Second Son_ A Reacher Story - Lee Child [12]
“Two girls more than once each.”
“A lot?”
“Maybe four times each.”
“Where?”
“On the mouth.”
“No, where? In the movies, or what?”
“One in the movies, one in a park.”
“With tongues?”
“Yes.”
She asked, “Are you good at it?”
He said, “I don’t know.”
“Will you show me how? I’ve never done it.”
So he leaned up on an elbow and kissed her on the mouth. Her lips were small and mobile, and her tongue was cool and wet. They kept it going for fifteen or twenty seconds, and then they broke apart.
He asked, “Did you like it?”
She said, “Kind of.”
“Was I good at it?”
“I don’t know. I don’t have anything to compare it with.”
“Well, you were better than the other two I kissed,” he said.
“Thank you,” she said, but he didn’t know what she was thanking him for. The compliment or the trial run, he wasn’t sure.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Reacher and Helen walked back together, and they almost made it home. They got within twenty yards of their destination, and then the kid with the boil stepped out of his yard and took up a position in the middle of the road. He was wearing the same Corps T-shirt and the same pair of ragged pants. And he was alone, for the time being.
Reacher felt Helen go quiet beside him. She stopped walking and Reacher stopped a pace ahead of her. The big kid was six feet away. The three of them were like the corners of a thin sloping triangle. Reacher said, “Stay there, Helen. I know you could kick this guy’s ass all by yourself, but there’s no reason why both of us should be exposed to the smell.”
The big kid just smiled.
He said, “You’ve been to the beach.”
Reacher said, “And we thought Einstein was smart.”
“How many times have you been?”
“You can’t count that high.”
“Are you trying to make me mad?”
Reacher was, of course. For his age he had always been a freakishly big kid, right from birth. His mother claimed he had been the biggest baby anyone had ever seen, although she had a well-known taste for the dramatic, so Reacher tended to discount that information. But even so, big or not, he had always fought two or three classes up. Sometimes more. With the result that one on one, ninety-nine percent of the time, he had been the small kid. So he had learned to fight like a small kid. All things being equal, size usually wins. But not always, otherwise the heavyweight championship of the world would be decided on the scale, not in the ring. Sometimes, if the small guy is faster and smarter, he can get a result. And one way of being smarter is to make the other guy dumber, which you can do by inducing a rage. An opponent’s red mist is the smaller guy’s best friend. So yes, Reacher was trying to make the smelly kid mad.
But the smelly kid wasn’t falling for it. He was just standing there, taking it, tense but controlled. His feet were well placed, and his shoulders were bunched. His fists were ready to come up. Reacher took one pace forward, into the miasma of halitosis and body odor. Rule one with a guy like that: don’t let him bite you. You could get an infection. Rule two: watch his eyes. If they stayed up, he was going to swing. If they dropped down, he was going to kick.
The guy’s eyes stayed up. He said, “There’s a girl here. You’re going to get your butt kicked in front of a girl. You won’t be able to show your face. You’ll be the neighborhood retard pussy. Maybe I’ll charge the toll every time you come out of your house. Maybe I’ll expand the zone all over the island. Maybe I’ll charge a double toll. From you and your retard brother.”
Rule three with a guy like that: upset the choreography. Don’t wait, don’t back off, don’t be the challenger, don’t be the underdog, don’t think defensively.
In other words, rule four: hit him first.
And not with a predictable little left jab, either.
Because rule five: there are no rules on the back streets of Okinawa.
Reacher snapped a vicious straight right into the guy’s face and caught him square on the cheek.
That got his attention.
The guy rocked back and shook his head and popped a straight right of his own, which Reacher had expected