Tripwire

by Child, Lee

  It was becoming obvious which one was Mrs. Jacob. If Hobie was right and this was her place, then she was the thin blond shaking hands and saying good-bye like all these departing people had been her guests. They were leaving, she was staying. She was Mrs. Jacob. They watched her, the center of attention, smiling bravely, embracing, waving. People filed up the driveway, ones and twos, then larger groups. Cars were starting. Blue exhaust haze was drifting. They could hear the hiss and groan of power steering as people eased out of the tight line. The rub of tires on pavement. The burble of motors accelerating away down the road. This was going to be easy. Pretty soon she was going to be standing there all by herself, all choked up and sad. Then she was going to get a couple of extra visitors. Maybe she would see them coming and take them for a couple of mourners arriving late. After all, they were dressed in dark suits and ties. What fits in Manhattan’s financial district looks just about right for a funeral.

  REACHER FOLLOWED THE last two guests up the cement steps and out of the yard. One was a colonel and the other was a two-star general, both in immaculate dress uniform. It was what he had expected. A place with free food and drink, the soldiers will always be the last to leave. He didn’t know the colonel, but he thought he vaguely recognized the general. He thought the general recognized him, too, but neither of them pursued it. No desire on either part to get into long and complicated so-what-are-you-doing-now explanations.

  The brass shook hands quite formally with Jodie and then they snapped to attention and saluted. Crisp parade-ground moves, gleaming boots smashing into the blacktop, eyes rigidly to the front, thousand-yard stares, all quite bizarre in the green stillness of a suburban driveway. They got into the last car left on the garage apron, one of the flat green sedans parked nearest to the house. First to arrive, last to leave. Peacetime, no Cold War, nothing to do all day. It was why Reacher had been happy when they cut him loose, and as he watched the green car turn and head out, he knew he was right to be happy.

  Jodie stepped sideways to him and linked her arm through his again.

  “So,” she said quietly. “That’s that.”

  Then there was just building silence as the noise from the green car faded and died along the road.

  “Where’s he buried?” Reacher asked.

  “The town cemetery,” she said. “He could have chosen Arlington, of course, but he didn’t want that. You want to go up there?”

  He shook his head.

  “No, I don’t do stuff like that. Makes no difference to him now, does it? He knew I’ll miss him, because I told him so, a long time ago.”

  She nodded. Held his arm.

  “We need to talk about Costello,” he said again.

  “Why?” she asked. “He gave you the message, right?”

  He shook his head.

  “No, he found me, but I was wary. I said I wasn’t Jack Reacher.”

  She looked up at him, astonished. “But why?”

  He shrugged.

  “Habit, I guess. I don’t go around looking for involvement. I didn’t recognize the name Jacob, so I just ignored him. I was happy, living quiet down there.”

  She was still looking at him.

  “I guess I should have used Garber,” she said. “It was Dad’s business anyway, not mine. But I did it through the firm, and I never even thought about it. You’d have listened to him if he’d said Garber, right?”

  “Of course,” he said.

  “And you needn’t have worried, because it was no kind of a big deal.”

  “Can we go inside?” he asked.

  She was surprised again. “Why?”

  “Because it was some kind of a very big deal.”

  THEY SAW HER lead him in through the front door. She pulled the screen and he held it while she turned the knob and opened up. Some kind of a big front door, dull brown wood. They went inside and the door closed behind them. Ten seconds later a dim light came on in a window, way off to the left. Some kind of a sitting room or den, they guessed, so shaded by the runaway plantings outside that it needed lights on even in the middle of the day. They crouched in their damp hollow and waited. Insects were drifting through the sunbeams all around them. They glanced at each other and listened hard. No sound.

  They pushed through to the driveway. Ran crouched to the comer of the garage. Pressed up against the siding and slid around to the front. Across the front toward the house. They went into their jackets for the pistols. Held them pointed at the ground and went one at a time for the front porch. They regrouped and eased slowly over the old timbers. Ended up squatting on the floor, backs pressed against the house, one on either side of the front door, pistols out and ready. She’d gone in this way. She’d come back out. Just a matter of time.

