Lee Child - [Jack Reacher 01-16]

by Jack Reacher Series (epub)

  The parts of the walls that were brick were a warm natural brick color, but everything else was white, except for the floor, which was pale maple strips. The decor was cool and neutral, like a gallery. There was no sign that more than one person had ever lived there. No sign of two tastes competing. The whole place was very unified. White sofas, white chairs, bookshelves built in simple cubic sections, painted with the same white paint that had been used on the walls. Big steam pipes and ugly radiators, all painted white. The only definite color in the living room was a life-size Mondrian copy on the wall above the largest sofa. It was a proper copy, done by hand in oil on canvas, with the proper colors. Not garish reds and blues and yellows, but the correct dulled tones, with authentic little cracks and crazings in the white, which was nearer a gray. He stood and looked at it for long time, totally astonished. Piet Mondrian was his favorite painter of all time, and this exact picture was his favorite work of all time. The title was Composition with Red, Yellow and Blue. Mondrian had painted the original in 1930 and Reacher had seen it in Zurich, Switzerland.

  There was a tall cabinet opposite the smallest sofa, painted the same white as everything else. There was a small TV in it, a video, a cable box, a CD player with a pair of large headphones plugged into the jack. A small stack of CDs, mostly fifties jazz, stuff he liked without really being crazy about.

  The windows gave out over lower Broadway. There was a constant wash of traffic hum, neon blaze from up and down the street, an occasional siren wailing and booping and blasting loud as it came out through the gaps between blocks. He tilted the blind with a clear plastic wand and looked down at the sidewalk. There were still the same knots of people hanging around. Nothing to make him nervous. He tilted the blind back and closed it up tight.

  The kitchen was huge and tall. All the cupboards were wood, painted white, and the appliances were industrial sizes in stainless steel, like pizza ovens. He had lived in places smaller than the refrigerator. He pulled it open and saw a dozen bottles of his favorite water, the same stuff he had grown to love in the Keys. He took the seal off one of them and carried it into the guest bedroom.

  The bedroom was white, like everything else. The furniture was wood, which had started out with a different finish, but which was now white like the walls. He put the water on the night table and used the bathroom. White tiles, white sink, white tub, all old enamel and tiling. He closed the blinds and stripped and folded his new clothes onto the closet shelf. Threw back the cover and slid into bed and fell to thinking.

  Illusion and reality. What was nine years, anyway? A lot, he guessed, when she was fifteen and he was twenty-four, but what was it now? He was thirty-eight, and she was either twenty-nine or thirty, he wasn’t exactly sure which. Where was the problem with that? Why wasn’t he doing something? Maybe it wasn’t the age thing. Maybe it was Leon. She was his daughter, and always would be. It gave him the guilty illusion she was somewhere between his kid sister and his niece. That obviously gave him a very inhibiting feeling, but it was just an illusion, right? She was the relative of an old friend, was all. An old friend who was now dead. So why the hell did he feel so bad about looking at her and seeing himself peeling off her sweatshirt and undoing the belt from around her waist? Why wasn’t he just doing it? Why the hell was he in the guest room instead of on the other side of the wall in bed with her? Like he’d ached to be through countless forgotten nights in the past, some of them shameful, some of them wistful?

  Because presumably her realities were rooted in the same kind of illusions. For kid sister and niece, call it big brother and uncle. Favorite uncle, for sure, because he knew she liked him. There was a lot of affection there. But that just made it worse. Affection for favorite uncles was a specific type of affection. Favorite uncles were there for specific types of things. Family things, like shopping and spoiling, one way or the other. Favorite uncles were not there to put the moves on you. That would come out of the blue like some kind of a shattering betrayal. Horrifying, unwelcome, incestuous, psychologically damaging.

