Blue Moon - Lee Child Page 0,84
The guys were right-handed. Smaller than Gezim Hoxha, but bigger than the average. Not scrappy little Adriatic guys. That was for sure. Both wore black pants and black T-shirts. And sunglasses. Neither one had shaved. No doubt they had been dragged out of bed and sent on patrol immediately after Hoxha’s car had been found.
They took a step forward. Reacher glanced left, glanced right. No cover taller than a hydrant or wider than a light pole. He put his hand in his pocket. The H&K that he knew for sure worked. That he also knew for sure he didn’t want to use. A gunshot on a city street at night would get a reaction. Ten times worse in the innocent morning sunshine. There would be more officers on the day watch than the night watch. They would all deploy. There would be dozens of cars, lights flashing, sirens going. There would be news helicopters and cell phone video. There would be paperwork. There would be hundreds of hours in a room with a cop and a table screwed to the floor. Abby’s phone log would implicate Barton and Hogan and Vantresca. The mess would spread far and wide. Could take weeks to resolve. Which Reacher didn’t want, and the Shevicks didn’t have.
The guys with the Glocks took another step. They were coming in from wide, around their thrown-open doors, guns first, shuffling steps, rigid two-handed grips, concentrated squints over their front sights.
Another step. And another. Then the guy on Reacher’s right, who had been the driver, kept on coming, but the other guy stopped. The passenger. A wheel play. Like sheepdogs. They wanted to get one of them around and behind, to press Reacher and Abby toward the other one, toward the far sidewalk, toward the three-story wall, where they would finally run out of room. An obvious, instinctive tactic.
Which depended on Reacher and Abby first staying where they were, and then rotating meekly in place, and then stumbling backward.
Not going to happen.
“Abby, take a step back,” Reacher said. “With me.”
He stepped back. She stepped back. The driver’s geometry was distorted. His envelope was enlarged. Now he had further to go.
“Again,” Reacher said.
He stepped back. She stepped back.
“Stand still,” the driver said. “Or I’ll shoot.”
Reacher thought, will you? It was one of life’s great questions. The guy had all the same structural inhibitions as Reacher himself. The dozens of squad cars, with their lights flashing and their sirens going. The news helicopters and the cell phone video. The paperwork. The hours in the room with the cop. Which would produce an uncertain outcome for the guy. Inevitable. Could go either way. There were no guarantees. Don’t frighten the voters. There was a new police commissioner on the way. Plus the guy had professional obligations to consider. There were questions to be answered. They thought Reacher was an outside agitator. We want to know who you are. There would be bonus points for his capture still able to talk. There would be punishments for his delivery dead or comatose or mortally wounded. Because the dead and the comatose couldn’t talk, and the mortally wounded didn’t last long enough to talk, when they brought out the spoons, and the electric saws, and the smoothing irons, and the cordless power tools, or whatever other grotesque procedures were favored east of Center. So would the guy shoot? Unlikely, Reacher thought. Probably not. But always possible. Was he prepared to bet his life on it? Probably yes. He had before. He had gambled and won. Ten thousand generations later his instincts were still working. He had walked away, and lived to tell the tale. In any case he was fundamentally indifferent. No one lived forever.
But was he prepared to bet Abby’s life on it?
The driver said, “Show me your hands.”
Which would be game over. The point of no return, right there. Which was getting close anyway. The geometry had gone bad. The driver and the passenger had gotten about sixty degrees apart. They were well positioned for enfilade fire. The likely sequence of events was easy to predict. Reacher would shoot through his pocket and hit the driver. One down. No problem. But then the sixty-degree turn toward the passenger would be slow and clumsy, because his hand would be still all snagged up inside his pocket, which would give the passenger time to fire, maybe two or three rounds, which would either hit Abby, or Reacher himself, or both, or miss altogether.