Items related to Running Blind (Jack Reacher)
Synopsis
Jack Reacher searches for an elusive killer responsible for the deaths of a number of women, who have nothing in common but the fact that they once worked for the military and had known Jack, and races against time to find a murderer who leaves no trace evidence at the scene of the crime
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Running Blind
By Lee ChildBrilliance Audio
Copyright © 2000 Lee ChildAll right reserved.
ISBN: 9781567403626
Chapter One
People say that knowledge is power. The more knowledge, the more power. Supposeyou knew the winning numbers for the lottery? All of them? Not guessed them, notdreamed them, but really knew them? What would you do? You would run to thestore. You would mark those numbers on the play card. And you would win.
Same for the stock market. Suppose you really knew what was going to go wayup? You're not talking about a hunch or a gut feeling. You're not talking about atrend or a percentage game or a whisper or a tip. You're talking about knowledge.Real, hard knowledge. Suppose you had it? What would you do? You would call yourbroker. You would buy. Then later you'd sell, and you'd be rich.
Same for basketball, same for the horses, whatever. Football, hockey, next year'sWorld Series, any kind of sports at all, if you could predict the future, you'd be homefree. No question. Same for the Oscars, same for the Nobel prize, same for the firstsnowfall of winter. Same for anything.
Same for killing people.
Suppose you wanted to kill people. You would need to know ahead of time howto do it. That part is not too difficult. There are many ways. Some of them are betterthan others. Most of them have drawbacks. So you use what knowledge you'vegot, and you invent a new way. You think, and you think, and you think, and youcome up with the perfect method.
You pay a lot of attention to the setup. Because the perfect method is not an easymethod, and careful preparation is very important. But that stuff is meat and potatoesto you. You have no problem with careful preparation. No problem at all. Howcould you, with your intelligence? After all your training?
You know the big problems will come afterward, How do you make sure you getaway with it? You use your knowledge. You know more than most people about howthe cops work. You've seen them on duty, many times, sometimes close-up. You knowwhat they look for. So you don't leave anything for them to find. You go through itall in your head, very precisely and very exactly and very carefully. Just as carefullyas you would mark the play card you knew for sure was going to win you a fortune.
People say that knowledge is power. The more knowledge, the more power. Whichmakes you just about the most powerful person on earth. When it comes to killingpeople. And then getting away with it.
Life is full of decisions and judgments and guesses, and it gets to the pointwhere you're so accustomed to making them you keep right on making themeven when you don't strictly need to. You get into a what if thing, and you startspeculating about what you would do if some problem was yours instead ofsomebody else's. It gets to be a habit. It was a habit Jack Reacher had in spades.Which was why he was sitting alone at a restaurant table and gazing at the backsof two guys twenty feet away and wondering if it would be enough just to warnthem off or if he would have to go the extra mile and break their arms.
It was a question of dynamics. From the start the dynamics of the city meantthat a brand-new Italian place in Tribeca like the one Reacher was in was goingto stay pretty empty until the food guy from the New York Times wrote it upor an Observer columnist spotted some celebrity in there two nights in a row.But neither thing had happened yet and the place was still uncrowded, whichmade it the perfect choice for a lonely guy looking to eat dinner near his girlfriend'sapartment while she worked late at the office. The dynamics of the city.They made it inevitable Reacher would be in there. They made it inevitable thetwo guys he was watching would be in there, too. Because the dynamics of thecity meant any bright new commercial venture would sooner or later get a visiton behalf of somebody wanting a steady three hundred bucks a week inexchange for not sending his boys in to smash it up with baseball bats and axhandles.
The two guys Reacher was watching were standing close to the bar, talkingquietly to the owner. The bar was a token affair built across the corner of theroom. It made a neat sharp triangle about seven or eight feet on a side. It wasnot really a bar in the sense that anybody was ever going to sit there and drinkanything. It was just a focal point. It was somewhere to keep the liquor bottles.They were crowded three-deep on glass shelves in front of sandblasted mirrors.The register and the credit card machine were on the bottom shelf. The ownerwas a small nervous guy and he had backed away into the point of the triangleand was standing with his backside jammed against the cash drawer. His armswere folded tight across his chest, defensively. Reacher could see his eyes. Theywere showing something halfway between disbelief and panic and they weredarting all around the room.
