by Child, Lee
Jodie nodded in the car. Opened and closed her spare hand in frustration.
“Mrs. Hobie, can’t you tell us what this is about?”
Silence. Breathing, thinking.
“I should let my husband tell you. I think he can explain it better than me. It’s a long story, and I sometimes get confused.”
“OK, when will he wake up?” Jodie asked. “Should we come by a little later?”
There was another pause.
“He usually sleeps right through, after his medication,” the old woman said. “It’s a blessing, really, I think. Can your father’s friend come first thing in the morning?”
HOBIE USED THE tip of his hook to press the intercom buzzer on his desk. Leaned forward and called through to his receptionist. He used the guy’s name, which was an unusual intimacy for Hobie, generally caused by stress.
“Tony?” he said. “We need to talk.”
Tony came in from his brass-and-oak reception counter in the lobby and threaded his way around the coffee table to the sofa.
“It was Garber who went to Hawaii,” he said.
“You sure?” Hobie asked him.
Tony nodded. “On American, White Plains to Chicago, Chicago to Honolulu, April fifteenth. Returned the next day, April sixteenth, same route. Paid by Amex. It’s all in their computer.”
“But what did he do there?” Hobie said, more or less to himself.
“We don’t know,” Tony muttered. “But we can guess, can’t we?”
There was an ominous silence in the office. Tony watched the unburned side of Hobie’s face, waiting for a response.
“I heard from Hanoi,” Hobie said, into the silence.
“Christ, when?”
“Ten minutes ago.”
“Jesus, Hanoi?” Tony said. “Shit, shit, shit.”
“Thirty years,” Hobie said. “And now it’s happened.”
Tony stood up and walked around behind the desk. Used
his fingers to push two slats of the window blind apart. A bar of afternoon sunlight fell across the room.
“So you should get out now. Now it’s way, way too dangerous.”
Hobie said nothing. He clasped his hook in the fingers of his left hand.
“You promised,” Tony said urgently. “Step one, step two. And they’ve happened. Both steps have happened now, for God’s sake.”
“It’ll still take them some time,” Hobie said. “Won’t it? Right now, they still don’t know anything.”
Tony shook his head. “Garber was no fool. He knew something. If he went to Hawaii, there was a good reason for it.”
Hobie used the muscle in his left arm to guide the hook up to his face. He ran the smooth, cold steel over the scar tissue there. Time to time, pressure from the hard curve could relieve the itching.
“What about this Reacher guy?” he asked. “Any progress on that?”
Tony squinted out through the gap in the blind, eighty-eight floors up.
“I called St. Louis,” he said. “He was a military policeman, too, served with Garber the best part of thirteen years. They’d had another inquiry on the same subject, ten days ago. I’m guessing that was Costello.”
“So why?” Hobie asked. “The Garber family pays Costello to chase down some old Army buddy? Why? What the hell for?”
“No idea,” Tony said. “The guy’s a drifter. He was digging swimming pools down where Costello was.”
Hobie nodded, vaguely. He was thinking hard.
“A military cop,” he said to himself. “Who’s now a drifter.”
“You should get out,” Tony said again.
“I don’t like the military police,” Hobie said.
“I know you don’t.”
“So what’s the interfering bastard doing here?”
“You should get out,” Tony said for the third time.
Hobie nodded.
“I’m a flexible guy,” he said. “You know that.”
Tony let the blind fall back into place. The room went dark. “I’m not asking you to be flexible. I’m asking you to stick to what you planned all along.”
“I changed the plan. I want the Stone score.”
Tony came back around the desk and took his place on the sofa. “Too risky to stick around for it. Both calls are in now. Vietnam and Hawaii, for Christ’s sake.”
“I know that,” Hobie said. “So I changed the plan again.”
“Back to what it was?”
Hobie shrugged and shook his head. “A combination. We get out, for sure, but only after I nail Stone.”
