by Lee Child
Hobart opened his eyes. “But it didn’t happen that way. They got to the lip of the hole and stopped and just stood there. Waited in the moonlight. Watched us floundering around looking for fresh clips. We didn’t have any. Then the crowd parted and some kind of an officer walked through. He looked down at us and smiled. Black face, white teeth, in the moonlight. It hit us then. We thought we’d been in deep shit before, but that was nothing. This was deep shit. We’d just killed hundreds of their guys and we were about to be captured.”
“How did it go down?”
“Surprisingly well, at the beginning. They stole everything of any value immediately. Then they slapped us around a little bit for a minute, but it was really nothing. I had worse from the NCOs in boot camp. We had these little Stars and Stripes patches on our BDUs, and I thought maybe they counted for something. The first few days were chaos. We were chained all the time, but that was more out of necessity than cruelty. They had no jail facilities. They had nothing, really. They’d been living in the bush for years. No infrastructure. But they fed us. Appalling food, but it was the same as they were eating, and it’s the thought that counts. Then after a week it was clear the coup had succeeded, so they all moved into O-Town proper and took us with them and put us in the city prison. We were in a separate wing for about four weeks. We figured they were maybe negotiating with Washington. They fed us and left us alone. We could hear bad stuff elsewhere in the building, but we figured we were special. So altogether the first month was a day at the beach compared to what came later.”
“What came later?”
“Evidently they gave up on Washington or stopped thinking we were special because they took us out of the separate wing and tossed us in with some of the others. And that was bad. Real bad. Incredible overcrowding, filth, disease, no clean water, almost no food. We were skeletons inside a month. Savages after two. I went six months without even lying down, the first cell was so crowded. We were ankle deep in shit, literally. There were worms. At night the place crawled with them. People were dying from disease and starvation. Then they put us on trial.”
“You had a trial?”
“I guess it was a trial. War crimes, probably. I had no idea what they were saying.”
“Weren’t they speaking French?”
“That’s for government and diplomacy. The rest of them speak tribal languages. It was just two hours of noise to me, and then they found us guilty. They took us back to the big house and we found out that the part we’d already been in was the VIP accommodations. Now we were headed for general population, which was a whole lot worse. Two months later I figured I was about as low as I could go. But I was wrong. Because then I had a birthday.”
“What happened on your birthday?”
“They gave me a present.”
“Which was?”
“A choice.”
“Of what?”
“They hauled out about a dozen guys. I guess we all shared the same birthday. They took us to a courtyard. First thing I noticed was a big bucket of tar on a propane burner. It was bubbling away. Real hot. I remembered the smell from when I was a kid, from when they were blacktopping roads where I lived. My mother believed some old superstition that said if a kid sniffed the tar smell it would protect him from getting coughs and colds. She would send us out to chase the trucks. So I knew the smell real well. Then I saw next to the bucket was a big stone block, all black with blood. Then some big guard grabbed a machete and started screaming at the first guy in line. I had no idea what he was saying. The guy next to me spoke a little English and translated for me. He said we had a choice. Three choices, actually. To celebrate our birthdays we were going to lose a foot. First choice, left or right. Second choice, long pants or short pants. That was a kind of joke. It meant we could be cut above the knee or below. Our choice. Third choice, we could use the bucket or not. Our choice. You plunge the stump in there, the boiling tar seals the arteries and cauterizes the wound. Choose not to, and you bleed out and die. Our choice. But the guard said we had to choose fast. We weren’t allowed to mess around and hold up the queue behind us.”
Silence in the tiny room. Nobody spoke. There was no sound at all, except faint incongruous New York City sirens in the far distance.
Hobart said, “I chose left, long pants, and yes to the bucket.”
CHAPTER 41
For a long time the small room stayed quiet as a tomb. Hobart rolled his head from side to side to ease his neck. Reacher sat down in a small chair near the window.
Hobart said, “Twelve months later on my next birthday I chose right, long pants, and yes to the bucket.”
Reacher said, “They did this to Knight, too?”
Hobart nodded. “We thought we had been close before. But some things really bring you together.”
Pauling was leaning up in the kitchen doorway, white as a sheet. “Knight told you about Anne Lane?”
“He told me about a lot of things. But remember, we were doing seriously hard time. We were sick and starving. We had infections. We had malaria and dysentery. We were out of our heads for weeks at a time with fevers.”
“What did he tell you?”
“He told me he shot Anne Lane in New Jersey.”
“Did he tell you why?”
“He gave me a whole bunch of different reasons. Different day, different reason. Sometimes it was that he had been having an affair with her, and she broke it off, and he got mad. Other times it was that Lane was mad at her and asked him to do it. Other times he said he was working for the CIA. Once he said she was an alien from another planet.”
“Did he kidnap her?”
Hobart nodded, slowly, painfully. “Drove her to the store, but didn’t stop there. Just pulled a gun and kept on going, all the way to New Jersey. Killed her there.”
“Immediately?” Pauling asked.
Hobart said, “Yes, immediately. She was dead a day before you ever even heard of her. There was nothing wrong with your procedures. He killed her that first morning and drove back and waited outside the store until it was time to sound the alarms.”