  She was on the other side of the wall. But there was nothing he could do about it. Nothing. It was never going to happen. He knew it was going to drive him crazy, so he forced his mind away from her and started thinking about other things. Things that were realities for sure, not just illusions. The two guys, whoever they were. They would have her address by now. There were a dozen ways of discovering where a person lives. They could be outside the building right at that moment. He scanned through the apartment building in his head. The lobby door, locked. The door from the parking garage, locked. The door to the apartment, locked and barred. The windows, all closed up, the blinds all drawn. So tonight, they were safe. But tomorrow morning was going to be dangerous. Maybe very dangerous. He concentrated on fixing the two guys in his mind as he fell asleep. Their vehicle, their suits, their build, their faces.

  BUT AT THAT exact moment, only one of the two guys had a face. They had sailed together ten miles south of where Reacher lay, out into the black waters of lower New York Harbor. They had worked together to unzip the rubber body bag and lower the secretary’s cold corpse down into the oily Atlantic swell. One guy had turned to the other with some cheap joke on his lips and was shot full in the face with a silenced Beretta. Then again, and again. The slow fall of his body put the three bullets all in different places. His face was all one big fatal wound, black in the darkness. His arm was levered up across the mahogany rail and his right hand was severed at the wrist with a stolen restaurant cleaver. Five blows were required. It was messy and brutal work. The hand went into a plastic bag and the body slipped into the water without a sound, less than twenty yards from the spot where the secretary was already sinking.

  7

  JODIE WOKE EARLY that morning, which was unusual for her. Normally she slept soundly right up to the point when her alarm went off and she had to drag herself out of bed and into the bathroom, sleepy and slow. But that morning, she was awake an hour before she had to be, alert, breathing lightly, heart racing gently in her chest.

  Her bedroom was white, like all her rooms, and her bed was a king with a white wood frame, set with the head against the wall opposite her window. The guest room was back to back with her room, laid out in exactly the same way, symmetrically, but in reverse, because it faced in the opposite direction. Which meant that his head was about eighteen inches away from hers. Just through the wall.

  She knew what the walls were made of. She had bought the apartment before it was finished. She had been in and out for months, watching over the conversion. The wall between the two bedrooms was an original wall, a hundred years old. There was a great balk of timber lying crossways on the floor, with bricks built up on top of it, all the way to the ceiling. The builders had simply patched the bricks where they were weak, and then plastered over them the way the Europeans do it, giving a solid hard stucco finish. The architect felt it was the right way to do it. It added solidity to the shell, and it gave better fireproofing and better soundproofing. But it also gave a foot-thick sandwich of stucco and brick and stucco between her and Reacher.

  She loved him. She was in no doubt about that. No doubt at all. She always had, right from the start. But was that OK? Was it OK to love him the way she did? She had agonized over that question before. She had lain awake nights about it, many years ago. She had burned with shame about her feelings. The nine-year age gap was obscene. Shameful. She knew that. A fifteen-year-old should not feel that way about her own father’s fellow officer. Army protocol had made it practically incestuous. It was like feeling that way about an uncle. Almost like feeling that way about her father himself. But she loved him. There was no doubt about it.

  She was with him whenever she could. Talking with him whenever she could, touching him whenever she could. She had her own print of the self-timer photograph from Manila, her arm around his waist. She had kept it pressed in a book for fifteen years. Looked at it countless times. For years, she had fed off the feeling of to
uching him, hugging him hard for the camera. She still remembered the exact feel of him, his broad hard frame, his smell.

  The feelings had never really gone away. She had wanted them to. She had wanted it just to be an adolescent thing, a teenage crush. But it wasn’t. She knew that from the way the feelings endured. He had disappeared, she had grown up and moved on, but the feelings were always there. They had never receded, but they had eventually moved parallel to the main flow of her life. Always there, always real, always strong, but not necessarily connected with her day-to-day reality anymore. Like people she knew, lawyers or bankers, who had really wanted to be dancers or ballplayers. A dream from the past, unconnected with reality, but absolutely defining the identity of the person involved. A lawyer, who had wanted to be a dancer. A banker, who had wanted to be a ballplayer. A divorced thirty-year-old woman, who had wanted to be with Jack Reacher all along.

