The Hard Way

“When will they call?” Lane asked.

“Drive time plus argument time,” Reacher said. “Late afternoon, early evening. Not before.”

Lane kept on swinging his chair through its tiny arc. He lapsed into silence. Then there was a quiet knock at the door and Gregory stuck his head in the room.

“I got what we need,” he said, to Reacher, not to Lane. “The building on Spring Street? The owner is a bankrupt developer. One of his lawyer’s people is meeting us there in an hour. I said we were interested in buying the place.”

“Good work,” Reacher said.

“So maybe you should revise what you said about a mirror on a stick.”

“Maybe I should. Maybe I will one day.”

“So let’s go.”

They were met at the 72nd Street curb by another new BMW 7-series sedan. This one was black. This time the driver stayed behind the wheel and Gregory and Reacher climbed in the back. The woman who was watching the building saw them go, and she noted the time.

CHAPTER 10

THE GUY FROM the bankrupt developer’s lawyer’s office was a reedy paralegal of about thirty. His suit pockets were bagged out from all the keys he carried. Clearly his firm specialized in distressed real estate. Gregory gave him an OSC business card and introduced Reacher as a contractor whose opinion he valued.

“Is the building habitable?” Gregory asked. “I mean, as of right now?”

“You worried about squatters being in there?” the reedy guy asked back.

“Or tenants,” Gregory said. “Or anybody.”

“There’s nobody in there,” the guy said. “I can assure you of that fact. No water, no power, no gas, capped sewer. Also, if I’m thinking of the right building, there’s another feature that makes it highly unlikely.”

He juggled his keys and unlocked the Thompson Street alley gate. The three men walked east together, behind the chocolate shop, to the target building’s red rear door.

“Wait,” Gregory said. Then he turned to Reacher and whispered, “If they’re in there, we need to think about how we do this. We could get them both killed right here.”

“It’s unlikely they’re in there,” Reacher said.

“Plan for the worst,” Gregory said.

Reacher nodded. Stepped back and looked up and checked the windows. They were black with filth and dusty black drapes were drawn tight behind them. Street noise was loud, even in the alley. Therefore, their approach thus far was still undetected.

“Decision?” Gregory asked.

Reacher looked around, pensive. Stepped up next to the lawyer’s guy.

“What makes you so sure there’s nobody in there?” he asked.

“I’ll show you,” the guy said. He shoved the key in the lock and pushed open the door. Then he raised his arm to stop Gregory and Reacher from crowding in too closely behind him. Because the feature that made current habitation of the building unlikely was that it had no floors.

The back door was hanging open over a yawning ten-foot pit. At the bottom of the pit was the original basement floor. It was knee-deep in trash. Above it was nothing at all. Just fifty feet of dark void, all the way up to the underside of the roof slab. The building was like a giant empty shoe box set on its end. Stumps of floor joists were faintly visible in the gloom. They had been cut off flush with the walls. The remains of individual rooms were still clearly delineated by patches of different wallpapers and vertical scars where interior partitions had been ripped out. Bizarrely, all the windows still had their drapes.

“See?” the lawyer’s guy said. “Not exactly habitable, is it?”

There was a ladder set next to the rear door. It was a tall old wooden thing. A nimble person could grasp the door frame and swing sideways and get on it and climb down into the basement trash. Then that person could pick his way forward to the front of the building and root through the garbage with a flashlight and collect anything that had fallen the thirteen feet from the letter slot above.

Or, a nimble person could be already waiting down there and could catch whatever came through the slot like a pop-up in the infield.

“Was that ladder always there?” Reacher asked.

“I don’t recall,” the guy said.

“Who else has keys to this place?” Reacher asked.

“Everyone and his uncle, probably,” the guy said. “This place has been vacant nearly twenty years. The last owner alone tried half a dozen different separate schemes. That’s half a dozen architects and contractors and God knows who else. Before that, who knows what went on? The first thing you’ll need to do is change the locks.”

“We don’t want it,” Gregory said. “We were looking for something ready to move into. You know, maybe a little paint. But this is off the charts.”

“We could be flexible on price,” the guy said.

“A dollar,” Gregory said. “That’s all I’d pay for a dump like this.”

“You’re wasting my time,” the guy said.

He leaned in over the yawning void and pulled the door closed. Then he relocked it and walked back up the alley without another word. Reacher and Gregory followed him out to Thompson Street. The guy relocked the gate and walked away south. Reacher and Gregory stayed where they were, on the sidewalk.

“Not their base, then,” Gregory said, clipped and British.

“Mirror on a stick,” Reacher said.

“Just a dead drop for the car keys. They must be up and down that ladder like trained monkeys.”

“I guess they must.”

“So next time we should watch the alley.”

“I guess we should.”

“If there is a next time.”

“There will be,” Reacher said.

“But they’ve already had six million dollars. Surely there’s going to come a point where they decide they’ve got enough.”

Reacher recalled the feel of the mugger’s hand in his pocket.

“Look south,” he said. “That’s Wall Street down there. Or take a stroll on Greene Street and look in the store windows. There’s no such thing as enough.”

“There would be for me.”

“For me, too,” Reacher said.

“That’s my point. They could be just like us.”

“Not exactly like us. I never abducted anyone. Did you?”

Gregory didn’t answer that. Thirty-six minutes later the two men were back in the Dakota, and the woman who was watching the building had made another entry in her log.