“Not possible,” Pauling said. “His EZ-Pass records showed he hadn’t used a bridge or a tunnel that day.”
“Give me a break,” Hobart said. “You pull the tag off the windshield and put it in the foil packet they mailed it in. Then you use a cash lane.”
“Were you really in Philadelphia?” Reacher asked.
“Yes, I really was,” Hobart said.
“Did you know what Knight was doing that day?”
“No, I really didn’t.”
“Who faked Anne’s voice on the phone?” Pauling asked. “Who set up the ransom drop?”
“Sometimes Knight would say it was a couple of his buddies. Sometimes he would say Lane took care of all of that.”
“Which version did you believe?”
Hobart’s head dropped to his chest and canted left. He stared toward the floor. Reacher asked, “Can I get you something?”
“I’m just looking at your shoes,” Hobart said. “I like nice shoes, too. Or at least I did.”
“You’ll get prosthetics. You can wear shoes with them.”
“Can’t afford them. Prosthetics, or shoes.”
Pauling said, “What was the truth about Anne Lane?”
Hobart pulled his head back to the cushion so he could look straight up at Pauling. He smiled, sadly.
“The truth about Anne Lane?” he said. “I thought about that a lot. Believe me, I obsessed over it. It became the central question of my life, because basically it was responsible for what was happening to me. The third birthday I spent in there, they took me back to the courtyard. The second choice was phrased slightly different. Long sleeves or short? Stupid question, really. Nobody ever chose short sleeves. I mean, who the hell would? I saw a thousand amputees in there and nobody ever took it above the elbow.”
Silence in the room.
“The things you remember,” Hobart said. “I remember the
stink of the blood and the tar bucket and the pile of severed hands behind that big stone block. A bunch of black ones and one little white one.”
Pauling asked, “What was the truth about Anne?”
“The waiting was the hardest part. I spent a year looking at my right hand. Doing things with it. Making a fist, spreading my fingers, scratching myself with my nails.”
“Why did Knight kill Anne Lane?”
“They weren’t having an affair. Not possible. Knight wasn’t that type of a guy. I’m not saying he had scruples. He was just a little timid around women, that’s all. He did OK with trash in bars or with hookers, but Anne Lane was way out of his league. She was classy, she had personality, she had energy, she knew who she was. She was intelligent. She wouldn’t have responded to the kind of thing that Knight had to offer. Not in a million years. And Knight wouldn’t have offered anything anyway, because Anne was the CO’s wife. That’s the biggest no-no of all time for an American fighting man. In the movies they show it maybe, but not in real life. Just wouldn’t happen, and if it did, Knight would have been the last Marine on earth to try it.”
“You sure?”
“I knew him very well. And he didn’t have the kind of buddies that could have faked the voices. Certainly not a woman’s voice. He had no women friends. He didn’t have any friends outside of me and the unit. Not really. Not close enough for work like that. What Marine does? That’s when I knew he was bullshitting. There was nobody he knew where he could just walk up to them and say, hey, help me out with this phony kidnap thing, why don’t you?”
“So why did he even try bullshitting you?”
“Because he understood better than me that reality was over for us. There was really no difference between truth and fantasy for us at that point. They were of absolutely equal value. He was just amusing himself. Maybe he was trying to amuse me, too. But I was still analyzing stuff. He gave me a whole rainbow of reasons and details and facts and scenarios and I checked them over very carefully in my mind for five long years and the only story I really believed was that Lane set the whole thing up because Anne wanted out of the marriage. She wanted a divorce and she wanted alimony and Lane’s ego couldn’t take it. So he had her killed.”
“Why would Lane want Knight dead if all he had done was act on Lane’s own orders?”
“Lane was covering his ass. Tying up the loose ends. And he was avoiding being in someone else’s debt. That was the main thing, really. Ultimately that was the true reason. A guy like Lane, his ego couldn’t take that, either. Being grateful to someone.”
Silence in the room.
“What happened to Knight in the end?” Reacher asked.
“His fourth birthday,” Hobart said. “He didn’t go for the bucket. He didn’t want to go on. The pussy just quit on me. Some damn jarhead he was.”
CHAPTER 42
Ten minutes later Dee Marie Graziano got home. The squawk box in the hallway sounded and she asked for help carrying packages up the stairs. Reacher went down four flights and hauled four grocery bags back up to the apartment. Dee Marie unpacked them in the kitchen. She had bought a lot of soup, and Jell-O, and painkillers, and antiseptic creams.
Reacher said, “We heard that Kate Lane had a visitor in the Hamptons.”
Dee Marie said nothing.
“Was it you?” Reacher asked.
“I went to the Dakota first,” she said. “But the doorman told me they were away.”
“So then you went.”
“Two days later. We decided that I should. It was a long day. Very expensive.”
“You went there to warn Anne Lane’s successor.”
“We thought she should be told what her husband was capable of doing.”
“How did she react?”
“She listened. We walked on the sand and she listened to what I had to say.”
“That was all?”
“She took it all in. Didn’t react much.”
“How definite were you?”
“I said we had no proof. Equally I said we had no doubt.”
“And she didn’t react?”
