Tripwire

by Child, Lee

  He stepped across the living room and out to the terrace. The terrace faced west across the park, from thirty floors up. It was a view he hated, because all the trees reminded him of his childhood. But it enhanced the value of his property, which was the name of the game. He wasn’t responsible for the way other people’s tastes drove the market. He was just there to benefit from them. He turned and looked left, to where he could see his office building, all the way downtown. The Twin Towers looked shorter than they should, because of the curvature of the earth. He turned back inside and slid the door closed. Walked through the apartment and out to the elevator. Rode down all the way to the parking garage.

  His car was not modified in any way to help him with his handicap. It was a late-model Cadillac sedan with the ignition and the selector on the right of the steering column. Using the key was awkward, because he had to lean across with his left hand and jab it in backward and twist. But after that, he never had much of a problem. He put it in drive by using the hook on the selector and drove out of the garage one-handed, using his left, the hook resting down in his lap.

  He felt better once he was south of Fifty-ninth Street. The park disappeared and he was deep in the noisy canyons of midtown. The traffic comforted him. The Cadillac’s air-conditioning relieved the itching under his scars. June was the worst time for that. Some particular combination of heat and humidity acted together to drive him crazy. But the Cadillac made it better. He wondered idly whether Stone’s Mercedes would be as good. He thought not. He had never trusted the air on foreign cars. So he would turn it into cash. He knew a guy in Queens who would spring for it. But it was another chore on the list. A lot to do, and not much time to do it in. The outfielder was right there, under the ball, leaping, with the fence at his back.

  He parked in the underground garage, in the slot previously occupied by the Suburban. He reached across and pulled the key and locked the Cadillac. Rode upstairs in the express elevator. Tony was at the reception counter.

  “Hanoi called again,” Hobie told him. “It’s in the air.”

  Tony looked away.

  “What?” Hobie asked him.

  “So we should just abandon this Stone thing.”

  “It’ll take them a few days, right?”

  “A few days might not be enough,” Tony said. “There are complications. The woman says she’s talked it over with him, and they’ll do the deal, but there are complications we don’t know about.”

  “What complications?”

  Tony shook his head. “She wouldn’t tell me. She wants to tell you, direct.”

  Hobie stared at the office door. “She’s kidding, right? She damn well better be kidding. I can’t afford any kind of complications now. I just presold the sites, three separate deals. I gave my word. The machinery is in motion. What complications?”

  “She wouldn’t tell me,” Tony said again.

  Hobie’s face was itching. There was no air-conditioning in the garage. The short walk to the elevator had upset his skin. He pressed the hook to his forehead, looking for some relief from the metal. But the hook was warm, too.

  “What about Mrs. Jacob?” he asked.

  “She was home all night,” Tony said. “With this Reacher guy. I checked. They were laughing about something this morning. I heard them from the corridor. Then they drove somewhere, north on the FDR Drive. Maybe going back to Garrison.”

  “I don’t need her in Garrison. I need her right here. And him.”

  Tony was silent.

  “Bring Mrs. Stone to me,” Hobie said.

  He walked into to his office and across to his desk. Tony went the opposite way, toward the bathroom. He came out a moment later, pushing Marilyn in front of him. She looked tired. The silk sheath looked ludicrously out of context, like she was a partygoer caught out by a blizzard and stranded in town the morning after.

  Hobie pointed to the sofa.

  “Sit down, Marilyn,” he said.

  She remained standing. The sofa was too low. Too low to sit on in a short dress, and too low to achieve the psychological advantage she was going to need. But to stand in front of his desk was wrong, too. Too supplicant. She walked around to the wall of windows. Eased the slats apart and gazed out at the morning. Then she turned and propped herself against the ledge. Made him rotate his chair to face her.

  “What are these complications?” he asked.

  She looked at him and took a deep breath.

  “We’ll get to that,” she said. “First we get Sheryl to the hospital.”

  There was silence. No sound at all, except the rumbling and booming of the populated building. Faraway to the west, a siren sounded faintly. Maybe all the way over in Jersey City.

