Blue Moon - Lee Child Page 0,35

which was not so straightforward. No job, no home, always restless. Always moving. Just the clothes on his back. No particular place to go, and all the time in the world to get there. Some people found it hard to understand. But Abby seemed to get it. She asked none of the usual dumb questions.

Her own story was shorter, because she was younger. Born in a suburb in Michigan, raised in a suburb in California, loved books and philosophy and theater and music and dance and experiment and performance art. Came to town as an undergraduate student, and never left. A temporary gig waiting tables for a month turned into ten years. She was thirty-two. Older than she looked. She said she was happy.

They went back and forth to the kitchen for refills of coffee and ended up facing each other at opposite ends of the sofa, Reacher sprawling comfortably, Abby sitting cross-legged, with the tails of her shirt dress tucked down demurely between her bare knees. Reacher didn’t know much about philosophy or theater or dance or experiment or performance art, but he read books when he could, and he heard music when he could, so he was able to keep up. A couple of times they found they had read the same stuff. Same with music. She called it her retro phase. He said it felt like yesterday. They laughed about it.

It got to two o’clock in the morning. He figured he could get a room at an Albanian hotel. One block further east. Just as good. He could afford to waste what he had already laid out. He was more annoyed about the five minutes of his life. At the desk. He would never get that back.

Abby said, “You can stay here, if you like.”

He was pretty certain there was one more button undone than before, on the front of her shirt dress. He felt he could trust his judgment on the matter. He was an observant man. He had previously inspected the original gap many times. It had been very appealing. But the new gap was better.

He said, “I didn’t see a guest room.”

She said, “I don’t have one.”

“Would this be a lifestyle experiment?”

“As opposed to what?”

“Normal reasons.”

“I guess a mixture.”

“Works for me,” Reacher said.

Chapter 15

Dino’s two guys were simply missing all night. From the liquor store onward, not a trace. Their phones were dead. No one had seen their car. They had disappeared into thin air. Which of course was impossible. But still, no one woke Dino. A small-scale search was mounted instead. All the likely neighborhoods. No results. The two guys stayed missing. Until seven o’clock in the morning, right there on their own property, when a guy stacking lumber with a forklift in a side yard backed up and found them, behind the last of the ten-by-two cedar.

Then they woke Dino.

The side yard was separated from direct contractor access by a wire fence eight feet high. The two guys had been hung upside down from the top of the fence. They had been slit open. Gravity had tumbled their guts out, on their chests, on their faces, on the ground beneath them. After death, happily. They both had crusted gunshot wounds. One had his head mostly gone.

No sign of their car. No tracks, no nothing.

Dino called a meeting in the back office boardroom. Just fifty yards from the gruesome discovery. Like a battlefield general, on hand to examine the terrain up close.

He said, “Gregory must be out of his mind. We were the original victims here, we got the short end of every stick, and now he wants to rub it in by making it four for two as well? That’s bullshit. How lopsided does he want it to get? What the hell is he thinking?”

“But why so nasty?” his right-hand man said. “Why all the drama with their intestines hanging out? Surely that’s the key to this thing.”

“Is it?”

“Got to be. It was already gratuitous. This was unnecessary. Like they were mad at us. Like revenge for something. As if we had gotten the better of them somehow.”

“Well, we didn’t.”

“Maybe there’s something we don’t know. Maybe we actually did get the better of them somehow, but we haven’t caught on to it yet.”

“Caught on to what?”

“We don’t know yet. That’s the point.”

“All we got is the restaurant block.”

“So maybe it’s special in some way. Maybe it’s a good producer. Maybe we get better access to people. All the bigwigs must