It was a large room, easily sixty feet by sixty, exactly square. The ceiling washigh, maybe twenty or twenty-five feet. It was made of pressed tin, sandblastedback to a dull glow. The building was more than a hundred years old, and theroom had probably been used for everything, one time or another. Maybe ithad started out as a factory. The windows were certainly large enough andnumerous enough to illuminate some kind of an industrial operation backwhen the city was only five stories tall. Then maybe it had become a store.Maybe even an automobile showroom. It was big enough. Now it was an Italianrestaurant. Not a checked-red-tablecloth and Mama's-sauce type of Italianrestaurant, but the type of place which has three hundred thousand dollarsinvested up front in bleached avant-garde decor and which gives you seven oreight handmade ravioli parcels on a large plate and calls them a meal. Reacherhad eaten there ten times in the four weeks it had been open and he always leftfeeling hungry. But the quality was so good he was telling people about it, whichreally had to mean something, because Reacher was no kind of a gourmet. Theplace was named Mostro's, which as far as he understood Italian translated asmonster's. He wasn't sure what the name referred to. Certainly not the size ofthe portions. But it had some kind of a resonance, and the whole place with itspale maple and white walls and dull aluminum accents was an attractive space.The people who worked there were amiable and confident. There were wholeoperas played beginning to end through excellent loudspeakers placed high onthe walls. In Reacher's inexpert opinion he was watching the start of a big reputation.
But the big reputation was obviously slow to spread. The spare avant-gardedecor made it OK to have only twenty tables in a sixty-by-sixty space, but infour weeks he had never seen more than three of them occupied. Once he hadbeen the only customer during the whole ninety-minute span he spent in theplace. Tonight there was just one other couple eating, five tables away. Theywere sitting face-to-face across from each other, side-on to him. The guy wasmedium-sized and sandy. Short sandy hair, fair mustache, light brown suit,brown shoes. The woman was thin and dark, in a skirt and a jacket. There wasan imitation-leather briefcase resting against the table leg next to her right foot.They were both maybe thirty-five and looked tired and worn and slightlydowdy. They were comfortable enough together, but they weren't talkingmuch.
The two guys at the bar were talking. That was for sure. They were leaningover, bending forward from the waist, talking fast and persuading hard. Theowner was against the register, bending backward by an equal amount. It waslike the three of them were trapped in a powerful gale blowing through theroom. The two guys were a lot bigger than medium-sized. They were dressedin identical dark wool coats which gave them breadth and bulk. Reacher couldsee their faces in the dull mirrors behind the liquor bottles. Olive skin, darkeyes. Not Italians. Syrians or Lebanese maybe, with their Arab scrappiness bredout of them by a generation of living in America. They were busy making onepoint after another. The guy on the right was making a sweeping gesture withhis hand. It was easy to see it represented a bat plowing through the bottles onthe shelf. Then the hand was chopping up and down. The guy was demonstratinghow the shelves could be smashed. One blow could smash them all, topto bottom, he was suggesting. The owner was going pale. He was glancing sidewaysat his shelves.
Then the guy on the left shot his cuff and tapped the face of his watch andturned to leave. His partner straightened up and followed him. He trailed hishand over the nearest table and knocked a plate to the floor. It shattered on thetile, loud and dissonant against the opera floating in the air. The sandy guy andthe dark woman sat still and looked away. The two guys walked slowly to thedoor, heads up, confident. Reacher watched them all the way out to the sidewalk.Then the owner came out from behind the bar and knelt down and rakedthrough the fragments of the broken plate with his fingertips.
"You OK?" Reacher called to him.
Soon as the words were out, he knew it was a dumb thing to say. The guyjust shrugged and put an all-purpose miserable look on his face. He cupped hishands on the floor and started butting the shards into a pile. Reacher slid outof his chair and stepped away from the table and squared his napkin on the tilenext to him and started collecting the debris into it. The couple five tables awaywas watching him.