  Yesterday should have been the worst day of her life. She had buried her father, her last relative on earth. She had been attacked by men with guns. People she knew were in therapy for much less. She should be prostrate with misery and shock. But she wasn’t. Yesterday had been the best day of her life. He had appeared like a vision on the steps, behind the garage, above the yard. The noon sun directly over his head, illuminating him. Her heart had thumped and the old feelings had swarmed back into the center of her life, fiercer and stronger than ever, like a drug howling through her veins, like claps of thunder.

  But it was all a waste of time. She knew it. She had to face it. He looked at her like a niece or a kid sister. Like the nine-year gap still counted for something. Which it no longer did. A couple aged fifteen and twenty-four would certainly have been a problem. But thirty and thirty-nine was perfectly OK. There were thousands of couples with gaps bigger than that. Millions of couples. There were guys aged seventy with twenty-year-old wives. But it still counted for something with him. Or maybe he was just too used to seeing her as Leon’s kid. Like a niece. Like the CO’s daughter. The rules of society or the protocol of the Army had blinded him to the possibility of seeing her any other way. She had always burned with resentment about that. She still did. Leon’s affection for him, his claiming of him as his own, had taken him away from her. It had made it impossible from the start.

  They had spent the day like brother and sister, like uncle and niece. Then he had turned all serious, like a bodyguard, like she was his professional responsibility. They had had fun, and he cared about her physical safety, but nothing more. There never would be anything more. And there was nothing she could do about it. Nothing. She had asked guys out. All women her age had. It was permissible. Accepted, even normal. But what could she say to him? What? What can a sister say to a brother or a niece to an uncle without causing outrage and shock and disgust? So it wasn’t going to happen, and there was absolutely nothing she could do about it.

  She stretched out in her bed and brought her hands up above her head. Laid her palms gently against the dividing wall and held them there. At least he was in her apartment, and at least she could dream.

  THE GUY GOT less than three hours in the sack, by the time he sailed the boat single-handed back to the slip and closed it down and got back across town to bed. He was up again at six and back on the street by six-twenty, with a quick shower and no breakfast. The hand was wrapped in the plastic, parceled up in yesterday’s Post and carried in a Zabar’s bag he had from the last time he bought ingredients and made his own dinner at home.

  He used the black Tahoe and made quick time past all the early-morning delivery people. He parked underground and rode up to the eighty-eighth floor. Tony the receptionist was already at the brass-and-oak counter. But he could tell from the stillness nobody else was in. He held up the Zabar’s bag, like a trophy.

  “I’ve got this for the Hook,” he said.

  “The Hook’s not here today,” Tony said.

  “Great,” the guy said, sourly.

  “Stick it in the refrigerator,” Tony said.

  There was a small office kitchen off the reception lobby. It was cramped and messy, like office kitchens are. Coffee rings on the counters, mugs with stains on the inside. The refrigerator was a miniature item under the counter. The guy shoved milk and a six-pack aside and folded the bag into what space was left.

  “Target for today is Mrs. Jacob,” Tony said. He was now in the kitchen doorway. “We know where she lives. Lower Broadway, north of City Hall. Eight blocks from here. Neighbors say she always leaves at seven-twenty, walks to work.”

  “Which is where exactly?” the guy asked.

  “Wall Street and Broadway,” Tony said. “I’ll drive, you grab her.”

  CHESTER STONE HAD driven home at the normal time and said nothing to Marilyn. There was nothing he could say. The speed of the collapse had left him bewildered. His whole world had turned inside out in a single twenty-four-hour period. He just couldn’t get a handle on it. He planned to ignore it until the morning and then go see Hobie and try and talk some sense. In his heart he didn’t believe he couldn’t save himself. The corporation was ninety years old, for God’s sake. Three generations of Chester Stones. There was too much there for it all to disappear overnight. So he said nothing and got through the evening in a daze.

  Marilyn Stone said nothing to Chester, either. Too early for him to know she had taken charge. The circumstances had to be right for that discussion. It was an ego thing. She just bustled about, doing her normal evening things, and then tried to sleep while he lay awake beside her, staring at the ceiling.

