Tripwire

5

REACHER WAS FIRST out through the door, for a number of reasons. Normally he might have let Jodie go out ahead of him, because his generation still carried with it the last vestiges of American good manners, but he had learned to be wary about displaying chivalry until he knew exactly how the woman he was with was going to react. And it was her house, not his, which altered the dynamic anyway, and she would need to use the key to lock the door behind them. So for all those reasons he was the first person to step out to the porch, and so he was the first person the two guys saw.

Waste the big guy and bring me Mrs. Jacob, Hobie had told them. The guy on the left went for a snapshot from a sitting position. He was tensed up and ready, so it took his brain a lot less than a second to process what his optic nerve was feeding it. He felt the front door open, he saw the screen swing out, he saw somebody stepping onto the porch, he saw it was the big guy coming first, and he fired.

The guy on the right was in a dumb position. The screen creaked open right in his face. In itself it was no kind of an obstacle, because tight nylon gauze designed to stop insects is not going to do a lot about stopping bullets, but he was a right-handed guy and the frame of the screen was moving on a direct collision course with his gun hand as it swung around into position. That made him hesitate fractionally and then scramble up and forward around the arc of the frame. He grabbed it backhanded with his left and pulled it into his body and folded himself around it with his right hand swinging up and into position.

By then Reacher was operating unconsciously and instinctively. He was nearly thirty-nine years old, and his memory stretched back through maybe thirty-five of those years to the dimmest early fragments of his childhood, and that memory was filled with absolutely nothing except military service, his father’s, his friends’ fathers’, his own, his friends’. He had never known stability, he had never completed a year in the same school, he had never worked nine to five, Monday to Friday, he had never counted on anything at all except surprise and unpredictability. There was a portion of his brain developed way out of all proportion, like a grotesquely over-trained muscle, which made it seem to him entirely reasonable that he should step out of a door in a quiet New York suburban town and glance down at two men he had last seen two thousand miles away in the Keys crouching and swinging nine- millimeter pistols up in his direction. No shock, no surprise, no gasping freezing fear or panic. No pausing, no hesitation, no inhibitions. Just instant reaction to a purely mechanical problem laid out in front of him like a geometric diagram involving time and space and angles and hard bullets and soft flesh.

The heavy suitcase was in his left hand, swinging forward as he labored with it over the threshold. He did two things at once. First he kept the swing going, using all the new strength in his left shoulder to kick the case onward and outward. Second he windmilled his right arm backward and shoved Jodie in the chest, smashing her back inside the hallway. She staggered back a step and the moving suitcase caught the first bullet. Reacher felt it kick in his hand. He jerked it right to the end of its swing, leaning out into the porch like a hesitant diver over a cold pool, and it hit the left-hand guy a glancing blow in the face. He was half up and half down, crouching, unstable, and the blow from the case rolled him over and backward and out of the picture.

But Reacher didn’t see him go down, because his eyes were already on the other guy looping around the screen with his gun about fifteen degrees away from ready. Reacher used the momentum of the swinging suitcase to hurl himself forward. He let the handle pull out through his hooked fingertips and flip him into a dive with his right arm accelerating back past him straight out across the porch. The gun swung around and smacked him flat on his chest. He heard it fire and felt the muzzle blast sear his skin. The bullet launched sideways under his raised left arm and hit the distant garage about the same time his right elbow hit the guy in the face.

An elbow moving fast ahead of 250 pounds of diving body weight does a lot of damage. It glanced off the frame of the screen and caught the guy in the chin. The shock wave went back and up through the hinge of the jaw, which is a sturdy enough joint that the force was carried undiminished up into the guy’s brain. Reacher could tell from the rubbery way he fell across his back that he was out for a spell. Then the screen door was creaking shut against its spring and the left-hand guy was scrabbling sideways across the porch floorboards for his gun, which was skittering away from him. Jodie was framed in the doorway, bent double, hands clasped to her chest, gasping for breath. The old suitcase was toppling end over end out onto the front lawn.

