Page 43 of Chain Reaction

“Here are the rules,” Reacher said. “You guys are going to do exactly what I tell you, and if you don’t, I’m going to shoot you where it’s going to hurt for the rest of your lives. Knees, elbows, places like that. Are we clear?”

No response. Just stunned stares from absurd positions. Reacher looked from one to the other. A cool gaze, absorbing, assessing. Not brothers this time. They were too different. One of the XLs was pale, with a short sandy beard so transparent Reacher hadn’t noticed it from a distance. The other XL was darker, with olive skin and thick black hair. The XXL with his arm in the ceiling was somewhere in between.

“Are we clear?” Reacher asked again. “Say it out loud for me.”

There was a pause. Tense breathing, helpless glances between the three of them. Then the XL with the sandy beard said, “Clear.” Immediately the XL with the black hair followed suit. “Clear,” he said.

“Crawl over and sit on the cushions by the window.”

They did. They shuffled across on hands and knees and turned around and dumped themselves back against the pile.

“Now link your hands behind your heads and sit completely still.”

They did.

The XXL still hadn’t spoken. He was glaring at Reacher, fury in his eyes.

“What’s up, big boy?” Reacher asked him. “Are you dumb in the literal sense as well as the vernacular?”

No response.

“Or are you mute with embarrassment and humiliation? You should be. Call yourself a professional? Because I got to say you don’t look like one to me. You look like an idiot. The phone ain’t up there. You missed it completely. You couldn’t find it. Because you’re dumb as a rock. Dumber than a rock. You couldn’t find anything. You couldn’t find your asshole if I gave you a mirror on a stick.”

Silence. Anger and hate in his face.

“Now you’re wishing we could meet face to face in a dark alley somewhere, when I didn’t have a gun. You would show me who was boss. Am I right? Is that what you’re thinking?”

A flicker.

Reacher smiled. He said, “Yeah, that’s what you’re thinking. But trust me, you’re safer where you are. You would lose. I would make you cry like a little girl.”

Another flicker.

“Don’t believe me? Want to try it?”

Half a flicker.

Reacher gave his gun to Turner. He showed the XXL his empty hands. He said, “Take your arm out of the ceiling and come over here. Show me who’s boss.”

The guy looked at Turner.

“She won’t intervene,” Reacher said. “She won’t need to.”

The guy wriggled his arm free and came down off his tiptoes. Up close and personal he was probably six-six and two-sixty. An inch taller than Reacher, ten pounds heavier, maybe ten years younger. None of which was going to help him. He had already lost. He had allowed himself to be goaded into an emotional state.

The guy charged across the room, straight at Reacher, full of sound and fury, creating a roiling bow wave of aggression ahead of him that was almost visible in the air. Reacher guessed that since grade school every opponent the guy had ever faced had felt battered by it, pushed backward by it, forced to retreat, if only an inch, if only in their heads. But Reacher had been raised in tougher schools. He knew backward was a losing direction. Instead he lunged forward, a fast hard pace, bursting through the bow wave, and he smashed a straight right into the guy’s fast-arriving face. Unexpected. Not in the script. Get your retaliation in first. The punch landed like a head-on car crash. All kinds of Newtonian physics were involved. Momentum one way colliding with equal momentum the other way, force, mass, acceleration, impact. All that good stuff. The guy tottered back and bounced off a wall. He stood there, swaying and wobbling, bleeding from the nose, bleeding from the mouth, about to fall down, but in the end an unsteady last-gasp shuffle kept him heroically upright. Whereupon Reacher stepped in and kicked him in the nuts. Then the fight was over. The guy went down forward and curled up into a fetal ball, gasping and squealing and whimpering.

Reacher turned to face the two XLs on the sofa cushions.

“Take that as proof I’m a serious man,” he said. “You’re in a world of trouble, and there’s no easy way out. You need to help yourselves now. You need to cooperate.”

Wary looks. No words.

Reacher pointed with his thumb, back over his shoulder, behind him, at the big guy on the floor. He said, “I’m guessing that dumb tub of lard isn’t the crew leader.”

Warier looks. No words.

“So which one of you is?”