Lee Child - Jack Reacher 04 Running Blind

Running Blind

People say that knowledge is power. The moreknowledge, the more power. Suppose you knew thewinning numbers for the lottery? All of them? Notguessed them, not dreamed them, but really knewthem? What would you do? You would run to the store.

You would mark those numbers on the play card. Andyou would win.

Same for the stock market. Suppose you really knew

what was going to go way up? You're not talking abouta hunch or a gut feeling. You're not talking about a trendor a percentage game or a whisper or a tip. You'retalking about knowledge. Real, hard knowledge.

Suppose you had it? What would you do? You wouldcall your broker. You would buy. Then later you'd sell,and you'd be rich.

Same for basketball, same for the horses, whatever.

Football, hockey, next year's World Series, any kind ofsports at all, if you could predict the future, you'd behome free. No question. Same for the Oscars, same forthe Nobel prize, same for the first snowfall of winter.

Same for anything.

Same for killing people.

Suppose you wanted to kill people. You would need toknow ahead of time how to do it. That part is not toodifficult. There are many ways. Some of them are betterthan others. Most of them have drawbacks. So you usewhat knowledge you've got, and you invent a new way.

You think, and you think, and you think, and you comeup with the perfect method.

You pay a lot of attention to the setup. Because theperfect method is not an easy method, and carefulpreparation is very important. But that stuff is meat andpotatoes to you. You have no problem with carefulpreparation. No problem at all. How could you, with yourintelligence? After all your training?

You know the big problems will come afterward. How

do you make sure you get away with it? You use yourknowledge. You know more than most people abouthow the cops work. You've seen them on duty, manytimes, sometimes close-up. You know what they lookfor. So you don't leave anything for them to find. You gothrough it all in your head, very precisely and veryexactly and very carefully. Just as carefully as youwould mark the play card you knew for sure was goingto win you a fortune.

People say that knowledge is power. The moreknowledge, the more power. Which makes you justabout the most powerful person on earth. When itcomes to killing people. And then getting away with it.

Life is full of decisions and judgments and guesses,and it gets to the point where you're so accustomed tomaking them you keep right on making them even whenyou don't strictly need to. You get into a thing, and youstart speculating about what you would do if someproblem was yours instead of somebody else's. It getsto be a habit. It was a habit Jack Reacher had in spades.

Which was why he was sitting alone at a restauranttable and gazing at the backs of two guys twenty feetaway and wondering if it would be enough just to warnthem off or if he would have to go the extra mile andbreak their arms.

It was a question of dynamics. From the start thedynamics of the city meant that a brand-new Italianplace in Tribeca like the one Reacher was in was goingto stay pretty empty until the food guy from the NewYork Times wrote it up or an Observer columnist spottedsome celebrity in there two nights in a row. But neitherthing had happened yet and the place was stilluncrowded, which made it the perfect choice for alonely guy looking to eat dinner near his girlfriend'sapartment while she worked late at the office. Thedynamics of the city. They made it inevitable Reacherwould be in there. They made it inevitable the two guyshe was watching would be in there, too. Because thedynamics of the city meant any bright new commercialventure would sooner or later get a visit on behalf ofsomebody wanting a steady three hundred bucks aweek in exchange for not sending his boys in to smashit up with baseball bats and ax handles.

The two guys Reacher was watching were standingclose to the bar, talking quietly to the owner. The barwas a token affair built across the corner of the room. Itmade a neat sharp triangle about seven or eight feet ona side. It was not really a bar in the sense that anybodywas ever going to sit there and drink anything. It wasjust a focal point. It was somewhere to keep the liquorbottles.

They were crowded three-deep on glass shelves infront of sandblasted mirrors. The register and the creditcard machine were on the bottom shelf. The owner wasa small nervous guy and he had backed away into thepoint of the triangle and was standing with his backsidejammed against the cash drawer. His arms were foldedtight across his chest, defensively. Reacher could seehis eyes. They were showing something halfwaybetween disbelief and panic and they were darting allaround the room.

It was a large room, easily sixty feet by sixty, exactlysquare. The ceiling was high, maybe twenty or twenty-five feet. It was made of pressed tin, sandblasted backto a dull glow. The building was more than a hundredyears old, and the room had probably been used foreverything, one time or another. Maybe it had started outas a factory. The windows were certainly large enoughand numerous enough to illuminate some kind of anindustrial operation back when the city was only fivestories tall. Then maybe it had become a store. Maybeeven an automobile showroom. It was big enough. Nowit was an Italian restaurant. Not a checked-red-tableclothand Mamas-sauce type of Italian restaurant, but the typeof place which has three hundred thousand dollarsinvested up front in bleached avant-garde decor andwhich gives you seven or eight handmade ravioliparcels on a large plate and calls them a meal. Reacherhad eaten there ten times in the four weeks it had beenopen and he always left feeling hungry. But the qualitywas so good he was telling people about it, which reallyhad to mean something, because Reacher was no kind

of a gourmet. The place was named Mostro's, which asfar as he understood Italian translated as monster's. Hewasn't sure what the name referred to. Certainly not thesize of the portions. But it had some kind of aresonance, and the whole place with its pale maple andwhite walls and dull aluminum accents was an attractivespace. The people who worked there were amiable andconfident. There were whole operas played beginningto end through excellent loudspeakers placed high onthe walls. In Reacher's inexpert opinion he waswatching the start of a big reputation.

But the big reputation was obviously slow to spread.

The spare avant-garde decor made it OK to have onlytwenty tables in a sixty-by-sixty space, but in four weekshe had never seen more than three of them occupied.

Once he had been the only customer during the wholeninety-minute span he spent in the place. Tonight therewas just one other couple eating, five tables away. They