  “What are these complications?” he asked again. He used the same exact voice, the same exact intonation. Like he was prepared to overlook her mistake.

  “The hospital first.”

  The silence continued. Hobie turned back to Tony.

  “Get Stone out of the bathroom,” he said.

  Stone stumbled out, in his underwear, with Tony’s knuckles in his back, all the way to the desk. He hit his shins on the coffee table and gasped in pain.

  “What are these complications?” Hobie asked him.

  He just glanced wildly left and right, like he was too scared and disoriented to speak. Hobie waited. Then he nodded.

  “Break his leg,” he said. He turned to look at Marilyn. There was silence. No sound, except Stone’s ragged breathing and the faint boom of the building. Hobie stared on at Marilyn. She stared back at him.

  “Go ahead,” she said quietly. “Break his damn leg. Why should I care? He’s made me penniless. He’s ruined my life. Break both his damn legs if you feel like it. But it won’t get you what you want any quicker. Because there are complications, and the sooner we get to them, the better it is for you. And we won’t get to them until Sheryl is in the hospital.”

  She leaned back on the window ledge, palms down, arms locked from the shoulder. She hoped it made her look relaxed and casual, but she was doing it to keep herself from falling on the floor.

  “The hospital first,” she said again. She was concentrating so hard on her voice, it sounded like somebody else’s. She was pleased with it. It sounded OK. A low, firm voice, steady and quiet in the silent office.

  “Then we deal,” she said. “Your choice.”

  The outfielder was leaping, glove high, and the ball was dropping. The glove was higher than the fence. The trajectory of the ball was too close to call. Hobie tapped his hook on the desk. The sound was loud. Stone was staring at him. Hobie ignored him and glanced up at Tony.

  “Take the bitch to the hospital,” he said sourly.

  “Chester goes with them,” Marilyn said. “For verification. He needs to see her go inside to the ER, alone. I stay here, as surety.”

  Hobie stopped tapping. Looked at her and smiled. “Don’t you trust me?”

  “No, I don’t trust you. We don’t do it this way, you’ll just take Sheryl out of here and lock her up someplace else.”

  Hobie was still smiling. “Farthest thing from my thoughts. I was going to have Tony shoot her and dump her in the sea.”

  There was silence again. Marilyn was shaking inside.

  “You sure you want to do this?” Hobie asked her. “She says one word to the hospital people, she gets you killed, you know that, right?”

  Marilyn nodded. “She won’t say anything to anybody. Not knowing you’ve still got me here.”

  “You better pray she doesn’t.”

  “She won’t. This isn’t about us. It’s about her. She needs to get help.”

  She stared at him, leaning back, feeling faint. She was searching his face for a sign of compassion. Some acceptance of his responsibility. He stared back at her. There was no compassion in his face. Nothing there at all, except annoyance. She swallowed and took a deep breath.

  “And she needs a skirt. She can’t go out without one. It’ll look suspicious. T
he hospital will get the police involved. Neither of us wants that. So Tony needs to go out and buy her a new skirt: ‘

  “Lend her your dress,” Hobie said. “Take it off and give it to her.”

  There was a long silence.

  “It wouldn’t fit her,” Marilyn said.

  “That’s not the reason, is it?”

  She made no reply. Silence. Hobie shrugged.

  “OK,” he said.

  She swallowed again. “And shoes.”

  “What?”

  “She needs shoes,” Marilyn said. “She can’t go without shoes.”

  “Jesus,” Hobie said. “What the hell next?”

  “Next, we deal. Soon as Chester is back here and tells me he saw her walk in alone and unharmed, then we deal.”

  Hobie traced the curve of his hook with the fingers of his left hand.

  “You’re a smart woman,” he said.

  I know I am, Marilyn thought. That’s the first of your complications.

  REACHER PLACED THE sports bag on the white sofa underneath the Mondrian copy. He unzipped it and turned it over and spilled out the bricks of fifties. Thirty-nine thousand, three hundred dollars in cash. He split it in half by tossing the bricks alternately left and right to opposite ends of the sofa. He finished up with two very impressive stacks.