Tony sighed and laid his hands palm-up on the upholstery. “Six weeks is way, way too long. Garber already went to Hawaii, for Christ’s sake. He was some kind of a hotshot general. And obviously he knew stuff, or why would he go out there?”
Hobie was nodding. His head was moving in and out of a thin shaft of light that picked up the crude gray tufts of his hair. “He knew stuff, I accept that. But he took sick and died. The stuff he knew died with him. Otherwise why would his daughter resort to some half-assed private dick and some unemployed drifter?”
“So what are you saying?”
Hobie slipped his hook below the level of the desktop and cupped his chin with his good hand. He let the fingers spread upward, over the scars. It was a pose he used subconsciously, when he was aiming to look accommodating and unthreatening.
“I can’t give up on the Stone score,” he said. “You can see that, right? It’s just sitting there, begging to be eaten up. I give up on that, I couldn’t live with myself the whole rest of my life. It would be cowardice. Running is smart, I agree with you, but running too early, earlier than you really need to, that’s cowardice. And I’m not a coward, Tony, you know that, right?”
“So what are you saying?” Tony asked again.
“We do both things together, but accelerated. Because I agree with you, six weeks is way too long. We need to get out before six weeks. But we aren’t going without the Stone score, so we speed things up.”
“OK, how?”
“I put the stock in the market today,” Hobie said. “It’ll hit the floor ninety minutes before the closing bell. That should be long enough to get the message through to the banks. Tomorrow morning, Stone will be coming here all steamed up. I won’t be here tomorrow, so you’ll tell him what we want, and what we’ll do if we don’t get it. We’ll have the whole nine yards within a couple of days, tops. I’ll presell the Long Island assets so we don’t hit any delay out there. Meanwhile, you’ll close things down here.”
“OK, how?” Tony asked again.
Hobie looked around the dim office, all four corners.
“We’ll just walk away from this place. Wastes six months of lease, but what the hell. Those two assholes playing at being my enforcers will be no problem. One of them is wasting the other tonight, and you’ll work with him until he gets hold of this Mrs. Jacob for me, whereupon you’ll waste her and him together. Sell the boat, sell the vehicles, and we’re out of here, no loose ends. Call it a week. Just a week. I think we can give ourselves a week, right?”
Tony nodded. Leaned forward, relieved at the prospect of action.
“What about this Reacher guy? He’s still a loose end.”
Hobie shrugged in his chair. “I’ve got a separate plan for him.”
“We won’t find him,” Tony said. “Not just the two of us. Not within a week. We don’t have the time to go out searching around for him.”
“We don’t need to.”
Tony stared at him. “We do, boss. He’s a loose end, right?”
Hobie shook his head. Then he dropped his hand away from his face and came out from under the desktop with his hook. “I’ll do this the efficient way. No reason to waste my energy finding him. I’ll let him find me. And he will. I know what military cops are like.”
“And then what?”
Hobie smiled.
“Then he leads a long and happy life,” he said. “Thirty more years at least.�
�
“SO WHAT NOW?” Reacher asked.
They were still in the lot outside McBannerman’s long, low office, engine idling, air roaring to combat, the sun beating down on the Bravada’s dark green paint. The vents were angled all over the place, and he was catching Jodie’s subtle perfume mixed in with the freon blast. Right at that moment, he was a happy guy, living an old fantasy. Many times in the past he’d speculated about how it would feel to be within touching distance of her when she was all grown up. It was something he had never expected to experience. He had assumed he would lose track of her and never see her again. He had assumed his feelings would just die away, over time. But there he was, sitting right next to her, breathing in her fragrance, taking sideways glances at her long legs sprawling down into the foot well. He had always assumed she would grow up pretty spectacular. Now he was feeling a little guilty for underestimating how beautiful she would become. His fantasies had not done her justice.
“It’s a problem,” she said. “I can’t go up there tomorrow. I can’t take more time out. We’re very busy right now, and I’ve got to keep on billing the hours.”
