Nothing to Lose

His body froze and went rigid and his face crumpled. He dropped both knives and clamped both hands low down on his stomach. For a long moment he stood like a statue and then he jerked forward from the waist and bent down and puked a long stream of blood and mucus on the floor. He staggered away in a crouch and fell to his knees. His shoulders sagged and his face went waxy and bloodless. His stomach heaved and he puked again. More blood, more mucus. He braced his spread fingertips either side of the spreading pool and tried to push himself upward. But he didn’t make it. He collapsed sideways in a heap. His eyes rolled up in his head and he rolled on his back and he started breathing fast and shallow. One hand moved back to his stomach and the other beat on the floor. He threw up again, projectile, a fountain of blood vertically into the air. Then he rolled away and curled into a fetal ball.

Game over.

The bar went silent. No sound, except ragged breathing. The air was full of dust and the stink of blood and vomit. Reacher was shaky with excess adrenaline. He forced himself back under control and put his chair down quietly and bent and picked up the fallen knives. Pressed the blades back into the handles against the wood of the bar and slipped both knives into one pocket. Then he stepped around in the silence and checked his results. The first guy he had hit was unconscious on his back. The elbow to the bridge of the nose was always an effective blow. Too hard, and it can slide shards of bone into the frontal lobes. Badly aimed, it can put splinters of cheekbone into the eye sockets. But this one had been perfectly judged. The guy would be sick and groggy for a week, but he would recover.

The guy who had started the evening with a busted jaw had added a rebroken nose and a bad headache. The new guy at the back of the room had a broken arm from the stool and maybe a concussion from being driven headfirst into the wall. The guy next to him was unconscious from the kick in the head. The deputy who the stool had missed had busted ribs and a broken wrist and a cracked larynx.

Major damage all around, but the whole enterprise had been voluntary from the start.

So, five for five, plus some kind of a medical explanation for the sixth. The big guy had stayed in the fetal position and looked very weak and pale. Like he was hollowed out with sickness. Reacher bent down and checked the pulse in his neck and found it weak and thready. He went through the guy’s pockets and found a five-pointed star in the front of the shirt. The badge was made of pewter and two lines were engraved in its center:Township of Despair, Police Deputy. Reacher put it in his own shirt pocket. He found a bunch of keys and a thin wad of money in a brass clip. He kept the keys and left the cash. Then he looked around until he found the bartender. The guy was where he had started, leaning back with his fat ass against his register drawer.

“Call the plant,” Reacher said. “Get the ambulance down here. Take care with the big guy. He doesn’t look good.”

His beer was where he had left it, still upright on its napkin. He drained the last of it and set the bottle back down again and walked out the front door into the night.

31

It took ten minutes of aimless driving south of the main drag before he found Nickel Street. The road signs were small and faded and the headlights on Vaughan’s old truck were weak and set low. He deciphered Iron and Chromium and Vanadium and Molybdenum and then lost metals altogether and ran through a sequence of numbered avenues before he hit Steel and Platinum and then Gold. Nickel was a dead end off Gold. It had sixteen houses, eight facing eight, fifteen of them small and one of them bigger.

Thurman’s pet judge Gardner lived in the big house on Nickel, the bartender had said. Reacher paused at the curb and checked the name on the big house’s mailbox and then pulled the truck into the driveway and shut it down. Climbed out and walked to the porch. The place was a medium-sized farmhouse-style structure and looked pretty good relative to its neighbors, but there was no doubt that Gardner would have done better for himself if he had gotten out of town and made it to the Supreme Court in D.C. Or to whatever Circuit included Colorado, or even to night traffic court in Denver. The porch sagged against rotted underpinnings and the paint on the clapboards had aged to dust. Millwork had dried and split. There were twin newel posts at the top of the porch steps. Both had decorative ball shapes carved into their tops and both balls had split along the grain, like they had been attacked with cleavers.