  “Four trips to the bank,” Jodie said. “Under ten thousand dollars, the reporting rules don’t apply, and we don’t want to be answering any questions about where we got this from, right? We’ll put it in my account and cut the Hobies a cashier’s check for nineteen-six-fifty. Our half, we’ll access through my gold card, OK?”

  Reacher nodded. “We need airfare to St. Louis, Missouri, plus a hotel. Nineteen grand in the bank, we can stay in decent places and go business class.”

  “It’s the only way to fly,” she said. She put her arms around his waist and stretched up on tiptoes and kissed him on the mouth. He kissed her back, hard.

  “This is fun, isn’t it?” she said.

  “For us, maybe,” he said. “Not for the Hobies.”

  They made three trips together to three separate banks and wound up at a fourth, where she made the final deposit and bought a cashier’s check made out to Mr. T. and Mrs. M. Hobie in the sum of $19,650. The bank guy put it in a creamy envelope and she zipped it into her pocketbook. Then they walked back to Broadway together, holding hands, so she could pack for the trip. She put the bank envelope in her bureau and he got on the phone and established that United from JFK was the best bet for St. Louis, that time of day.

  “Cab?” she asked.

  He shook his head. “We’ll drive.”

  The big V-8 made a hell of a sound in the basement garage. He blipped the throttle a couple of times and grinned. The torque rocked the heavy vehicle, side to side on its springs.

  “The price of their toys,” Jodie said.

  He looked at her.

  “You never heard that?” she said. “Difference between the men and the boys is the price of their toys?”

  He blipped the motor and grinned again. “Price on this was a dollar.”

  “And you just blipped away two dollars in gas,” she said.

  He shoved it in drive and took off up the ramp. Worked around east to the Midtown Tunnel and took 495 to the Van Wyck and down into the sprawl of JFK.

  “Park in short-term,” she said. “We can afford it now, right?”

  He had to leave the Steyr and the silencer behind. No easy way to get through the airport security hoops with big metal weapons in your pocket. He hid them under the driver’s seat. They left the Lincoln in the lot right opposite the United building and five minutes later were at the counter buying two business-class one-ways to St. Louis. The expensive tickets entitled them to wait in a special lounge, where a uniformed steward served them good coffee in china cups with saucers, and where they could read The Wall Street Journal without paying for it. Then Reacher carried Jodie’s bag down the jetway into the plane. The business-class seats were two-on-a-side, the first half-dozen rows. Wide, comfortable seats. Reacher smiled.

  “I never did this before,” he said.

  He slid into the window seat. He had room to stretch out a little. Jodie was lost in her seat. There was room enough for three of her, side by side. The attendant brought them juice before the plane even taxied. Minutes later they were in the air, wheeling west across the southern tip of Manhattan.

  TONY CAME BACK into the office with a shiny red Talbot’s bag and a brown Bally carrier hanging by their rope handles from his clenched fist. Marilyn carried them into the bathroom and five minutes later Sheryl came out. The new skirt was the right size, but the wrong color. She was smoothing it down over her hips with vague movements of her hands. The new shoes didn’t match the skirt and they were too big. Her face looked awful. Her eyes were blank and acquiescent, like Marilyn had told her they should be.

  “What are you going to tell the doctors?” Hobie called to her.

  Sheryl looked away and concentrated on Marilyn’s script. “I walked into a door,” she said.

  Her voice was low and nasal. Dull, like she was still in shock.

  “Are you going to call the cops?”

  She shook her head. “No, I’m not going to do that.”

  Hobie nodded. “What would happen if you did?”

  “I don’t know,” she replied. Blank and dull.

  “Your friend Marilyn would die, in terrible pain. You understand that?”

  He raised the hook and let her focus on it from across the room. Then he came out from behind the desk. Walked around and stood directly behind Marilyn. Used his left hand to lift her hair aside. His hand brushed her skin. She stiffened. He touched her cheek with the curve of the hook. Sheryl nodded, vaguely.

  “Yes, I understand that,” she said.

