FaceOff (43 page)

The commercials ended, and the broadcast returned to Fenway. The little green bandbox looked luscious under the lights. The Yankees
were in the field, in road gray. Their pitcher was throwing the last of his warm-ups. He didn’t look very good.

NICK HELLER HAD ENTERED THE
bar three minutes earlier, and had immediately picked up on the after-work vibe, the frenzied high spirits, the smell of sweat and cologne and beer and unwinding anxiety. It was like walking into a party at its very peak: the disorienting cacophony of chatter, the nearly deafening babble, the whooping laughter.

It was one of Heller’s favorite hometown bars because it was the real thing. You’d never find raspberry wheat craft beer here. They had Narragansett beer on tap, a beer that Bostonians were loyal to even if it was watery swill.

There were a couple of available seats at the bar, on either side of a great fat man. Interesting. Heller wondered whether the fat guy was saving them for friends. He couldn’t be from the neighborhood. No one who came here did things like saving seats.

Heller sidled through the crowd toward the bar counter. One of the things he liked about this place was the mirror behind the serried ranks of bottles. A mirror like this, you could see the faces of those sitting at the bar as you approached. Or you could sit at the bar, back to the room, and see who was coming up from behind. You could talk to the guy or the woman next to you and be looking him or her in the face. In the mirror. Directly, but at the same time indirectly. Heller liked being able to relax when he went for a drink, and you never knew who might turn up.

As he neared the bar, he noticed one face in the mirror looking at him. The fat guy. He had an odd face, a receding chin with a cowl-like wattle that tucked under his collar like an apron. He reminded Heller of a trout. He was watching Heller intently. Like
he’d been waiting for him. Heller had never seen the guy before, but still the fat man studied him. As if . . . well, as if he were expecting someone but didn’t know what that person might look like.

As if Heller might be that guy. Strange. Heller didn’t know him.

Heller sat on the stool and nodded at the man.

“Howyadoin?” the guy said.

“Hey,” Heller said, neither friendly nor rude.

A pause. “Jerry DeLong,” the man said, sticking out his hand.

Heller didn’t feel like making friends. He didn’t want to chat. The Red Sox were playing the Yankees at Fenway Park. This was a major moment in Boston sports, a rite, like the gladiator games at the Roman Coliseum back in the day. And there was no better place to watch an important game like this than here.

After a brief pause, Heller shook his hand. “Nick,” he said. No last name. Heller didn’t like to give out his name. He immediately turned to the huge, flat TV screen, set to the Sox. Of course it was. The owner of the bar, a buddy of Nick’s, was an ardent Sox fan. So was Sully, the bartender. Some nights, though, there was discord in the bar when the Sox were playing opposite the Bruins. Bostonians also loved their hockey. You even had nights when all four Boston teams—the Sox, the Bruins, the Celtics, and the Patriots—were playing on four different channels. You didn’t want to be in this particular bar on a night like that. It got ugly.

“Nick,” the bartender said, pulling him a Budweiser without asking.

“Sully,” Heller said.

“Big night, huh?”

“Romp to victory.”

“Absolutely,” said Sully, setting the glass of beer in front of him, a foamy white head like a layer of cotton batting. He wagged his head as if to say,
From your mouth to God’s ear
.

Then Heller sensed in his peripheral field the fat guy staring at him again.

In a neutral voice Heller said, “Do I know you?”

The guy sipped a gin and tonic. “Uh, you here to meet someone?” he said.

“I’m here to watch the Sox win,” Heller said. A degree friendlier this time, but still no-nonsense.

“Sorry.”

“It’s cool,” Heller relented.

In the bar-back mirror he noticed a large man approaching the empty seat on DeLong’s left. Heller knew at once this was someone to keep a wary eye on. He was huge, way taller than most—easily six-foot-five—and at least two hundred fifty pounds. Unusually broad-shouldered. A tank. He was all muscle and had that ex-military look you couldn’t miss. The thrift-shop clothes and brutalist haircut made him look a little like a drifter, or at least not someone who paid more than ten bucks at the barber shop.

But there was also a canny intelligence in the eyes, and a wariness. He had the confident look of someone who wasn’t challenged physically very often and, when he was, usually won. He intimidated people and didn’t mind it.

So this was who Jerry DeLong was meeting. That was a relief. Heller wasn’t going to have to fend off some blab-o-maniac during the ball game.

Then he overheard Jerry DeLong introduce himself to the big guy and meet with the same puzzled reaction he’d got from Nick.

Heller put his elbow on the mahogany bar next to an ugly cigarette burn from the good old days when you could smoke in bars, and took a sip of the beer. It was crisp and cold. He never understood why the Brits liked beer at room temperature.

The Yankee pitcher was throwing the last of his warm-ups. He
was dismayingly good. Graceful, and a great arm. A knuckleballer. He had a mean slider and a nasty power changeup with serious depth and fade. Most important, he wasn’t wasting his stuff. He was saving it for the game. This wasn’t a pitcher who’d burn out long before one hundred pitches, like so many others did.

