TWENTY-THREE

MAHMEINI’S TWO TOUGH GUYS ARRIVED IN SAFIR’S LAS VEGAS office about an hour after Safir’s own two tough guys had left it. Mahmeini’s men were not physically impressive. No straining shirt collars, no bulging muscles. They were small and wiry, dark and dead-eyed, rumpled, and not very clean. Safir was Lebanese and he knew plenty of Iranians. Most of them were the nicest people in the world, especially when they lived somewhere else. But some of them were the worst. These two had brought nothing with them. No bags, no tools, no equipment. They didn’t need any. Safir knew they would have guns under their arms and knives in their pockets. It was the knives he was worried about. Guns were fast. Knives were slow. And these two Iranians could be very slow with knives. And very inventive. Safir knew that for a fact. He had seen one of their victims, out in the desert. A little decomposed, but even so the cops had taken longer than they should even to determine the sex of the corpse. Which was no surprise. There had been no external evidence of gender. None at all.

Safir dialled his phone. Three rings, and one of his guys answered, six blocks away. Safir said, ‘Give me a progress report.’

His guy said, ‘It’s all messed up.’

‘Evidently. But I need more than that.’

‘OK, it turns out Rossi’s contacts are a bunch of Nebraska people called Duncan. They’re all in an uproar over some guy poking around. Nothing to do with anything, probably, but Rossi thinks the Duncans are going to stall until the guy is down, to save face, because they’ve been claiming the guy is the cause of the delay. Which Rossi thinks is most likely bullshit, but the whole thing has gone completely circular. Rossi thinks nothing is going to happen now until the guy is captured. He’s got boys up there, working on it.’

‘How hard?’

‘As hard as they can, I guess.’

‘Tell Rossi to tell them to work harder. Much, much harder. And make sure he knows I’m serious, OK? Tell him I’ve got people in my office too, and if I’m going to get hurt over this, then he’s going to get hurt first, and twice as bad.’

Reacher remembered the way to the doctor’s house from the night before. In daylight the roads looked different. More open, less secret. More exposed. They were just narrow ribbons of blacktop, built up a little higher than the surrounding dirt, unprotected by hedgerows, unshaded by trees. The morning mist had risen up and was now a layer of low cloud at about five hundred feet. The whole sky was like a flat lit panel, casting baleful illumination everywhere. No glare, no shadows.

But Reacher arrived OK. The plain ranch house, the couple of flat acres, the post-and-rail fence. In the daylight the house looked raw and new. There was a satellite dish on the roof. There were no cars on the driveway. No dark blue Chevrolet. No neighbours, either. The nearest house might have been a mile away. On three sides there was nothing beyond the doctor’s fence except dirt, tired and hibernating, waiting for ploughing and seeding in the spring. On the fourth side was the road, and then more dirt, flat and featureless all the way to the horizon. The doctor and his wife were not gardeners. That was clear. Their lot was all grass, from the base of the fence posts to the foundation of the house. No bushes, no evergreens, no flowerbeds.

Reacher parked on the driveway and walked to the door. It had a spy hole. A little glass lens, like a fat drop of water. Common in a city. Unusual in a rural area. He rang the bell. There was a long delay. He guessed he wasn’t the first visitor of the day. More likely the third. Hence the reluctance on the part of the doctor and his wife to open up. But open up they did, eventually. The spy hole darkened and then lightened again and the door swung back slowly and Reacher saw the woman he had met the night before, standing there in the hallway, looking a little surprised but plenty relieved.

‘You,’ she said.

‘Yes, me,’ Reacher said. ‘Not them.’

‘Thank God.’

‘When were they here?’

‘This morning.’

‘What happened?’

The woman didn’t answer. She just stepped back. A mute invitation. Reacher stepped in and walked down the hallway and found out pretty much what had happened when he came face to face with the doctor. The guy was a little damaged, in much the same way that Vincent was, over at the motel. Bruising around the eyes, swellings, blood in the nostrils, splits in the lips. Loose teeth too, probably, judging by the way the guy was pursing his mouth and moving his tongue, as if he was pressing them home, or counting how many were left. Four blows, Reacher figured, each one hard but subtly different in placement. Expert blows.

Reacher asked, ‘Do you know who they are?’

The doctor said, ‘No. They’re not from around here.’ His words were thick and indistinct and hard to decipher. Loose teeth, split lips. And a hangover, presumably. ‘They said they were representing the Duncans. Not working for them. So they’re not hired hands. We don’t know who they are or what their connection is.’

