Night School

Chapter 27

Reacher walked on and turned in at the alley. It was about three feet wide. Like a mean hallway in a cheap apartment. Up ahead was a rectangle of light. Morning shade, and sandstone colors. No people. They would be flat against the wall, either side of the alley mouth.

Reacher walked on in the dark, trailing his fingertips against the stone on both sides, to keep himself centered. His footsteps were loud, and a strange quacking echo came first off the walls and then off the roof. Up ahead nothing changed. Morning light, and painted concrete. Fleshy colors. Bright and clean. Bricks underfoot, like some of the sidewalks. No physical obstructions. No well heads or water pumps. All 1950s modernity.

Reacher walked on.

Then three paces from the end of the alley he broke into a run and burst out into the courtyard, moving fast, all the way to the center, where he jammed to a stop and spun around.

Eight guys.

All still pressed flat against the wall. All evidently expecting a more cautious approach. Four of them were the four from outside the bar, the first time. Germany is for Germans. They looked partially recovered. Three of the others looked similar, but as yet undamaged. And possibly older, on average. Possibly selected on merit. One had nothing in his hands. One had a baseball bat. One had a broken bottle. Brown glass, jagged, like a miniature crown. That guy would go down first, Reacher decided. The bat guy could wait. A bat was no use in a melee. The first four would hang back. Once bitten, twice shy. The decoy from the doorway wouldn’t fight at all. Not his job. So it would be three on one initially. Not a huge problem. After that, who knew.

The guy with the bat moved first. Which was dumb but predictable. It was the biggest weapon. It set the tone. But it was useless on the run. No one could get a hit while simultaneously sprinting down a track. Not Babe Ruth, not Joe DiMaggio, not Mickey Mantle. Not even Ted Williams at his finest. Wasted effort, but indicative of an attempt at tactics. The idea seemed to be the bat would knock Reacher down, and then the guy with the bottle would follow up, leaning down, jabbing and twisting. Which meant the bottle guy was on the move very early, just two steps behind the bat guy’s shoulder, ready for his moment of glory, looking for all the momentum he could get.

But momentum was a two-way street.

Reacher sidestepped the guy with the bat and met the guy with the bottle head on, two opposing masses colliding at high speed, like a wreck on the highway. Reacher was watching nothing but the bottle, which was out in front and coming up in a panic, toward his face, in the guy’s right hand. Which made it purely a question of approximate timing. Easier than hitting a baseball. Reacher swept his left forearm up, inside out, like a guy shooing a wasp at a picnic, and it hit the bottle guy’s right forearm somewhere along its length, so that the bottle’s trajectory was slammed up and out, harmlessly over Reacher’s left shoulder, which left time and space for Reacher’s right elbow to hook around and smash the guy full in the face, which because of all of the kinetic energy was more or less like a stick of dynamite going off in the guy’s mouth. He went down faster than gravity and Reacher turned and stomped on the bottle, so no one else could use it, and then he started back toward the guy with the bat, who had spun off uselessly behind him.

Reacher decided he wanted the bat.

The guy planted his feet and started to drop into a crouch, and started to pull the bat back, low, more like a tennis swing than a baseball swing, like setting up for a cautious two-handed backhand return of serve, or a long drive off a golf tee, all his momentum cocking back, and back, and back, ahead of eventually pulling the trigger when Reacher arrived within range. Which made it another question of approximate timing. The only way to defend against the swing of a bat was to get there early, ideally before the swing had even started, or worst case in its first foot or so, where it would still be weak and slow, no more than a soft lateral thump, like walking into a fence rail at night. Getting there early required sudden acceleration, which was not easy for a guy built like Reacher, but which came naturally on that occasion. Because of motivation. Because of the difference between a soft lateral thump and a broken femur or arm or ribs. Reacher exploded at the guy and got there three inches into the bat’s forward swing, which gave him time to catch its sweet spot in the meat of his palm, and jerk it away, and add his other hand, and stab the knob of the handle at the guy’s head like a rifle butt, and connect, like a ferocious punch through a single knuckle.

The guy went down sideways and Reacher spun around, looking for the next target, which presented itself immediately in the form of the third new guy rushing in, unarmed, his hands up and open as if he was aiming for a wrestling hold. Reacher swung the bat the wrong way around, like a bad switch hitter flailing at a high fastball, a swinging strike for sure, except the third new guy was a lot bigger than a baseball, so a perfect aim was not a crucial requirement. Anywhere between the chest and the head was a bull’s-eye. The elbow, the upper arm, the neck, the skull. Or all four at once, which is what happened. The guy brought his arm up to protect his head, and the bat caught his elbow, and his triceps, which impact smashed the heavy bone of his upper arm backward into the point of his jaw, where his neck met his skull. Which dropped him to his knees, but the lights stayed on. So Reacher swung again, this time properly right-handed, probably good enough for nothing more than a fly ball at a July Fourth picnic, but more than adequate against human biology. The guy rocked sideways and then flopped forward on his face.

By that point the clock in Reacher’s head told him the fight had been running a little over four seconds. The decoy from the doorway was still plastered against the wall. Not his business. The four sides of beef from the first bar were lumbering into action. They had broken raggedly from their concealed positions and were haphazardly placed. No rhyme or reason. Just random. Which was a problem. The first two would be easy. The third would not be difficult. But the fourth would be a problem. Reacher could see that. Time and space and movement. Like astronomy. Like planets on collision courses. Orbits and angles and relative speeds. The fourth guy would come pressing in before the third guy was down. No other possibility. It was in the way their centers of gravity were moving. There was no logical sequence beyond one, two, three. No matter where a person started.

All of which made Reacher regret he had told Neagley two minutes exactly. He still had a minute and fifty-five seconds to go. With no logical way of surviving. Against vengeful opposition. He should have left it to her discretion. She would have entered the alley as soon as she was sure attention was focused ahead, which meant right then she would be already waiting in the shadows of the alley’s mouth, watching, doing the same instinctive calculations he was doing, and therefore ready to step in and put a wrench in the fourth guy’s works.

A sergeant’s first duty is to keep her officer safe.

Maybe she had disobeyed him.

Which of course she had. He launched against the first two, using the bat like a fist, one, two, forehand, backhand, thinking ahead, lining up for the third guy, executing the pivot with speed and grace and economy, but even so the fourth guy came pressing in way too early, as predicted, just half a step behind, by blind luck timed to arrive just before the bat could start moving again.

But then the fourth guy disappeared. Like he had run full speed into a clothes rope. Like a special effect in a movie. One frame he was there, and the next he was gone. The third guy went down and behind him Reacher saw Neagley, following through from what looked like a roundhouse rabbit punch to the fourth guy’s throat.

The decoy from the doorway raised his hands.

Reacher said, “Thank you, sergeant.”

Neagley said, “You should have picked up the bottle. Better than the bat.”

Reacher walked over to the decoy and said, “Tell your boss to stop wasting my time. Tell him to come see me himself. One on one. I’ll walk him around the block. We’ll have an exchange of views.”

Then they left, back down the alley to the street, first Neagley, then Reacher. They stood in the sun and shrugged and straightened, and then they hustled back to the hotel.