  “SOMEBODY KILLED HIM?” Jodie repeated.

  “And his secretary, probably,” Reacher said.

  “I don’t believe it,” she said. “Why?”

  She had led him through a dark hallway to a small den in the far corner of the house. A tiny window and dark wood paneling and heavy brown leather furniture made it gloomy, so she switched on a desk lamp, which changed it into a cozy man’s space like the pre-war bars Reacher had seen in Europe. There were shelves of books, cheap editions bought by subscription decades ago, and curled faded photographs thumbtacked to the front edges of the shelves. There was a plain desk, the sort of place where an old underemployed man does his bills and taxes in imitation of how he used to work when he had a job.

  “I don’t know why,” Reacher said. “I don’t know anything. I don’t even know why you sent him looking for me.”

  “Dad wanted you,” she said. “He never really told me why. I was busy, I had a trial, complex thing, lasted months. I was preoccupied. All I know is, after he got sick he was going to the cardiologist, right? He met somebody there and got involved with something. He was worried about it. Seemed to me he felt he was under some kind of a big obligation. Then later when he got worse, he knew he would have to drop it, and he started saying he should find you and let you take a look at it, because you were a person who could maybe do something about it. He was getting all agitated, which was really not a good idea, so I said I’d get Costello to locate you. We use him all the time at the firm, and it felt like the least I should do.”

  It made some kind of sense, but Reacher’s first thought was why me? He could see Garber’s problem. In the middle of something, health failing, unwilling to abandon an obligation, needing help. But a guy like Garber could get help anywhere. The Manhattan Yellow Pages were full of investigators. And if it was something too arcane or too personal for a city investigator, then all he had to do was pick up the phone and a dozen of his friends from the military police would come running. Two dozen. A hundred. All of them willing and anxious to repay his many kindnesses and favors that stretched right back through their whole careers. So Reacher was sitting there asking himself why me in particular?

  “Who was the person he met at the cardiologist?”

  She shrugged, unhappily.

  “I don’t know. I was preoccupied. We never really went into it.”

  “Did Costello come up here? Discuss it directly with him?”

  She nodded. “I called him and told him we’d pay him through the firm, but he was to come here and get the details. He called me back a day or two later, said he’d discussed it with Dad, and it all boiled down to finding you. He wanted me to retain him officially, on paper, because it could get expensive. So naturally I did that, because I didn’t want Dad worrying about the cost or anything.”

  “Which is why he told me his client was Mrs. Jacob,” Reacher said. “Not Leon Garber. Which is why I ignored him. Which is how I got him killed.”

  She shook her head and looked at him sharply, like he was some kind of a new associate who had just done a piece of sloppy drafting. It took him by surprise. He was still thinking of her as a fifteen-year-old girl, not a thirty-year-old lawyer who spent her time getting preoccupied with long and comple
x trials.

  “Non sequitur,” she said. “It’s clear what happened, right? Dad told Costello the story, Costello tried some kind of a shortcut before he went looking for you, whereby he turned over the wrong stone and got somebody alerted. That somebody killed him to find out who was looking, and why. Makes no difference if you’d played ball right away. They’d still have gotten to Costello to ask him exactly who put him on the trail. So it’s me who got him killed, ultimately.”

  Reacher shook his head. “It was Leon. Through you.”

  She shook her head in turn. “It was the person at the cardiology clinic. Him, through Dad, through me.”

  “I need to find that person,” he said.

  “Does it matter now?”

  “I think it does,” he said. “If Leon was worried about something, then I’m worried about it, too. That’s how it worked for us.”

  Jodie nodded quietly. Stood up quickly and stepped over to the bookshelves. Pincered her fingernails and levered the thumbtack out of one of the photographs. Looked hard at it and then passed it across to him.