“She just took it all in. Gave it a fair hearing.”
“Did you tell her about your brother?”
“It’s a part of the story. She listened to it. Didn’t say much. She’s beautiful and she’s rich. People like that are different. If it’s not happening to them, it’s not happening at all.”
“What happened to your husband?”
“Vinnie? Iraq happened to Vinnie. Fallujah. A roadside booby-trap.”
“I’m sorry.”
“They told me he was killed instantly. But they always say that.”
“Sometimes it’s true.”
“I hope it was. Just that one time.”
“The Corps or private?”
“Vinnie? The Corps. Vinnie hated private contractors.”
Reacher left Dee Marie in the kitchen and stepped back into the living room. Hobart’s head was laid back and his lips were stretched in a grimace. His neck was thin and bulging with ligaments. His torso was painfully wasted and looked bizarrely long in proportion to the stumps of his limbs.
“You need anything?” Reacher asked him.
Hobart said, “Silly question.”
“What would the three of clubs mean to you?”
“Knight.”
“How so?”
“Three was his lucky number. Club was his nickname in the Corps. Because of how he liked to party, and because of the pun on his name. Knight Club, nightclub, like that. They called him Club, back in the day.”
“He left a playing card on Anne Lane’s body. The three of clubs.”
“He did? He told me that. I didn’t believe him. I thought it was embellishment. Like a book or a movie.”
Reacher said nothing.
“I need the bathroom,” Hobart said. “Tell Dee.”
“I’ll do it,” Reacher said. “Let’s give Dee a break.”
He stepped over and bunched the front of Hobart’s shirt and hauled him upright. Slipped an arm behind his shoulders. Ducked down and caught him under the knees and lifted him up off the sofa. He was incredibly light. Probably close to a hundred pounds. Not much of him left.
Reacher carried Hobart to the bathroom and grabbed the front of his shirt again one-handed and held him vertical in the air like a rag doll. Undid his pants and eased them down.
“You’ve done this before,” Hobart said.
“I was an MP,” Reacher said. “I’ve done everything before.”
Reacher put Hobart back on the sofa and Dee Marie fed him more soup. Used the same damp cloth to clean his chin.
Reacher said, “I need to ask you both one important question. I need to know where you’ve been and what you’ve been doing for the last four days.”
Dee Marie answered. No guile, no hesitation, nothing phony or overrehearsed. Just a slightly incoherent and therefore completely convincing pieced-together narrative account of four random days from an ongoing nightmare. The four days had started with Hobart in Saint Vincent’s hospital. Dee Marie had taken him to the ER the night before with a severe malaria relapse. The ER doctor had admitted him for forty-eight hours of IV medication. Dee Marie had stayed with him most of the time. Then she had brought him home in a taxi and carried him on her back up the four flights of stairs. They had been alone in the apartment since then, eating what was in the kitchen cupboards, doing nothing, seeing nobody, until their door had smashed open and Reacher had ended up in the middle of their living room.
“Why are you asking?” Hobart said.
“The new Mrs. Lane was kidnapped. And her kid.”
“You thought I did it?”
“For a spell.”
“Think again.”
“I already have.”
“Why would I?”
“For revenge. For money. The ransom was exactly half the Burkina Faso payment.”
“I would have wanted all of it.”
“M
e too.”
“But I wouldn’t have gone after a woman and a kid.”
“Me either.”
“So why pick me out?”
“We got a basic report on you and Knight. We heard about mutilations. No specific details. Then we heard about a guy with no tongue. We put two and two together and made three. We thought it was you.”
“No tongue?” Hobart said. “I wish. I’d take that deal.” Then he said, “But no tongue is a South American thing. Brazil, Colombia, Peru. Maybe Sicily in Europe. Not Africa. You can’t get a machete in somebody’s mouth. Lips, maybe. I saw that, sometimes. Or ears. But not the tongue.”
“We apologize,” Pauling said.
“No harm, no foul,” Hobart said.
“We’ll have the door fixed.”
“I’d appreciate that.”
“And we’ll help you if we can.”
“I’d appreciate that, too. But see to the woman and the child first.”
“We think we’re already too late.”
“Don’t say that. It depends who took them. Where there’s hope, there’s life. Hope kept me going, five hard years.”
Reacher and Pauling left Hobart and Dee Marie right there, together on their battered sofa, the bowl of soup half-gone. They walked down four flights to the street and stepped out into the afternoon shadows of a fabulous late-summer day. Traffic ground past on the street, slow and angry. Horns blared and sirens barked. Fast pedestrians swerved by on the sidewalk.
Reacher said, “Eight million stories in the naked city.”
Pauling said, “We’re nowhere.”
CHAPTER 43
Reacher led Pauling north on Hudson, across Houston, to the block between Clarkson and Leroy. He said, “I think the man with no tongue lives near this spot.”
“Twenty thousand people live near this spot,” Pauling said.
Reacher didn’t reply.
“What now?” Pauling said.
“Back to the hard way. We wasted some time, that’s all. Wasted some energy. My fault entirely. I was stupid.”
“How?”
“Did you see how Hobart was dressed?”
“Cheap new denims.”