Personal

THIRTY-THREE

I picked up an armchair, fingers and thumbs dug hard into the soft upholstery, and I hoisted it in front of my face, holding it upside down at a forty-five-degree angle, leading with the stubby wooden legs, and I took two long strides and flung it at the window. The legs shattered the glass, very noisily, and the bulk of the thing bounced off the centre spine of the frame and fell back on the desk and ended up on its side on the floor. Noise, noise, noise.

Casey Nice stepped over close to the window, and I picked up the desk chair and went to the door to wait.

No point in us getting out the window, I had said. The alley leads nowhere. We need to bring the four guys back in the room.

And they came. Human nature. A sudden loud crash, obviously the window glass shattering, what else were they going to do? They were going to burst in, look around, hustle to the broken window, stick their heads out the hole, and look left and right.

The lock clicked, the door opened fast, and the first guy got part way in. He was the main man, who had done all the talking. I got my right hand on the back of his neck and helped him along, with a vicious backhand shove that sent him skittering towards Nice at the window. I can deal with numbers two, three and four, I had said. But number one is yours. Get the best jagged splinter you can find, wrap your hand in the old sweater, and stick the splinter in his eye.

Which I sincerely hoped she was doing, but I wasn’t watching, because at that point I was smashing the desk chair into the second guy’s head. Into it, not over it. Not like a saloon brawl in an old Western movie. Like a lion tamer in the circus. Because jabbing is better, like a punch, your whole moving bodyweight concentrated through the inch-square end of a leg. Mass and velocity, just like baseball, just like everything. I was aiming for a broken skull at the minimum, and instantaneous brain death at the maximum. I was hoping for an inch-square shard of bone punched right through into the soft tissue beyond. Which I might well have gotten. I couldn’t tell immediately. That would be a question for the autopsy. But either way, killed or just stunned, the guy went down like a sack. He was the guy who had driven us in the Skoda. I dropped the chair and ran right over him to get at the next two.

Two against one is never a problem, I had said. Don’t worry about me. Just look after the first guy. If the splinter doesn’t finish the job, slam him with the desk drawer, edge on, bridge of his nose, hard, and keep on slamming him until he goes quiet.

The third guy had slowed up dramatically, after seeing the fate of the first two unfold right in front of his eyes, and the fourth guy had crashed into him from behind, but the slapstick ended right there. The surprise was over, and they were not idiots. They reversed direction instantly, retreating and regrouping like they should. Neither one had a gun in his hand, which was a risk gone good. London was different. Guns were for special occasions, not routine. I was more worried about knives, because I don’t like them much, and Londoners do, apparently, but neither one had a knife out either. Not yet, anyway. No way of knowing what was still in their pockets.

The workshop floor was a cluttered space bigger than a basketball court, littered with tools and hoses, blocked here and there by cars and hoists, still lit by nothing more than electricity. The security shutter was still closed. The two guys ahead of me fanned out twenty feet, and then stopped and turned, and cast about, the third guy ducking left and picking up a tyre iron, the fourth guy ducking right and scooping a wrench off a bench. The third guy was one of the pair who had come out of the boxed-off room. The fourth guy was the one who had stepped out of the shadows and closed the security gate. They came back a step towards me, in unison, balanced easy, up on their toes, arms out, eyes on me, blank and unwavering. Not the worst I had ever seen. Tough lives, and perpetual conflict in their ancestral DNA, and maybe some military service, and maybe some guerrilla activity, and certainly the guts to muscle in on folks like Charlie White and Karel Libor and make a shady living in a foreign capital. They weren’t going to fall down in a dead faint if I shouted boo.

In my mind’s eye I could see Little Joey’s Bentley nosing through the traffic, but I figured I still had plenty of time. And there was no sense in rushing. Always better to let them come to you. Let them commit. Let them show you their moves, which shows you their weaknesses.

We stood there for most of a minute, which felt like a good long time, locked together in a silent unchanging triangle, all of us tense, all of us rocking a little, staying loose, staying limber, their eyes on me, my eyes between them, relying on peripheral vision only, while learning the territory, and judging angles, and mapping routes. The Skoda we had arrived in was on my left, and beyond it was a car up on a ramp, all black and dirty on its underside, and then there was an empty bay, and then there was a dusty sedan parked in a corner, with soft tyres and a front wing missing, and on the other side of the space were racks of components in soiled cardboard boxes, and tyres, some new and stickered, most not, and a wheel-balancing machine, and oil funnels, and drums full of old rags, and a sad stack of corroded mufflers waiting for disposal. Behind me was more of the same, plus the boxed-off room, where I heard a sudden soft whimper. Male or female, I couldn’t tell, and I didn’t look back.

