter in a black and white movie. Not that I believed those old stories. I never met a guy who could aim left and right simultaneously. Not well, anyway. Better to focus on the Glock, like it was the only gun I had, and if the Browning happened to blaze away at the same time, unaimed and unsynchronized, then so much the better. Couldn’t hurt.

I made the first turn. Ahead of me was the feature window. But still a long way away. I was getting better at decoding the funhouse dimensions. I had the Glock aimed hard on the near corner of the anteroom, the equivalent of three baseboards up, which would be four feet six, which would be high on Kott’s chest. At that point I was fifteen feet away, and the ninemillimetre Parabellum was a speedy little bullet. If Kott stepped out, he would be dead about an eightieth of a second later. Plus my reaction time. Which would be very rapid. That was for damn sure.

Kott didn’t step out. I arrived at the anteroom. The bedroom door was closed. Nine feet tall, ten with the frame, rib-high knob.

I heard a woman’s voice behind it.

No words. Inarticulate. Not a scream or a moan, but a kind of frustrated gasp. She wanted to do something, or get something, or reach something, but she couldn’t. But
want
was the wrong word. She wasn’t annoyed. She was desperate. She
needed
to do something, or get something, or reach something.

But she couldn’t.

I stepped back and called over my shoulder, ‘Bennett? You still down there?’

No answer.

Sudden silence in the bedroom.

I stepped to one side, in case he fired through the wood.

He didn’t.

How do you make them come out of there voluntarily? No one knows. No one ever has
. Normally I would have stood with my back against the wall and eased the door open, arm’s length and out of sight, but Joey’s doors were too wide for that. So like the neat little guy I was in that new environment, I dodged forward, twisted the knob, kicked the door, dodged back, and aimed.

And fired. And hit John Kott in the centre of the forehead. Except I didn’t. It was a mirror on the side wall. The gunshot roared and silvered glass sheeted down, and then the world went quiet again, and from inside the room Kott said, ‘What happened to forgetting about me and going our separate ways?’

I hadn’t heard his voice for sixteen years, but it was him. The slow Ozark accent, the querulous pitch, the aggrieved tone.

I said, ‘You didn’t answer me.’

‘Not worth answering.’

‘Who is in there with you?’

‘Step inside and take a look.’

I called up the blueprint in my head again. I said, ‘You’re on the second floor of a very tall house. I’m at the only door out. I just fired a gun in London. Five minutes from now you’ll have five thousand cops outside. You’ll survive about three weeks without food. And then what will you do?’

He said, ‘The cops won’t come.’

I said, ‘You think?’

‘Bennett will tell them it was one of his.’

‘What do you know about Bennett?’

‘I know plenty about Bennett.’

‘Who is in there with you?’

‘I could have showed you in the mirror, except you bust it. You’re going to have to come on in.’

I backed away a step and called over my shoulder. ‘Bennett? You down there still?’

No answer.

‘Nice? Are you there?’

No answer.

I stepped back to the bedroom door and said, ‘I guess you know Joey is no longer with us. And you know his guys ran away. So I can stay here as long as I need to. You’ll still starve to death, even if the cops don’t come.’