by Child, Lee
“Can’t you do it unofficially? Privately? You can do that, right? You run this place, Nash. Please? For me?”
Newman shook his head. “You’re clutching at straws, is all.”
“Please, Nash,” Reacher said.
There was silence. Then Newman sighed.
“OK, damn it,” he said. “For you, I’ll do it, I guess.”
“When?” Reacher asked.
Newman shrugged. “First thing tomorrow morning, OK?”
“Call me as soon as you’ve done it?”
“Sure, but you’re wasting your time. Number?”
“Use the mobile,” Jodie said.
She recited the number. Newman wrote it on the cuff of his lab coat.
“Thanks, Nash,” Reacher said. “I really appreciate this.”
“Waste of time,” Newman said again.
“We need to go,” Jodie called.
Reacher nodded vaguely and they all moved toward the plain door in the cinder-block wall. Lieutenant Simon was waiting on the other side of it with the offer of a ride around the perimeter road to the passenger terminals.
15
FIRST-CLASS OR NOT, the flight back was miserable. It was the same plane, going east to New York along the second leg of a giant triangle. It was cleaned and perfumed and checked and refueled, and it had a new crew on board. Reacher and Jodie were in the same seats they had left four hours earlier. Reacher took the window again, but it felt different. It was still two and a half times as wide as normal, still sumptuously upholstered in leather and sheepskin, but he took no pleasure in sitting in it again.
The lights were dimmed, to represent night. They had taken off into an outrageous tropical sunset boiling away beyond the islands, and then they had turned away to fly toward darkness. The engines settled to a muted hiss. The flight attendants were quiet and unobtrusive. There was only one other passenger in the cabin. He was sitting two rows ahead, across the aisle. He was a tall, spare man, dressed in a seersucker short-sleeve shirt printed with pale stripes. His right forearm was laid gently on the arm of the chair, and his hand hung down, limp and relaxed. His eyes were closed.
“How tall is he?” Jodie whispered.
Reacher leaned over and glanced ahead. “Maybe six one.”
“Same as Victor Hobie,” she said. “Remember the file?”
Reacher nodded. Glanced diagonally across at the pale forearm resting along the seat. The guy was thin, and he could see the prominent knob of bone at the wrist, standing out in the dimness. There was slim muscle and freckled skin and bleached hair. The radius bone was visible, running all the way back to the elbow. Hobie had left six inches of his radius bone behind at the crash site. Reacher counted with his eyes. up from the guy’s wrist joint. Six inches took him halfway to the elbow.
“About half and half, right?” Jodie said.
“A little more than half,” Reacher said. “The stump would have needed trimming. They’d have filed it down where it was splintered, I guess. If he survived.”
The guy two rows ahead turned sleepily and pulled his arm in close to his body and out of sight, like he knew they were talking about it.
“He survived,” Jodie said. “He’s in New York, trying to stay hidden.”
Reacher leaned the other way and rested his forehead on the cold plastic of the porthole.
“I would have bet my life he isn’t,” he said.
He kept his eyes open, but there was nothing to see out of the window. Just black night sky all the way down to the black night ocean, seven miles below.
“Why does it bother you so much?” she asked, in the quiet.
He turned forward and stared at the empty seat six feet in front of him.
“Lots of reasons,” he said.
“Like what?”
He shrugged. “Like everything, like a great big depressing spiral. It was a professional call. My gut told me something, and it looks like I was wrong.”
She laid her hand gently on his forearm, where the muscle narrowed a little above his wrist. “Being wrong isn’t the end of the world.”
He shook his head. “Sometimes it isn’t, sometimes it is. Depends on the issue, right? Somebody asks me who’s going to win the Series, and I say the Yankees, that doesn’t matter, does it? Because how can I know stuff like that? But suppose I was a sportswriter who was supposed to know stuff like that? Or a professional gambler? Suppose baseball was my life? Then it’s the end of the world if I start to screw up.”
“So what are you saying?”