  WHEN JODIE PLACED her palms flat on the dividing wall. Reacher was in the shower. He had three distinct routines worked out for showering, and every morning he made a choice about which one to use. The first was a straight shower, nothing more. It took eleven minutes. The second was a shave and a shower, twenty-two minutes. The third was a special procedure, rarely used. It involved showering once, then getting out and shaving, and then showering all over again. It took more than a half hour, but the advantage was moisturization. Some girl had explained the shave was better if the skin was already thoroughly moisturized. And she had said it can’t hurt any to shampoo twice.

  He was using the special procedure. Shower, shave, shower. It felt good. Jodie’s guest bathroom was big and tall, and the showerhead was set high enough for him to stand upright under it, which was unusual. There were bottles of shampoo, neatly lined up. He suspected they were brands she had tried and hadn’t liked, relegated to the guest room. But he didn’t care. He found one that claimed to be aimed at dry, sun-damaged hair. He figured that was exactly what he needed. He ladled it on and lathered up. Scrubbed his body all over with some kind of yellow soap and rinsed. Dripped all over the floor as he shaved at the sink. He did it carefully, right up from his collarbones, around the bottom of his nose, sideways, backward, forward. Then back into the shower all over again.

  He spent five minutes on his teeth with the new toothbrush. The bristles were hard, and it felt like they were doing some good in there. Then he dried off and shook the creases out of his new clothes. Put the pants on without the shirt and wandered through to the kitchen for something to eat.

  Jodie was in there. She was fresh from the shower, too. Her hair was dark with water and hanging straight down. She was wearing an oversize white T-shirt that finished an inch above her knees. The material was thin. Her legs were long and smooth. Her feet were bare. She was very slender, except where she shouldn’t be. He caught his breath.

  “Morning, Reacher,” she said.

  “Morning, Jodie,” he said back.

  She was looking at him. Her eyes were all over him. Something in her face.

  “That blister,” she said. ”Looks worse.”

  He squinted down. It was still red and angry. Spreading slightly, and puffy.

  “You put the ointment on?” she asked.

  He shook his head.

  “Forgot,” he said.

  “Get it,” she said.

  He w
ent back to his bathroom and found it in the brown bag. Brought it back to the kitchen. She took it from him and unscrewed the cap. Pierced the metal seal with the plastic spike and squeezed a dot of the salve onto the pad of her index finger. She was concentrating on it, tongue between her teeth. She stepped in front of him and raised her hand. Touched the blister gently and rubbed with her fingertip. He stared rigidly over her head. She was a foot away from him. Naked under her shirt. Rubbing his bare chest with her fingertip. He wanted to take her in his arms. He wanted to lift her off her feet and crush her close. Kiss her gently, starting with her neck. He wanted to turn her face up to his and kiss her mouth. She was rubbing small gentle circles on his chest. He could smell her hair, damp and glossy. He could smell her skin. She was tracing her finger the length of the burn. A foot away from him, naked under her shirt. He gasped and clenched his hands. She stepped away.

  “Hurting?” she asked.

  “What?”

  “Was I hurting you?”

  He saw her fingertip, shiny from the grease.

  “A little,” he said.

  She nodded.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “But you needed it.”

  He nodded back.

  “I guess,” he said.

  Then the crisis was past. She screwed the cap back on the tube and he moved away, just to be moving. He pulled the refrigerator door and took a bottle of water. Found a banana in a bowl on the counter. She put the tube of ointment on the table.

  “I’ll go get dressed,” she said. “We should get moving.”

  “OK,” he said. “I’ll be ready.”

  She disappeared back into her bedroom and he drank the water and ate the fruit. Wandered back to his bedroom and shrugged the shirt on and tucked it in. Found his socks and shoes and jacket. Strolled through to the living room to wait. He pulled the blind all the way up and unlocked the window and pushed it up. Leaned right out and scanned the street four floors below.