The Hard Way

CHAPTER 8

REACHER HEADED SOUTH again, all the way back to Spring Street. Six blocks, moving fast, seven minutes. He found Gregory on the sidewalk outside the dull red door.

“Well?” Gregory said.

Reacher shook his head.

“Nothing,” he said. “Not a damn thing. Nobody showed up. It all turned to rat shit. Isn’t that what you SAS guys call it?”

“When we’re feeling polite,” Gregory said.

“The car is gone.”

“How is that possible?”

“There’s a back door,” Reacher said. “That’s my best guess right now.”

“Shit.”

Reacher nodded. “Like I said, rat shit.”

“We should check it out. Mr. Lane is going to want the whole story.”

They found an alley entrance two buildings west. It was gated and the gates were chained. The chains were secured with a padlock the size of a frying pan. Unbreakable. But reasonably new. Oiled, and frequently used. Above the gates was a single iron screen covering the whole width of the alley and extending twenty feet in the air.

No way in.

Reacher stepped back and looked left and right. The target building’s right-hand neighbor was a chocolate shop. A security screen was down over the window but Reacher could see confections the size of babies’ fists displayed behind it. Fakes, he guessed. Otherwise they would melt or go white. There was a light on in back of the store. He cupped his hands against the glass and peered inside. Saw a small shadowy figure moving about. He banged on the door, loud, with the flat of his hand. The small figure stopped moving and turned around. Pointed at something waist-high to Reacher’s right. There was a neatly engraved card taped to the door glass: Opening hours, 10 am-10 pm. Reacher shook his head and beckoned the small figure closer. It gave a little universal shrug of exasperation and headed his way. It was a woman. Short, dark, young, tired. She turned numerous complicated locks and opened the door against a thick steel chain.

“We’re closed,” she said, through the narrow gap.

“Department of Health,” Reacher said.

“You don’t look like it,” the woman said. And she was right. Reacher had looked convincing as a bum in a doorway. He didn’t look convincing as a city bureaucrat. So he nodded at Gregory, in his neat gray suit.

“He’s with the city,” he said. “I’m with him.”

“I was just inspected,” the woman said.

“This is about the building next door,” Reacher said.

“What about it?”

Reacher glanced behind her. A confectionery store full of luxury items that nobody really needs. Therefore, a fragile client base. Therefore, an insecure proprietor.

“Rats,” he said. “I’m the exterminator. We’ve had reports.”

The woman went quiet.

“You got a key for the alley gate?” Gregory asked her.

The woman nodded. “But you can use my back door if you want. That would be quicker.”

She took the door off the chain. Led them inside through air intense with the smell of cocoa. The front of the store was dressed up for retail, and there was a working kitchen in back. Ovens, just now warming up. Dozens of shiny trays. Milk, butter, sugar. Vats of melting chocolate. Steel work-surfaces. A rear door, at the end of a short tiled hallway. The woman let them out through it and Reacher and Gregory found themselves in a brick alley about wide enough for the kind of carts and trucks they had in 1900. The alley ran east to west across the block with a single gated exit on Thompson Street at one end and a right-angle dogleg to the gate they had already seen on Spring at the other. The target building looked just as bad from the back as it had from the front. Or maybe even worse. Less graffiti, more decay. Ice damage on the brickwork, moss from spilling gutters.

One ground floor window. And a back door.

It was the same dull red color as the front door, but it looked even more decrepit. It looked like a wooden core sheeted over with steel and last painted by some GI looking for work after Korea. Or after World War Two. Or World War One. But it had a modern lock, just one, a good solid deadbolt. The handle was an old-fashioned brass ball, black and pitted with age. Impossible to tell whether it had been touched within the last hour. Reacher grabbed it and pushed. The door gave an eighth-inch and then stopped dead against the lock’s steel tongue.

No way in.

Reacher turned back and headed for the chocolatier’s kitchen. She was squeezing molten chocolate out of a heavy linen bag through a silver nozzle, dotting a baking sheet with one squeeze every two inches.

“Want to lick the spoon?” she asked, watching him watching her.

“You ever seen anyone next door?” he asked back.

“Nobody,” she said.

“Not even coming and going?”

“Never,” she said. “It’s a vacant building.”

“Are you here every day?”

“From seven-thirty in the morning. I fire up the ovens first thing, and I turn them off at ten in the evening. Then I clean up and I’m out of here by eleven-thirty. Sixteen-hour days. I’m regular as clockwork.”

“Seven days a week?”

“Small business. We never rest.”

“Hard life.”

“For you, too.”

“Me?”

“With the rats in this town.”

Reacher nodded. “Who’s the owner next door?”

“Don’t you know?” the woman asked. “You’re with the city.”

“You could save me some time,” Reacher said. “The records are a mess.”

“I’ve got no idea,” the woman said.

“OK,” Reacher said. “Have a great day.”

“Check the building permits on the front window. They have a bunch of phone numbers on them. The owner’s probably listed. You should have seen the shit I had to list to get this place done.”

“Thanks,” Reacher said.

“Want a chocolate?”

“Not on duty,” he said.

He followed Gregory out of the front of the store and they turned right and checked the target building’s front window. It was backed with dark curtains. There were a dozen permits pasted to the glass. The glass was filthy with soot and the permits were dry and curled. All of them were long expired. But they still had phone numbers handwritten with a black marker pen, one number for each of the participants in the abandoned project. Architect, contractor, owner. Gregory didn’t write them down. Just took out his small silver cell phone and took a picture with it. Then he used it again, this time to make a call to the Dakota.

“Incoming,” he said.

He and Reacher walked west to Sixth Avenue and rode the C train eight stops north to 72nd Street. They came up into the daylight right next to Strawberry Fields. Walked into the Dakota’s lobby at eight-thirty exactly.

The woman who was watching the building saw them enter and made a note of the time.