“Your receipt is in here,” he said. “That’s all you need to know.”
“I could have Fisnik coming after me tomorrow.”
“I told you two times already, yesterday you were Fisnik’s, today you are mine. Tomorrow you will still be mine. Fisnik is history. Fisnik is gone. Things change. How much do you owe?”
“I don’t know,” Reacher said. “I depended on Fisnik to tell me. He had a formula.”
“What formula?”
“For the fees and the penalties and the add-ons. Rounded up to the nearest hundred, plus another five hundred as an administrative charge. That was his rule. I could never work it out right. I didn’t want him to think I was shortchanging him. I preferred to pay what he told me. Safer that way.”
“How much do you think it should be?”
“This time?”
“As your final payment.”
“I wouldn’t want you to think I was shortchanging you, either. Not if you inherited Fisnik’s business. I assume the same terms apply.”
“Give it to me both ways,” the guy said. “What you figure, and then what you think Fisnik’s formula would figure. Maybe I’ll cut you a break. Maybe we’ll split the difference. As an introductory offer.”
“I figure eight hundred dollars,” Reacher said. “But Fisnik would probably figure fourteen hundred. Like I told you. Rounded up to the nearest hundred plus five as a charge.”
The guy squinted down at his book.
He nodded, slowly, sagely, in complete agreement.
“But no break,” he said. “I decided against. I’ll take the full fourteen hundred.”
He closed his book and laid it flat on the table.
Reacher put his hand in his pocket and his thumb in the envelope and peeled fourteen bills off the back of Shevick’s wad. He handed them over. The pale guy recounted them with fast practiced fingers, folded them once, and put them in his own pocket.
“Are we good now?” Reacher asked.
“Paid off in full,” the guy said.
“Receipt?”
The guy tapped the side of his head again.
“Now get lost,” he said. “Until the next time.”
“The next time what?” Reacher said.
“You need a loan.”
“I hope not to.”
“Losers like you always do. You know where to find me.”
Reacher paused a beat.
“Yes,” he said. “I do. Count on it.”
He stayed where he was for a long moment, and then he got up out of the visitor chair and walked away, slowly, eyes front, all the way out the door to the sidewalk.
A minute later Shevick limped out after him.
“We need to talk,” Reacher said.
Chapter 6
Shevick still had a cell phone. He said he hadn’t sold it because it was an old flip worth close to nothing, and he was still using it because canceling his plan would have cost more than continuing it. Plus there were times he really needed it. Reacher told him this was one of those times. He told him to call a cab. Shevick said he couldn’t afford a cab. Reacher told him yes he could, just this once.
The cab that came was an old beat-up Crown Vic, thick with orange-peel paint, with a cop-car spotlight on the driver’s pillar and a taxi light strapped to the roof. Not an appealing vehicle, visually. But it worked OK. It wallowed and whined the mile to Shevick’s house and pulled up outside. Reacher helped Shevick down the narrow concrete path to his door. Once again it opened before the guy could get his key in the lock. Mrs. Shevick stared out at him. There were silent questions in her face. A taxi? For your knee? Then why did the big man come back, too?
And above alclass="underline" Do we owe another thousand dollars?
“It’s complicated again,” Shevick said.
They went back to the kitchen. The stove was cold. No dinner. They had already eaten once that day. They all sat down at the table. Shevick told his part of the story. No Fisnik. A substitute instead. A sinister pale stranger with a big black book. Then Reacher’s offer to be a go-between.
Mrs. Shevick switched her gaze to Reacher.
Who said, “I’m pretty sure he was Ukrainian. He had a prison tattoo on his neck. Cyrillic alphabet, certainly.”
“I don’t think Fisnik was Ukrainian,” Mrs. Shevick said. “Fisnik is an Albanian name. I looked it up at the library.”
“He said Fisnik had been replaced. He said whatever business anyone had with Fisnik, now they had it with him. He said Fisnik’s clients were now his clients. He said if you owed money to Fisnik, now you owed it to him. He made the same kind of point several times over. He said it wasn’t rocket science.”
“Did he want another thousand dollars?”
“He propped his book open so close to his chest it was awkward. At first I wasn’t sure why. I assumed he didn’t want me to see what was in it. He asked my name, and I said Aaron Shevick. He looked down at his book and nodded. Which I thought was weird.”
“Why?”
“What were the odds the book happened to be propped open at the S page? One in twenty-six. Possible, but unlikely. So then I started to think he was hiding the book not because he didn’t want me to see what was in it, but because he didn’t want me to see what wasn’t in it. Because there was nothing in it. It was blank. That was my guess. Then he proved it. He asked me how much I owed. He didn’t know. He didn’t have Fisnik’s previous data. It wasn’t Fisnik’s old ledger. It was a new blank book.”
“What does all that mean?”
“It means this wasn’t a routine internal reorganization. They didn’t bench Fisnik and send in a pinch hitter. It was a hostile takeover from the outside. There’s a whole new management now. I went back through the guy’s words. His use of language. He made it clear. Someone else is muscling in.”
“Wait,” Mrs. Shevick said. “I heard it on the radio. Last week, I think. We’re getting a new police commissioner. He says we have rival Ukrainian and Albanian gangs in town.”
Reacher nodded.
“There you go,” he said. “The Ukrainians are moving in on a part of the Albanians’ business. You’re dealing with new people now.”
“Did they want the extra thousand dollars?”
“They’re looking ahead, not back in the past. They’re prepared to write off Fisnik’s old loans. All or part. Because they have to. They have no choice. They don’t know what anyone owes. They don’t have the information. And why wouldn’t they write it off anyway? It wasn’t their money. They want his customers. That’s all. For the future. They want to service their needs for the next many years.”
“Did you pay the man?”
“He asked what I owed and I took a chance and told him fourteen hundred dollars. He looked down at his blank page and nodded solemnly and agreed. So I paid him fourteen hundred dollars. At which point he said I was good to go and he confirmed I was paid off in full.”
“Where’s the rest of the money?”
“Right here,” Reacher said. He took the envelope out of his pocket. Barely thinner than it was before. Still two hundred eleven bills in it. Twenty-one thousand one hundred dollars. He put it on the table, in the middle, equidistant. Shevick and his wife stared at it and said nothing.
Reacher said, “This is a random universe. Once in a blue moon things turn out just right. Like now. Someone started a war and you’re the exact opposite of collateral damage.”
Shevick said, “Not if Fisnik shows up next week wanting all this plus seven grand more.”
“He won’t,” Reacher said. “Fisnik has been replaced. Which coming from a Ukrainian gangster with prison ink on his neck almost certainly means Fisnik is dead. Or otherwise incapacitated. He won’t be showing up next week. Or any week. And you’re all squared away with the new guys. They said so. You’re out of the woods.”
There was silence for a long moment.
Mrs. Shevick looked at Reacher.
“Thank you,” she said.
Then Shevick’s cell phone rang. He limped out to the hallway and took the call. Reacher heard a faint plastic quack from the earpiece. A man’s voice, he thought. He couldn’t make out the words. Some long stream of information. He heard Shevick reply, loud and clear, ten feet away, with a muttered assent that sounded weary and unsurprised, yet still disappointed. Then Shevick asked what was unmistakably a question.