Blue Moon

There was silence for a long moment.

Mrs. Shevick looked at Reacher.

“Thank you,” she said.

Then Shevick’s cell phone rang. He limped out to the hallway and took the call. Reacher heard a faint plastic quack from the earpiece. A man’s voice, he thought. He couldn’t make out the words. Some long stream of information. He heard Shevick reply, loud and clear, ten feet away, with a muttered assent that sounded weary and unsurprised, yet still disappointed. Then Shevick asked what was unmistakably a question.

He said, “How much?”

The faint plastic quack answered.

Shevick closed his phone. He stood still for a moment, and then he limped back into the kitchen and sat down again at the table. He folded his hands in front of him. He looked at the envelope. Not a stare, not a gaze. Some kind of a bittersweet glance. Equidistant. Equally far away from all of them.

He said, “They need another forty thousand dollars.”

His wife closed her eyes and clamped her hands over her face.

Reacher said, “Who needs?”

“Not Fisnik,” Shevick said. “Not the Ukrainians, either. Not any of them. This is the other end of the issue entirely. This is the reason we had to borrow money in the first place.”

“Are you being blackmailed?”

“No, nothing like that. I wish it was that simple. All I can say is there are bills we have to pay. One just came due. Now we have to find another forty thousand dollars.” He glanced at the envelope again. “Some of which we’ve already got, thanks to you.” He worked it out in his head. “Technically we need to find another eighteen thousand nine hundred dollars.”

“By when?”

“Tomorrow morning.”

“Can you?”

“We couldn’t find another eighteen cents.”

“Why so quick?”

“Some things can’t wait.”

“What are you going to do?”

Shevick didn’t answer.

His wife took her hands away from her face.

“We’re going to borrow it,” she said. “What else can we do?”

“Who from?”

“The man with the prison tattoo,” she said. “What choice do we have? We’re maxed out everywhere else.”

“Can you pay it back?”

“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”

No one spoke.

Reacher said, “I’m sorry I can’t help you more.”

Mrs. Shevick looked at him.

“You can,” she said.

“Can I?”

“In fact you’ll have to.”

“Will I?”

“The man with the prison tattoo thinks you’re Aaron Shevick. You have to go get our money for us.”

Chapter 7

They discussed it thirty minutes more. Reacher and the Shevicks, back and forth. Certain facts were established early. The fixed points. The dealbreakers. They absolutely needed the money. No question. No debate. They absolutely needed it by morning. No leeway. No flexibility.

They absolutely would not say why.

Their life savings were gone. Their house was gone. They were newly into an old-person’s mortgage arrangement, whereby they were allowed to live there the rest of their lives, but the title had already passed to the bank. The lump sum they had gotten was already spent. No more could be raised. Their credit cards were maxed out and canceled. They had borrowed against their Social Security checks. They had cashed in their life insurance and given up their landline telephone. Now that their car was gone they had sold everything of value. All they had left were personal trinkets. Between their own stuff and family heirlooms they had five nine-carat wedding bands, three small diamond rings, and a gold-plated wristwatch with a crack in the crystal. Reacher figured on the happiest day of his life the most warmhearted pawnbroker in the world might have given them two hundred bucks. No more than that. Maybe less than a hundred on a bad day. Not even a drop in the bucket.

They said they had first used Fisnik five weeks previously. They had gotten his name from a neighbor. As an item of gossip, not as a recommendation. Some kind of a scandal. Some lurid story about some other neighbor’s nephew’s wife’s cousin borrowing money from a gangster in a bar. Name of Fisnik, imagine that. Shevick had narrowed the search radius based on detail and rumor, and he had started checking every bar within that predicted area, one by one, blushing, embarrassed, stared at, asking every barman if he knew a guy named Fisnik, until at his fourth stop a fat man with a sarcastic manner jerked his thumb at the corner table.

Reacher said, “How did it work?”

“Very easy,” Shevick said. “I approached his table, and stood there, while he inspected me, and then he signaled me to sit down, so I did. I guess at first I beat about the bush a bit, but then I just came out and said, look, I need to borrow money, and I understand you lend it. He asked how much, and I told him. He explained the terms of the contract. He showed me the photographs. I watched the video. I gave him my account number. Twenty minutes later the money was in my bank. It was wired in from somewhere untraceable via a corporation in Delaware.”

“I pictured a bag of cash,” Reacher said.

“We had to make our repayments in cash.”

Reacher nodded.