Of course he was good: he’d been one of the Red Sox’s best starters until the Yankees hired him away for money no one could turn down. The best pitching money can buy. Yankee fans used to boo him relentlessly when the Sox came to Yankee Stadium. But as soon as he started pitching no-hitters for them, they switched allegiances.

Heller wasn’t a guy who switched allegiances.

The bottom of the first started and the Red Sox batter stepped up to the plate and hit a smash off the first pitch. A home run. It sailed over the Green Monster, that ridiculously high left-field wall that had turned many a surefire homer into a double. The ball probably broke a store window somewhere over on Lansdowne Street. The bar erupted in cheers, predictably.

Then Heller noticed three interesting things.

Jerry DeLong hadn’t been paying attention to the game. He turned to the set searchingly, a beat too late, trying to figure out what had just happened.

And the big bruiser on his left wasn’t cheering. Not even smiling. He’d been watching the game closely, but obviously wasn’t a Sox fan. He winced at the home run and made a little snort. He didn’t look happy. A New Yorker, then. A Yankees fan. It took a fair measure of chutzpah for a Yankees fan to watch a Sox-Yankees game in a bar like this one. Either that or not caring what other people thought. The latter, Heller decided.

Then the fat guy’s cell phone rang and he took it out of his pocket and held it up to his ear, next to the pouch of flesh below
his jowls. He cupped his other hand around the phone, shielding it from the clamor of the bar.

“Hey, honey,” he said, easy and familiar, but also a little panicked, like husbands in bars everywhere. “No, not at all—I’m watching the game with Howie and Ken.”

Which was the third interesting thing. The fat man was lying to his wife.

Men lie to their wives for a long list of reasons, infidelity being right at the top. But this was no Craigslist assignation. He wasn’t here for sex. He didn’t have that freshly scrubbed look of a guy on the make. He hadn’t combed his hair or splashed on fresh cologne.

He looked scared.

REACHER’S FIRST NAME WAS JACK,
and he was pretty damn sure the guy with the muscles wasn’t called either Howie or Ken. He could have been born with either moniker, obviously, but he would have abandoned it fast, in favor of something harder, if he wanted to survive the kind of world he evidently had. Which meant the fat guy was lying through his teeth. He wasn’t watching the game with Howie and Ken. In fact he wasn’t watching the game at all. When the lucky fly ball had left the tiny bandbox the guy had been a long beat behind. He had looked up with a blank expression because of the sudden noise. He was watching the mirror. He was watching the door. He was expecting someone he didn’t know by sight. Hence the half-expectant welcome a minute earlier.
Jerry DeLong,
the guy had said, as if it might mean something.

Reacher snaked a long arm behind DeLong’s immense back and poked the guy with the muscles in the shoulder. The guy leaned back, but kept his eyes on the game. As did Reacher. The
guy in the two-hole for the Sox swung and missed. Strike three. Better.

Reacher said, “Who got here first, you or him?”

The guy said, “Him.”

“Did you get the same thing I got?”

“Identical.”

“Was he saving the seats?”

“I doubt it.”

“So now he’s expecting a tap on the shoulder, and then they’ll go somewhere to do their business?”

“That’s how I see it.”

The third batter for the Sox stepped up. Reacher said, “What kind of business? Am I in the kind of place I don’t want to be?”

“You from New York?”

“Not exactly.”

“But you’re rooting for them.”

“No crime in being a sane human being.”

“This place is okay. I don’t know what the tub of lard wants.”

Reacher said, “You could ask him.”

“Or you could.”

“I’m not very interested.”

“Me, either. But he’s worried about something.”

The third Sox batter popped up, way high, in the infield. Comfortable for the Yankees’ second baseman. The guy with the muscles said, “You got a name?”

Reacher said, “Everyone’s got a name.”

“What is it?”

“Reacher.”

“I’m Heller.” The guy offered his left fist. Reacher bumped it with his right, behind DeLong’s back. Not the first time his knuckles had touched a Sox fan, but by far the gentlest.

The Sox cleanup hitter grounded weakly back to the pitcher, and the inning was over. One–zip Boston. Bad, but not a humiliating disaster. Yet.

Reacher said, “If we keep on talking about him like this, eventually he might clue us in.”

Heller said, “Why would he?”

“He’s in trouble.”

“What are you, Santa Claus?”

“I don’t like our pitching. I’m looking for a diversion.”

“Suck it up.”

“Like you did for a hundred years?”

At that point the bar was quiet. Just the natural ebb and flow, but the barman heard what Reacher said, and he stared, hard.

Reacher said, “What?”

Heller said, “It’s okay, Sully.”

And then Jerry DeLong looked left, looked right, and said, “I’m waiting for someone to break my legs.”

HELLER GAVE REACHER A GLANCE.

Reacher seemed to have an intuition about the fat guy. He knew something was off, somehow. Something was wrong. Funny, Heller’d had the same sort of intuition. Same way he realized pretty quickly that this Reacher guy was really sharp.

The fat man had blurted it out. He was genuinely terrified.

But then he said no more.