The fourth guy moved. His wrench was a big handsome thing, dull steel, maybe a foot and a half long, with jaws each end two inches wide. For some kind of a big heavy-duty component, I guessed. A suspension bush, perhaps. Whatever that was. I knew nothing about cars. I knew some of the words, but not what they meant. The guy was holding the wrench like a hammer, and he raised it up, and he took a step forward. Whereupon the other guy should have rushed me, while I was distracted, but he didn’t. Maybe teamwork wasn’t on their agenda. Every man for himself. Which suited me fine. Two against one is never a problem, but no one likes to work harder than he needs to.

The guy took another step. The wrench was still raised like a hammer. I took a step forward in turn, because I wanted my subconscious mind to know for sure what was behind me, which had to be empty space if I had just stepped out of it. And because moving up is always better than moving back. It unsettles the other guy, just a little. He had a wrench, and he was holding it like a hammer, and he was advancing, so why wasn’t I retreating?

Come right ahead and find out, pal, I thought.

He kept on coming, with just a trace of uncertainty in his face, and beyond him his partner started moving too, just a step. Show time. I watched the guy with the wrench, watched his hips and his waist, waiting for the first small sign of imminent action, and I saw it coming, his legs bracing, his elbow rising an inch, his intention as plain as day. He was going to launch himself at me with the wrench raised high, and he was going to bring it down like a tomahawk, ideally on the top of my head, but no big deal if he missed, because he still had a target about a yard wide to aim at, my left shoulder, my head, my right shoulder. A busted collarbone would have worked for him just fine, at that point.

So I went for him first, a long, fast, skipping stride, like a boxer aiming to finish a helpless opponent, and in the space of a split second all his previous certainty disappeared, and he crashed out of an offensive mode into a defensive panic, his back arching a little, his elbow rising even higher, as if he felt now he needed to land an even more enormous blow. Which was his weakness. Blunt instruments require a backswing, which is purely wasted motion. At the critical time his weapon was moving in exactly the wrong direction.

I got the flat of my left palm on the underside of his elbow and pushed hard, exploiting his own momentum, forcing the backswing way further than he intended, bringing his upper arm past vertical, bringing the weight of the wrench scything down behind his back until it was about to hit him in the ass, whereupon I reached around behind him with my right hand and grabbed the wrench and twisted it and tore it clean out of his grasp. Which was not wasted motion. Taking the wrench away from him was the same thing as my own backswing. I swung it right back in immediately, high and hard and flat, and I caught him in the side of his jaw, just below his cheekbone, which must have smashed his upper back molars, assuming he had any, and the hinge of his jaw, and which must have jerked his brain around inside his skull like a jellyfish in a bell jar.

He went down sideways, like a tree, on his right shoulder, and I heard the breath oomph out of him, and I heard his right temple hit the floor. By which point I was already double-timing it over to his partner, pretty sure the guy wasn’t going to do the only thing that could have saved him. And he didn’t.

He didn’t throw the tyre iron at me. He held on to it, in a sudden defensive panic just like his friend, rearing back, arching away.

Game over, right there. One on one, me against him. I slipped the wrench through my hand until one end was tight in my palm, and I jabbed it at him like a sword, my arm now about five feet long, effectively. You could have scoured every rainforest in the world and found the lankiest baboon or orangutan ever born, and he would have had a shorter reach than me. The guy could flail away with his tyre iron to his heart’s content, and he wasn’t going to get it near me.

I said, ‘Where are Kott and Carson?’

He didn’t answer.

‘The two men the Romford Boys are hiding,’ I said. ‘Where are they?’

He didn’t answer.

I jabbed him with the wrench, in the chest, in and out real fast. The open jaws were sharp, evidently. He yelped and backed off a yard. I stepped forward a yard. I said, ‘Where are they?’

He didn’t know what I was talking about. That was clear. His eyes were truly blank. No evasion there. Maybe the two outfits were cooperating to a limited extent, but important information was still compartmentalized.

I said, ‘Where are the guns?’

He didn’t answer. But now there was evasion in his eyes. And resolve. He knew, but he wasn’t going to tell me.

Behind me I heard the same soft whimper and Casey Nice called out, ‘Reacher, hurry.’

So I did. I jabbed the guy with the wrench again, and he swung his tyre iron to fend it off, with a jarring clang, and I jabbed again, and he parried again, by that point putting all his focus on our respective above-the-waist activities, which was exactly where I wanted it, because it meant I was able to step in and kick him in the nuts with absolutely no impediment at all.

And it was a good kick. Mass and velocity, like baseball, like everything. The guy dropped his tyre iron, and folded forward and down, and tipped on to his knees, gasping and retching, hanging his head, kneeling there right in front of me. Which gave me plenty of time and space to pick my spot. I tapped him hard on the side of the head with the wrench, serious but not deadly, like a tennis player just warming up, and he rolled over on his side and lay still.

Then I hustled back to the boxed-off room, to see how Casey Nice was doing.