“I’m saying judgments like that are my life. It’s what I’m supposed to be good at. I used to be good at it. I could always depend on being right.”
“But you had nothing to go on.”
“Bullshit, Jodie. I had a whole lot to go on. A whole lot more than I sometimes used to have. I met with the guy’s folks, I read his letters, I talked with his old friend, I saw his record, I talked with his old comrade-in-arms, and everything told me this was a guy who definitely could not behave the way he clearly did behave. So I was just plain wrong, and that bums me up, because where does it leave me now?”
“In what sense?”
“I’ve got to tell the Hobies,” he said. “It’ll kill them stone dead. You should have met them. They worshiped that boy. They worshiped the military, the patriotism of it all, serving your country, the whole damn thing. Now I’ve got to walk in there and tell them their boy is a murderer and a deserter. And a cruel son who left them twisting in the wind for thirty long years. I’ll be walking in there and killing them stone dead, Jodie. I should call ahead for an ambulance.”
He lapsed into silence and turned back to the black porthole.
“And?” she said.
He turned back to face her. “And the future. What am I going to do? I’ve got a house, I need a job. What kind of a job? I can’t put myself about as an investigator anymore, not if I’ve started getting things completely ass-backward all of a sudden. The timing is wonderful, right? My professional capabilities have turned to mush right at the exact time I need to find work. I should go back to the Keys and dig pools the rest of my life.”
“You’re being too hard on yourself. It was a feeling, was all. A gut feeling that turned out wrong.”
“Gut feelings should turn out right,” he said. “Mine always did before. I could tell you about a dozen times when I stuck to gut feelings, no other reason than I felt them. They saved my life, time to time.”
She nodded, without speaking.
“And statistically I should have been right,” he said. “You know how many men were officially unaccounted for after ’Nam? Only about five. Twenty-two hundred missing, but they’re dead, we all know that. Eventually Nash will find them all, and tick them all off. But there were five guys left we can’t categorize. Three of them changed sides and stayed on in the villages afterward, gone native. One disappeared in Thailand. One of them was living in a hut under a bridge in Bangkok. Five loose ends out of a million men, and Victor Hobie is one of them, and I was wrong about him.”
“But you weren’t really wrong,” she said. “You were judging the old Victor Hobie, is all. All that stuff was about Victor Hobie before the war and before the crash. War changes people. The only witness to the change was DeWitt, and he went out of his way not to notice it.”
He shook his head again. “I took that into account, or at least I tried to. I didn’t figure it could change him that much.”
“Maybe the crash did it,” she said. “Think about it, Reacher. What was he, twenty-one years old? Twenty-two, something like that? Seven people died, and maybe he felt responsible. He was the captain of the ship, right? And he was disfigured. He lost his arm, and he was probably burned, too. That’s a big trauma for a young guy, physical disfigurement, right? And then in the field hospital, he was probably woozy with drugs, terrified of going back.”
“They wouldn’t have sent him back to combat,” Reacher said.
Jodie nodded. “Yes, but ma
ybe he wasn’t thinking straight. The morphine, it’s like being high, right? Maybe he thought they were going to send him straight back. Maybe he thought they were going to punish him for losing the helicopter. We just don’t know his mental state at the time. So he tried to get away, and he hit the orderly on the head. Then later he woke up to what he’d done. Probably felt terrible about it. That was my gut feeling, all along. He’s hiding out, because of a guilty secret. He should have turned himself in, because nobody was going to convict him of anything. The mitigating circumstances were too obvious. But he hid out, and the longer it went on, the worse it got. It kind of snowballed.”
“Still makes me wrong,” he said. “You’ve just described an irrational guy. Panicky, unrealistic, a little hysterical. I had him down as a plodder. Very sane, very rational, very normal. I’m losing my touch.”
The giant plane hissed on imperceptibly. Six hundred miles an hour through the thin air of altitude, and it felt like it was suspended immobile. A spacious pastel coccoon, hanging there seven miles up in the night sky, going nowhere at all.
