by Child, Lee
“Fine,” he said.
“There are people here to see you,” she said. “They heard you’d come around.”
He nodded and stretched. He could feel the chest wound. It was on the left. There was weakness there. He reached up with his left hand to the IV stand. It was a vertical stainless steel bar with a spiral curl at the top where the bags slipped on. He put his hand over the curl and squeezed hard. He felt bruising in his elbow where the needles had been and sensitivity in his chest where the bullet had been, but the steel spiral still flattened from round to oval. He smiled.
“OK, send them in,” he said.
He knew who they were before they got inside. He could tell by the sound. The wheels on the oxygen cart squeaked. The old lady stood aside and let her husband enter first. She was wearing a brand-new dress. He was in the same old blue serge suit. He wheeled the cart past her and paused. He kept hold of the handle with his left hand and drew his right up into a trembling salute. He held it for a long moment and Reacher replied with the same. He threw his best parade-ground move and held it steady, meaning every second of it. Then he snapped it down and the old guy wheeled the cart slowly toward him with his wife fussing behind.
They were changed people. Still old, still feeble, but serene. Knowing your son is dead is better than not knowing, he guessed. He tracked back to Newman’s windowless lab in Hawaii and recalled Allen’s casket with Victor Hobie’s skeleton in it. Victor Hobie’s old bones. He remembered them pretty well. They were distinctive. The smooth arch of the brow, the high round cranium. The even white teeth. The long, clean limbs. It was a noble skeleton.
“He was a hero, you know.”
The old man nodded.
“He did his duty.”
“Much more than that,” Reacher replied. “I read his record. I talked with General DeWitt. He was a brave flyer who did more than his duty. He saved a lot of lives with his courage. If he’d lived, he’d have three stars now. He’d be General Victor Truman Hobie, with a big command somewhere, or a big job in the Pentagon.”
It was what they needed to hear, but it was still true. The old woman put her thin pale hand over her husband’s and they sat in silence, eyes moist and focused eleven thousand miles away. They were telling themselves stories of what might have been. The past stretched away straight and uncomplicated and now it was neatly amputated by a noble combat death, leaving only honest dreams ahead of it. They were recounting those dreams for the first time, because now they were legitimate. Those dreams were fortifying them just like the oxygen hissing in and out of the bottle in time with the old man’s ragged breathing.
“I can die happy now,” he said.
Reacher shook his head.
“Not yet you can’t,” he said. “You have to go see the Wall. His name will be there. I want you to bring me a photograph of it.”
The old man nodded and his wife smiled a watery smile.
“Miss Garber told us you might be living over in Garrison,” she said. “You might be our neighbor.”
Reacher nodded.
“It’s possible,” he said.
“Miss Garber is a fine young woman.”
“Yes, ma’am, she is.”
“Stop your nonsense,” the old man said to her. Then they told him they couldn’t stay, because their neighbor had driven them down and had to get back. Reacher watched them all the way out to the corridor. Soon as they were gone, Jodie came back in, smiling.
“The doctor says you can leave.”
“So can you drive me? Did you get a new car yet?”
She shook her head. “Just a rental. No time for shopping. Hertz brought me a Mercury. It’s got satellite navigation.”
He stretched his arms above his head and flexed his shoulders. They felt OK. Surprisingly good. His ribs were fine. No pain.
“I need clothes,” he said. “I guess those old ones got ruined.”
She nodded. “Nurses sliced them off with scissors.”
“You were here for that?”
“I’ve been here all the time,” she said. “I’m living in a room down the hall.”
“What about work?”
“Leave of absence,” she said. “I told them, agree or I quit.”
She ducked down to a laminate cupboard and came out with a stack of clothes. New jeans, new shirt, new jacket, new socks and shorts, all folded and piled together, his old shoes squared on top, Army-style.
“They’re nothing special,” she said. “I didn’t want to take too much time out. I wanted to be with you when you woke up.”
“You sat around here for three weeks?”
“Felt like three years,” she said. “You were all scrunched up. Comatose. You looked awful. In a real bad way.”
“This satellite thing,” he said. “Does it have Garrison on it?”
“You going up there?”
He shrugged.
“I guess. I need to take it easy, right? Country air might do me good.”
Then he looked away from her.
“Maybe you could stay with me awhile, you know, help me recover.”
He threw back the sheet and slid his feet to the floor. Stood up, slow and unsteady, and started to dress, while she held his elbow to keep him from falling.
Turn the page for a preview of
another Lee Child novel featuring Jack Reacher
Running Blind
In paperback from Jove
PEOPLE SAY THAT knowledge is power. The more knowledge, the more power. 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. You would mark those numbers on the play card. And you would win.
