Running Blind

stretched back for the briefcase. Reacher saw pale hairs on his wrist. The strap of a watch. The guy flipped the case open and pulled out a sheaf of papers. He juggled a flashlight and played the beam over them. Reacher saw dense print and his own name in bold letters near the top of the first page.

“Search warrant,” the woman said to him. “For your house.”

The sandy guy ducked back out and slammed the door. The car went silent. Reacher heard footsteps through the fog. They grew faint. For a second the woman was backlit by the glare outside. Then she reached up and forward and clicked on the dome light. It was hot and yellow. She was sitting sideways, her back against the door, her knees toward him, resting her gun arm along the seatback. The arm was bent, with the elbow on the parcel shelf so the gun was canted comfortably forward, pointing at him. It was a SIG-Sauer, big and efficient and expensive.

“Keep your feet flat on the floor,” she said.

He nodded. He knew what she wanted. He kept his back against his own door and shoved his feet underneath the front seat. It put an awkward sideways twist in his body that meant if he wanted to start moving he would be slow enough at it to get his head blown off before he got anywhere.

“Hands where I can see them,” she said.

He straightened his arms and cupped his palms around the headrest on the seat in front of him and rested his chin on his shoulder. He was looking sideways at the SIG-Sauer’s muzzle. It was rock-steady. Beyond it her finger was tight on the trigger. Beyond that was her face.

“OK, now sit still,” she said.

Her face was impassive.

“You’re not asking what this is about,” she said.

It’s not about what happened an hour and seventeen minutes ago, he said to himself. No way was this all organized in an hour and seventeen minutes. He kept quiet and absolutely still. He was worried about the whiteness in the woman’s knuckle where it wrapped around the SIG-Sauer’s trigger. Accidents can happen.

“You don’t want to know what this is about?” she asked.

He looked at her, blankly. No handcuffs, he thought. Why not? The woman shrugged at him. OK have it your own way, she was saying. Her face settled to a stare. It was not a pretty face, but it was interesting. Some character there. She was about thirty-five, which is not old, but there were lines in her skin, like she spent time making animated expressions. Probably more frowns than smiles, he thought. Her hair was jet-black but thin. He could see her scalp. It was white. It gave her a tired, sickly look. But her eyes were bright. She glanced beyond him, out into the darkness through the car window, out to where her men were doing things in his house.

She smiled. Her front teeth were crossed. The right one was canted sideways and it overlaid the left one by a fraction. An interesting mouth. It implied some kind of a decision. Her parents hadn’t had the flaw corrected, and later neither had she. She must have had the opportunity. But she had decided to stick with nature. Probably the right choice. It made her face distinctive. Gave it character.

She was slim under her bulky coat. There was a black jacket that matched the skirt, and a cream blouse loose over small breasts. The blouse looked like polyester that had been washed many times. It spiraled down into the waist-band of the skirt. She was twisted sideways and the skirt was halfway up her thighs. Her legs were thin and hard under black nylon. Her knees were pressed together, but there was a gap between her thighs.

“Would you stop doing that, please?” she said.

Her voice had gone cold, and the gun moved.

“Doing what?” Reacher asked.

“Looking at my legs.”

He switched his gaze up to her face. “Somebody points a gun at me, I’m entitled to check them out head to toe, wouldn’t you say?”

“You like doing that?”

“Doing what?”

“Looking at women.”

He shrugged. “Better than I like looking at some things, I guess.”

The gun moved closer. “This isn’t funny, asshole. I don’t like the way you’re looking at me.”

He stared at her.

“What way am I looking at you?” he asked.

“You know what way.”

He shook his head.

“No, I don’t,” he said.

“Like you’re making advances,” she said. “You’re disgusting, you know that?”

He listened to the contempt in her voice and stared at her thin hair, her frown, her crooked tooth, her hard dried-up body in its ludicrous cheap businesswoman’s uniform.

“You think I’m making advances to you?”

“Aren’t you? Wouldn’t you like to?”

He shook his head again.

“Not while there are dogs on the street,” he said.

THEY SAT IN crackling hostile silence for the best part of twenty minutes. Then the sandy guy with the mustache came back to the car and slid into the front passenger seat. The driver’s door opened and a second man got in. He had keys in his hand. He watched the mirror until the woman nodded and then fired up the motor and eased past Reacher’s parked truck and headed out toward the road.

“Do I get to make a phone call?” Reacher asked. “Or doesn’t the FBI believe in stuff like that?”

The sandy guy was staring straight ahead, at the windshield.

“At some point within the first twenty-four hours,” he said. “We’ll make sure you’re not denied your constitutional rights.”

The woman kept the SIG-Sauer’s muzzle close to Reacher’s head all the way back to Manhattan, fifty-eight fast miles through the dark and the fog.

3

THEY PARKED UNDERGROUND someplace south of mid-town and forced him out of the car into a white- painted garage full of bright light and dark sedans. The woman turned a full circle on the concrete floor with her shoes scraping in the silence. She was examining the whole crowded space. A cautious approach. Then she pointed toward a single black elevator door located in a distant corner. There were two more guys waiting there. Dark suits, white shirts, quiet ties. They watched the woman and the sandy guy all the way in across the diagonal. There was deference in their faces. They were junior guys. But they were also comfortable, and a little proud. Like they were some kind of hosts. Reacher suddenly understood the woman and the sandy guy were not New York agents. They were visitors from somewhere else. They were on somebody else’s turf. The woman hadn’t examined the whole garage simply because she was cautious. She had done it because she didn’t know where the elevator was.

They put Reacher in the center of the elevator car and crowded in around him. The woman, the sandy guy, the driver, the two local boys. Five people, five weapons. The four men took a corner each and the woman stood in the center, close to Reacher, like she was claiming him as hers. One of the local boys touched a button and the door rolled shut and the elevator took off.

It traveled upward for a long time and stopped hard with 21 showing on the floor indicator. The door thumped back and the local boys led the way out into a blank corridor. It was gray. Thin gray carpet, gray paint, gray light. It was quiet, like everyone except the hard-core enthusiasts had gone home hours before. There were closed doors spaced along the corridor wall. The guy who had driven the sedan down from Garrison paused in front of the third and opened it up. Reacher was maneuvered to the doorway and looked in at a