  I HAD TO be done quickly, because although Sheryl was now in her new skirt and shoes, Chester was still in his boxers and undershirt. Tony made them both wait in reception until the freight elevator arrived, and then he hustled them along the corridor and inside. He stepped out in the garage and scanned ahead. Hustled them over to the Tahoe and pushed Chester into the backseat and Sheryl into the front. He fired it up and locked the doors. Took off up the ramp and out to the street.

  He could recall offhand maybe two dozen hospitals in Manhattan, and as far as he knew most of them had emergency rooms. His instinct was to drive all the way north, maybe up to Mount Sinai on 100th Street, because he felt it would be safer to put some distance between themselves and wherever Sheryl was going to be. But they were tight for time. To drive all the way uptown and back was going to take an hour, maybe more. An hour they couldn’t spare. So he decided on St. Vincent’s on Eleventh Street and Seventh Avenue. Bellevue, over on Twenty-seventh and First, was better geographically, but Bellevue was usually swarming with cops, for one reason or another. That was his experience. They practically lived there. So St. Vincent’s it would be. And he knew St. Vincent’s had a big, wide area facing the ER entrance, where Greenwich Avenue sliced across Seventh. He remembered the layout from when they had gone out to capture Costello’s secretary. A big, wide area, almost like a plaza. They could watch her all the way inside, without having to stop too close.

  The drive took eight minutes. He eased into the curb on the west side of Seventh and clicked the button to unlock the doors.

  “Out,” he said.

  She opened the door and slid down to the sidewalk. Stood there, uncertain. Then she moved away to the crosswalk, without looking back. Tony leaned over and slammed the door behind her. Turned in his seat toward Stone.

  “So watch her,” he said.

  Stone was already watching her. He saw the traffic stop and the walk light change. He saw her step forward with the crowd, dazed. She walked slower than the others, shuffling in her big shoes. Her hand was up at her face, masking it. She reached the opposite sidewalk well after the walk light changed back to DON’T. An impatient truck pulled right and eased ar
ound her. She walked on toward the hospital entrance. Across the wide sidewalk. Then she was in the ambulance circle. A pair of double doors ahead of her. Scarred, floppy plastic doors. A trio of nurses standing next to them, on their cigarette break, smoking. She walked past the nurses, straight to the doors, slowly. She pushed at them, tentatively, both hands. They opened. She stepped inside. The doors fell shut behind her.

  “OK, you see that?”

  Stone nodded. “Yes, I saw it. She’s inside.”

  Tony checked his mirror and fought his way out into the traffic stream. By the time he was a hundred yards south, Sheryl was waiting in the triage line, going over and over in her head what Marilyn had told her to do.

  IT WAS A short and cheap cab ride from the St. Louis Airport to the National Personnel Records Center building, and familiar territory for Reacher. Most of his Stateside tours of duty had involved at least one trip through the archives, searching backward in time for one thing or another. But this time, it was going to be different. He would be going in as a civilian. Not the same thing as going in dressed in a major’s uniform. Not the same thing at all. He was clear on that.

  Public access is controlled by the counter staff in the lobby. The whole archive is technically part of the public record, but the staff take a lot of trouble to keep that fact well obscured. In the past Reacher had agreed with that tactic, no hesitation. Military records can be very frank, and they need to be read and interpreted in strict context. He’d always been very happy they were kept away from the public. But now he was the public, and he was wondering how it was going to play. There were millions of files piled up in dozens of huge storerooms, and it would be very easy to wait days or weeks before anything got found, even with the staff running around like crazy and looking exactly like they were doing their absolute best. He had seen it happen before, from the inside, many times. It was a very plausible act. He had watched it, with a wry smile on his face.

  So they paused in the hot Missouri sunshine after they paid off the cab and agreed on how to do it. They walked inside and saw the big sign: One File at a Time. They lined up in front of the clerk and waited. She was a heavy woman, middle-aged, dressed in a master sergeant’s uniform, busy with the sort of work designed to achieve nothing at all except to make people wait until it was done. After a long moment she pushed two blank forms across the counter and pointed to where a pencil was tied down to a desk with a piece of string.