Same for the stock market. Suppose you really knew what was going to go way up? You’re not talking about a hunch or a gut feeling. You’re not talking about a trend or a percentage game or a whisper or a tip. You’re talking about knowledge. Real, hard knowledge. Suppose you had it? What would you do? You would call your broker. You would buy. Then later you’d sell, and you’d be rich.
Same for basketball, same for the horses, whatever. Football, hockey, next year’s World Series, any kind of sports at all. If you could predict the future, you’d be home and dry. No question. Same for the Oscars, same for the Nobel Prize, same for the first snowfall of winter.
Same for killing people.
Suppose you wanted to kill people. You would need to know ahead of time how to do it. That part is not too difficult. There are many ways. Some of them are better than others. Most of them have drawbacks. You use what knowledge you’ve got, and you invent a new way. You think, and you think, and you think, and you come up with the perfect method.
You pay a lot of attention to the setup. Because the perfect method is not an easy method, and careful preparation is very important. But that stuff is meat and drink to you. You have no problem with careful preparation. No problem at all. How could you, with your intelligence? After all your training?
You know the big problems will come afterward. How do you make sure you get away with it? You use your knowledge. You know more than most people about how the cops work. You’ve seen them on duty, many times, sometimes close-up. You know what they look for. So you don’t leave anything for them to find. You go through it all in your head, very precisely and very exactly and very carefully. Just as carefully as you would mark the play card you knew for sure was going to win you a fortune.
People say that knowledge is power. The more knowledge, the more power. Which makes you just about the most powerful person on earth. When it comes to killing people. And then getting away with it.
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 need to. 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. It gets to be a habit. It was a habit Jack Reac
her had in spades. 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 question of dynamics. 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. 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. The dynamics of the city. They made it inevitable Reacher would be in there. They made it inevitable the two guys he was watching would be in there, too. 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.
The two guys Reacher was watching were standing close to the bar, talking quietly to the owner. The bar was a token affair built across the corner of the room. It made a neat sharp triangle about seven or eight feet on a side. It was not really a bar in the sense that anybody was ever going to sit there and drink anything. It was just a focal point. It was somewhere to keep the liquor bottles. They were crowded three-deep on glass shelves in front of sandblasted mirrors. The register and the credit card machine were on the bottom shelf. 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. His arms were folded tight across his chest, defensively. Reacher could see his eyes. They were showing something halfway between disbelief and panic and they were darting all around the room.
It was a large room, easily sixty feet by sixty, exactly square. The ceiling was high, maybe twenty or twenty-five feet. It was made of pressed tin, sandblasted back to a dull glow. The building was more than a hundred years old, and the room had probably been used for everything, one time or another. Maybe it had started out as a factory. The windows were certainly large enough and numerous enough to illuminate some kind of an industrial operation back when the city was only five stories tall. Then maybe it had become a store. Maybe even an automobile showroom. It was big enough. Now it was an Italian restaurant. Not a checked-red-tablecloth and Mama’s sauce-type of Italian restaurant, but the type of place that has three hundred thousand dollars invested up front in bleached avant-garde decor and which gives you seven or eight handmade ravioli parcels on a large plate and calls them a meal. Reacher had eaten there ten times in the four weeks it had been open and he always left feeling hungry. But the quality was so good he was telling people about it, which really had to mean something, because Reacher was no gourmet. The place was named Mostro’s, which as far as he understood Italian, translated as “Monster’s.” He wasn’t sure what the name referred to. Certainly not the size of the portions. But it had some kind of a resonance, and the whole place, with its pale maple-and-white walls and dull aluminum accents, was an attractive space. The people who worked there were amiable and confident. There were whole operas played beginning to end through excellent loudspeakers placed high on the walls. In Reacher’s inexpert opinion he was watching the start of a big reputation.
But the big reputation was obviously slow to spread. The spare avant-garde decor made it OK to have only twenty tables in a sixty-by-sixty space, but in four weeks he had never seen more than three of them occupied. Once, he had been the only customer during the whole ninety-minute span he spent in the place. Tonight there was just one other couple eating, five tables away. They were sitting face-to-face across from each other, side-on to him. The guy was medium-sized with short sandy hair, fair mustache, light brown suit, brown shoes. The woman was thin and dark, in a skirt and a jacket. There was an imitation-leather briefcase resting against the table leg next to her right foot. They were both maybe thirty-five and looked tired and worn and slightly dowdy. They were comfortable enough together, but they weren’t talking much.
