"I heard there's a first-aid station at the plant."
"That's right."
"With an ambulance."
"An old one. It's a big plant. It covers a big area."
"Are there a lot of accidents?"
"It's an industrial operation. Shit happens."
"Does the plant pay disability?"
"Mr. Thurman looks after people if they get hurt on the job."
Reacher nodded and sipped his beer. Watched the other customers sipping theirs, directly and in the mirrors.Three minutes, he thought.
Unless they're early.
Which they were.
Reacher looked to his right and saw two deputies step in through the fire door. He glanced in a mirror and saw the other two walk in the front.
29
The telephone. A useful invention, and instructive in the way it was used. Or not used. Four deputies heading east to make a surprise arrest would not tip their hand with a courtesy telephone call. Not in the real world. They would swoop down unannounced. They would aim to grab up their prey unawares. Therefore their courtesy call was a decoy. It was a move in a game. A move designed to flush Reacher westward into safer territory. It was an invitation.
Which Reacher had interpreted correctly.
And accepted.
And the bartender had not called the station house. Had not gotten voice mail. Had not made a local call at all. He had dialed too many digits. He had called a deputy's cell, and spoken just long enough to let the deputy know who he was, and therefore where Reacher was. Whereupon he had changed his attitude and turned talkative and friendly, to keep Reacher sitting tight. Like he had been told to, beforehand, should the opportunity arise.
Which is why Reacher had not left the bar. If the guy wanted to participate, he was welcome to. He could participate by cleaning up the mess.
And there was going to be a mess.
That was for damn sure.
The deputies who had come in the back walked through the short corridor past the restrooms and stopped where the main room widened out. Reacher kept his eyes on them. Didn't turn his head. A two-front attack was fairly pointless in a room full of mirrors. He could see the other guys quite clearly, smaller than life and reversed. They had stopped a yard inside the front door and were standing shoulder to shoulder, waiting.
The big guy who had thrown up the night before was one of the pair that had come in the front. With him was the guy Reacher had smacked outside the family restaurant. Neither one of them looked in great shape. The two who had come in the back looked large and healthy enough, but manageable. Four against one, but no real cause for concern. Reacher had first fought four-on-one when he was five years old, against seven-year-olds, on his father's base in the Philippines. He had won then, easily, and he expected to win now.
But then the situation changed.
Two guys stood up from the body of the room. They put their glasses down and dabbed their lips with napkins and scraped their chairs back and stepped forward and separated. One went left, and one went right. One lined up with the guys in back, and one lined up with the guys in front. The newcomers were not the biggest people Reacher had ever seen, but they weren't the smallest, either. They could have been the deputies' brothers or cousins. They probably were. They were dressed the same and looked the same and were built the same.
So, thirteen minutes previously the bartender had not been glancing into the room in hopes of immediate short-term assistance. He had been catching the ringers' eyes and tipping them off:Stand by, the others are on their way. Reacher clamped his jaw and the beer in his stomach went sour.Mistake. A bad one. He had been smart, but not smart enough.
And now he was going to pay, big time.
Six against one.
Twelve hundred pounds against two-fifty.
No kind of excellent odds.
He realized he was holding his breath. He exhaled, long and slow. Because:Dum spero speri. Where there's breath, there's hope. Not an aphorism Zeno of Cittium would have understood or approved of. Zeno spoke Greek, not Latin, and preferred passive resignation to reckless optimism. But the saying worked well enough for Reacher, when all else failed. He took a last sip of Bud and set the bottle back on his napkin. Swiveled his stool and faced the room. Behind him he sensed the bartender moving away to a safe place by the register. In front of him he saw the other customers sidling backward toward the far wall, cradling their glasses and bottles, huddling together, hunkering down. Beside him guys slipped off their stools and melted across the room into the safety of the crowd.
There was movement at both ends of the bar.
Both sets of three men took long paces forward.
Now they defined the ends of an empty rectangle of space. Nothing in it, except Reacher alone on his stool, and the bare wooden floor.
The six guys weren't armed. Reacher was pretty sure about that. Vaughan had said that in Colorado police deputies were limited to civilian status. And the other two guys were just members of the public. Plenty of members of the public in Colorado had private weapons, of course, but generally people pulled weapons at the start of a fight, not later on. They wanted to display them. Show them off. Intimidate, from the get-go. Nobody in Reacher's experience had ever waited to pull a gun.
So, unarmed combat, six-on-one.
The big guy spoke, from six feet inside the front door. He said, "You're in so much trouble you couldn't dig your way out with a steam shovel."
Reacher said, "You talking to me?"
"Damn straight I am."
"Well, don't."
"You showed up one too many times, pal."
"Save your breath. Go outside and throw up. That's what you're good at."
"We're not leaving. And neither are you."
"Free country."
"Not for you. Not anymore."
Reacher stayed on his stool, tensed up and ready, but not visibly. Outwardly he was still calm and relaxed. His brother Joe had been two years older, physically very similar, but temperamentally very different. Joe had eased into fights. He had met escalation with escalation, reluctantly, slowly, rationally, patiently, a little sadly. Therefore he had been a frustrating opponent. Therefore according to the peculiar little-boy dynamics of the era, Joe's enemies had turned on Reacher himself, the younger brother. The first time, confronted with four baiting seven-year-olds, the five-year-old Reacher had felt a jolt of real fear. The jolt of fear had sparked wildly and jumped tracks in his brain and emerged as intense aggression. He had exploded into action and the fight was over before his four assailants had really intended it to begin. When they got out of the pediatric ward they had stayed well away from him, and his brother, forever. And in his earnest childhood manner Reacher had pondered the experience and felt he had learned a valuable lesson. Years later during advanced army training that lesson had been reinforced. At the grand strategic level it even had a title:Overwhelming Force. At the individual level in sweaty gyms the thugs doing the training had pointed out that gentlemen who behaved decently weren't around to train anyone. They were already dead. Therefore:Hit early, hit hard.
Overwhelming force.
Hit early, hit hard.
Reacher called it:Get your retaliation in first.
He slipped forward off his stool, turned, bent, grasped the iron pillar, spun, and hurled the stool head-high as hard as he could at the three men at the back of the room. Before it hit he launched the other way and charged the new guy next to the guy with the damaged jaw. He led with his elbow and smashed it flat against the bridge of the guy's nose. The guy went down like a tree and before he hit the boards Reacher jerked sideways from the waist and put the same elbow into the big guy's ear. Then he bounced away from the impact and backed into the guy with the bad jaw and buried the elbow deep in his gut. The guy folded forward and Reacher put his hand flat on the back of the guy's head and powered it downward into his raised knee and then shoved the guy away and turned around fast.