Sometimes the trade was on foot, but the system was always the same. The boys were the cut-outs. They carried the money in and the packages out, and they were too young to go to trial. Reacher was watching them use three doorways in particular, spaced out along the block frontage. The center of the three was doing the busiest trade. About two-to-one, in terms of commercial volume. It was the eleventh building, counting up from the south corner. He pushed off the fence and turned east. There was a vacant lot ahead which gave him a glimpse of the river. The bridge soared over his head. He turned north and came up behind the buildings in a narrow alley. Scanned ahead as he walked and counted eleven fire escapes. Dropped his glance to ground level and saw a black sedan jammed into the narrow space outside the eleventh rear entrance. There was a boy of maybe nineteen sitting on the trunk lid, with a mobile phone in his hand. The back-door guard, one step up the promotion ladder from his baby brothers shuttling back and forward across the sidewalk.
There was nobody else around. The boy was on his own. Reacher stepped into the alley. The way to do it is to walk fast and focus on something way beyond your target. Make the guy feel like he’s got nothing to do with anything. Reacher made a show of checking his watch and glancing far ahead into the distance. He hustled along, almost running. At the last minute, he dropped his gaze to the car, like he was suddenly dragged back into the present by the obstacle. The boy was watching him. Reacher dodged left, where he knew the angle of the car wouldn’t let him through. He pulled up in exasperation and dodged right, turning with the pent-up fury of a hurrying man balked by a nuisance. He swung his left arm with the turn and hit the kid square in the side of the head. The kid toppled and he hit him again, right-handed, just a short-arm jab, relatively gentle. No reason to put him in the hospital.
He let him fall off the trunk lid unaided, to see how far away he’d put him. A conscious person will always break his fall. This kid didn’t. He hit the alley floor with a dusty thump. Reacher rolled him over and checked his pockets. There was a gun in there, but it wasn’t the sort of thing he was going to bear home in triumph. It was a Chinese.22, some imitation of a Soviet imitation of something that was probably useless to start with. He pitched it out of reach under the car.
He knew the back door of the tenement would be unlocked, because that’s the point of a back door when you’re doing a roaring trade about 150 yards south of Police Plaza. They come in the front, you need to be able to get out the back without fumbling for the key. He inched it open with his toe and stood gazing into the gloom. There was an inner door off the back hallway, leading to the right, into a room with a light on inside. It was about ten paces away.
No point in waiting. They weren’t about to take a dinner break. He walked ahead ten paces and stopped at the door. The building stank of decay and sweat and urine. It was quiet. An abandoned building. He listened. There was a low voice inside the room. Then an answer to it. Two people, minimum.
Swinging the door open and standing and taking stock of the scene inside is not the way to do it. The guy who pauses even for a millisecond is the guy who dies earlier than his classmates. Reacher’s guess was the tenement was maybe fifteen feet wide, of which three were represented by the hallway he was standing in. So he aimed to be the other twelve feet into the room before they even knew he was there. They would still be looking at the door, wondering who else was coming in after him.
He took a breath and burst through the door like it wasn’t there at all. It crashed back against the hinge and he was across the room in two huge strides. Dim light. A single electric bulb. Two men. Packages on the table. Money on the table. A handgun on the table. He hit the first guy a wide swinging roundhouse blow square on the temple. The guy fell sideways and Reacher drove through him with a knee in the gut on his way back to the second man, who was coming up out of his chair with his eyes wide and his mouth open in shock. Reacher aimed high and smacked him with a forearm smash exactly horizontal between his eyebrows and his hairline. Do it hard enough, and the guy goes down for an hour, but his skull stays in one piece. This was supposed to be a shopping trip, not an execution.
He stood still and listened through the door. Nothing. The guy in the alley was sleeping and the noise on the street was occupying the kids on the sidewalk. He glanced at the table and glanced away again, because the handgun lying there was a Colt Detective Special. A six-shot,.38-caliber revolver in blued steel with black plastic grips. Stubby little two-inch barrel. No good at all. Nowhere near the sort of thing he was looking for. The short barrel was a drawback, and the caliber was a disappointment. He remembered a Louisiana cop he’d met, a police captain from some small jurisdiction out in the bayou. The guy had come to the military police for firearms advice and Reacher had been detailed to deal with him. The guy had all kinds of tales of woe about the.38-caliber revolvers his men were using. He said you just can’t rely on them to put a guy down, not if he’s coming at you all pumped up on angel dust. He told a story about a suicide. The guy needed five shots to the head with a.38 to put himself away. Reacher had been impressed by the guy’s unhappy face and he had decided then and there to stay away from.38s, which was a policy he was not about to change now. So he turned his back on the table and stood still and listened again. Nothing. He squatted next to the guy he’d hit in the head and started through his jacket.
The busiest dealers make the most money, and the most money buys the best toys, which was why he was in this building, and not in one of the slower rivals up or down the street. He found exactly what he wanted in the guy’s left-hand inner pocket. Something a whole lot better than a puny.38 Detective Special. It was a big black automatic, a Steyr GB, a handsome nine-millimeter which had been a big favorite of his Special Forces friends through most of his career. He pulled it out and checked it over. The magazine had all eighteen shells in it and the chamber smelled like it had never been fired. He pulled the trigger and watched the mechanism move. Then he reassembled the gun and jammed it under his belt in the small of his back and smiled. Stayed down next to the unconscious guy and whispered, “I’ll buy your Steyr for a buck. Just shake your head if you’ve got a problem with that, OK?”
Then he smiled again and stood up. Peeled a dollar bill off his roll and left it weighted down on the tabletop under the Detective Special. Stepped back to the hallway. All quiet. He made the ten paces to the back and came out into the light. Checked left and right up and down the alley and stepped over to the parked sedan. Opened the driver’s door and found the lever and popped the trunk. There was a black nylon sports bag in there, empty. A small cardboard box of nine-millimeter reloads under a tangle of red and black jump leads. He put the ammunition in the bag and walked away with it. The pizza was waiting for him when he arrived back on Broadway.