by Lee Child
“I’ll get Mrs. Jacob’s address, you’ll bring her to me, OK?”
“Sure,” the guy said. “What about this one?”
He nodded toward the bathroom door. Hobie followed his glance.
“Wait until tonight,” he said. “Put some of her clothes back on, take her down to the boat. Dump her a couple of miles out in the bay.”
“She’s likely to wash back in,” the guy said. “Couple of days.”
Hobie shrugged.
“I don’t care,” he said. “Couple of days, she’ll be all bloated up. They’ll figure she fell off a motorboat. Injuries like that, they’ll put it down to propeller damage.”
THE COVERT HABIT had advantages, but it also had problems. Best way to get up to Garrison in a hurry would be to grab a rental car and head straight out. But a guy who chooses not to use credit cards and won’t carry a driver’s license loses that option. So Reacher was back in a cab, heading for Grand Central. He was pretty sure the Hudson Line ran a train up there. He guessed commuters sometimes lived as far north as that. If not, the big Amtraks that ran up to Albany and Canada might stop there.
He paid off the cab and pushed through the crowd to the doors. Down the long ramp and out into the giant concourse. He glanced around and craned his head to read the departures screen. Tried to recall the geography. Croton-Harmon trains were no good. They terminated way too far south. He needed Poughkeepsie at the minimum. He scanned down the list. Nothing doing. No trains out of there inside the next hour and a half that would get him to Garrison.
THEY DID IT the usual way. One of them rode ninety floors down to the underground loading bay and found an empty carton in the trash pile. Refrigerator cartons were best, or soda machines, but once he’d done it with the box from a thirty-five-inch color television. This time, he found a filing cabinet carton. He used a janitor’s trolley from the loading ramp and wheeled it into the freight elevator. Rode with it back up to the eighty-eighth floor.
The other guy was zipping her into a body bag in the bathroom. They folded it into the carton and used the remaining duct tape to secure the carton shut. Then they hefted it back on the trolley and headed for the elevator once more. This time, they rode down to the parking garage. Wheeled the box over to the black Suburban. Counted to three and heaved it into the back. Slammed the tailgate shut and clicked the lock. Walked away and glanced back. Deep tints on the windows, dark garage, no problem.
“You know what?” the first guy said. “We fold the seat down, we’ll get Mrs. Jacob in there along with her. Do it all in one trip, tonight. I don’t like going on that boat any more times than I have to.”
“OK,” the second guy said. “Were there more boxes?”
“That was the best one. Depends if Mrs. Jacob is big or small, I guess.”
“Depends if she’s finished by tonight.”
“You got any doubts on that score? The mood he’s in today?”
They strolled together to a different slot and unlocked a black Chevy Tahoe. Little brother to the Suburban, but still a giant vehicle.
“So where is she?” the second guy asked.
“A town called Garrison,” the first guy said. “Straight up the Hudson, a ways past Sing Sing. An hour, hour and a half.”
The Tahoe backed out of the slot and squealed its tires on its way around the garage. Bumped up the ramp into the sunshine and headed out to West Street, where it made a right and accelerated north.
4
WEST STREET BECOMES Eleventh Avenue right opposite Pier 56, where the westbound traffic spills out of Fourteenth Street and turns north. The big black Tahoe was caught in the congestion and added its horn to the frustrated blasts cannoning off the high buildings and echoing out over the river. It crawled nine blocks and made a left at Twenty-third Street, then swung north again on Twelfth. It got above walking speed until it passed the back of the Javits Convention Center, and then it got jammed up again in the traffic pouring out of West Forty-second. Twelfth became the Miller Highway and it was still solid, all the way over the top of the huge messy acreage of the old rail yards. Then the Miller became the Henry Hudson Parkway. Still a slow road, but the Henry Hudson was technically Route 9A, which would become Route 9 up in Crotonville and take them all the way north to Garrison. A straight line, no turns anywhere, but they were still in Manhattan, stuck in Riverside Park, a whole half hour after setting out.
IT WAS THE word processor that meant the most. The cursor, patiently blinking in the middle of a word. The open door and the abandoned bag were persuasive, but not critical. Office workers usually take their stuff and close their doors, but not always. The secretary might have just stepped across the hall and gotten involved in something, a quest for bond paper or a plea for help with somebody’s copying machine, leading to a cup of coffee and a juicy story about last night’s date. A person expecting to be absent two minutes might leave her bag behind and her door open and end up being gone a half hour. But nobody leaves computer work unsaved. Not even for a minute. And this woman had. The machine had asked him DO YOU WANT TO SAVE THE CHANGES? Which meant she had gotten up from her desk without clicking on the save icon, which is a habit just about as regular as breathing for people who spend their days fighting with software.
Which put a very bad complexion on the whole thing. Reacher was through in Grand Central’s other big hall, with a twenty-ounce cup of black coffee he had bought from a vendor. He jammed the lid down tight and squeezed the cash roll in his pocket. It was thick enough for what he was going to have to do. He ran back and around to the track where the next Croton train was waiting to leave.
