Blue Moon - Lee Child Page 0,73
most Americans. Can you explain that to me?”
“She’s a smart person. Maybe she was talking about something. Maybe it was the exact right word, if it’s so rare and subtle. Smart people do that. They use foreign words. Maybe she wrote it down for me. So I could look it up later.”
“Possible,” the guy said. “Some other time, I might have shrugged my shoulders and let it go at that. Stranger things have happened. Except I don’t like coincidences. Especially not four all at once. First coincidence is she wasn’t here alone. She had a male partner. Second coincidence is, I’ve seen that rare word a lot in the last twelve hours. In text messages on my phone. Contained in descriptions of our male fugitive. Like I said at the beginning, a man and a woman. I said she’s small and dark, and he’s big and ugly.”
Upstairs in the hallway Abby whispered, “This is going to turn bad.”
Like a waitress smelling a bar fight coming.
“Probably,” Reacher said.
Below them they heard the guy say, “The third coincidence is that a phone with copies of those same messages on it was stolen last night. At one point recently it was switched on for twenty minutes. No calls were made or received. But twenty minutes is long enough to read plenty of texts. Long enough to note down the hard words to work on later.”
Hogan said, “Lighten up, man. No one had a stolen phone.”
“The fourth coincidence is that the stolen phone was stolen by the big ugly guy in the description. We know that for sure. We got a full report. The guy was acting alone at the time, but he is known to associate with a small dark-haired woman. Who was undoubtedly your dinner guest, because she wrote the word on the paper. Undoubtedly she copied it from the stolen phone. Because how else would she know that word? Why else would she be interested in that word right now?”
“I don’t know, man,” Hogan said. “Maybe we’re talking about different people.”
“He went out and stole the phone and brought it back to her. Did she instruct him to, ahead of time? Is she his boss? Did she send him on a mission?”
“I have no clue what you’re talking about, man.”
“Then you better get a clue,” the guy said. “You have been caught harboring enemies of the community. Doesn’t reflect well on you.”
“Whatever,” Hogan said.
“You want to move out of state?”
“I would prefer you to.”
Silence for a long moment.
Then the guy spoke again. Some new menace in his voice. Some new thought. He said, “Did they walk or drive?”
“Who?”
“The man and the woman you were harboring.”
“We weren’t harboring diddly squat. We had friends over for dinner.”
“Walk or drive?”
“When?”
“When they left your house at the end of the evening. When they didn’t stay over.”
“They walked.”
“Do they live close by?”
“Not very,” Hogan said, cautiously.
“So a walk of some length. We’re watching these blocks very carefully. We didn’t see a man and a woman walking home.”
“Maybe they had a car parked around the corner.”
“We didn’t see a man and a woman driving home, either.”
“Maybe you missed them.”
“I don’t think we would have.”
“Then I can’t help you, man.”
The guy said, “I know they were here. I saw the food they ate. I have the note they transcribed from the stolen phone. Tonight these are the most heavily watched blocks in the city. They were not seen leaving. Therefore they’re still here. I think they’re upstairs, right now.”
Silence for another long moment.
Then Hogan said, “You’re a pain in the ass, man. Go ahead up and take a look. Three rooms, all of them empty. Then get out of the house and don’t come back. Don’t send an invitation to the picnic.”
In the hallway upstairs Abby whispered, “We could still climb out the window.”
“We didn’t make the bed,” Reacher whispered back. “And I decided we need this guy’s car. We can’t let him leave anyway.”
“Why do we need his car?”
“Something I just realized we need to do.”
Below them the guy’s footsteps crossed the hallway. Toward the bottom of the stairs. A heavy tread. The old floor creaked and yielded under it. Reacher left his gun in his pocket. He didn’t want to use it. A gunshot on a city street at night is going to get a reaction. Too many complications. Evidently the Albanian guy thought the same way. His right hand snaked into view and gripped the stair rail. No gun. His left hand