Blue Moon - Lee Child Page 0,14

book and laid it flat on the table.

Reacher put his hand in his pocket and his thumb in the envelope and peeled fourteen bills off the back of Shevick’s wad. He handed them over. The pale guy recounted them with fast practiced fingers, folded them once, and put them in his own pocket.

“Are we good now?” Reacher asked.

“Paid off in full,” the guy said.

“Receipt?”

The guy tapped the side of his head again.

“Now get lost,” he said. “Until the next time.”

“The next time what?” Reacher said.

“You need a loan.”

“I hope not to.”

“Losers like you always do. You know where to find me.”

Reacher paused a beat.

“Yes,” he said. “I do. Count on it.”

He stayed where he was for a long moment, and then he got up out of the visitor chair and walked away, slowly, eyes front, all the way out the door to the sidewalk.

A minute later Shevick limped out after him.

“We need to talk,” Reacher said.

Chapter 6

Shevick still had a cell phone. He said he hadn’t sold it because it was an old flip worth close to nothing, and he was still using it because canceling his plan would have cost more than continuing it. Plus there were times he really needed it. Reacher told him this was one of those times. He told him to call a cab. Shevick said he couldn’t afford a cab. Reacher told him yes he could, just this once.

The cab that came was an old beat-up Crown Vic, thick with orange-peel paint, with a cop-car spotlight on the driver’s pillar and a taxi light strapped to the roof. Not an appealing vehicle, visually. But it worked OK. It wallowed and whined the mile to Shevick’s house and pulled up outside. Reacher helped Shevick down the narrow concrete path to his door. Once again it opened before the guy could get his key in the lock. Mrs. Shevick stared out at him. There were silent questions in her face. A taxi? For your knee? Then why did the big man come back, too?

And above all: Do we owe another thousand dollars?

“It’s complicated again,” Shevick said.

They went back to the kitchen. The stove was cold. No dinner. They had already eaten once that day. They all sat down at the table. Shevick told his part of the story. No Fisnik. A substitute instead. A sinister pale stranger with a big black book. Then Reacher’s offer to be a go-between.

Mrs. Shevick switched her gaze to Reacher.

Who said, “I’m pretty sure he was Ukrainian. He had a prison tattoo on his neck. Cyrillic alphabet, certainly.”

“I don’t think Fisnik was Ukrainian,” Mrs. Shevick said. “Fisnik is an Albanian name. I looked it up at the library.”

“He said Fisnik had been replaced. He said whatever business anyone had with Fisnik, now they had it with him. He said Fisnik’s clients were now his clients. He said if you owed money to Fisnik, now you owed it to him. He made the same kind of point several times over. He said it wasn’t rocket science.”

“Did he want another thousand dollars?”

“He propped his book open so close to his chest it was awkward. At first I wasn’t sure why. I assumed he didn’t want me to see what was in it. He asked my name, and I said Aaron Shevick. He looked down at his book and nodded. Which I thought was weird.”

“Why?”

“What were the odds the book happened to be propped open at the S page? One in twenty-six. Possible, but unlikely. So then I started to think he was hiding the book not because he didn’t want me to see what was in it, but because he didn’t want me to see what wasn’t in it. Because there was nothing in it. It was blank. That was my guess. Then he proved it. He asked me how much I owed. He didn’t know. He didn’t have Fisnik’s previous data. It wasn’t Fisnik’s old ledger. It was a new blank book.”

“What does all that mean?”

“It means this wasn’t a routine internal reorganization. They didn’t bench Fisnik and send in a pinch hitter. It was a hostile takeover from the outside. There’s a whole new management now. I went back through the guy’s words. His use of language. He made it clear. Someone else is muscling in.”

“Wait,” Mrs. Shevick said. “I heard it on the radio. Last week, I think. We’re getting a new police commissioner. He says we have rival Ukrainian and Albanian gangs in town.”

Reacher nodded.

“There you