Bad Luck and Trouble

statutes.”
    “Is there?” Reacher asked.
    “A technicality,” the guy said. It took him a couple of tries before he got the whole word out. He had trouble with the harsh consonants. “Me or you or anybody can’t sell or give a gun to someone else without all the formalities.”
    “But?”
    “Me or you or anybody is entitled to loan one out. A temporary and infrequent loan lasting less than thirty days is OK.”
    “Is that right?” Reacher said.
    “It’s in the statute.”
    “Interesting.”
    “Like between family members,” the guy said. “Husband to wife, father to daughter.”
    “I can see that.”
    “Or like between friends,” the guy said. “A friend can loan a gun to a friend, thirty days, temporary.”
    “Are we friends?” Reacher asked.
    “We could be,” the guy said.
    Reacher asked, “What kind of things do friends do for one another?”
    The guy said, “Maybe they loan each other things. Like one loans out a gun, and the other loans out some money.”
    “But only temporarily,” Reacher said. “Thirty days.”
    “Loans can go bad. Sometimes you just have to write them off. It’s a risk. People move away, they fall out. You can never tell with friends.”
    Reacher left the money where it was. Stepped away to the wired glass cabinet. There was some junk in there. But some good stuff, too. About fifty-fifty revolvers and automatics. The automatics were about two-thirds cheap and one-third premium brands. The premium brands ran about one-in-four nine-millimeter.
    Total choice, thirteen suitable pistols. From a stock of about three hundred. Four and a third percent. Worse than his breakfast calculation, by a factor of close to two.
    Seven of the suitable pistols were Glocks. Clearly they had been fashionable once, but weren’t anymore. One of them was a 19. The other six were 17s. In terms of visual condition they ranged from good to mint.
    “Suppose you loaned me four Glocks,” Reacher said.
    “Suppose I didn’t,” the guy said.
    Reacher turned around. The money was gone from the counter. Reacher had expected that. There was a gun in the guy’s hand. Reacher had not expected that.
    We’re old, we’re slow, and we’re rusty, Neagley had said. We’re a million miles from what we used to be.
    Roger that, Reacher thought.
    The gun was a Colt Python. Blued carbon steel, walnut grips, .357 Magnum, eight-inch barrel. Not the biggest revolver in the world, but not very far from it. Certainly it wasn’t the smallest revolver in the world. And it was maybe one of the most accurate.
    “That isn’t very friendly,” Reacher said.
    “We ain’t friends,” the guy said.
    “It’s also kind of dumb,” Reacher said. “I’m in a very bad mood right now.”
    “Suck it up. And keep your hands where I can see them.”
    Reacher paused, and then he raised his hands, halfway, palms out, fingers spread, unthreatening. The guy said, “Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on your way out.”
    The store was narrow. Reacher was all the way in back. The guy was behind the counter, a third of the way to the door. The aisle was cramped. The sunlight was bright in the window.
    The guy said, “Leave the building, Elvis.”
    Reacher stood still for a moment. Listened hard. Glanced left, glanced right, checked behind him. There was a door in the back left corner. Probably just a bathroom. Not an office. There was paperwork piled behind the counter. Nobody piles paperwork behind the counter if they have a separate room for it. Therefore the guy was alone. No partner, no backup.
    No more surprises.
    Reacher put the kind of look on his face that he had seen in Vegas. The rueful loser. It was worth a try, you got to be in it to win it. Then he kept his hands up at his shoulders and stepped forward. One pace. Two. Three. His fourth pace put him directly level with the guy. Just the width of the counter between them. Reacher was facing the door. The guy was ninety degrees to his left. The counter was maybe thirty inches deep. Two and a half feet.
    Reacher’s left arm moved, straight out sideways from the shoulder.
    The boxer Muhammad Ali’s reach was reckoned to be about forty inches and his hands were once timed at an average eighty miles an hour as they moved through it. Reacher was no Ali. Not even close. Especially not on his weaker side. His left hand moved at about sixty miles an hour, maximum. That was all. But sixty miles an hour was the same thing as a mile a minute, which was the