Tripwire

They were comfortable enough together, but they weren’t talking much.
    The two guys at the bar were talking. That was for sure. They were leaning over, bending forward from the waist, talking fast and persuading hard. The owner was against the register, bending backward by an equal amount. It was like the three of them were trapped in a powerful gale blowing through the room. The two guys were a lot bigger than medium-sized. They were dressed in identical dark wool coats which gave them breadth and bulk. Reacher could see their faces in the dull mirrors behind the liquor bottles. Olive skin, dark eyes. Not Italians. Syrians or Lebanese maybe, with their Arab scrappiness bred out of them by a generation of living in America. They were busy making one point after another. The guy on the right was making a sweeping gesture with his hand. It was easy to see it represented a bat plowing through the bottles on the shelf. Then the hand was chopping up and down. The guy was demonstrating how the shelves could be smashed. One blow could smash them all, top to bottom, he was suggesting. The owner was going pale. He was glancing sideways at his shelves.
    Then the guy on the left shot his cuff and tapped the face of his watch and turned to leave. His partner straightened up and followed him. He trailed his hand over the nearest table and knocked a plate to the floor. It shattered on the tile, loud and dissonant against the opera floating in the air. The sandy guy and the dark woman sat still and looked away. The two guys walked slowly to the door, heads up, confident. Reacher watched them all the way out to the sidewalk. Then the owner came out from behind the bar and knelt down and raked through the fragments of the broken plate with his fingertips.
    “You OK?” Reacher called to him.
    Soon as the words were out, he knew it was a dumb thing to say. The guy just shrugged and put an all-purpose miserable look on his face. He cupped his hands on the floor and started butting the shards into a pile. Reacher slid out of his chair and stepped away from the table and squared his napkin on the tile next to him and started collecting the debris into it. The couple five tables away were watching him.
    “When are they coming back?” Reacher asked.
    “An hour,” the guy said.
    “How much do they want?”
    The guy shrugged again and smiled a bitter smile.
    “I get a start-up discount,” he said. “Two hundred a week, goes to four when the place picks up.”
    “You want to pay?”
    The guy made another sad face. “I want to stay in business, I guess. But paying out two bills a week ain’t exactly going to help me do that.”
    The sandy guy and the dark woman were looking at the opposite wall, but they were listening. The opera fell away to a minor-key aria and the diva started in on it with a low, mournful note.
    “Who were they?” Reacher asked quietly.
    “Not Italians,” the guy said. “Just some punks.”
    “Can I use your phone?”
    The guy nodded.
    “You know an office-supply store open late?” Reacher asked.
    “Broadway, two blocks over,” the guy said. “Why? You got business to attend to?”
    Reacher nodded.
    “Yeah, business,” he said.
    He stood up and slid around behind the bar. There was a new telephone next to a new reservations book. The book looked like it had never been opened. He picked up the phone and dialed a number and waited two beats until it was answered a mile away and forty floors up.
    “Hello?” she said.
    “Hey, Jodie,” he said.
    “Hey, Reacher, what’s new?”
    “You going to be finished anytime soon?”
    He heard her sigh.
    “No, this is an all-nighter,” she said. “Complex law, and they need an opinion like yesterday. I’m real sorry.”
    “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “I’ve got something to do. Then I guess I’ll head back on up to Garrison.”
    “OK, take care of yourself,” she said. “I love you.”
    He heard the crackle of legal documents and the phone went down. He hung up and came out from behind the bar and stepped back to his table. He left forty dollars trapped under his espresso saucer and headed for the door.
    “Good luck,” he called.
    The guy crouched on the floor nodded vaguely and the couple at the distant table watched him go. He turned his collar up and shrugged down into his coat and left the opera behind him and stepped out to the sidewalk. It was dark and the air was chill with fall. Small haloes of fog were starting up around the