“So what are you going to do?” she asked.
“About what?”
“The future?”
He shrugged again. “I don’t know.”
“What about the Hobies?”
“I don’t know,” he said again.
“You could try to find him,” she said. “You know, convince him no action would be taken now. Talk some sense into him. Maybe you could get him to meet with his folks again.”
“How could I find him? The way I feel right now, I couldn’t find the nose on my face. And you’re so keen on making me feel better, you’re forgetting something.”
“What?”
“He doesn’t want to be found. Like you figured, he wants to stay hidden. Even if he started out real confused about it, he evidently got the taste for it later. He had Costello killed, Jodie. He sent people after us. So he could stay hidden.”
Then the stewardess dimmed the cabin lights right down to darkness, and Reacher gave up and laid his seat back and tried to sleep, with his last thought uppermost in his mind: Victor Hobie had Costello killed, so he could stay hidden.
THIRTY FLOORS ABOVE Fifth Avenue, he woke up just after six o’clock in the morning, which for him was about normal, depending on how bad the fire dream had been. Thirty years is nearly eleven thousand days, and eleven thousand days have eleven thousand nights attached to them, and during every single one of those nights he had dreamed about fire. The cockpit broke away from the tail section, and the treetops flipped it backward. The fracture in the airframe split the fuel tank. The fuel hurled itself out. He saw it coming at him every night, in appalling slow motion. It gleamed and shimmered in the gray jungle air. It was liquid and globular and formed itself into solid shapes like giant distorted raindrops. They twisted and changed and grew, like living things floating slowly through the air. The light caught them and made them strange and beautiful. There were rainbows in them. They got to him before the rotor blade hit his arm. Every night he turned his head in the exact same convulsive jerk, but every night they still got to him. They splashed on his face. The liquid was warm. It puzzled him. It looked like water. Water should be cold. He should feel the thrill of cold. But it was warm. It was sticky. Thicker than water. It smelled. A chemical smell. It splashed across the left side of his head. It was in his hair. It plastered the hair to his forehead and ran slowly down into his eye.
Then he turned his head back, and he saw that the air was on fire. There were fingers of flame pointing down the floating rivulets of fuel like accusations. Then the fingers were mouths. They were eating the floating liquid shapes. They ate fast, and they left the shapes bigger and blazing with heat. Then the separate globules in the air were bursting into flames ahead of each other. There was no connection anymore. No sequence. They were just exploding. He jerked his head down eleven thousand separate times, but the fire always hit him. It smelled hot, like burning, but it felt cold, like ice. A sudden ice-cold shock on the side of his face, in his hair. Then the black shape of the rotor blade, arcing down. It broke against the chest of the guy called Bamford and a fragment smacked him edge-on, precisely halfway along the length of his forearm.
He saw his hand come off. He saw it in detail. That part was never in the dream, because the dream was about fire, and he didn’t need to dream about his hand coming off, because he could remember seeing it happen. The edge of the blade had a slim aerodynamic profile, and it was dull black. It punched through the bones of his arm and stopped dead against his thigh, its energy already expended. His forearm just fell in two. His watch was still strapped to the wrist. The hand and the wrist fell to the floor. He raised the severed forearm and touched his face with it, to try and find out why the skin up there felt so cold but smelled so hot.
He realized some time later that action had saved his life. When he could think straight again, he understood what he had done. The intense flames had cauterized his open forearm. The heat had seared the exposed flesh and sealed the arteries. If he hadn’t touched his burning face with it, he would have bled to death. It was a triumph. Even in extreme danger and confusion, he had done the right thing. The smart thing. He was a survivor. It gave him a deadly assurance he had never lost.
He stayed conscious for about twenty minutes. He did what he had to do inside the cockpit and crawled away from the wreck. He knew nobody was crawling with him. He made it into the undergrowth and kept on going. He was on his knees, using his remaining hand ahead of him, walking on the knuckles like an ape. He ducked his head to the ground and jammed his burned skin into the earth. Then the agony started. He survived twenty minutes of it and collapsed.