  “Remember that?” she asked.

  The photograph must have been fifteen years old, the colors fading to pale pastels the way old Kodak does with age and sunlight. It had the harsh bright sky of Manila above a dirt yard. Leon Garber was on the left, about fifty, dressed in creased olive fatigues. Reacher himself was on the right, twenty-four years old, a lieutenant, a foot taller than Garber, smiling with all the blazing vigor of youth. Between the two of them was Jodie, fifteen, in a sundress, one bare arm around her father’s shoulders, the other around Reacher’s waist. She was squinting in the sun, smiling, leaning toward Reacher like she was hugging his waist with all the strength in her skinny brown frame.

  “Remember? He’d just bought the Nikon in the PX? With the self-timer? Borrowed a tripod and couldn’t wait to try it out?”

  Reacher nodded. He remembered. He remembered the smell of her hair that day, in the hot Pacific sun. Clean, young hair. He remembered the feel of her body against his. He remembered the feel of her long, thin arm around his waist. He remembered screaming at himself hold on, pal, she’s only fifteen and she’s your CO’s daughter.

  “He called that his family picture,” she said. “Always did.”

  He nodded again. “That’s why. That’s how it worked for us.”

  She gazed at the photograph for a long moment, something in her face.

  “And there’s the secretary,” he said to her. “They’ll have asked her who the client was. She’ll have told them. And even if she didn’t, they’ll find out anyway. Took me thirty seconds and one phone call. So now they’re going to come looking for you, to ask you who’s behind all of this.”

  She looked blank and put the old photograph on the desk.

  “But I don’t know who.”

  “You think they’re going to believe that?”

  She nodded vaguely and glanced toward the window.

  “OK, so what do I do?”

  “You get out of here,” he said. “That’s for damn sure. Too lonely, too isolated. You got a place in the city?”

  “Sure,” she said. “A loft on lower Broadway.”

  “You got a car here?”

  She nodded. “Sure, in the garage. But I was going to stay here tonight. I’ve got to find his will, do the paperwork, close things down. I was going to leave tomorrow morning, early.”

  “Do all that stuff now,” he said. “As fast as you can, and get out. I mean it, Jodie. Whoever these people are, they’re not playing games.”

  The look on his face told her more than words. She nodded quickly and stood up.

  “OK, the desk. You can give me a hand.”

  From his high school ROTC until his ill-health demobilization Leon Garber had done almost fifty years of military service of one sort or another. It showed right there in his desk. The upper drawers contained pens and pencils and rulers, all in neat rows. The lower drawers were double height, with concertina files hanging on neat rods. Each was labeled in careful handwriting. Taxes, phone, electricity, heating oil, yardwork, appliance warranties. There was a label with newer handwriting in a different color: LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT. Jodie flicked through the files and ended up lifting the whole concertina out of each drawer. Reacher found a battered leather suitcase in the den closet and they loaded the concertinas straight into it. Forced the lid down tight and snapped it shut. Reacher picked up the old photograph from the desk and looked at it again.

  “Did you resent it?” he asked. “The way he thought about me? Family?”

  She paused in the doorway and nodded.

  “I resented it like crazy,” she said. “And one day I’ll tell you exactly why.”

  He just looked at her and she turned and disappeared down the hallway.

  “I’ll get my things,” she called. “Five minutes, OK?”

  He stepped over to the bookshelf and tacked the old picture back in its original position. Then he snapped the light off and carried the suitcase out of the room. Stood in the quiet hallway and looked around. It was a pleasant house. It had been expanded in size at some stage in its history. That was clear. There was a central core of rooms that made some kind of sense in terms of layout, and then there were more rooms off the doglegged hallway he was standing in. They branched out from arbitrary little inner lobbies. Too small to be called a warren, too big to be predictable. He wandered through to the living room. The windows overlooked the yard and the river, with the West Point buildings visible at an angle from the fireplace end. The air was still and smelled of old polish. The decor was faded, and had been plain to start with. Neutral wood floors, cream walls, heavy furniture. An ancient TV, no video. Books, pictures, more photographs. Nothing matched. It was an undesigned place, evolved, comfortable. It had been lived in.

