29

The telephone. A useful invention, and instructive in the way it was used. Or not used. Four deputies heading east to make a surprise arrest would not tip their hand with a courtesy telephone call. Not in the real world. They would swoop down unannounced. They would aim to grab up their prey unawares. Therefore their courtesy call was a decoy. It was a move in a game. A move designed to flush Reacher westward into safer territory. It was an invitation.

Which Reacher had interpreted correctly.

And accepted.

And the bartender had not called the station house. Had not gotten voice mail. Had not made a local call at all. He had dialed too many digits. He had called a deputy’s cell, and spoken just long enough to let the deputy know who he was, and therefore where Reacher was. Whereupon he had changed his attitude and turned talkative and friendly, to keep Reacher sitting tight. Like he had been told to, beforehand, should the opportunity arise.

Which is why Reacher had not left the bar. If the guy wanted to participate, he was welcome to. He could participate by cleaning up the mess.

And there was going to be a mess.

That was for damn sure.

The deputies who had come in the back walked through the short corridor past the restrooms and stopped where the main room widened out. Reacher kept his eyes on them. Didn’t turn his head. A two-front attack was fairly pointless in a room full of mirrors. He could see the other guys quite clearly, smaller than life and reversed. They had stopped a yard inside the front door and were standing shoulder to shoulder, waiting.

The big guy who had thrown up the night before was one of the pair that had come in the front. With him was the guy Reacher had smacked outside the family restaurant. Neither one of them looked in great shape. The two who had come in the back looked large and healthy enough, but manageable. Four against one, but no real cause for concern. Reacher had first fought four-on-one when he was five years old, against seven-year-olds, on his father’s base in the Philippines. He had won then, easily, and he expected to win now.

But then the situation changed.

Two guys stood up from the body of the room. They put their glasses down and dabbed their lips with napkins and scraped their chairs back and stepped forward and separated. One went left, and one went right. One lined up with the guys in back, and one lined up with the guys in front. The newcomers were not the biggest people Reacher had ever seen, but they weren’t the smallest, either. They could have been the deputies’ brothers or cousins. They probably were. They were dressed the same and looked the same and were built the same.

So, thirteen minutes previously the bartender had not been glancing into the room in hopes of immediate short-term assistance. He had been catching the ringers’ eyes and tipping them off:Stand by, the others are on their way. Reacher clamped his jaw and the beer in his stomach went sour.Mistake. A bad one. He had been smart, but not smart enough.

And now he was going to pay, big time.

Six against one.

Twelve hundred pounds against two-fifty.

No kind of excellent odds.

He realized he was holding his breath. He exhaled, long and slow. Because:Dum spero speri. Where there’s breath, there’s hope. Not an aphorism Zeno of Cittium would have understood or approved of. Zeno spoke Greek, not Latin, and preferred passive resignation to reckless optimism. But the saying worked well enough for Reacher, when all else failed. He took a last sip of Bud and set the bottle back on his napkin. Swiveled his stool and faced the room. Behind him he sensed the bartender moving away to a safe place by the register. In front of him he saw the other customers sidling backward toward the far wall, cradling their glasses and bottles, huddling together, hunkering down. Beside him guys slipped off their stools and melted across the room into the safety of the crowd.

There was movement at both ends of the bar.

Both sets of three men took long paces forward.

Now they defined the ends of an empty rectangle of space. Nothing in it, except Reacher alone on his stool, and the bare wooden floor.

The six guys weren’t armed. Reacher was pretty sure about that. Vaughan had said that in Colorado police deputies were limited to civilian status. And the other two guys were just members of the public. Plenty of members of the public in Colorado had private weapons, of course, but generally people pulled weapons at the start of a fight, not later on. They wanted to display them. Show them off. Intimidate, from the get-go. Nobody in Reacher’s experience had ever waited to pull a gun.

So, unarmed combat, six-on-one.

The big guy spoke, from six feet inside the front door. He said, “You’re in so much trouble you couldn’t dig your way out with a steam shovel.”

Reacher said, “You talking to me?”

“Damn straight I am.”

“Well, don’t.”

“You showed up one too many times, pal.”

“Save your breath. Go outside and throw up. That’s what you’re good at.”

“We’re not leaving. And neither are you.”

“Free country.”

“Not for you. Not anymore.”

