The Hard Way

a rope off the fire escape. Haul them up through the bedroom.”
    Pauling said nothing to that. They turned one-eighty together and walked the length of the hallway to the foot of the next flight of stairs. Stepped noisily up to three. 3L and 3R were right there in front of them, identical to the situation one floor below and presumably identical to the situation one floor above.
    “Let’s do it,” Reacher said.
    They walked through the hallway and turned and glanced up into the fourth floor gloom. They could see 4R’s door. Not 4L’s. Reacher went first. He took the stairs two at a time to cut the number of creaks and cracks by half. Pauling followed, putting her feet near the edges of the treads where any staircase is quieter. They made it to the top. Stood there. The building hummed with the kind of subliminal background noises you find in any packed dwelling in a big city. Muted traffic sounds from the street. The blare of car horns and the wail of sirens, dulled by the thickness of walls. Ten refrigerators running, window air conditioners, room fans, TV, radio, electricity buzzing through faulty fluorescent ballasts, water flowing through pipes.
    4L’s door had been painted a dull institutional green many years previously. Old, but there was nothing wrong with the job. Probably a union painter, well trained by a long and painstaking apprenticeship. The careful sheen was overlaid with years of grime. Soot from buses, grease from kitchens, rail dust from the subways. There was a clouded spy lens about level with Reacher’s chest. The
4
and the
L
were separate cast-brass items attached straight and true with brass screws.
    Reacher turned sideways and bent forward from the waist. Put his ear on the crack where the door met the jamb. Listened for a moment.
    Then he straightened up.
    “There’s someone in there,” he whispered.

CHAPTER 37
    REACHER BENT FORWARD and listened again. “Straight ahead. A woman, talking.” Then he straightened up and stepped back. “What’s the layout going to be?”
    “A short hallway,” Pauling whispered. “Narrow for six feet, until it clears the bathroom. Then maybe it opens out to the living room. The living room will be maybe twelve feet long. The back wall will have a window on the left into the light well. Kitchen door on the right. The kitchen will be bumped out to the back. Maybe six or seven feet deep.”
    Reacher nodded. Worst case, the woman was in the kitchen, a maximum twenty-five feet away down a straight and direct line of sight to the door. Worse than worst case, she had a loaded gun next to her on the countertop and she knew how to shoot.
    Pauling asked, “Who’s she talking to?”
    Reacher whispered, “I don’t know.”
    “It’s them, isn’t it?”
    “They’d be nuts to still be here.”
    “Who else can it be?”
    Reacher said nothing.
    Pauling asked, “What do you want to do?”
    “What would you do?”
    “Get a warrant. Call a SWAT team. Full body armor and a battering ram.”
    “Those days are gone.”
    “Tell me about it.”
    Reacher took another step back. Pointed at 4R’s door.
    “Wait there,” he said. “If you hear shooting, call an ambulance. If you don’t, follow me in six feet behind.”
    “You’re just going to knock?”
    “No,” Reacher said. “Not exactly.”
    He took another step back. He was six feet five inches tall and weighed about two hundred and fifty pounds. His shoes were bench-made by a company called Cheaney, from Northampton in England. Smarter buys than Church’s, which were basically the same shoes but with a premium tag for the name. The style Reacher had chosen was called Tenterden, which was a brown semi-brogue made of heavy pebbled leather. Size twelve. The soles were heavy composite items bought in from a company called Dainite. Reacher hated leather soles. They wore out too fast and stayed wet too long after rain. Dainites were better. Their heels were a five-layer stack an inch and a quarter thick. The Cheaney leather welt, the Dainite welt, two slabs of hard Cheaney leather, and a thick Dainite cap.
    Each shoe on its own weighed more than two pounds.
    4L’s door had three keyholes. Three locks. Probably good ones. Maybe a chain inside. But door furniture is only as good as the wood it is set into. The door itself was probably hundred-year-old Douglas fir. Same for the frame. Cheap to start with, damp and swelled all through a hundred summers, dry and shrunken all through a hundred winters. A