Blue Moon - Lee Child Page 0,77
all around the inside of the lock. No glow-in-the-dark handle. Removed.
Hogan stepped away. Reacher looked down at the guy. Gezim Hoxha. Forty-seven years old. Once a police detective in Tirana. He closed the trunk lid on him, and stepped away to join the others. Once a police detective in the United States Army.
Hogan said, “We can’t leave the car here. Not right outside the house. Especially not with their boy in the trunk. Sooner or later they’ll cruise by and spot it and check it.”
Reacher nodded.
“Abby and I need to use it,” he said. “We’ll park it someplace else when we’re done.”
“You’re going to drive around with him in the trunk?”
“Keep your enemies close.”
“Where are we going?” Abby asked.
“When the guy in the trunk talked about people getting banned from playing in their clubs, I thought, yeah, that’s obviously a problem, because they got to eat. Then I remembered saying the same words to you once before. When we stopped at the gas station deli counter, on the way to visit with the Shevicks. You asked were they OK with that. I said they got to eat. Their cupboards are always bare. Especially now. I bet they haven’t left the house since the Ukrainians arrived out front. I know how people are. They would be shy and embarrassed and scared to walk past the car, and certainly neither one would let the other do it alone, and they wouldn’t do it together, either, because then the house would be empty behind them, and they would be suspicious the Ukrainians would sneak in and rummage through their underwear drawers. So all things considered, I bet they didn’t eat anything yesterday, and won’t eat anything today. We need to take them some food.”
“What about the car out front of their house?”
“We’ll go in the back. Probably through someone else’s yard. We’ll do the last part on foot.”
* * *
—
First they drove to the giant supermarket on the road out of town. Like most such places it was open all night, cold, empty, vast, cavernous, flooded with bright hard light. They rolled a cart the size of a bathtub through the aisles, and they filled it up with four of everything they could think of. Reacher paid at the check-out register, all in cash, all from Gezim Hoxha’s potato-shaped wallet. It seemed like the least the guy could do, under the circumstances. They packed the groceries carefully, into six balanced bags. Doing the last part on foot meant carrying them, maybe a decent distance, maybe over gates and fences.
They unlocked the Chrysler and lined up the bags on the rear seat. There was no sound from the trunk. No commotion. Nothing at all. Abby wanted to check if the guy was OK.
“What if he isn’t?” Reacher said. “What are you going to do about it?”
“Nothing, I guess.”
“No point checking, then.”
“How long are we going to leave him in there?”
“As long as it takes. He should have thought about all this before. I don’t see how his welfare suddenly becomes my responsibility, just because he chose to attack my welfare first. I’m not clear how that works exactly. They started it. They can’t expect me to provide a health plan.”
“We should be magnanimous in victory. Someone said that.”
“Full disclosure,” Reacher said. “I told you before. I’m a certain kind of person. Is the guy in the trunk still breathing?”
“I don’t know,” Abby said.
“But there’s a possibility.”
“Yes, there’s a possibility.”
“That’s me being magnanimous in victory. Normally I kill them, kill their families, and piss on their ancestors’ graves.”
“I never know when you’re kidding me.”
“I guess that’s true.”
“Are you saying you’re not kidding me now?”
“I’m saying in my case magnanimity is in short supply.”
“You’re taking food to an old couple in the middle of the night.”
“That’s a different word than magnanimous.”
“Still a nice gesture.”
“Because one day I could be them. But I’ll never be the guy in the trunk.”
“So it’s purely tribal,” Abby said. “Your kind of people, or the other kind.”
“My kind of people, or the wrong kind.”
“Who’s in your tribe?”
“Almost nobody,” Reacher said. “I live a lonely life.”
They drove the Chrysler back toward town, and took the left that led them into the east side hinterland, through the original city blocks, and out toward where the Shevicks lived. The old postwar development lay up ahead. By that point Reacher felt he knew it well enough. He figured they could get to a parallel street without the Ukrainians ever seeing them pass by,