by Child, Lee
Stone glanced across at Sheryl. Then he shook his head. “The house belongs to the company. It was a technical thing, easier to finance that way. So Hobie will get it, along with everything else.”
She nodded and stared into space. On her right, Sheryl was sleeping, sitting up. The terror had exhausted her.
“You go to sleep, too,” she said. “I’ll figure something out.”
He squeezed her hand again and leaned his head back. Closed his eyes.
“I’m so sorry,” he said again.
She made no reply. Just smoothed the thin silk down over her thighs and stared straight ahead, thinking hard.
THE SUN WAS gone before they finished for the second time. It became a bright bar sliding sideways off the window. Then it became a narrow horizontal beam, playing across the white wall, traveling slowly, dust dancing through it. Then it was gone, shut off like a light, leaving the room with the cool, dull glow of evening. They lay spent and nuzzling in a tangle of sheets, bodies slack, breathing low. Then he felt her smile again. She came up on one elbow and looked at him with the same teasing grin he’d seen outside her office building.
“What?” he asked.
“I’ve got something to tell you,” she said.
He waited.
“In my official capacity.”
He focused on her face. She was still smiling. Her teeth were white and her eyes were bright blue, even in the new cool dimness. He thought what official capacity? She was a lawyer who cleaned up the mess when somebody owed somebody else a hundred million dollars.
“I don’t owe money,” he said. “And I don’t think anybody owes me.”
She shook her head. Still smiling. “As executor of Dad’s will.”
He nodded. It made sense that Leon should appoint her. A lawyer in the family, the obvious choice.
“I opened it up and read it,” she said. “Today, at work.”
“So what’s in it? He was a secret miser? A closet billionaire?”
She shook her head again. Said nothing.
“He knows what happened to Victor Hobie and wrote it all down in his will?”
She was still smiling. “He left you something. A bequest.”
He nodded again, slowly. That made sense, too. That was Leon. He’d remember, and he’d pick out some little thing, for the sake of sentiment. But what? He scanned back. Probably a souvenir. Maybe his medals? Maybe the sniper rifle he brought home from Korea. It was an old Mauser, originally German, presumably captured by the Soviets on the Eastern Front and sold on ten years later to their Korean customers. It was a hell of a piece of machinery. Leon and he had speculated on the action it must have seen, many times. It would be a nice thing to have. A nice memory. But where the hell would he keep it?
“He left you his house,” she said.
“His what?”
“His house,” she said again. “Where we were, up in Garrison.”
He stared at her blankly. “His house?”
She nodded. Still smiling.
“I don’t believe it,” he said. “And I can’t accept it. What would I do with it?”
“What would you do with it? You’d live in it, Reacher. That’s what houses are for, right?”
“But I don’t live in houses,” he said. “I’ve never lived in a house.”
“Well, you can live in one now.”
He was silent. Then he shook his head. “Jodie, I just can’t accept it. It should be yours. He should have left it to you. It’s your inheritance.”
“I don’t want it,” she said simply. “He knew that. I like the city better.”
“OK, so sell it. But it’s yours, right? Sell it and keep the money.”
“I don’t need money. He knew that, too. It’s worth less than I make in a year.”
He looked at her. “I thought that was an expensive area, right by the river?”
She nodded. “It is.”
He paused, confused.
“His house?” he said again.
She nodded.
“Did you know he was doing this?”
“Not specifically,” she said. “But I knew he wasn’t leaving it to me. I thought he might want me to sell it, give the money to charity. Old soldiers, or something.”
“OK, so you should do that instead.”
She smiled again. “Reacher, I can’t. It’s not up to me. It’s a binding instruction in his will. I’ve got to obey it.”
“His house,” he said vaguely. “He left me his house?”
“He was worried about you. For two years, he was worrying. Since they cut you loose. He knew how it could be, you spend the whole of your life in the service, and suddenly you find you’ve got nothing at the end of it. He was concerned about how you were living.”
“But he didn’t know how I was living,” he said.
She nodded again. “But he could guess, right? He was a smart old guy. He knew you’d be drifting around somewhere. He used to say, drifting around is great, maybe three or four years. But what about when he’s fifty? Sixty? Seventy? He was thinking about it.”
Reacher shrugged, flat on his back, naked, staring at the ceiling.
“I was never thinking about it. ‘One day at a time’ was my motto.”
She made no reply. Just ducked her head and kissed his chest.
“I feel like I’m stealing from you,” he said. “It’s your inheritance, Jodie. You should have it.”
She kissed him again. “It was his house. Even if I wanted it, we’d have to respect his wishes. But the fact is I don’t want it. I never did. He knew that. He was totally free to do whatever he wanted with it. And he did. He left it to you because he wanted you to have it.”
He was staring at the ceiling, but he was wandering through the house in his mind. Down the driveway, through the trees, the garage on his right, the breezeway, the low bulk of the place on his left. The den, the living room, the wide slow Hudson rolling by. The furniture. It had looked pretty comfortable. Maybe he could get a stereo. Some books. A house. His house. He tried the words in his head: my house. My-house. He barely knew how to say them. My house. He shivered.
