Running Blind (The Visitor)

entitled to check them out head to toe, wouldn’t you say?”
    “You like doing that?”
    “Doing what?”
    “Looking at women.”
    He shrugged. “Better than I like looking at some things, I guess.”
    The gun moved closer. “This isn’t funny, asshole. I don’t like the way you’re looking at me.”
    He stared at her.
    “What way am I looking at you?” he asked.
    “You know what way.”
    He shook his head.
    “No, I don’t,” he said.
    “Like you’re making advances,” she said. “You’re disgusting, you know that?”
    He listened to the contempt in her voice and stared at her thin hair, her frown, her crooked tooth, her hard dried-up body in its ludicrous cheap businesswoman’s uniform.
    “You think I’m making advances to you?”
    “Aren’t you? Wouldn’t you like to?”
    He shook his head again.
    “Not while there are dogs on the street,” he said.
    THEY SAT IN crackling hostile silence for the best part of twenty minutes. Then the sandy guy with the mustache came back to the car and slid into the front passenger seat. The driver’s door opened and a second man got in. He had keys in his hand. He watched the mirror until the woman nodded and then fired up the motor and eased past Reacher’s parked truck and headed out toward the road.
    “Do I get to make a phone call?” Reacher asked. “Or doesn’t the FBI believe in stuff like that?”
    The sandy guy was staring straight ahead, at the windshield.
    “At some point within the first twenty-four hours,” he said. “We’ll make sure you’re not denied your constitutional rights.”
    The woman kept the SIG-Sauer’s muzzle close to Reacher’s head all the way back to Manhattan, fifty-eight fast miles through the dark and the fog.

3
    THEY PARKED UNDERGROUND someplace south of mid-town and forced him out of the car into a white-painted garage full of bright light and dark sedans. The woman turned a full circle on the concrete floor with her shoes scraping in the silence. She was examining the whole crowded space. A cautious approach. Then she pointed toward a single black elevator door located in a distant corner. There were two more guys waiting there. Dark suits, white shirts, quiet ties. They watched the woman and the sandy guy all the way in across the diagonal. There was deference in their faces. They were junior guys. But they were also comfortable, and a little proud. Like they were some kind of hosts . Reacher suddenly understood the woman and the sandy guy were not New York agents. They were visitors from somewhere else. They were on somebody else’s turf. The woman hadn’t examined the whole garage simply because she was cautious. She had done it because she didn’t know where the elevator was.
    They put Reacher in the center of the elevator car and crowded in around him. The woman, the sandy guy, the driver, the two local boys. Five people, five weapons. The four men took a corner each and the woman stood in the center, close to Reacher, like she was claiming him as hers. One of the local boys touched a button and the door rolled shut and the elevator took off.
    It traveled upward for a long time and stopped hard with 21 showing on the floor indicator. The door thumped back and the local boys led the way out into a blank corridor. It was gray. Thin gray carpet, gray paint, gray light. It was quiet, like everyone except the hard-core enthusiasts had gone home hours before. There were closed doors spaced along the corridor wall. The guy who had driven the sedan down from Garrison paused in front of the third and opened it up. Reacher was maneuvered to the doorway and looked in at a bare space, maybe twelve by sixteen, concrete floor, cinder-block walls, all covered in thick gray paint like the side of a battleship. The ceiling was unfinished, and the ducting was all visible, square trunking made from thin flecked metal. Fluorescent fittings hung from chains and threw a flat glare across the gray. There was a single plastic garden chair in the corner. It was the only thing in the room.
    “Sit down,” the woman said.
    Reacher walked away from the chair to the opposite corner and sat on the floor, wedged into the angle of the cinder-block walls. The cinder block was cold and the paint was slick. He folded his arms over his chest and stretched his legs out straight and crossed his ankles. Rested his head on the wall, forty-five degrees to his shoulders, so he was gazing straight at the people standing by the door. They