by Lee Child
“My fault,” he said. “I was too slow, is all. I was supposed to trick him and get him first. But apparently I survived it. So don’t say anything. I mean it. Don’t ever mention it.”
“But I have to say thank you,” she whispered.
“Maybe I should say thank you,” he said. “Feels good to know somebody worth taking a bullet for.”
She nodded, but not because she was agreeing. It was just random physical motion designed to keep her from crying.
“So how am I?” he asked.
She paused for a long moment.
“I’ll get the doctor,” she said quietly. “He can tell you better than me.”
She went out and a guy in a white coat came in. Reacher smiled. It was the guy the Army had sent to finish him off at the end of his parade. He was a small, wide, hairy man who could have found work wrestling.
“You know anything about computers?” he asked.
Reacher shrugged and started worrying this was a coded lead-in to bad news about a brain injury, impairment, loss of memory, loss of function.
“Computers?” he said. “Not really.”
“OK, try this,” the doctor said. “Imagine a big Cray supercomputer humming away. We feed it everything we know about human physiology and everything we know about gunshot wounds and then we ask it to design us a male person best equipped to survive a thirty-eight in the chest. Suppose it hums away for a week. What does it come up with?”
Reacher shrugged again. “I don’t know.”
“A picture of you, my friend,” the doctor said. “That’s what. The damn bullet didn’t even make it into your chest. Your pectoral muscle is so thick and so dense it stopped it dead. Like a three-inch kevlar vest. It popped out the other side of the muscle wall and smashed a rib, but it went no farther.”
“So why was I out three weeks?” Reacher asked immediately. “Not for a muscle wound or a broken rib, that’s for damn sure. Is my head OK?”
The doctor did a weird thing. He clapped his hands and punched the air. Then he stepped closer, beaming all over his face.
“I was worried about it,” he said. “Real worried about it. Bad wound. I would have figured it for a nail gun, until they told me it was shotgun debris from manufactured furniture. It penetrated your skull and was about an eighth inch into your brain. Frontal lobe, my friend, bad place to have a nail. If I had to have a nail in my skull, the frontal lobe would definitely not be my first choice. But if I had to see a nail in anybody else’s frontal lobe I’d pick yours, I guess, because you’ve got a skull thicker than Neanderthal man’s. Anybody normal, that nail would have been all the way in, and that would have been thank you and good night.”
“So am I OK?” Reacher asked again.
“You just saved us ten thousand dollars in tests,” the doctor said happily. “I told you the news about the chest, and what did you do? Analytically? You compared it with your own internal database, realized it wasn’t a very serious wound, realized it couldn’t have needed three weeks of coma, remembered your other injury, put two and two together and asked the question you asked. Immediately. No hesitation. Fast, logical thinking, assembly of pertinent information, rapid conclusion, lucid questioning of the source of a possible answer. Nothing wrong with your head, my friend. Take that as a professional opinion.”
Reacher nodded slowly. “So when can I get out of here?”
The doctor took the medical chart off the foot of the bed. There was a mass of paper clipped to a metal board. He riffed it through. “Well, your health is excellent in general, but we better watch you a while. Couple more days, maybe.”
“Nuts to that,” Reacher said. “I’m leaving tonight.”
The doctor nodded. “Well, see how you feel in an hour.”
He stepped close and stretched up to a valve on the bottom of one of the IV bags. Clicked it a notch and tapped a tube with his finger. Watched carefully and nodded and walked back out of the room. He passed Jodie in the doorway. She was walking in with a guy in a seersucker jacket. He was about fifty, pale, short gray hair. Reacher watched him and thought a buck gets ten this is the Pentagon guy.
“Reacher, this is General Mead,” Jodie said.
“Department of the Army,” Reacher said.
The guy in the jacket looked at him, surprised. “Have we met?”
Reacher shook his head. “No, but I knew one of you would be sniffing around, soon as I was up and running.”