"When are they coming back?" Reacher asked.
"An hour," the guy said.
"How much do they want?"
The guy shrugged again and smiled a bitter smile.
"I get a start-up discount," he said. "Two hundred a week, goes to four whenthe place picks up."
"You want to pay?"
The guy made another sad face. "I want to stay in business, I guess. But payingout two bills a week ain't exactly going to help me do that."
The sandy guy and the dark woman were looking at the opposite wall, butthey were listening. The opera fell away to a minor-key aria and the diva startedin on it with a low mournful note.
"Who were they?" Reacher asked quietly.
"Not Italians," the guy said. "Just some punks."
"Can I use your phone?"
The guy nodded.
"You know an office-supply store open late?" Reacher asked.
"Broadway, two blocks over," the guy said. "Why? You got business to attendto?"
Reacher nodded.
"Yeah, business," he said.
He stood up and slid around behind the bar. There was a new telephonenext to a new reservations book. The book looked like it had never been opened.He picked up the phone and dialed a number and waited two beats until it wasanswered a mile away and forty floors up.
"Hello?" she said.
"Hey, Jodie," he said.
"Hey, Reacher, what's new?"
"You going to be finished anytime soon?"
He heard her sigh.
"No, this is an all-nighter," she said. "Complex law, and they need an opinionlike yesterday. I'm real sorry."
"Don't worry about it," he said. "I've got something to do. Then I guess I'llhead back on up to Garrison."
"OK, take care of yourself," she said. "I love you."
He heard the crackle of legal documents and the phone went down. Hehung up and came out from behind the bar and stepped back to his table. Heleft forty dollars trapped under his espresso saucer and headed for the door.
"Good luck," he called.
The guy crouched on the floor nodded vaguely and the couple at the distanttable watched him go. He turned his collar up and shrugged down into hiscoat and left the opera behind him and stepped out to the sidewalk. It was darkand the air was chill with fall. Small haloes of fog were starting up around thelights. He walked east to Broadway and scanned through the neon for the officestore. It was a narrow place packed with items marked with prices on largepieces of fluorescent card cut in the shape of stars. Everything was a bargain,which suited Reacher fine. He bought a small labeling machine and a tube ofsuperglue. Then he hunched back down in his coat and headed north to Jodie'sapartment.
His four-wheel-drive was parked in the garage under her building. He droveit up the ramp and turned south on Broadway and west back to the restaurant.He slowed on the street and glanced in through the big windows. The placegleamed with halogen light on white walls and pale wood. No patrons. Everysingle table was empty and the owner was sitting on a stool behind the bar.Reacher glanced away and came around the block and parked illegally at themouth of the alley that ran down toward the kitchen doors. He killed the motorand the lights and settled down to wait.
The dynamics of the city. The strong terrorize the weak. They keep on at it,like they always have, until they come up against somebody stronger with somearbitrary humane reason for stopping them. Somebody like Reacher. He hadno real reason to help a guy he hardly knew. There was no logic involved. Noagenda. Right then in a city of eight million souls there must be hundreds ofstrong people hurting weak people, maybe even thousands. Right then, at thatexact moment. He wasn't going to seek them all out. He wasn't mounting anykind of a big campaign. But equally he wasn't about to let anything happenright under his nose. He couldn't just walk away. He never had.
He fumbled the label machine out of his pocket. Scaring the two guys awaywas only half the job. What mattered was who they thought was doing the scaring.A concerned citizen standing up alone for some restaurant owner's rightswas going to cut no ice at all, no matter how effective that concerned citizenmight be at the outset. Nobody is afraid of a lone individual, because a loneindividual can be overwhelmed by sheer numbers, and anyway sooner or latera lone individual dies or moves away or loses interest. What makes a big impressionis an organization. He smiled and looked down at the machine and startedto figure out how it worked. He printed his own name as a test and pinchedthe tape off and inspected it. Reacher. Seven letters punched through in whiteon a blue plastic ribbon, a hair over an inch long. That was going to make thefirst guy's label about five inches long. And then about four, maybe four and ahalf for the second guy. Ideal. He smiled again and clicked and printed and laidthe finished ribbons on the seat next to him. They had adhesive on the backunder a peel-off paper strip, but he needed something better than that, whichis why he had bought the superglue. He unscrewed the cap off the tiny tubeand pierced the metal foil with the plastic spike and filled the nozzle ready foraction. He put the cap back on and dropped the tube and the labels into hispocket. Then he got out of the car into the chill air and stood in the shadows,waiting.