Fifteen years. Was that a long time or a short time? Does it change a person? It felt like a short time to him. He didn’t feel radically different from the person he had been fifteen years before. He was the same person, thinking the same way, capable of the same things. He had acquired a thick gloss of experience during those years, he was older, more burnished, but he was the same person. He felt she had to be different. Had to be, surely. Her fifteen years had been a greater leap, through bigger transitions. High school, college, law school, marriage, divorce, the partnership track, hours to bill. So now he felt he was in uncharted waters, unsure of how to relate to her, because he was dealing with three separate things, all competing in his head: the reality of her as kid, fifteen years ago, and then the way he had imagined she would turn out, and then the way she really had turned out. He knew all about two of those things, but not the third. He knew the kid. He knew the adult he’d invented inside his head. But he didn’t know the reality, and it was making him unsure, because suddenly he wanted to avoid making any stupid mistakes with her.
“You’ll have to go by yourself,” she said. “Is that OK?”
“Sure,” he said. “But that’s not the issue here. You need to take care.”
She nodded. Pulled her hands up inside her sleeves, and hugged herself. He didn’t know why.
“I’ll be OK, I guess,” she said.
“Where’s your office?”
“Wall Street and lower Broadway.”
“That’s where you live, right? Lower Broadway?”
She nodded. “Thirteen blocks. I usually walk.”
“Not tomorrow,” he said. “I’ll drive you.”
She looked surprised. “You will?”
“Damn right I will,” he said. “Thirteen blocks on foot? Forget about it, Jodie. You’ll be safe enough at home, but they could grab you on the street. What about your office? Is it secure?”
She nodded again. “Nobody gets in, not without an appointment and ID.”
“OK,” he said. “So I’ll be in your apartment all night, and I’ll drive you door-to-door in the morning. Then I’ll come back up here and see these Hobie people, and you can stay right there in the office until I come get you out again, OK?”
She was silent. He tracked back and reviewed what he’d said.
“I mean, you got a spare room, right?”
“Sure,” she said. “There’s a spare room.”
“So is that OK?”
She nodded, quietly.
“So what now?” he asked her. She turned sideways on her seat. The blast of air from the center vents caught her hair and blew it over her face. She smoothed it back behind her ear and her eyes flicked him up and down. Then she smiled.
“We should go shopping,” she said.
“Shopping? What for? What do you need?”
“Not what I need,” she said. “What you need.”
He looked at her, worried. “What do I need?”
“Clothes,” she said. “You can’t go visiting with those old folks looking like a cross between a beach bum and the wild man of Borneo, can you?”
Then she leaned sideways and touched the mark on his shirt with her fingertip.
“And we should find a pharmacy. You need something to put on that burn.”
“WHAT THE HELL are you doing?” the finance director screamed.
He was in Chester Stone’s office doorway, two floors above his own, gripping the frame with both hands, panting with exertion and fury. He hadn’t waited for the elevator. He had raced up the fire stairs. Stone was staring at him, blankly.
“You idiot,” he screamed. “I told you not to do this.”
“Do what?” Stone said back.
“Put stock in the market,” the finance guy yelled. “I told you not to do that.”
“I didn’t,” Stone said. “There’s no stock in the market.”
“There damn well is,” the guy said. “A great big slice, sitting there doing absolutely nothing at all. You got people shying away from it like it’s radioactive or something.”
“What?”
The finance guy breathed in. Stared at his employer. Saw a small, crumpled man in a ridiculous British suit sitting at a desk that alone was now worth a hundred times the corporation’s entire net assets.
“You asshole, I told you not to do this. Why not just take a page in The Wall Street Journal and say, ‘Hey people, my company’s worth exactly less than jack shit’?”
“What are you talking about?” Stone asked.
