Blue Moon - Lee Child Page 0,96
the side. A slabby white cheek, a small pink ear, buzzed fair hair glittering over ridges of bone. He was over thirty, but maybe not yet forty. Was he senior enough to know where their nerve center was? That was Reacher’s main question.
And the answer was no, he thought. Like before. We’re guys who sit in cars and watch doors. You think they would tell folks like us where Trulenko is? The guy was no use.
Unfortunate.
Especially for him.
Reacher dropped to the ground and elbowed-and-toed his way to the narrow concrete path, and over it, and beyond it. The front door was standing open. The guy was still staring at the kitchen. Still waiting. Reacher squirmed around until his angle of view through the open door was a quarter circle different than his oblique glance in through the window. Now he was looking at the back of the guy’s head. A wide white neck, tight rolls of hard flesh, the glittering buzz cut over lumps of bone. He was looking at it all from a very low angle. He was prone on the ground, outside at grade level, below the step, below the threshold, below the hallway floor. He was aiming the Glock at a steep upward angle. At a point where the guy’s spine met his skull. Which was as high as he dared to go. He wanted the round to dig in, not crease off. Which happened, sometimes, with shallow angles. Some people had skulls like concrete.
He counted to three, and breathed out, long and slow.
He pulled the trigger. The guy’s head cracked open like a dropped watermelon and the bullet came out the top of his skull and lodged in the ceiling directly above him. The air was instantly full of pink and purple mist. Instant brain death. Messy, but necessary, with a finger hard on a trigger. The only safe way. Medically proven.
The guy fell away from behind Maria Shevick like she was shucking off a big winter coat and letting it float to the floor. She was left standing alone, a yard from her husband, both of them mute and rigid. The crash of the shot died away to silence. The pink mist drifted down, infinitely slow.
Then the Jaguar showed up.
* * *
—
Reacher’s plan had been to present the hotel idea as a fun adventure, and then to top it off by handing over the ten grand in hundreds, all crisp and new and sweet smelling. It didn’t work out that way. Maria Shevick had blood and bone fragments in her hair. Aaron was shaky. He was an inch away from losing it. Vantresca took them out and sat them in the back of his Jaguar. Abby packed a bag for them. She went from room to room, grabbing up what she thought they would need. Reacher and Hogan carried the bodies out and put them in the Lincoln’s trunk, less their money, their guns, and their phones. Familiar work, by that point. Reacher gave Vantresca cash from Gezim Hoxha’s potato-shaped wallet, to pay for the Shevicks’ hotel room. Vantresca said he would drive them there and check them in. He would ride upstairs with them and settle them down. Reacher said the other four would stay behind and deal with the Lincoln.
“What do we do with it?” Barton asked.
“Drive it,” Reacher said.
“Where?”
“You have a gig. We need to go get your van and load up your stuff.”
“With them in the trunk?”
“You ever been on a plane?”
“Sure.”
“There was probably a coffin in the baggage hold. Dead people are forever getting repatriated.”
“You know the gig is west of Center.”
Reacher nodded.
“In a lounge,” he said. “With a guy on the door.”
Chapter 38
Barton’s van was stored on a vacant lot behind a razor wire fence with a chained gate. He and Hogan got it out and Reacher and Abby followed them back to the house in the Lincoln. The van was a beat-up third-hand soccer mom vehicle, with the rear seats taken out and the windows covered over with black plastic. Reacher helped them load it. He had done many odd jobs since leaving the army, but he had never been a rock’n’roll roadie before. He carried Barton’s lethal Precision in a hard-shell case, plus a back-up instrument, plus an amplifier head the size of a rich man’s suitcase, and then finally the huge eight-speaker cabinet. He carried Hogan’s disassembled drum kit. He packed it all in.
Then he and Abby followed the van again, in the Lincoln,