‘What did they want?’

‘You, of course.’

Reacher said, ‘I’m very sorry for your trouble.’

The doctor said, ‘It is what it is.’

Reacher turned back to the doctor’s wife. ‘Are you OK?’

She said, ‘They didn’t hit me.’

‘But?’

‘I don’t want to talk about it. Why are you here?’

‘I need medical treatment,’ Reacher said.

‘What kind?’

‘I got scratched by thorns. I want to get the cuts cleaned.’

‘Really?’

‘No, not really,’ Reacher said. ‘I need some painkillers, that’s all. I haven’t been able to rest my arms like I hoped.’

‘What do you really want?’

‘I want to talk,’ Reacher said.

They started in the kitchen. They cleaned his cuts, purely as a way of occupying themselves. The doctor’s wife said she had trained as a nurse. She poured some thin stinging liquid into a bowl and used cotton balls. She started on his face and neck and then did his hands. She made him take off his shirt. His back was all ripped up by the long scrabbling escape from under the truck. He said, ‘I had breakfast with Dorothy this morning. At her place.’

The doctor’s wife said, ‘You shouldn’t be telling us that. It could get her in trouble.’

‘Only if you rat her out to the Duncans.’

‘We might have to.’

‘She said she’s a friend of yours.’

‘Not really a friend. She’s much older.’

‘She said you stood by her, twenty-five years ago.’

The woman said nothing. Just continued her careful ministrations behind his back. She was thorough. She was opening each scratch with thumb and forefinger, and swabbing extensively. The doctor said, ‘Would you like a drink?’

‘Too early for me,’ Reacher said.

‘I meant coffee,’ the doctor said. ‘You were drinking coffee last night.’

Reacher smiled. The guy was trying to prove he could remember something. Trying to prove he hadn’t been really drunk, trying to prove he wasn’t really hung over.

‘A cup of coffee is always welcome,’ Reacher said.

The doctor stepped away to the sink and got a drip machine going. Then he came back and took Reacher’s arm, like doctors do, his fingertips in Reacher’s palm, lifting, turning, manipulating. The doctor was small and Reacher’s arm was big. The guy was struggling like a butcher with a side of beef. He dug the fingers of his other hand deep into Reacher’s shoulder joint, poking, feeling, probing.

‘I could give you cortisone,’ he said.

‘Do I need it?’

‘It would help.’

‘How much?’

‘A little. Maybe more than a little. You should think about it. It would ease the discomfort. Right now it’s nagging at you. Probably making you tired.’

‘OK,’ Reacher said. ‘Go for it.’

‘I will,’ the doctor said. ‘In exchange for some information.’

‘Like what?’

‘How did you hurt yourself?’

‘Why do you want to know?’

‘Call it professional interest.’

The doctor’s wife finished her work. She tossed the last cotton ball on the table and handed Reacher his shirt. He shrugged it on and started buttoning it. He said, ‘It was like you figured. I was caught in a hurricane.’

The doctor said, ‘I don’t believe you.’

‘Not a natural weather event. I was in an underground chamber. It caught on fire. There was a stair shaft and two ventilation shafts. I was lucky. The flames went up the ventilation shafts. I was on the stairs. So I wasn’t burned. But air to feed the fire was coming down the stair shaft just as hard as the flames were going back up the ventilation shafts. So it was like climbing through a hurricane. It blew me back down twice. I couldn’t keep my feet. In the end I had to haul myself up by the arms.’

‘How far?’

‘Two hundred and eighty steps.’

‘Wow. That would do it. Where was this?’

‘That’s outside of your professional interest.’

‘Then what happened?’

‘That’s outside of your professional interest, too.’

‘Recent event, yes?’

‘Feels like yesterday,’ Reacher said. ‘Now go get the needle.’

It was a long needle. The doctor went away and came back with a stainless steel syringe that looked big enough for a horse. He made Reacher take his shirt off again and sit forward with his elbow on the table. He eased the sharp point deep into the joint, from the back. Reacher felt it pushing and popping through all kinds of tendons and muscles. The doctor pressed the plunger, slow and steady. Reacher felt the fluid flood the joint. Felt the joint loosen and relax, in real time, immediately, like healing insanely accelerated. Then the doctor did the other shoulder. Same procedure. Same result.

‘Wonderful,’ Reacher said.

The doctor asked, ‘What did you want to talk about?’

‘A time long ago,’ Reacher said. ‘When your wife was a kid.’