Gone Tomorrow - Lee Child [99]
It was close to three o’clock, and therefore technically morning. But I didn’t want to appear quarrelsome. So I just said, “Hello.”
She said, “Did you know that word is a recent invention?”
I said, “What word?”
“Hello,” she said. “It was developed as a greeting only after the invention of the telephone. People felt they needed something to say when they picked up the receiver. It was a corruption of the old word halloo. Which was really an expression of temporary shock or surprise. You would come upon something unexpected, and you would go, Halloo! Perhaps people were startled by the shrillness of the telephone bell.”
“Yes,” I said. “Perhaps they were.”
“Do you have a telephone?”
“I’ve used them,” I said. “Certainly I’ve heard them ring.”
“Do you find the sound to be disturbing?”
“I always assumed that was the point.”
“Well, goodbye,” the woman said. “It has been most pleasant chatting with you.”
Only in New York, I thought. The woman moved on, with her old dog by her side. I watched her go. She headed east and then south on Second Avenue and was lost to sight. I turned around and got set to head west again. But twenty feet ahead of me a gold Chevy Impala jammed to a stop in the gutter and Leonid climbed out of the back.
Chapter 53
Leonid stood on the curb and the car took off again and then stopped again twenty feet behind me. The driver got out. Good moves. I was boxed on the sidewalk, one guy in front of me, another guy behind. Leonid looked the same but different. Still tall, still thin, still bald apart from the ginger stubble, but now he was in sensible clothes and he had shed his sleepy demeanor. He was in black shoes, black knit pants, and a black hooded sweatshirt. He looked alive and alert and very dangerous. He looked like more than a gangster. More than a brawler or a hoodlum. He looked like a professional. Trained, and experienced.
He looked like an ex–soldier.
I backed up against the wall of the building next to me so that I could watch both guys at once. Leonid on my left, and the other guy on my right. The other guy was a squat man somewhere in his thirties. He looked more Middle Eastern than East European. Dark hair, no neck. Not huge. Like Leonid, but compressed vertically and therefore expanded laterally. He was dressed the same, in cheap black sweats. I looked at the knit pants and a word lodged in my mind.
The word was: disposable.
The guy took a step toward me.
Leonid did the same.
Two choices, as always: fight or flight. We were on 56th Street’s southern sidewalk. I could have run straight across the road and tried to get away. But Leonid and his pal were probably faster than me. The law of averages. Most humans are faster than me. The old lady in the summer dress was probably faster than me. Her old gray mutt was probably faster than me.
And running away was bad enough. Running away and then getting caught immediately was totally undignified.
So I stayed where I was.
On my left, Leonid took another step closer.
On my right, the short guy did the same thing.
Whatever the army had failed to teach me about staying out of sight, they had made up for by teaching me a lot about fighting. They had taken one look at me and sent me straight to the gym. I was like a lot of military children. We had weird backgrounds. We had lived all over the world. Part of our culture was to learn from the locals. Not history or language or political concerns. We learned fighting from them. Their favored techniques. Martial arts from the Far East, full-on