The Affair: A Reacher Novel

the real world. Utter confusion. I said, “You want to get lunch?”
    She said, “After.”
    “After what?”
    “You have a problem to deal with. The McKinney cousins are out on the street. They’re waiting for you. And they’ve brought reinforcements.”
    Deveraux led me across the corridor to a dim corner room with windows in two walls. The view across Main Street was empty. Nothing happening. But the view north toward the T-junction showed four figures. My two old friends, plus two more similar guys. Dirt, hair, fur,and ink. They were standing around in the wide area where the two roads met, hands in pockets, kicking the dirt, doing nothing at all.
    My first reaction was a kind of dumbfounded admiration. A head butt is a serious blow, especially one of mine. To be walking and talking just a few hours later was impressive. My second reaction was annoyance. With myself. I had been too gentle. Too new in town, too reluctant, too proper, too ready to see mitigating circumstances in sheer animal stupidity. I looked at Deveraux and asked, “What do you want me to do?”
    She said, “You could apologize and make them go away.”
    “What’s my second choice?”
    “You could let them hit you first. Then I could arrest them for unprovoked assault. I’d love to get the chance to do that.”
    “They won’t hit me at all if you’re there.”
    “I’ll stay out of sight.”
    “I’m not sure I want to do either thing.”
    “One or the other, Reacher. Your choice.”
    I stepped out to Main Street like some guy in an old movie. There should have been music playing. I turned right and faced north. I stood still. The four guys saw me. They showed a moment of surprise, and then a moment of warm anticipation. They formed up in a side-to-side line, all four of them strung out west to east, about four feet apart. They all took a step toward me, and then they all stopped and waited. There were two trucks parked on the Kelham road, behind them and to the right. There was the brush-painted pick-up I had seen before, and in front of it was another one just as bad.
    I walked on, like a fish toward a net. The sun was about as high as it was going to get in March. The air was warm. I could feel heat on my skin. I could feel the road surface under the soles of my shoes. I put my hands in my pockets. Nothing in there, except most of the roll of quarters I had gotten in the diner. I closed my fist around the paper tube. A ten dollar punch, less what I had spent on the phone.
    I walked on and stopped ten feet from the skirmish line. The two guys I had met before were on the left. The silent mastermind was onthe outside, and the alpha dog was in second position. Both of them had noses like spoiled eggplants. Both of them had two black eyes. Both of them had crusted blood on their lips. Neither one of them exhibited much in the way of balance or focus. Right of the alpha dog was a guy slightly smaller than the others, and next to him was a big guy in a biker vest.
    I looked at the alpha dog and said, “This is your plan?”
    He didn’t answer.
    I said, “Four guys? Is that all?”
    He didn’t answer.
    I said, “I was told there were dozens of you.”
    No answer.
    “But I guess logistics and communications were difficult. So you settled on a lighter force, quickly assembled and rapidly deployed. Which is very up to date, actually. You should go to the Pentagon and sit in on some seminars. You’d feel right at home with their thinking.”
    The new guy second from the right was drunk. He had a low level buzz going on. It was oozing from his pores. I could practically smell it. Beer for breakfast. Maybe with chasers. A decade-long diet, judging by the look of him. So he would be slow to react, and then wild and unaimed afterward. No big problem. The new guy with the biker vest was carrying some kind of back pain. Low down, base of his spine. I could tell because he was standing with his pelvis rolled forward, taking the pressure off. Some kind of rupture or strain. A dozen possible causes. He was a country boy. He could have lifted a bale, or fallen off a horse. No major threat. He would defeat himself. One enthusiastic swing, and all kinds of things would tear loose inside. He would hobble away like a cripple. By which time his drunken friend would already be down. And the other two were already in no kind of good shape. The two I knew. The two that knew me. The alpha dog was slightly on my left, and I’m a right-handed