“He wanted you to have it,” she said again. “It’s a bequest. You can’t argue against it. It’s happened. And it’s not any kind of a problem to me, I promise, OK?”
He nodded, slowly.
“OK,” he said. “OK, but weird. Really, truly weird.”
“You want coffee?” she asked.
He turned and focused on her face. He could get his own coffee machine. In his kitchen. In his house. Connected to the electricity. His electricity.
“Coffee?” she asked again.
“I guess,” he said.
She slid off the bed and found her shoes.
“Black, no sugar, right?”
She was standing there, naked except for her shoes. Patent, with heels. She saw him looking at her.
“Kitchen floor feels cold. I always wear shoes in there.”
“Forget the coffee, OK?”
THEY SLEPT IN her bed, all night, way past dawn. Reacher woke first and eased his arm out from under her and checked his watch. Almost seven. He had slept nine hours. The finest sleep of his life. The best bed. He had slept in a lot of beds. Hundreds, maybe even thousands. This was the best of all of them. Jodie was asleep beside him. She was on her front and had thrown the sheet off during the night. Her back was bare, all the way down to her waist. He could see the swell of her breast under her. Her hair spilled over her shoulders. One knee was pulled up, resting on his thigh. Her head was bent forward on the pillow, curving in, following the direction of her knee. It gave her a compact, athletic look. He kissed her neck. She stirred.
“Morning, Jodie,” he said.
She opened her eyes. Then she closed them, and opened them again. She smiled. A warm, morning smile.
“I was afraid I’d dreamed it,” she said. “I used to, once.”
He kissed her again. Tenderly, on the cheek. Then less tenderly, on t
he mouth. Her arms came around behind him and he rolled over with her. They made love again, the fourth time in fifteen years. Then they showered together, the first time ever. Then breakfast. They ate like they were starving.
“I need to go to the Bronx,” he said.
She nodded. “This Rutter guy? I’ll drive. I know roughly where it is.”
“What about work? I thought you had to go in.”
She looked at him, mystified.
“You told me you had hours to bill,” he said. “You sounded real busy.”
She smiled, shyly. “I made that up. I’m well ahead, really. They said I should take the whole week off. I just didn’t want to be hanging around with you, feeling what I was feeling. That’s why I just ran off to bed, the first night. I should have shown you the guest room, you know, like a proper little hostess. But I didn’t want to be alone in a bedroom with you. It would have driven me crazy. So near, but so far, you know what I mean?”
He nodded. “So what did you do in the office all day?”
She giggled. “Nothing. Just sat there all day, doing nothing.”
“You’re nuts,” he said. “Why didn’t you just tell me?”
“Why didn’t you just tell me?”
“I did tell you.”
“Eventually,” she said. “After fifteen years.”
He nodded. “I know, but I was worried about it. I thought you’d be hurt or something. I thought it would be the last thing you wanted to hear.”
“Same here,” she said. “I thought you’d hate me forever.”
They looked at each other and they smiled. Then they grinned. Then they laughed, and kept on laughing for five solid minutes.
“I’m going to get dressed,” she said, still laughing. He followed her through to the bedroom and found his clothes on the floor. She was halfway into her closet, selecting something clean. He watched her, and started wondering if Leon’s house had closets. No, if his house had them. Of course it did. All houses had closets, right? So did that mean he’d have to start assembling stuff to fill them all with?
She chose jeans and a shirt, dressed up with a leather belt and expensive shoes. He took his new jacket out to the hallway and loaded it with the Steyr from the sports bag. He poured twenty loose refills into the opposite pocket. All the metal made the jacket feel heavy. She came out to join him with the leather-bound folder. She was checking Rutter’s address.
“Ready?” she asked.
“As I’ll ever be,” he said.
He made her wait at every stage while he checked ahead. The exact same procedures he had used the day before. Her safety had felt important then. Now it felt vital. But everything was clean and quiet. Empty hallway, empty elevator, empty lobby, empty garage. They got in the Taurus together and she drove it around the block and headed back north and east.
“East River Drive to 1-95 OK with you?” she asked. “Going east, it’s the Cross Bronx Expressway.”
He shrugged and tried to recall the Hertz map. “Then take the Bronx River Parkway north. We need to go to the zoo.”
“The zoo? Rutter doesn’t live near the zoo.”
“Not the zoo, exactly. The Botanical Gardens. Something you need to see.”
She glanced sideways at him and then concentrated on driving. Traffic was heavy, just past the peak of rush hour, but it was moving. They followed the river north and then northwest to the George Washington Bridge and turned their backs on it and headed east into the Bronx. The expressway was slow, but the parkway north was faster, because it was leading out of town and New York was sucking people inward at that hour. Across the barrier, the southbound traffic was snarled.
“OK, where to?” she asked.
“Go past Fordham University. Past the conservatory, and park at the top.”
She nodded and made the lane changes. Fordham slid by on the left, and then the conservatory on the right. She used the museum entrance and found the lot just beyond it. It was mostly empty.
“Now what?”
He took the leather-bound folder with him.
“Just keep an open mind,” he said.
