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A Jack Reacher Short Story

SHE was about 19 No older Maybe younger An insurance coured a s rong froo

She was blond and blue-eyed, but not Aenerations of plenty This girl was different Her ancestors had known hardship and fear That inheritance was in her face and her movements Her eyes ary Her body was lean Not the kind of lean you get frorandparents had no food — and either starved or didn’t Her ile and tense, a little alert, a little nervous, though on the face of it she was having as good a tiet

She was in a New York bar, drinking beer, listening to a band, and she was in love with the guitar player That was clear The part of her gaze that wasn’t as filled with adoration, and it was all aimed in his direction She was probably Russian She was rich She was alone at a table near the stage and she had a pile of ATM-fresh twenties in front of her and she was paying for each new bottle with one of thee The waitresses loved her

There was a guy further back in the roouard, presumably He was a tall, wide man with a shaved head and a black T-shirt under a black suit He was part of the reason she was drinking beer in a city bar at the age of 19 or less It wasn’t the kind of glossy place that had a policy about under-age rich girls, either for or against It was a scruffy dive on Bleecker Street, staffed by skinny kids trying to uessed they had looked at her and her ainst trouble and in favor of tips

I watched her for a minute, and then I looked away My name is Jack Reacher, and once I was a military cop, with heavy e as I was in But old habits die hard I had stepped into the bar the same way I always step anywhere, which is carefully One-thirty in theI had ridden the A train to West Fourth and walked south on Sixth Avenue and made the left on Bleecker and checked the sidewalks I wanted e numbers of patrons outside to smoke

The sht of stairs leading up to its door There was a shiny black Mercedes sedan parked on the curb, with a driver behind the wheel Theout of the place was filtered and dulled by the walls but I could hear an agile bass line and so So I walked up the stairs and paid a 5 cover and shouldered my way inside

Two exits One the door I had just co dark restroom corridor way in back The room was narrow and about 90 feet deep A bar on the left at the front, then some upholstered horseshoe benches, then a cluster of freestanding tables on what, on other nights, e, with the band on it

The band looked as if it had been put together by accident after a ency The bass player was a stout old black guy in a suit with a vest He was plucking away at an upright bass fiddle The druuy sprawled coer was also a harer than the druer than either one

The guitarist was co and white and small Maybe 20, uitar wired to a crisp new aether the instrument and the electronics made sharp sounds full of space and echoes The amp must have been turned up to 11 The sound was incredibly loud It was as if the air in the room was locked solid It had no more capacity for volume

But the uys were old pros, and the white kid knew all the notes, and when and how and in what order to play the a red T-shirt and black pants and white tennis shoes He had a very serious expression on his face He looked foreign Maybe Russian, too

I spent the first half of the first song checking the rooe Old habits die hard There were two guys facing each other across a table with their hands underneath it One selling, one buying, obviously, the deal done by feel and confir the owner by selling store-bought beer out of an ice chest Two out of three doerator cabinets, and then the third caot one of thein I carried the bottle to a corner seat and sat doith my back to the wall

It was at that point that I saw the girl alone at her table, and her bodyguard on his bench I guessed the Mercedes outside was theirs I guessed Daddy was a B-grade oligarch, hter with four years at NYU and a credit card that never stopped working

Just two people out of 80 in the roo deal

Until I sao other guys