called.
She appeared in the living room doorway. She was carrying a leather garment bag and she had changed out of her black funeral suit. Now she was in a pair of faded Levi’s and a powder blue sweatshirt with a small logo Reacher couldn’t decipher. She had brushed her hair, and the static had kicked a couple of strands outward. She was smoothing them back with her hand, hooking them behind her ear. The powder blue shirt picked up her eyes and emphasized the pale honey of her skin. The last fifteen years had done her no harm at all.
They walked through to the kitchen and bolted the door to the yard. Turned off all the appliances they could see and screwed the faucets tight shut. Came back out into the hallway and opened the front door.
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
She appeared in the living room doorway. She was carrying a leather garment bag and she had changed out of her black funeral suit. Now she was in a pair of faded Levi’s and a powder blue sweatshirt with a small logo Reacher couldn’t decipher. She had brushed her hair, and the static had kicked a couple of strands outward. She was smoothing them back with her hand, hooking them behind her ear. The powder blue shirt picked up her eyes and emphasized the pale honey of her skin. The last fifteen years had done her no harm at all.
They walked through to the kitchen and bolted the door to the yard. Turned off all the appliances they could see and screwed the faucets tight shut. Came back out into the hallway and opened the front door.
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
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