The phone hit the floor. It sounded like the padlock. A loud wooden thump.
My last spent shell case ejected and raffled away across the room.
The twentieth guy went down in a clatter of limbs and head and gun, dead before he hit the boards, shot through the base of the brain.
A head shot. A hit. Not bad for my left hand. Except that I had been aiming for his centre mass.
Lila kept on moving. Gliding, swooping, ducking down.
She came back up with the dead guy's gun. Another Sig P220, another silencer.
Swiss manufacture.
A nine-round detachable box magazine.
If Lila was scrambling for the gun, it was the only one in the apartment. In which case it had been fired at least three times, through the ceiling.
Maximum six rounds left. Six versus zero.
Lila pointed the gun at me. I pointed mine at her.
She said, 'I'm faster.'
I said, 'You think?'
Way off to my left Svetlana said, 'Your gun is empty.'
I glanced at her. 'You speak English?'
'Fairly well.'
'I reloaded upstairs.'
'Bullshit. I can see from here. You're set to three-round bursts. But you fired only once. Therefore that was your last bullet.'
We stood like that for what seemed like a long time. The P220 was as steady as a rock in Lila's hand. She was fifteen feet from me. Behind her the dead guy was leaking fluid all over the floor. Svetlana was in the kitchen. There were all kinds of smells in the air. There was a draught from the open window. Air was moving in and stirring through the room and funnelling up the staircase and out through the hole in the roof.
Svetlana said, 'Put your gun down.'
I said, 'You want the memory stick.'
'You don't have it.'
'But I know where it is.'
'So do we.'
I said nothing.
Svetlana said, 'You don't have it but you know where it is. Therefore you employed a deductive process. Do you think you are uniquely talented? Do you think that deductive processes are unavailable to others? We all share the same facts. We can all arrive at the same conclusions.'
I said nothing.
She said, 'As soon as you told us you knew where it was, we set about thinking. You spurred us on. You talk too much, Reacher. You make yourself disposable.'
Lila said, 'Put the gun down. Have a little dignity. Don't stand there like an idiot, holding an empty gun.'
I stood still.
Lila dropped her arm maybe ten degrees and fired into the floor between my feet. She hit a spot level with and exactly equidistant between the toecaps of my shoes. Not an easy shot. She was a great markswoman. The floorboard splintered. I flinched a little. The Sig's silencer was louder than the H amp;K's. Like a phone book smashed down, not dropped. A wisp of wood smoke drifted upward, where the friction of the bullet had burned the pine. The spent shell case ejected in a brassy arc and tinkled away.
Five rounds left.
Lila said, 'Put the gun down.'
I looped the strap up over my head. Held the gun by the grip down by my side. It was no longer any use to me, except as a seven-pound metal club. And I doubted that I would get near enough to either one of them for a club to be effective. And if I did, I would prefer bare-knuckle hand-to-hand combat. A seven-pound metal club is good. But a 250-pound human club is better.
Svetlana said, 'Throw it over here. But carefully. If you hit one of us, you die.'
I swung the gun slowly and let it go. It cartwheeled lazily through the air and bounced off its muzzle and clattered against the far wall.
Svetlana said, 'Now take off your jacket.'
Lila pointed her gun at my head.
I complied. I shrugged the jacket off and threw it across the room. It landed next to the MP5. Svetlana came out from behind the kitchen counter and rooted through the pockets. She found the nine loose Parabellum rounds and the part-used roll of duct tape. She stood the nine loose rounds upright on the counter, in a neat little line. She put the roll of tape next to it.
She said, 'Glove.'
I complied. I bit the glove off and tossed it after the jacket.
'Shoes and socks.'
I hopped from foot to foot and leaned back against the wall to steady myself and undid my laces and eased my shoes off and peeled my socks down. I threw them one after the other towards the pile.
Lila said, 'Take your shirt off.'
I said, 'I will if you will.'
She dropped her arm ten degrees and put another round into the floor between my feet. The bang of the silencer, the splintering wood, the smoke, the hard tinkle of the spent case.
Four left.
Lila said, 'Next time I'll shoot you in the leg.'
Svetlana said, 'Your shirt.'
So for the second time in five hours I peeled my T-shirt off at a woman's request. I kept my back against the wall and threw the shirt overhand into the pile. Lila and Svetlana spent a moment looking at my scars. They seemed to like them. Especially the shrapnel wound. The tip of Lila's tongue came out, pink and moist and pointed between her lips.
Svetlana said, 'Now your pants.'
I looked at Lila and said, 'I think your gun is empty.'
She said, 'It isn't. I have four left. Two legs and two arms.'
Svetlana said, 'Take your pants off.'
I unbuttoned. I unzipped. I pushed the stiff denim down. I stepped out. I kept my back against the wall and kicked the pants towards the pile. Svetlana picked them up. Went through the pockets. Made a mound of my possessions on the kitchen counter next to the nine loose rounds and the roll of tape. My cash, plus a few coins. My old expired passport. My ATM card. My subway card. Theresa Lee's NYPD business card. And my clip-together toothbrush.
'Not much,' Svetlana said.
'Everything I need,' I said. 'Nothing I don't.'
'You're a poor man.'
'No, I'm a rich man. To have everything you need is the definition of affluence.'
'The American dream, then. To die rich.
'Opportunity for all.'
'We have more than you, where we come from.'
'I don't like goats.'
The room went quiet. It felt damp and cold. I stood there in nothing except my new white boxers. The P220 was rock steady in Lila's hand. Muscles like thin cords stood out in her arm. Next to the bathroom the dead guy continued to leak. Outside the window it was five o'clock in the morning and the city was starting to stir.
Svetlana bustled about and balled up my gun and my shoes and my clothes into a tidy bundle and threw it behind the kitchen counter. She followed it with the two hard chairs. She picked up my phone, and shut it off, and tossed it away. She was clearing the space. She was emptying it. The living room part of the studio was about twenty feet by twelve. I was backed up against the centre of one of the long walls. Lila tracked around in front of me, keeping her distance, pointing the gun. She stopped in the far corner, by the window. Now she was facing me at a shallow angle.
Svetlana went into the kitchen. I heard a drawer rattle open. Heard it close. Saw Svetlana come back.
With two knives.
They were long butcher's tools. For gutting or filleting or boning. They had black handles. Steel blades. Wicked wafer-thin cutting edges. Svetlana threw one of them to Lila. She caught it expertly by the handle with her free hand. Svetlana moved to the corner opposite her. They had me triangulated. Lila was forty-five degrees to my left, Svetlana was forty-five degrees to my right.
Lila twisted her upper body and jammed the P220's silencer hard into the angle where the front wall met the side. She found the catch at the heel of the butt with her thumb and dropped the magazine. It fell out and hit the floor in the corner of the room. Three rounds showed in the slot. Therefore one was still chambered. She threw the gun itself into the other corner, behind Svetlana. The gun and the magazine were now twenty feet apart, one behind one woman, and the other behind the other.