Blue Moon - Lee Child Page 0,94
far. Some things can’t be ignored. I bet the whole thing is already on the television. In the spotlight, literally. Where no one wants to be. Which makes the west side the whole enchilada now. Now they’ll want it more than ever.”
“When will they come for us?”
“I don’t know,” Gregory said. “But we’ll be ready. Starting right now, we’ll go to Situation C. Tighten the guard. Take up defensive positions. Let no one through.”
“We can’t sustain Situation C indefinitely. We need to know when they’re coming.”
Gregory nodded.
“Aaron Shevick must know,” he said. “We should ask him.”
“We can’t find him.”
“Do we still have people at the old woman’s house?”
“Yes, but Shevick never shows up there anymore. Probably the old woman tipped him off. Obviously she’s his mother or his aunt or something.”
Gregory nodded again.
“OK,” he said. “There’s your answer. Call our boys and tell them to bring her in. She can get him on the phone, while we’re working on her. He’ll come running, the first time he hears her scream.”
* * *
—
Vantresca had picked them up a mile from the lumber yard, which meant the Shevicks’ house was another mile further on, to the southwest, like two sides of a triangle. The black Jaguar rumbled through the streets. By then it was mid-morning. The sun was high. The neighborhood was harsh with light and shadows. Reacher asked Vantresca to pull over at the gas station with the deli counter. They parked in the back, next to the car wash tunnel. A white sedan was inching its way through, under the thrashing brushes. There was blue foam and white bubbles everywhere.
Reacher said, “I guess now we can put the Shevicks in an east side hotel. No need to hide anymore. There’s no one left to care if we’re seen walking in with them.”
“They can’t afford it,” Abby said.
Reacher checked Gezim Hoxha’s potato-shaped wallet.
He said, “They don’t need to.”
“I’m sure they would prefer it all spent on Meg.”
“It’s a drop in the ocean. And this ain’t a democracy. They can’t stay in their house anymore.”
“Why not?”
“We need to get this thing rolling. I want their capo unsettled. Gregory, right? I want him to hear us knocking at the door. Might as well start right here, with the guys outside the house. They’ve been cluttering up the place long enough. But there might be a response. So the Shevicks need to move out. Just for the time being.”
“There’s no room in the car,” Barton said.
“We’ll take their Lincoln,” Reacher said. “We’ll drive the Shevicks to a fancy hotel in the back of a Town Car. They might like that.”
“They live on a cul-de-sac,” Vantresca said. “We’ll be approaching head on. No element of surprise.”
“For you, maybe,” Reacher said. “I’ll go in the back again, and come out through the house. Behind them. While they’re trying to figure out who the hell you guys are. That should be a surprise.”
The Jaguar rolled back out to the main drag, and took the early right, and the left, and stopped in the same spot Reacher and Abby had parked the Chrysler, before dawn, outside the Shevicks’ back-to-back neighbor. Outside the informer’s house, whose calls would henceforth go unanswered, because the instrument on the other end of the line had long ago melted. Like the Chrysler had been, the Jaguar was lined up exactly parallel with the Lincoln, nose to nose and tail to tail, about two hundred feet apart, the depth of two small residential lots, with two buildings in the way. But only for a moment. Reacher got out, and it rolled onward.
Reacher walked through the neighbor’s front yard and wrenched open the fold-back section of fence. He walked through the neighbor’s back yard. To the rickety back fence. Which was either the neighbor’s, or the Shevicks’, or shared. He had no great desire to climb it again. So he kicked it down. If it was the Shevicks’, then Trulenko could buy them a new one. If it was the neighbor’s, then tough shit, for being an informer. If it was shared, then fifty-fifty on each of the above.
He walked through the Shevicks’ back yard, past the spot where the photographs had been taken, to their kitchen door. He knocked gently on the glass. No response. He knocked again, a little louder. Still no response.
He tried the handle. Locked, from the inside. He looked in through the window. Nothing to see. No people. Just the heart-monitor countertops and the atomic table and