THE HENRY HUDSON Parkway splits into a tangle of curling ramps around 170th Street and the north lanes come out again labeled Riverside Drive. Same road, same direction, no turn, but the complex dynamic of heavy traffic means that if one driver slows down more than the average, then the highway can back up dramatically, with hundreds of people stalled way behind, all because some out-of-towner a mile ahead became momentarily confused. The big black Tahoe was brought to a complete halt opposite Fort Washington and was reduced to a lurching stop-start crawl all the way under the George Washington Bridge. Then Riverside Drive broadens out and it got itself up into third gear before the label changed back to the Henry Hudson and the traffic in the toll plaza stopped it again. It waited in line to pay the money that let it off the island of Manhattan and away north through the Bronx.
THERE ARE TWO types of trains running up and down the Hudson River between Grand Central and Croton-Harmon: locals and expresses. The expresses do not run any faster in terms of speed, but they stop less often. They make the journey last somewhere between forty-nine and fifty-two minutes. The locals stop everywhere, and the repeated braking and waiting and accelerating spin the trip out to anywhere between sixty-five and seventy-three minutes. A maximum advantage for the express of up to twenty-four minutes.
Reacher was on a local. He had given the trainman five and a half bucks for an off-peak one-way and was sitting sideways on an empty three-person bench, wired from too much coffee, his head resting on the window, wondering exactly where the hell he was going, and why, and what he was going to do when he got there. And whether he would get there in time to do it, anyway, whatever it was.
ROUTE 9A BECAME 9 and curved gracefully away from the river to run behind Camp Smith. Up in Westchester, it was a fast enough road. Not exactly a racetrack, because it curved and bounced around too much for sustained high speed, but it was clear and empty, a patchwork of old sections and new stretches carved through the woods. There were housing developments here and there beyond the shoulders, high timber fencing and neatly painted siding and optimistic names carved into imposing boulders flanking the entrance gates. The Tahoe hustled along, one guy driving and the other with a map across his knees.
They passed Peekskill and started hunting a left turn. They found it and swung head-on toward the river, which they sensed ahead of them, an empty break in the landscape. They ente
red the township of Garrison, and started hunting the address. Not easy to find. The residential areas were scattered. You could have a Garrison zip code and live way in the back of beyond. That was clear. But they found the right road and made all the correct turns and found the right street. Slowed and cruised through the thinning woods above the river, watching the mailboxes. The road curved and opened out. They cruised on. Then they spotted the right house up ahead and slowed abruptly and pulled in at the curb.
REACHER GOT OFF of the train at Croton, seventy-one minutes after getting in. He ran up the stairs and across and down to the taxi rank. There were four operators lined up, all nose-in to the station entrance, all of them using old-model Caprice wagons with fake wood on the sides. The first driver to react was a stout woman who tilted her head up like she was ready to pay attention.
“You know Garrison?” Reacher asked her.
“Garrison?” she said. “That’s a long way, mister, twenty miles.”
“I know where it is,” he said.
“Could be forty bucks.”
“I’ll give you fifty,” he said. “But I need to be there right now.”
He sat in front, next to her. The car stank like old taxis do, sweet cloying air freshener and upholstery cleaner. There were a million miles on the clock and it rode like a boat on a swell as the woman hustled through the parking lot and up onto Route 9 and headed north.
“You got an address for me?” she asked, watching the road.
Reacher repeated what the assistant in the law firm had told him. The woman nodded and settled to a fast cruise.
“Overlooks the river,” she said.
She cruised for a quarter hour, passed by Peekskill and then slowed, looking for a particular left. Hauled the huge boat around and headed west. Reacher could feel the river up ahead, a mile-wide trench in the forest. The woman knew where she was going. She went all the way to the river and turned north on a country road. The rail tracks ran parallel between them and the water. No trains on them. The land fell away and Reacher could see West Point ahead and on his left, a mile away across the blue water.
“Should be along here someplace,” she said.
It was a narrow country road, domesticated with ranch fencing in rough timber and tamed with mowed shoulders and specimen plantings. There were mailboxes a hundred yards apart and poles that hung cables through the treetops.
“Whoa,” the woman said, surprised. “I guess this is it.”
The road was already narrow, and now it became just about impassable. There was a long line of cars parked up on the shoulder. Maybe forty automobiles, many of them black or dark blue. All neat late-model sedans or big sport-utilities. The woman eased the taxi into the driveway. The line of parked cars stretched nose-to-tail all the way to the house. Another ten or twelve cars were parked together on the apron in front of the garage. Two of them were plain Detroit sedans, in flat green. Army vehicles. Reacher could spot Defense Department issue a mile away.
“OK?” the woman asked him.
“I guess,” he said, cautiously.
He peeled a fifty off his roll and handed it to her. Got out and stood in the driveway, unsure. He heard the taxi whine away in reverse. He walked back up to the road. Looked at the long line of cars. Looked at the mailbox. There was a name spelled out in little aluminum letters along the top of it. The name was Garber. A name he knew as well as his own.
