The fourth guy moved. His wrench was a big handsome thing, dull steel, maybe a foot and a half long, with jaws each end two inches wide. For some kind of a big heavy-duty component, I guessed. A suspension bush, perhaps. Whatever that was. I knew nothing about cars. I knew some of the words, but not what they meant. The guy was holding the wrench like a hammer, and he raised it up, and he took a step forward. Whereupon the other guy should have rushed me, while I was distracted, but he didn’t. Maybe teamwork wasn’t on their agenda. Every man for himself. Which suited me fine. Two against one is never a problem, but no one likes to work harder than he needs to.
The guy took another step. The wrench was still raised like a hammer. I took a step forward in turn, because I wanted my subconscious mind to know for sure what was behind me, which had to be empty space if I had just stepped out of it. And because moving up is always better than moving back. It unsettles the other guy, just a little. He had a wrench, and he was holding it like a hammer, and he was advancing, so why wasn’t I retreating?
Come right ahead and find out, pal, I thought.
He kept on coming, with just a trace of uncertainty in his face, and beyond him his partner started moving too, just a step. Show time. I watched the guy with the wrench, watched his hips and his waist, waiting for the first small sign of imminent action, and I saw it coming, his legs bracing, his elbow rising an inch, his intention as plain as day. He was going to launch himself at me with the wrench raised high, and he was going to bring it down like a tomahawk, ideally on the top of my head, but no big deal if he missed, because he still had a target about a yard wide to aim at, my left shoulder, my head, my right shoulder. A busted collarbone would have worked for him just fine, at that point.
So I went for him first, a long, fast, skipping stride, like a boxer aiming to finish a helpless opponent, and in the space of a split second all his previous certainty disappeared, and he crashed out of an offensive mode into a defensive panic, his back arching a little, his elbow rising even higher, as if he felt now he needed to land an even more enormous blow. Which was his weakness. Blunt instruments require a backswing, which is purely wasted motion. At the critical time his weapon was moving in exactly the wrong direction.
I got the flat of my left palm on the underside of his elbow and pushed hard, exploiting his own momentum, forcing the backswing way further than he intended, bringing his upper arm past vertical, bringing the weight of the wrench scything down behind his back until it was about to hit him in the ass, whereupon I reached around behind him with my right hand and grabbed the wrench and twisted it and tore it clean out of his grasp. Which was not wasted motion. Taking the wrench away from him was the same thing as my own backswing. I swung it right back in immediately, high and hard and flat, and I caught him in the side of his jaw, just below his cheekbone, which must have smashed his upper back molars, assuming he had any, and the hinge of his jaw, and which must have jerked his brain around inside his skull like a jellyfish in a bell jar.
He went down sideways, like a tree, on his right shoulder, and I heard the breath oomph out of him, and I heard his right temple hit the floor. By which point I was already double-timing it over to his partner, pretty sure the guy wasn’t going to do the only thing that could have saved him. And he didn’t.
He didn’t throw the tyre iron at me. He held on to it, in a sudden defensive panic just like his friend, rearing back, arching away.
Game over, right there. One on one, me against him. I slipped the wrench through my hand until one end was tight in my palm, and I jabbed it at him like a sword, my arm now about five feet long, effectively. You could have scoured every rainforest in the world and found the lankiest baboon or orangutan ever born, and he would have had a shorter reach than me. The guy could flail away with his tyre iron to his heart’s content, and he wasn’t going to get it near me.
I said, ‘Where are Kott and Carson?’
He didn’t answer.
‘The two men the Romford Boys are hiding,’ I said. ‘Where are they?’
He didn’t answer.
I jabbed him with the wrench, in the chest, in and out real fast. The open jaws were sharp, evidently. He yelped and backed off a yard. I stepped forward a yard. I said, ‘Where are they?’
He didn’t know what I was talking about. That was clear. His eyes were truly blank. No evasion there. Maybe the two outfits were cooperating to a limited extent, but important information was still compartmentalized.
I said, ‘Where are the guns?’
He didn’t answer. But now there was evasion in his eyes. And resolve. He knew, but he wasn’t going to tell me.
Behind me I heard the same soft whimper and Casey Nice called out, ‘Reacher, hurry.’
So I did. I jabbed the guy with the wrench again, and he swung his tyre iron to fend it off, with a jarring clang, and I jabbed again, and he parried again, by that point putting all his focus on our respective above-the-waist activities, which was exactly where I wanted it, because it meant I was able to step in and kick him in the nuts with absolutely no impediment at all.
And it was a good kick. Mass and velocity, like baseball, like everything. The guy dropped his tyre iron, and folded forward and down, and tipped on to his knees, gasping and retching, hanging his head, kneeling there right in front of me. Which gave me plenty of time and space to pick my spot. I tapped him hard on the side of the head with the wrench, serious but not deadly, like a tennis player just warming up, and he rolled over on his side and lay still.
Then I hustled back to the boxed-off room, to see how Casey Nice was doing.
THIRTY-FOUR
THE FIRST GUY was lying mostly on his back with a footlong shard of glass in his eye. Dead, for sure. I could tell by the limp shapelessness of his body. Unmistakable. Life had recently departed. There wasn’t much blood. Just a slow trickle, now stopped, hanging on his cheek like a fat red worm. Plus a thick clear liquid, which might have been the inside of his eyeball.
It was the second guy who was whimpering. The guy I had hit with the chair. He was on the floor in the doorway. His hair was all matted with blood, and there was a decent pool of it under his head. His eyes were closed. I didn’t think he was about to get up and give us any trouble. Not any time soon, anyway.
Casey Nice was backed up against the desk, looking somewhere halfway between shaky and resolute. I had asked Shoemaker, Has she operated overseas before? Has she operated anywhere before?
She had now.
I said, ‘You OK?’
She said, ‘I think so.’
‘You did a good job.’
She didn’t answer.
I said, ‘We need to search this place.’
She said, ‘We need to call an ambulance.’
‘We will. After we search. We need guns. That’s what we came for.’
‘They won’t be here. It was a decoy.’
‘How many secure locations do they have? I think the guns are here. I asked the last guy, and he got all worried.’
‘We don’t have time.’
I thought about Little Joey, in his Bentley. Nosing through the traffic. Red lights and gridlock. Or maybe not. I said, ‘We’ll be quick.’
She said, ‘We better be.’
We started by searching the main man’s pockets. I figured if he had a key, then we might be able to tell what kind of a lock we were looking for, and therefore where we might find it. A safe key would look different than a door key, which would look different than a locker key. And so on, and so forth. But all he had was a car key. It was a grimy old item on a creased leather fob that had Ealing Taxis printed on it in flaking gold leaf. Possibly one of the battered sedans in the shop was his. He had cash money too, spoils of war, which I added to our treasury. And a cell phone, which I put in my pocket. But he had nothing else of interest.