  Garber must have bought it thirty years ago. Probably when Jodie’s mother got pregnant. It was a common move. Married officers with a family often bought a place, often near their first service base or near some other location they imagined was going to be central to their lives, like West Point. They bought the place and usually left it empty while they lived overseas. The point was to have an anchor, somewhere identifiable they knew they would come back to when it was all over. Or somewhere their families could live if the overseas posting was unsuitable, or if their children’s education demanded consistency.

  Reacher’s parents had not taken that route. They had never bought a place. Reacher had never lived in a house. Grim service bungalows and army bunkhouses were where he had lived, and since then, cheap motels. And he was pretty sure he never wanted anything different. He was pretty sure he didn’t want to live in a house. The desire just passed him by. The necessary involvement intimidated him. It was a physical weight, exactly like the suitcase in his hand. The bills, the property taxes, the insurance, the warranties, the repairs, the maintenance, the decisions, new roof or new stove, carpeting or rugs, the budgets. The yard work. He stepped over and looked out of the window at the lawn. Yard work summed up the whole futile procedure. First you spend a lot of time and money making the grass grow, just so you can spend a lot of time and money cutting it down again a little while later. You curse about it getting too long, and then you worry about it staying too short and you sprinkle expensive water on it all summer, and expensive chemicals all fall.

  Crazy. But if any house could change his mind, maybe Garber’s house might do it. It was so casual, so undemanding. It looked like it had prospered on benign neglect. He could just about imagine living in it. And the view was powerful. The wide Hudson rolling by, reassuring and physical. That old river was going to keep on rolling by, whatever anybody did about the houses and the yards that dotted its banks.

  “OK, I’m ready, I guess,” Jodie called.

  She appeared in the living room doorway. She was carrying a leather garment bag and she had changed out of her black funeral suit. Now she was in a pair of faded Levi’s and a powder blue sweatshirt wi
th a small logo Reacher couldn’t decipher. She had brushed her hair, and the static had kicked a couple of strands outward. She was smoothing them back with her hand, hooking them behind her ear. The powder blue shirt picked up her eyes and emphasized the pale honey of her skin. The last fifteen years had done her no harm at all.

  They walked through to the kitchen and bolted the door to the yard. Turned off all the appliances they could see and screwed the faucets tight shut. Came back out into the hallway and opened the front door.

  5

  REACHER WAS FIRST out through the door, for a number of reasons. Normally he might have let Jodie go out ahead of him, because his generation still carried with it the last vestiges of American good manners, but he had learned to be wary about displaying chivalry until he knew exactly how the woman he was with was going to react. And it was her house, not his, which altered the dynamic anyway, and she would need to use the key to lock the door behind them. So for all those reasons he was the first person to step out to the porch, and so he was the first person the two guys saw.

  Waste the big guy and bring me Mrs. Jacob, Hobie had told them. The guy on the left went for a snapshot from a sitting position. He was tensed up and ready, so it took his brain a lot less than a second to process what his optic nerve was feeding it. He felt the front door open, he saw the screen swing out, he saw somebody stepping onto the porch, he saw it was the big guy coming first, and he fired.

  The guy on the right was in a dumb position. The screen creaked open right in his face. In itself it was no kind of an obstacle, because tight nylon gauze designed to stop insects is not going to do a lot about stopping bullets, but he was a right-handed guy and the frame of the screen was moving on a direct collision course with his gun hand as it swung around into position. That made him hesitate fractionally and then scramble up and forward around the arc of the frame. He grabbed it backhanded with his left and pulled it into his body and folded himself around it with his right hand swinging up and into position.