Without Fail

They were useful-sized guys, short but wide, dressed pretty much alike in blue peacoats and gray denim pants. They both had hats. Little knitted watch caps made from gray wool, jammed down over meaty heads. Clearly they knew how to dress for the climate. They had their hands in their pockets, so he couldn’t tell whether they had gloves to match. Their pockets were high on their coats, so their elbows were forced outward. They both wore heavy boots, the sort of things a steelworker or a stevedore might choose. They were both a little bowlegged, or maybe they were just attempting an intimidating swagger. They both had a little scar tissue around their brows. They looked like fairground scufflers or dockyard bruisers from fifty years ago. Reacher glanced back and saw nobody behind him, all the way to Ireland. So he just stopped walking. Didn’t worry about putting his back against the rail.

The two men walked on and stopped eight feet in front of him and faced him head-on. Reacher flexed his fingers by his side, to test how cold they were. Eight feet was an interesting choice of distance. It meant they were going to talk before they tangled. He flexed his toes and ran some muscle tension up through his calves, his thighs, his back, his shoulders. Moved his head side to side and then back a little, to loosen his neck. He breathed in through his nose. The wind was on his back. The guy on the left took his hands out of his pockets. No gloves. And either he had bad arthritis or he was holding rolls of quarters in both palms.

“We got a message for you,” he said.

Reacher glanced at the pier rail and the ocean beyond. The sea was gray and roiled. Probably freezing. Throwing them in would be close to homicide.

“From that club manager?” he asked.

“From his people, yeah.”

“He’s got people?”

“This is Atlantic City,” the guy said. “Stands to reason he’s got people.”

Reacher nodded. “So let me guess. I’m supposed to get out of town, skedaddle, beat it, get lost, never come back, never darken your door again, forget I was ever here.”

“You’re on the ball today.”

“I can read minds,” Reacher said. “I used to work a fairground booth. Right next to the bearded lady. Weren’t you guys there too? Three booths along? The World’s Ugliest Twins?”

The guy on the right took his hands out of his pockets. He had the same neuralgic pain in his knuckles, or else a couple more rolls of quarters. Reacher smiled. He liked rolls of quarters. Good old-fashioned technology. And they implied the absence of firearms. Nobody clutches rolls of coins if they’ve got a gun in their pocket.

“We don’t want to hurt you,” the guy on the right said.

“But you got to go,” the guy on the left said. “We don’t need people interfering in this town’s economic procedures.”

“So take the easy way out,” the guy on the right said. “Let us walk you to the bus depot. Or the old folk could wind up getting hurt, too. And not just financially.”

Reacher heard an absurd voice in his head: straight from his childhood, his mother saying please don’t fight when you’re wearing new clothes. Then he heard a boot-camp unarmed-combat instructor saying hit them fast, hit them hard, and hit them a lot. He flexed his shoulders inside his coat. Suddenly felt very grateful to the woman in the store for making him take the bigger size. He gazed at the two guys, exactly nothing in his eyes except a little amusement and a lot of absolute self-confidence. He moved a little to his left, and they rotated with him. He moved a little closer to them, tightening the triangle. He raised his hand and smoothed his hair where the wind was disturbing it.

“Better just to walk away now,” he said.

They didn’t, like he knew they wouldn’t. They responded to the challenge by crowding in toward him, imperceptibly, just a fractional muscle movement that eased their body weight forward rather than backward. They need to be laid up for a week, he thought. Cheekbones, probably. A sharp blow, depressed fractures, maybe temporary loss of consciousness, bad headaches. Nothing too severe. He waited until the wind gusted again and raised his right hand and swept his hair back behind his left ear. Then he kept his hand there, with his elbow poised high, like a thought had just struck him.

“Can you guys swim?” he asked.

It would have taken superhuman self-control not to glance at the ocean. They weren’t superhuman. They turned their heads like robots. He clubbed the right-hand guy in the face with his raised elbow and cocked it again and hit the left-hand guy as his head snapped back toward the sound of his buddy’s bones breaking. They went down on the boards together and their rolls of quarters split open and coins rolled everywhere and pirouetted small silver circles and collided and fell over, heads and tails. Reacher coughed in the bitter cold and stood still and replayed it in his head: two guys, two seconds, two blows, game over. You’ve still got the good stuff. He breathed hard and wiped cold sweat from his forehead. Then he walked away. Stepped off the pier onto the boardwalk and went looking for Western Union.

He had looked at the address in the motel phone book, but he didn’t need it. You could find a Western Union office by feel. By intuition. It was a simple algorithm: stand on a street corner and ask yourself, is it more likely to be left or right now? Then you turned left or right as appropriate, and pretty soon you were in the right neighborhood, and pretty soon you found it. This one had a two-year-old Chevy Suburban parked on a fireplug right outside the door. The truck was black with smoked windows, and it was immaculately clean and shiny. It had three short UHF ante

“Jack Reacher?” she said.

He double-checked his memory, because he didn’t want to be wrong, although he didn’t think he was. Short fair hair, great eyes looking right at him, some kind of a quiet confidence in the way she held herself. She had qualities he would remember. He was sure of that. But he didn’t remember them. Therefore he had never seen her before.

“You knew my brother,” he said.

She looked surprised, and a little gratified. And temporarily lost for words.

“I could tell,” he said. “People look at me like that, they’re thinking about how we look a lot alike, but also a lot different.”

She said nothing.

“Been nice meeting you,” he said, and moved away.

“Wait,” she called.

He turned back.

“Can we talk?” she said. “I’ve been looking for you.”

He nodded. “We could talk in the car. I’m freezing my ass off out here.”

She was still for a second longer, with her eyes locked on his face. Then she moved suddenly and opened the passenger door.

“Please,” she said. He climbed in and she walked around the hood and climbed in on her side. Started the engine to run the heater, but didn’t go anywhere.

“I knew your brother very well,” she said. “We dated, Joe and I. More than dated, really. We were pretty serious for a time. Before he died.”

Reacher said nothing. The woman flushed.

“Well, obviously before he died,” she said. “Stupid thing to say.”