Mead smiled. “We’ve been practically camped out here. To put it bluntly, we’d like you to keep quiet about the Carl Allen situation.”
“Not a chance,” Reacher said.
Mead smiled again and waited. He was enough of an Army bureaucrat to know the steps. Leon used to say something for nothing, that’s a foreign language.
“The Hobies,” Reacher said. “Fly them down to D.C. first class, put them up in a five-star hotel, show them their boy’s name on the Wall and make sure there’s a shitload of brass in full-dress uniform saluting like crazy the whole time they’re doing it. Then I’ll keep quiet.”
Mead nodded.
“It’ll be done,” he said. He got up unbidden and went back outside. Jodie sat down on the foot of the bed.
“Tell me about the police,” Reacher said. “Have I got questions to answer?”
She shook her head.
“Allen was a cop killer,” she said. “You stick around NYPD territory and you’ll never get another ticket in your life. It was self-defense, everybody’s cool.”
“What about my gun? It was stolen.”
“No, it was Allen’s gun. You wrestled it away from him. Roomful of witnesses saw you do it.”
He nodded slowly. Saw the spray of blood and brains all over again as he shot him. A pretty good shot, he thought. Dark room, stress, a nail in his head, a .38 slug in his chest, bull’s-eye. Pretty damn close to the perfect shot. Then he saw the hook again, up at Jodie’s face, hard steel against the honey of her skin.
“You OK?” he asked her.
“I’m fine,” she said.
“You sure? No bad dreams?”
“No bad dreams. I’m a big girl now.”
He nodded again. Recalled their first night together. A big girl. Seemed like a million years ago.
“But are you OK?” she asked him back.
“The doctor thinks so. He called me Neanderthal man.”
“No, seriously.”
“How do I look?”
“I’ll show you,” she said.
She ducked away to the bathroom and came back with the mirror from the wall. It was a round thing, framed in plastic. She propped it on his legs and he steadied it with his right hand and looked. He still had a fearsome tan. Blue eyes. White teeth. His head had been shaved. The hair had grown back an eighth of an inch. On the left of his face was a peppering of scars. The nail hole in his forehead was lost among the debris of a long and violent life. He could make it out because it was redder and newer than the rest, but it was no bigger than the mark a half-inch away where his brother, Joe, had caught him with a shard of glass in some long-forgotten childhood dispute over nothing, in the same exact year Hobie’s Huey went down. He tilted the mirror and saw broad strapping over his chest, snowy white against the tan. He figured he had lost maybe thirty pounds. Back to 220, his normal weight. He handed the mirror back to Jodie and tried to sit up. He was suddenly dizzy.
“I want to get out of here,” he said.
“You sure?” she asked.
He nodded. He was sure, but he felt very sleepy. He put his head back on the pillow, just temporarily. He was warm and the pillow was soft. His head weighed a ton and his neck muscles were powerless to move it. The room was darkening. He swiveled his eyes upward and saw the IV bags hanging in the far distance above him. He saw the valve the doctor had adjusted. He had clicked it. He remembered the plastic sound. There was writing on the IV bag. The writing was upside down. He focused on it. Concentrated hard. The writing was green. It read Morphine.
>
“Shit,” he whispered, and the room spun away into total darkness.
WHEN HE OPENED his eyes again, the sun had moved backward. It was earlier in the day. Morning, not afternoon. Jodie was sitting in her chair by the window, reading. The same book. She was a half-inch farther through it. Her dress was blue, not yellow.
“It’s tomorrow,” he said.
She closed the book and stood up. Stepped over and bent and kissed his lips. He kissed her back and clamped his teeth and pulled the IV needles out of his arm and dropped them over the side of the bed. They started a steady drip onto the floor. He hauled himself upright against the pillows and smoothed a hand over his bristly scalp.
“How do you feel?” she asked.
He sat still in the bed and concentrated on a slow survey up his body, starting with his toes and ending with the top of his head.
“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 m
ost 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 Reacher 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.