The dynamics of the city. His mother had been scared of cities. It had beenpart of his education. She had told him cities are dangerous places. They're full oftough, scary guys. He was a tough boy himself but he had walked around as ateenager ready and willing to believe her. And he had seen that she was right.People on city streets were fearful and furtive and defensive. They kept theirdistance and crossed to the opposite sidewalk to avoid coming near him. Theymade it so obvious he became convinced the scary guys were always rightbehind him, at his shoulder. Then he suddenly realized no, I'm the scary guy.They're scared of me. It was a revelation. He saw himself reflected in store windowsand understood how it could happen. He had stopped growing at fifteenwhen he was already six feet five and two hundred and twenty pounds. A giant.Like most teenagers in those days he was dressed like a bum. The caution hismother had drummed into him was showing up in his face as a blank-eyed,impassive stare. They're scared of me. It amused him and he smiled and thenpeople stayed even farther away. From that point onward he knew cities werejust the same as every other place, and for every city person he needed to bescared of there were nine hundred and ninety-nine others a lot more scared ofhim. He used the knowledge like a tactic, and the calm confidence it put inhis walk and his gaze redoubled the effect he had on people. The dynamics ofthe city.
Fifty-five minutes into the hour he moved out of the shadows and stood onthe corner, leaning back against the brick wall of the restaurant building, stillwaiting. He could hear the opera, just a faint breath of sound coming throughthe glass next to him. The traffic thumped and banged through potholes on thestreet. There was a bar on the opposite corner with an extractor roaring andsteam drifting outward through the neon glare. It was cold and the people onthe sidewalk were hurrying past with their faces ducked deep into scarves. Hekept his hands in his pockets and leaned on one shoulder and watched the trafficflow coming toward him.
The two guys came back right on time in a black Mercedes sedan. It parkeda block away with one tire hard against the curb and the lights went out andthe two front doors opened in unison. The guys stepped out with their longcoats flowing and reached back and opened the rear doors and pulled ball batsoff the rear seat. They slipped the bats under their coats and slammed the doorsand glanced around once and started moving. They had ten yards of sidewalk,then the cross street, then ten more yards. They moved easily. Big, confidentguys, moving easily, striding long. Reacher pushed off the wall and met themas they stepped up onto his curb.
"In the alley, guys," he said.
Up close, they were impressive enough. As a pair, they certainly looked thepart. They were young, some way short of thirty. They were heavy, padded withthat dense flesh which isn't quite pure muscle but which works nearly as well.Wide necks, silk ties, shirts and suits that didn't come out of a catalog. The batswere upright under the left side of their coats, gripped around the meat of thewood with their left hands through their pocket linings.
"Who the hell are you?" the right-hand guy said.
Reacher glanced at him. The first guy to speak is the dominant half of anypartnership, and in a one-on-two situation you put the dominant one downfirst.
"The hell are you?" the guy said again.
Reacher stepped to his left and turned a fraction, blocking the sidewalk,channeling them toward the alley.
"Business manager," he said. "You want to get paid, I'm the guy who can doit for you."
The guy paused. Then he nodded. "OK, but screw the alley. We'll do itinside."
Reacher shook his head. "Not logical, my friend. We're paying you to stayout of the restaurant, starting from now, right?"
"You got the money?"
"Sure," Reacher said. "Two hundred bucks."
He stepped in front of them and walked into the alley. Steam was driftingup to meet him from the kitchen vents. It smelled of Italian food. There wastrash and grit underfoot and the crunch of his steps echoed off the old brick.He stopped and turned and stood like an impatient man bemused by theirreluctance to follow him. They were silhouetted against the red glare of trafficwaiting at the light behind them. They looked at him and looked at each otherand stepped forward shoulder to shoulder. Walked into the alley. They werehappy enough. Big confident guys, bats under their coats, two on one. Reacherwaited a beat and moved through the sharp diagonal division between the lightand the shadow. Then he paused again. Stepped back like he wanted them toprecede him. Like a courtesy. They shuffled forward. Came close.