Jodie was the problem. He was separated from her by about eight feet, and the left-hand guy was between the two of them. If he grabbed the skittering gun and lined it up to his right, he would be lined up on her. Reacher heaved the unconscious guy out of the way and threw himself at the door. Batted the screen back and fell inside. Dragged Jodie a yard into the hallway and slammed the door shut. It kicked and banged three times as the guy fired after him and dust and wood splinters blasted out into the air. He clicked the lock and pulled Jodie across the floor to the kitchen.

“Can we get to the garage?”

“Through the breezeway,” she gasped.

It was June, so the storm windows were down and the breezeway was nothing but a wide passage with floor- to-ceiling screens on both sides. The left-hand guy was using an M9 Beretta, which would have started the day with fifteen rounds in the box. He’d fired four, one into the suitcase and three into the door. Eleven left, which was not a comforting thought when all that stood between you and them was a few square yards of nylon mesh.

“Car keys?”

She fumbled them out of her bag. He took them and closed them into his fist. The kitchen door had a glass panel with a view straight through the breezeway to an identical door exactly opposite, which led into the garage.

“Is that door locked?”

She nodded breathlessly. “The green one. Green for garage.”

He looked at the bunch of keys. There was an old Yale, dotted with a smear of green paint. He eased the kitchen door open and knelt and eased his head out, lower than would be expected. He craned around, both ways. No sign of the guy waiting outside. Then he selected the green key and held it pointed out in front of him like a tiny lance. Pushed to his feet and sprinted. Checked and slammed the key into the hole and turned it and yanked it back out. Pushed the door open and waved Jodie across after him. She fell into the garage and he slammed the door behind her. Locked it and listened. No sound.

The garage was a large, dark space, open rafters, open framing, smelling of old motor oil and creosote. It was full of garage things, mowers and hoses and lawn chairs, but they were all old things, the belongings of a man who stopped buying new gizmos twenty years ago. So the main doors were just manual rollers that ran upward in curving metal tracks. No mechanism. No electric opener. The floor was smooth poured concrete, aged and swept to a shine. Jodie’s car was a new Oldsmobile Bravada, dark green, gold accents. It was crouched there in the dark, nose-in to the back wall. Badges on the tailgate, boasting about four-wheel drive and a V-6 engine. The four-wheel drive would be useful, but how fast that V-6 started would be crucial.

“Get in the back,” he whispered. “Down on the floor, OK?”

She crawled in headfirst, and lay down across the transmission hump. He crossed the garage and found the key to the door out to the yard. Opened it up and peered out and listened. No movement, no sound. Then he came back to the car and slid the key in and switched on the ignition so he could rack the electric seat all the way back to the end of its runners.

“I’ll be there in a minute,” he whispered.

Garber’s tool area was as tidy as his desk had been. There was an eight-by-four pegboard with a full set of household tools neatly arranged on it. Reacher selected a heavy carpenter’s hammer and lifted it down. Stepped out of the door to the yard and threw the hammer overarm, diagonally right over the house, to send it crashing into the undergrowth he had seen at the front. He counted to five to give the guy time to hear it and react to it and run toward it from wherever he was currently hiding. Then he ducked back inside to the car. Stood alongside the open door and turned the key, arm’s length. Fired it up. The engine started instantly. He dodged backward and flung the roller door up. It crashed along its metal track. He threw himself into the driver’s seat and smashed the selector into reverse and stamped on the pedal. All four tires howled and then bit on the smooth concrete and the vehicle shot backward out of the garage. Reacher glimpsed the guy with the Beretta, way off to his left on the front lawn, spinning to look at them. He accelerated all the way up the driveway and lurched backward into the road. Braked fiercely and spun the wheel and found drive and took off in a haze of blue tire smoke.

He accelerated hard for fifty yards and then lifted off the gas. Coasted to a gentle stop just beyond the