Reacher stayed on his stool, tensed up and ready, but not visibly. Outwardly he was still calm and relaxed. His brother Joe had been two years older, physically very similar, but temperamentally very different. Joe had eased into fights. He had met escalation with escalation, reluctantly, slowly, rationally, patiently, a little sadly. Therefore he had been a frustrating opponent. Therefore according to the peculiar little-boy dynamics of the era, Joe’s enemies had turned on Reacher himself, the younger brother. The first time, confronted with four baiting seven-year-olds, the five-year-old Reacher had felt a jolt of real fear. The jolt of fear had sparked wildly and jumped tracks in his brain and emerged as intense aggression. He had exploded into action and the fight was over before his four assailants had really intended it to begin. When they got out of the pediatric ward they had stayed well away from him, and his brother, forever. And in his earnest childhood manner Reacher had pondered the experience and felt he had learned a valuable lesson. Years later during advanced army training that lesson had been reinforced. At the grand strategic level it even had a title:Overwhelming Force. At the individual level in sweaty gyms the thugs doing the training had pointed out that gentlemen who behaved decently weren’t around to train anyone. They were already dead. Therefore:Hit early, hit hard.

Overwhelming force.

Hit early, hit hard.

Reacher called it:Get your retaliation in first.

He slipped forward off his stool, turned, bent, grasped the iron pillar, spun, and hurled the stool head-high as hard as he could at the three men at the back of the room. Before it hit he launched the other way and charged the new guy next to the guy with the damaged jaw. He led with his elbow and smashed it flat against the bridge of the guy’s nose. The guy went down like a tree and before he hit the boards Reacher jerked sideways from the waist and put the same elbow into the big guy’s ear. Then he bounced away from the impact and backed into the guy with the bad jaw and buried the elbow deep in his gut. The guy folded forward and Reacher put his hand flat on the back of the guy’s head and powered it downward into his raised knee and then shoved the guy away and turned around fast.

The stool had hit one of the deputies and the other new guy neck-high. Wood and iron, thrown hard, spinning horizontally. Maybe they had raised their hands instinctively and broken their wrists, or maybe they hadn’t been fast enough and the stool had connected. Reacher wasn’t sure. But either way the two guys were sidelined for the moment. They were turned away, bent over, crouched, with the stool still rolling noisily at their feet.

The other deputy was untouched. He was launching forward with a wild grimace on his face. Reacher danced two steps and took a left hook on the shoulder and put a straight right into the center of the grimace. The guy stumbled back and shook his head and Reacher’s arms were clamped from behind in a bear hug. The big guy, presumably. Reacher forced him backward and dropped his chin to his chest and snapped a reverse head butt that made solid contact. Not as good as a forward-going blow, but useful. Then Reacher accelerated all the way backward and crushed the breath out of the guy against the wall. A mirror smashed and the arms loosened and Reacher pulled away and met the other deputy in the center of the room and dodged an incoming right and snapped a right of his own to the guy’s jaw. Not a powerful blow, but it rocked the guy enough to open him up for a colossal left to the throat that put him down in a heap.

Eight blows delivered, one taken, one guy down for maybe a seven count, four down for maybe an eight count, the big guy still basically functional.

Not efficient.

Time to get serious.

The bartender had said:Mr. Thurman looks after people if they get hurt on the job. Reacher thought:So let him. Because these guys are following Thurman’s orders. Clearly nothing happens here except what Thurman wants.

The deputy in the back of the room was rolling around and clutching his throat. Reacher kicked him in the ribs hard enough to break a couple and then forced the guy’s forearm to the floor with one foot and stamped on it with the other. Then he moved on to the two guys he had hit with the stool. The second deputy, and the new guy. One was crouched down, clutching his forearm, whimpering. Reacher put the flat of his foot on the guy’s backside and drove him headfirst into the wall. The other guy had maybe taken the edge of the seat in the chest, like a dull blade. He was having trouble breathing. Reacher kicked his feet out from under him and then kicked him in the head. Then he turned in time to dodge a right hook from the big guy. He took it in the shoulder. Looked for a response. But his balance wasn’t good. Floor space was limited by inert assailants. The big guy threw a straight left and Reacher swatted it away and bulldozed a path back to the center of the room.

The big guy followed, fast. Threw a straight right. Reacher jerked his head to the side and took the blow on the collarbone. It was a weak punch. The guy was pale in the face. He threw a wild breathless haymaker and Reacher stepped back out of range and glanced around.

One stool damaged, one mirror broken, five guys down, twenty spectators still passive.So far so good. The big guy stepped back and straightened like they were in a timeout and called, “Like you said, one of us would stay on his feet long enough to get to you.”

Reacher said, “You’re not getting to me. Not even a little bit.” Which puzzled him, deep down. He was close to winning a six-on-one bar brawl and he had nothing to show for it except two bruised shoulders and an ache in his knuckles. It had gone way better than he could have hoped.

Then it started to go way worse.

The big guy said, “Think again.” He put his hands in his pants pockets and came out with two switchblades. Neat wooden handles, plated bindings, plated buttons. He stood in the dusty panting silence and popped the first blade with a precisionclick and then paused and popped the second.