He hit the right-hand guy in the side of the head with his elbow. Lots ofgood biological reasons for doing that. Generally speaking the human skull isharder than the human hand. A hand-to-skull impact, the hand gets damagedfirst. The elbow is better. And the side of the head is better than the front orthe back. The human brain can withstand front-to-back displacement maybeten times better than side-to-side displacement. Some kind of a complicatedevolutionary reason. So it was the elbow, and the side of the head. It was a shorthard blow, well delivered, but the guy stayed upright on rubber knees for a longsecond. Then he let the bat go. It slid down inside his coat and hit the groundend-on with a loud wooden clonk. Then Reacher hit him again. Same elbow.Same side of the head. Same snap. The guy went down like a trapdoor hadopened up under his feet.
The second guy was almost on the ball. He got his right hand on the bathandle, then his left. He got it clear of his coat and swung it ready, but he madethe same mistake most people make. He swung it way too far back, and heswung it way too low. He went for a massive blow aimed at the middle ofReacher's body. Two things wrong with that. A big backswing takes time to getinto. And a blow aimed at the middle of the body is too easy to defend against.Better to aim high at the head or low at the knees.
The way to take a blow from a bat is to get near, and get near early. Theforce of the blow comes from the weight of the bat multiplied by the speed ofthe swing. A mathematical thing. Mass times velocity equals momentum. Nothingyou can do about the mass of the bat. The bat is going to weigh exactly the samewherever the hell it is. So you need to kill the speed. You need to get close andtake it as it comes off the backswing. While it's still in the first split second ofacceleration. While it's still slow. That's why a big backswing is a bad idea. Thefarther back you swing it, the later it is before you can get it moving forwardagain. The more time you give away.
Reacher was a foot from it before the swing came in. He watched the arcand caught the bat in both hands, low down in front of his gut. A foot of swing,there's no power there at all. Just a harmless smack in the palms. Then all themomentum the guy is trying to put into it becomes a weapon to use againsthim. Reacher swung with him and jacked the handle up and hurled the guy offbalance. Kicked out at his ankles and tore the bat free and jabbed him with it.The jab is the move to use. No backswing. The guy went down on his kneesand butted his head into the restaurant wall. Reacher kicked him over on hisback and squatted down and jammed the bat across his throat, with the handletrapped under his foot and his right hand leaning hard on the business end.He used his left hand to go into each pocket in turn. He came out with an automatichandgun, a thick wallet, and a mobile phone.
"Who are you from?" he asked.
"Mr. Petrosian," the guy gasped.
The name meant nothing to Reacher. He had heard of a Soviet chess championcalled Petrosian. And a Nazi tank general of the same name. But neitherof them was running protection rackets in New York City. He smiled incredulously.
"Petrosian?" he said. "You have got to be kidding."
He put a lot of sneer in his voice, like out of all the whole spectrum of worrisomerivals his bosses could possibly think of, Petrosian was so far down thelist he was just about totally invisible.
"You're kidding us, right?" he said. "Petrosian? What is he, crazy?"
The first guy was moving. His arms and legs were starting a slow-motionscrabble for grip. Reacher crunched the bat for a second and then jerked it awayfrom the second guy's neck and used it to tap the first guy on the top of thehead. He had it back in place within a second and a half. The second guy startedgagging under the force of the wood on his throat. The first guy was limp onthe floor. Not like in the movies. Three blows to the head, nobody keeps onfighting. Instead, they're sick and dizzy and nauseous for a week. Barely able tostand.
"We've got a message for Petrosian," Reacher said softly.
"What's the message?" the second guy gasped.
Reacher smiled again.
"You are," he said.
He went into his pocket for the labels and the glue.
"Now lie real still," he said.
