Worth Dying For_ A Reacher Novel - Lee Child [74]
Starbursts and waterfalls and explosions of thoughts, all jostling and competing and fighting for supremacy.
Better safe than sorry.
Reacher reacted.
He twisted from the waist in a violent spasm and started a low sidearm punch aimed at the center of the Iranian’s chest. Chemical reaction in his brain, instantaneous transmission of the impulse, chemical reaction in every muscle system from his left foot to his right fist, total elapsed time a small fraction of a second, total distance to target less than a yard, total time to target another small fraction of a second, which was good to know right then, because the guy’s hand was all the way in his pocket by that point, his own nervous system reacting just as fast as Reacher’s, his elbow jerking up and back and trying to free whatever the hell it was he wanted, be it a knife, or a gun, or a phone, or a driver’s license, or a passport, or a government ID, or a perfectly innocent letter from the University of Tehran proving he was a world expert on plant genetics and an honored guest in Nebraska just days away from increasing local profits a hundredfold and eliminating world hunger at one fell swoop. But right or wrong Reacher’s fist was homing in regardless and the guy’s eyes were going wide and panicked in the gloom and his arm was jerking harder and the brown skin and the black hair on the back of his moving hand was showing above the hem of his pocket, and then came his knuckles, all five of them bunched and knotted because his fingers were clamping hard around something big and black.
Then Reacher’s blow landed.
Two hundred and fifty pounds of moving mass, a huge fist, a huge impact, the zipper of the guy’s coat driving backward into his breastbone, his breastbone driving backward into his chest cavity, the natural elasticity of his ribcage letting it yield whole inches, the resulting violent compression driving the air from his lungs, the hydrostatic shock driving blood back into his heart, his head snapping forward like a crash test dummy, his shoulders driving backward, his weight coming up off the ground, his head whipping backward again and hitting a plate-glass window behind him with a dull boom like a kettle drum, his arms and legs and torso all going down like a rag doll, his body falling, sprawling, the hard polycarbonate click and clatter of something black skittering away on the ground, Reacher tracking it all the way in the corner of his eye, not a wallet, not a phone, not a knife, but a Glock 17 semiautomatic pistol, all dark and boxy and wicked. It ended up six or eight feet away from the guy, completely out of his reach, safe, not retrievable, partly because of the distance itself and partly because the guy was down and he wasn’t moving at all.
In fact he was looking like he might never move again.
Something Reacher had heard about, but never actually seen.
His army medic friends had called it commotio cordis, their name for low-energy trauma to the chest wall. Low energy only in the sense that the damage wasn’t done by a car wreck or a shotgun blast but by a line drive in baseball or a football collision or a punch in a fight or a bad fall onto a blunt object. Gruesome research on laboratory animals proved it was all about luck and timing. Electrocardiograms showed waveforms associated with the beating of the heart, one of which was called the T-wave, and the experiments showed that if the blow landed when the T-wave was between fifteen and thirty milliseconds short of its peak, then lethal cardiac dysrhythmias could occur, stopping the heart just like a regular heart attack. And in a high-stress environment like a confrontation in a parking lot, a guy’s heart was pounding away much harder than normal and therefore it was bringing those T-wave peaks around