The house was set in a large lot, casually landscaped, placed somewhere comfortable in the region between natural and neglected. The house itself was low and sprawling, dark cedar siding, dark screens at the windows, big stone chimney, somewhere between suburban modest and cozy cottage. It was very quiet. The air smelled hot and damp and fecund. He could hear insects massing in the undergrowth. He could sense the river beyond the house, a mile-wide void dragging stray sounds away to the south.
He walked closer and heard muted conversation behind the house. People talking low, maybe a lot of people. He walked down toward the sound and came out around the side of the garage. He was at the top of a flight of cement steps, looking west across the backyard to the river, blue and blinding in the sun. A mile away in the haze, slightly northwest to his right, was West Point, low and gray in the distance.
The backyard was a flat area cleared out of the woods on the top of the bluff. It was covered in coarse grass, mowed short, and there was a solemn crowd of a hundred people standing in it. They were all dressed in black, men and women alike, black suits and ties and blouses and shoes, except for a half dozen Army officers in full dress uniform. They were all talking quietly, soberly, juggling paper buffet plates and glasses of wine, sadness in the slope of their shoulders.
A funeral. He was gate-crashing a funeral. He stood there awkwardly, looming against the skyline in the gear he had thrown on yesterday in the Keys, faded chinos, creased pale yellow shirt, no socks, scuffed shoes, sun-bleached hair sticking out all over the place, a day’s beard on his face. He gazed down at the group of mourners and as if he had suddenly clapped his hands they all fell silent and turned to look up at him. He froze. They all stared at him, quietly, inquiringly, and he looked back at them, blankly. There was silence. Stillness. Then a woman moved. She handed her paper plate and her glass to the nearest bystander and stepped forward.
She was a young woman, maybe thirty, dressed like the others in a severe black suit. She was pale and strained, but very beautiful. Achingly beautiful. Very slim, tall in her heels, long legs in sheer dark nylon. Fine blond hair, long and unstyled, blue eyes, fine bones. She moved delicately across the lawn and stopped at the bottom of the cement steps, like she was waiting for him to come down to her.
“Hello, Reacher,” she said, softly.
He looked down at her. She knew who he was. And he knew who she was. It came to him suddenly like a stop-motion film blasting through fifteen years in a single glance. A teenage girl grew up and blossomed into a beautiful woman right in front of his eyes, all in a split second. Garber, the name on the mailbox. Leon Garber, for many years his commanding officer. He recalled their early acquaintance, getting to know each other at backyard barbecues on hot, wet evenings in the Philippines. A slender girl gliding in and out of the shadows around the bleak base house, enough of a woman at fifteen to be utterly captivating but enough of a girl to be totally forbidden. Jodie, Garber’s daughter. His only child. The light of his life. This was Jodie Garber, fifteen years later, all grown up and beautiful and waiting for him at the bottom of a set of cement steps.
He glanced at the crowd and went down the steps to the lawn.
“Hello, Reacher,” she said again.
Her voice was low and strained. Sad, like the scene around her.
“Hello, Jodie,” he said.
Then he wanted to ask who died? But he couldn’t frame it in any way which wasn’t going to sound callous, or stupid. She saw him struggling, and nodded.
“Dad,” she said simply.
“When?” he asked.
“Five days ago,” she said. “He was sick the last few months, but it was sudden at the end. A surprise, I guess.”
He nodded slowly.
“I’m very sorry,” he said.
He glanced at the river and the hundred faces in front of him became a hundred faces of Leon Garber. A short, squat, tough man. A wide smile he always used whether he was happy or annoyed or in danger. A brave man, physically and mentally. A great leader. Honest as the day is long, fair, perceptive. Reacher’s role model during his vital formative years. His mentor and his sponsor. His protector. He had gone way out on a limb and promoted him twice in an eighteen-month span which made Reacher the youngest peacetime major anybody could remember. Then he had spread his blunt hands wide and smiled and disclaimed any credit for his ensuing successes.
“I’m very sorry, Jodie,” he said again.
She nodded, silently.
“I can’t believe it,” he said. “I can’t take it in. I saw him less than a year ago. He was in good shape
then. He got sick?”
She nodded again, still silent.
“But he was always so tough,” he said.
She nodded, sadly. “He was, wasn’t he? Always so tough.”
“And not old,” he said.
“Sixty-four.”
“So what happened?”
“His heart,” she said. “It got him in the end. Remember how he always liked to pretend he didn’t have one?”
Reacher shook his head. “Biggest heart you ever saw.”
“I found that out,” she said. “When Mom died, we were best friends for ten years. I loved him.”
“I loved him, too,” Reacher said. “Like he was my dad, not yours.”
She nodded again. “He still talked about you all the time.”
Reacher looked away. Stared out at the unfocused shape of the West Point buildings, gray in the haze. He was numb. He was in that age zone where people he knew died. His father was dead, his mother was dead, his brother was dead. Now the nearest thing to a substitute relative was dead, too.
“He had a heart attack six months ago,” Jodie said. Her eyes clouded and she hooked her long, straight hair behind her ear. “He sort of recovered for a spell, looked pretty good, but really he was failing fast. They were considering a bypass, but he took a turn for the worse and went down too quickly. He wouldn’t have survived the surgery.”
“I’m very sorry,” he said, for the third time.