He remembered almost nothing of the next three weeks. He didn’t know where he went, or what he ate, or what he drank. He had brief flashes of clarity, which were worse than not remembering. He was covered in leeches. His burned skin came off and the flesh underneath stank of rot and decay. There were things living and crawling in his raw stump. Then he was in the hospital. One morning he woke up floating on a cloud of morphine. It felt better than anything had felt in his whole life. But he pretended to be in agony throughout. That way, they would postpone sending him back.
They applied burn dressings to his face. They cleaned the maggots out of his wound. Years later, he realized the maggots had saved his life, too. He read a report about new medical research. Maggots were being used in a revolutionary new treatment for gangrene. Their tireless eating consumed the gangrenous flesh before the rot could spread. Experiments had proven successful. He had smiled. He knew.
The evacuation of the hospital caught him by surprise. They hadn’t told him. He overheard the orderlies making plans for the morning. He got out immediately. There were no guards. Just an orderly, by chance loitering on the perimeter. The orderly cost him a precious bottle of water broken across his head, but didn’t delay him by more than a second.
His long journey home started right there, a yard into the undergrowth outside the hospital fence. First task was to retrieve his money. It was buried fifty miles away, in a secret spot outside his last base camp, inside a coffin. The coffin was just a lucky chance. It had been the only large receptacle he could lay his hands on at the time, but later it would prove to be a stroke of absolute genius. The money was all in hundreds and fifties and twenties and tens, and there was a hundred and seventy pounds of it. A plausible weight to find in a coffin. Just under two million dollars.
By then the base camp was abandoned and far behind enemy lines. But he got himself there, and faced the first of his many difficulties. How does a sick one-armed man dig up a coffin? At first, with blind perseverance. Then later, with help. He had already shifted most of the earth when he was discovered. The coffin lid was plainly visible, lying in the shallow grave. The VC patrol crashed in on him out of the trees, and he expected to die. But he didn’t. Instead, he made a discovery. It ranked with the other great discoveries he made in his life. Th
e VC stood back, fearful and muttering and uncertain. He realized they didn’t know who he was. They didn’t know what he was. The terrible bums robbed him of his identity. He was wearing a torn and filthy hospital night-shirt. He didn’t look American. He didn’t look like anything. He didn’t look human. He learned that the combination of his terrible looks and his wild behavior and the coffin had an effect on anybody who saw him. Distant atavistic fears of death and corpses and madness made them passive. He learned in an instant if he was prepared to act like a madman and cling to his coffin, these people would do anything for him. Their ancient superstitions worked in his favor. The VC patrol completed the excavation for him and loaded the coffin onto a buffalo cart. He sat up high on top of it and raved and gibbered and pointed west and they took him a hundred miles toward Cambodia.
Vietnam is a narrow country, side to side. He was passed from group to group and was in Cambodia within four days. They fed him rice and gave him water to drink and clothed him in black pajamas, to tame him and assuage their primitive fears. Then Cambodians took him onward. He bounced and jabbered like a monkey and pointed west, west, west. Two months later, he was in Thailand. The Cambodians manhandled the coffin over the border and turned and ran.
Thailand was different. When he passed the border, it was like stepping out of the Stone Age. There were roads, and vehicles. The people were different. More modern. But they had the same old fears deep down inside. The babbling scarred man with the coffin was an object for wary pity and concern. He was not a threat. He got rides on old Chevrolet pickups and in old Peugeot trucks left over from the French days and within two weeks he found himself washed up with all the other Far Eastern flotsam in the sewer they called Bangkok.
He lived in Bangkok for a year. He reburied the coffin in the yard behind the shack he rented, working furiously all through his first night with a black-market entrenching tool stolen from the U.S. Army. He could manage an entrenching tool. It was designed to be used one-handed, while the other hand held a rifle.