The conservatory was a hundred yards ahead of them. He had read all about it in a free leaflet, the day before. It was named for somebody called Enid Haupt and had cost a fortune to build in 1902, and ten times as much to renovate ninety-five years later, which was money well spent because the result was magnificent. It was huge and ornate, the absolute definition of urban philanthropy expressed in iron and milky white glass.
It was hot and damp inside. Reacher led Jodie around to the place he was looking for. The exotic plants were massed in huge beds bounded by little walls and railings. There were benches set on the edges of the walkways. The milky glass filtered the sunlight to a bright overcast. There was a strong smell of heavy damp earth and pungent blooms.
“What?” she asked. She was partly amused, partly impatient. He found the bench he was looking for and stepped away from it, close to the low wall. He stepped half a pace left, then another, until he was sure.
“Stand here,” he said.
He took her shoulders from behind and moved her into the same position he had just occupied. Ducked his head to her level and checked.
“Stand on tiptoes,” he told her. “Look straight ahead.”
She made herself taller and stared ahead. Her back was straight and her hair was spilled on her shoulders.
“OK,” he said. “Tell me what you see.”
“Nothing,” she said. “Well, plants and things.”
He nodded and opened the leather folder. Took out the glossy photograph of the gray emaciated Westerner, flinching away from his guard’s rifle. He held it out, arm’s length in front of her, just on the edge of her vision. She looked at it.
“What?” she asked again, half-amused, half-frustrated.
“Compare,” he said.
She kept her head still and flicked her eyes left and right between the photograph and the scene in front of her. Then she snatched the picture from him and held it herself, arm’s length in front of her. Her eyes widened and her face went pale.
“Christ,” she said. “Shit, this picture was taken here? Right here? It was, wasn’t it? All these plants are exactly the same.”
He ducked down again and checked once more. She was holding the picture so the shapes of the plants corresponded exactly. A mass of some kind of palm on the left, fifteen feet high, fronds of fern to the right and behind in a tangled spray. The two figures would have been twenty feet into the dense flower bed, picked out by a telephoto lens that compressed the perspective and threw the nearer vegetation out of focus. Well to the rear was a jungle hardwood, which the camera had blurred with distance. It was actually growing in a different bed.
“Shit,” she said again. “Shit, I don’t believe it.”
The light was right, too. The milky glass way above them gave a pretty good impersonation of jungle overcast. Vietnam is a mostly cloudy place. The jagged mountains suck the clouds down, and most people remember the fogs and the mists, like the ground itself is always steaming. Jodie stared between the photo and the reality in front of her, dodging fractionally left and right to get a perfect fit.
“But what about the wire? The bamboo poles? It looks so real.”
“Stage props,” he said. “Three poles, ten yards of barbed wire. How difficult is that to get? They carried it in here, probably all rolled up.”
“But when? How?”
He shrugged. “Maybe early one morning? When the place was still closed? Maybe they know somebody who works here. Maybe they did it while the place was closed for the renovations.”
She was staring at the picture, close up to her eyes. “Wait a damn minute. You can see that bench. You can see the corner of that bench over there.”
She showed him what she meant, with her fingernail placed precisely on the glossy surface of the photograph. There was a tiny square blur, white. It was the comer of an iron bench, off to the right, behind the
main scene. The telephoto lens had been framed tight, but not quite tight enough.
“I didn’t spot that,” he said. “You’re getting good at this.”
She turned around to face him. “No, I’m getting good and mad, Reacher. This guy Rutter took eighteen thousand dollars for a faked photograph.”
“Worse than that. He gave them false hope.”
“So what are we going to do?”
“We’re going to pay him a visit,” he said.
They were back at the Taurus sixteen minutes after leaving it. Jodie threaded back toward the parkway, drumming her fingers on the wheel and talking fast. “But you told me you believed it. I said the photo proved the place existed, and you agreed it did. You said you’d been there, not long ago, got about as close as Rutter had.”
“All true,” Reacher said. “I believed the Botanical Gardens existed. I’d just come back from there. And I got as close as Rutter did. I was standing right next to the little wall where he must have taken the picture from.”
“Jesus, Reacher, what is this? A game?”
He shrugged. “Yesterday I didn’t know what it was. I mean in terms of how much I needed to share with you.”
She nodded and smiled through her exasperation. She was remembering the difference between yesterday and today. “But how the hell did he expect to get away with it? The greenhouse in the New York Botanical Gardens, for God’s sake?”
He stretched in his seat. Eased his arms all the way forward to the windshield.
“Psychology,” he said. “It’s the basis of any scam, right? You tell people what they want to hear. Those old folks, they wanted to hear their boy was still alive. So he tells them their boy probably is. So they invest a lot of hope and money, they’re waiting on pins three whole months, he gives them a photo, and basically they’re going to see whatever they want to see. And he was smart. He asked them for the exact name and unit, he wanted existing pictures of the boy, so he could pick out a middle-aged guy roughly the right size and shape for the photo, and he fed them back the right name and the right unit. Psychology. They see what they want to see. He could have had a guy in a gorilla suit in the picture and they’d have believed it was representative of the local wildlife.”
