It was made of pressed tin, sandblasted back to a dull glow. The ceiling was high, maybe twenty or twenty-five feet. It was a large room, easily sixty feet by sixty, exactly square. They were showing something halfway between disbelief and panic and they were darting all around the room.
His arms were folded tight across his chest, defensively. The owner was a small nervous guy and he had backed away into the point of the triangle and was standing with his backside jammed against the cash drawer. The register and the credit card machine were on the bottom shelf. They were crowded three-deep on glass shelves in front of sandblasted mirrors. It was somewhere to keep the liquor bottles. It was not really a bar in the sense that anybody was ever going to sit there and drink anything. It made a neat sharp triangle about seven or eight feet on a side. The bar was a token affair built across the corner of the room. The two guys Reacher was watching were standing close to the bar, talking quietly to the owner. Because the dynamics of the city meant any bright new commercial venture would sooner or later get a visit on behalf of somebody wanting a steady three hundred bucks a week in exchange for not sending his boys in to smash it up with baseball bats and ax handles. They made it inevitable the two guys he was watching would be in there, too. They made it inevitable Reacher would be in there. But neither thing had happened yet and the place was still uncrowded, which made it the perfect choice for a lonely guy looking to eat dinner near his girlfriend's apartment while she worked late at the office. From the start the dynamics of the city meant that a brand-new Italian place in Tribeca like the one Reacher was in was going to stay pretty empty until the food guy from the New York Times wrote it up or an Observer columnist spotted some celebrity in there two nights in a row. Which was why he was sitting alone at a restaurant table and gazing at the backs of two guys twenty feet away and wondering if it would be enough just to warn them off or if he would have to go the extra mile and break their arms. It was a habit Jack Reacher had in spades. You get into a what if thing, and you start speculating about what you would do if some problem was yours instead of somebody else's.
LIFE IS FULL of decisions and judgments and guesses, and it gets to the point where you're so accustomed to making them you keep right on making them even when you don't strictly need to. Which makes you just about the most powerful person on earth. Just as carefully as you would mark the play card you knew for sure was going to win you a fortune. You go through it all in your head, very precisely and very exactly and very carefully. So you don't leave anything for them to find. You've seen them on duty, many times, sometimes close-up. You know more than most people about how the cops work.
How do you make sure you get away with it? You use your knowledge. You know the big problems will come afterward. How could you, with your intelligence? After all your training? You have no problem with careful preparation. But that stuff is meat and potatoes to you. Because the perfect method is not an easy method, and careful preparation is very important. You think, and you think, and you think, and you come up with the perfect method. So you use what knowledge you've got, and you invent a new way.
You would need to know ahead of time how to do it. Same for the Oscars, same for the Nobel prize, same for the first snowfall of winter. Football, hockey, next year's World Series, any kind of sports at all, if you could predict the future, you'd be home free. Same for basketball, same for the horses, whatever. Then later you'd sell, and you'd be rich. Suppose you had it? What would you do? You would call your broker. You're not talking about a trend or a percentage game or a whisper or a tip. Suppose you really knew what was going to go way up? You're not talking about a hunch or a gut feeling. You would mark those numbers on the play card. Suppose you knew the winning numbers for the lottery? All of them? Not guessed them, not dreamed them, but really knew them? What would you do? You would run to the store.