Worth Dying For_ A Reacher Novel - Lee Child [116]
No response.
Pitch-black throughout the house. Not even a glimmer, anywhere.
“Turn the power back on, Reacher.”
No response.
Cold, and silence.
The guy from the living room found his way out to the hallway. “Maybe he isn’t awake. Maybe it’s a real outage.”
His partner asked, “Got a flashlight, doctor?”
The doctor said, “In the garage.”
“Go get it.”
“I can’t see.”
“Do your best, OK?”
The doctor shuffled down the hallway, hesitantly, fingers brushing the wall, colliding with the first guy, sensing the second guy’s hulking presence and avoiding it, making it to the kitchen, stumbling against a chair with a hollow rattle of wood, hitting the edge of the table with his thighs. The world of the blind. Not easy. He trailed his fingers along the countertops, passing the sink, passing the stove, making it to the mud room lobby in back. He turned ninety degrees with his hands out in front of him and found the door to the garage. He groped for the knob and opened the door and stepped down into the chill space beyond. He found the workbench and reached up and traced his fingers over the items clipped neatly above it. A hammer, good for hitting. Screwdrivers, good for stabbing. Wrenches, stone cold to the touch. He found the flashlight’s plastic barrel and pulled it out from its clip. He thumbed the switch and a weak yellow beam jumped out. He rapped the head against his palm and the beam sparked a little brighter. He turned and found a football player standing right next to him. The one from the living room.
The football player smiled and took the flashlight out of his hand and held it under his chin and made a face, like a Halloween lantern. He said, “Good work, doc,” and turned away and used the beam up and down and side to side to paint his way back into the house. The doctor followed, using the same lit memories a second later. The football player said, “Go back in the dining room now,” and shone the beam ahead, showing the doctor the way. The doctor went back to the table and the football player said, “All of you stay right where you are, and don’t move a muscle,” and then he closed the door on them.
His partner said, “So what now?”
The guy with the flashlight said, “We need to know if Reacher is awake or asleep.”
“We hit him pretty hard.”
“Best guess?”
“What’s yours?”
The guy with the flashlight didn’t answer. He stepped back down the hallway to the basement door. He pounded on it with the flat of his hand. He called, “Reacher, turn the power back on, or something bad is going to happen up here.”
No response.
Silence.
The guy with the flashlight hit the door again and said, “I’m not kidding, Reacher. Turn the damn power back on.”
No response.
Silence.
The other guy asked again, “So what now?”
The guy with the flashlight said, “Go get the doctor’s wife.” He aimed the beam at the dining room door and his partner went in and came back out holding the doctor’s wife by the elbow. The guy with the flashlight said, “Scream.”
She said, “What?”
“Scream, or I’ll make you.”
She paused a beat and blinked in the light of the beam, and then she screamed, long and high and loud. Then she stopped and dead silence came back and the guy with the flashlight hammered on the basement door again and called, “You hear that, asshole?”
No response.
Silence.
The guy with the flashlight jerked the beam back toward the dining room and his partner led the doctor’s wife back down the hallway and pushed her inside and closed the door on her again. He said, “So?”
The guy with the flashlight said, “We wait for daylight.”
“That’s four hours away.”
“You got a better idea?”
“We could call the mothership.”
“They’ll just tell us to handle it.”
“I’m not going down there. Not with him.”
“Me either.”
“So what do we do?”
“We wait him out. He thinks he’s smart, but he isn’t. We can sit in the dark. Anyone can. It ain’t exactly rocket science.”
They followed the dancing beam back to the living room and sat side by side on the sofa with the old Remington propped between them. They clicked