“I’ve got the banks on the phone,” the guy said. “They’re watching the ticker. Stone stock popped up an hour ago, and the price is unwinding faster than the damn computers can track it. It’s unsalable. You’ve sent them a message, for God’s sake. You’ve told them you’re insolvent. You’ve told them you owe them sixteen million dollars against security that isn’t worth sixteen damn cents.”
“I didn’t put stock in the market,” Stone said again.
The finance guy nodded sarcastically.
“So who the hell did? The tooth fairy?”
“Hobie,” Stone said. “Has to be. Jesus, why?”
“Hobie?” the guy repeated.
Stone nodded.
“Hobie?” the guy said again, incredulous. “Shit, you gave him stock?”
“I had to,” Stone said. “No other way.”
“Shit,” the guy said again, panting. “You see what he’s doing here?”
Stone looked blank, and then he nodded, scared. “What can we do?”
The finance director dropped his hands off the doorframe and turned his back. “Forget we. There’s no we here anymore. I’m resigning. I’m out of here. You can fix it yourself.”
“But you recommended the guy,” Stone yelled.
“I didn’t recommend giving him stock, you asshole,” the guy yelled back. “What are you? A moron? If I recommended you visit the aquarium to see the piranha fish, would you stick your damn finger in the tank?”
“You’ve got to help me,” Stone said.
The guy just shook his head. “You’re on your own. I’m resigning. Right now my recommendation is you go down to what was my office and get started. There’s a line of phones on what was my desk, all ringing. My recommendation is you start with whichever one is ringing the loudest.”
“Wait up,” Stone yelled. “I need your help here.”
“Against Hobie?” the guy yelled back. “Dream on, pal.”
Then he was gone. He just turned and strode out through the secretarial pen and disappeared. Stone came out from behind his desk and stood in the doorway and watched him go. The suite was silent. His secretary had left. Earlier than she should have. He walked out into the corridor. The sales department on the right was deserted. The marketing suite on the left was empty. The photocopiers were silent. He called the elevator and the mechanism so
unded very loud in the hush. He rode down two floors, alone. The finance director’s suite was empty. Drawers were standing open. Personal belongings had been taken away. He wandered through to the inner office. The Italian desk light was glowing. The computer was turned off. The phones were off their hooks, lying on the rosewood desktop. He picked one of them up.
“Hello?” he said into it. “This is Chester Stone.”
He repeated it twice into the electronic silence. Then a woman came on and asked him to hold. There were clicks and buzzes. A moment of soothing music.
“Mr. Stone?” a new voice said. “This is the Insolvency Unit.”
Stone closed his eyes and gripped the phone.
“Please hold for the director,” the voice said.
There was more music. Fierce baroque violins, scraping away, relentlessly.
“Mr. Stone?” a deep voice said. “This is the director.”
“Hello,” Stone said. It was all he could think of to say.
“We’re taking steps,” the voice said. “I’m sure you understand our position.”
“OK,” Stone said. He was thinking what steps? Lawsuits? Prison?
“We should be out of the woods, start of business tomorrow,” the voice said.
“Out of the woods? How?”
“We’re selling the debt, obviously.”
“Selling it?” Stone repeated. “I don’t understand.”
“We don’t want it anymore,” the voice said. “I’m sure you can understand that. It’s moved itself way outside of the parameters that we feel happy with. So we’re selling it. That’s what people do, right? They got something they don’t want anymore, they sell it, best price they can get.”
“Who are you selling it to?” Stone asked, dazed.
“A trust company in the Caymans. They made an offer.”
“So where does that leave us?”
“Us?” the voice repeated, puzzled. “It leaves us nowhere. Your obligation to us is terminated. There is no us. Our relationship is over. My only advice is that you never try to resurrect it. We would tend to regard that as insult added to injury.”
“So who do I owe now?”
“The trust company in the Caymans,” the voice said patiently. “I’m sure whoever’s behind it will be contacting you very soon, with their repayment proposals.”