The guy lay real still. He moved his hand to feel his throat, but that was all.Reacher tore the backing strip off the label and eased a thick worm of glue ontothe plastic and pressed the label hard on the guy's forehead. He ran his fingerside to side across it, twice. The label read Mostro's has protection already.
"Lie still," he said again.
He took the bat with him and turned the other guy face upward with a handin his hair. Used plenty of glue and smoothed the other label into place on hisbrow. This one read don't start a turf war with us. He checked the pockets andcame out with an identical haul. An automatic handgun, a wallet, and a telephone.Plus a key for the Benz. He waited until the guy started moving again.Then he glanced back at the second guy. He was crawling up to his hands andknees, picking at the label on his head.
"It won't come off," Reacher called. "Not without taking a bunch of skinwith it. Go give our best regards to Mr. Petrosian, and then go to the hospital."
He turned back. Emptied the tube of glue into the first guy's palms andcrushed them together and counted to ten. Chemical handcuffs. He hauled theguy upright by his collar and held him while he relearned how to stand. Thenhe tossed the car key to the second guy.
"I guess you're the designated driver," he said. "Now beat it."
The guy just stood there, eyes jerking left and right. Reacher shook his head.
"Don't even think about it," he said. "Or I'll rip your ears off and make youeat them. And don't come back here either. Not ever. Or we'll send somebodya lot worse than me. Right now I'm the best friend you got, OK? You clear onthat?"
The guy stared. Then he nodded, cautiously.
"So beat it," Reacher said.
The guy with the glued hands had a problem moving. He was out of it. Theother guy had a problem helping him. There was no free arm to hold. He puzzledover it for a second and then ducked down in front of him and came backup between the glued hands, piggybacking him. He staggered away and pausedin the mouth of the alley, silhouetted against the glare of the street. He bentforward and jacked the weight onto his shoulders and turned out of sight.
The handguns were M9 Berettas, military-issue nine-millimeters. Reacherhad carried an identical gun for thirteen long years. The serial number on anM9 is etched into the aluminum frame, right underneath where Pietro Berettais engraved on the slide. The numbers on both guns had been erased. Somebodyhad used a round-tipped file, rubbing from the muzzle toward the trigger guard.Not a very elegant job of work. Both magazines were full of shiny copperParabellums. Reacher stripped the guns in the dark and pitched the barrels andthe slides and the bullets into the Dumpster outside the kitchen door. Then helaid the frames on the ground and scooped grit into the firing mechanisms andworked the triggers in and out until the grit jammed the mechanisms. Then hepitched them into the Dumpster and smashed the phones with the bats and leftthe pieces where they lay.
The wallets held cards and licenses and cash. Maybe three hundred bucksin total. He rolled the cash into his pocket and kicked the wallets away into acorner. Then he straightened and turned and walked back to the sidewalk, smiling.Glanced up the street. No sign of the black Mercedes. It was gone. Hewalked back into the deserted restaurant. The orchestra was blazing away andsome tenor was winding up to a heroic high note. The owner was behind thebar, lost in thought. He looked up. The tenor hit the note and the violins andcellos and basses swarmed in behind him. Reacher peeled a ten from the stolenwad and dropped it on the bar.
"For the plate they broke," he said. "They had a change of heart."
The guy just looked at the ten and said nothing. Reacher turned again andwalked back out to the sidewalk. Across the street, he saw the couple from therestaurant. They were standing on the opposite sidewalk, watching him. Thesandy guy with the mustache and the dark woman with the briefcase. They werestanding there, muffled up in coats, watching him. He walked to his four-wheel-driveand opened the door. Climbed in and fired it up. Glanced over hisshoulder at the traffic stream. They were still watching him. He pulled out intothe traffic and gunned the motor. A block away, he used the mirror and saw thedark woman with the briefcase stepping out to the curb, craning her head,watching him go. Then the neon wash closed over her and she was lost to sight.
Continues...
Excerpted from Running Blindby Lee Child Copyright © 2000 by Lee Child. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
(No Available Copies)
Search Books: Create a WantCan't find the book you're looking for? We'll keep searching for you. If one of our booksellers adds it to AbeBooks, we'll let you know!
Create a Want