The two guys at the bar were talking. That was for sure. They were leaning over, bending forward from the waist, talking fast and persuading hard. The owner was against the register, bending backward by an equal amount. It was like the three of them were trapped in a powerful gale blowing through the room. The two guys were a lot bigger than medium-sized. They were dressed in identical dark wool coats which gave them breadth and bulk. Reacher could see their faces in the dull mirrors behind the liquor bottles. Olive skin, dark eyes. Not Italians. Syrians or Lebanese maybe, with their Arab scrappiness bred out of them by a generation of living in America. They were busy making one point after another. The guy on the right was making a sweeping gesture with his hand. It was easy to see it represented a bat plowing through the bottles on the shelf. Then the hand was chopping up and down. The guy was demonstrating how the shelves could be smashed. One blow could smash them all, top to bottom, he was suggesting. The owner was going pale. He was glancing sideways at his shelves.
Then the guy on the left shot his cuff and tapped the face of his watch and turned to leave. His partner straightened up and followed him. He trailed his hand over the nearest table and knocked a plate to the floor. It shattered on the tile, loud and dissonant against the opera floating in the air. The sandy guy and the dark woman sat still and looked away. The two guys walked slowly to the door, heads up, confident. Reacher watched them all the way out to the sidewalk. Then the owner came out from behind the bar and knelt down and raked through the fragments of the broken plate with his fingertips.
“You OK?” Reacher called to him.
Soon as the words were out, he knew it was a dumb thing to say. The guy just shrugged and put an all-purpose miserable look on his face. He cupped his hands on the floor and started butting the shards into a pile. Reacher slid out of his chair and stepped away from the table and squared his napkin on the tile next to him and started collecting the debris into it. The couple five tables away were watching him.
“When are they coming back?” Reacher asked.
“An hour,” the guy said.
“How much do they want?”
The guy shrugged again and smiled a bitter smile.
“I get a start-up discount,” he said. “Two hundred a week, goes to four when the place picks up.”
“You want to pay?”
The guy made another sad face. “I want to stay in business, I guess. But paying out two bills a week ain’t exactly going to help me do that.”
The sandy guy and the dark woman were looking at the opposite wall, but they were listening. The opera fell away to a minor-key aria and the diva started in on it with a low, mournful note.
“Who were they?” Reacher asked quietly.
“Not Italians,” the guy said. “Just some punks.”
“Can I use your phone?”
The guy nodded.
“You know an office-supply store open late?” Reacher asked.
“Broadway, two blocks over,” the guy said. “Why? You got business to attend to?”
Reacher nodded.
“Yeah, business,” he said.
He stood up and slid around behind the bar. There was a new telephone next to a new reservations book. The book looked like it had never been opened. He picked up the phone and dialed a number and waited two beats until it was answered a mile away and forty floors up.
“Hello?” she said.
“Hey, Jodie,” he said.
“Hey, Reacher, what’s new?”
“You going to be finished anytime soon?”
He heard her sigh.
“No, this is an all-nighter,” she said. “Complex law, and they need an opinion like yesterday. I’m real sorry.”
“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “I’ve got something to do. Then I guess I’ll head back
on up to Garrison.”
“OK, take care of yourself,” she said. “I love you.”
He heard the crackle of legal documents and the phone went down. He hung up and came out from behind the bar and stepped back to his table. He left forty dollars trapped under his espresso saucer and headed for the door.
“Good luck,” he called.
The guy crouched on the floor nodded vaguely and the couple at the distant table watched him go. He turned his collar up and shrugged down into his coat and left the opera behind him and stepped out to the sidewalk. It was dark and the air was chill with fall. Small haloes of fog were starting up around the lights. He walked east to Broadway and scanned through the neon for the office store. It was a narrow place packed with items marked with prices on large pieces of fluorescent card cut in the shape of stars. Everything was a bargain, which suited Reacher fine. He bought a small labeling machine and a tube of superglue. Then he hunched back down in his coat and headed north to Jodie’s apartment.
His four-wheel-drive was parked in the garage under her building. He drove it up the ramp and turned south on Broadway and west back to the restaurant. He slowed on the street and glanced in through the big windows. The place gleamed with halogen light on white walls and pale wood. No patrons. Every single table was empty and the owner was sitting on a stool behind the bar. Reacher glanced away and came around the block and parked illegally at the mouth of the alley that ran down toward the kitchen doors. He killed the motor and the lights and settled down to wait.
The dynamics of the city. The strong terrorize the weak. They keep on at it, like they always have, until they come up against somebody stronger with some arbitrary humane reason for stopping them. Somebody like Reacher. He had no real reason to help a guy he hardly knew. There was no logic involved. No agenda. Right then in a city of seven million souls there must be hundreds of strong people hurting weak people, maybe even thousands. Right then, at that exact moment. He wasn’t going to seek them all out. He wasn’t mounting any kind of a big campaign. But equally he wasn’t about to let anything happen right under his nose. He couldn’t just walk away. He never had.