Tripwire

by Child, Lee

  Once his money was safe again, he went looking for doctors. There was a large supply in Bangkok. Gin-soaked remnants of an empire, fired from every other job they ever had, but reasonably competent on the days they were sober. There wasn’t much they could do with his face. A surgeon rebuilt his eyelid so it would almost close, and that was it. But they were thorough with his arm. They opened the wound again and filed the bones round and smooth. They stitched the muscle down and folded the skin over tight and sealed it all back up. They told him to let it heal for a month, and then they sent him to a man who built false limbs.

  The man offered him a choice of styles. They all involved the same corset to be worn around the bicep, the same straps, the same cup molded to the exact contours of his stump. But there were different appendages. There was a wooden hand, carved with great skill and painted by his daughter. There was a three-pronged thing like some kind of a gardening tool. But he chose the simple hook. It appealed to him, though he couldn’t explain why. The man forged it from stainless steel and polished it for a week. He welded it to a funnel-shaped steel sheet and built the sheet into the heavy leather cup. He carved a wooden replica of the stump and beat the leather into shape over it, and then he soaked it in resins to make it stiff. He sewed the corset and attached the straps and buckles. He fitted it carefully and charged five hundred American dollars for it.

  He lived out the year in Bangkok. At first the hook chafed and was clumsy and uncontrollable. But he got better with it. With practice, he got along. By the time he dug up the coffin again and booked passage to San Francisco on a tramp steamer, he had forgotten all about ever having two hands. It was his face that continued to bother him.

  He landed in California and retrieved the coffin from the cargo sheds and used a small portion of its contents to buy a used station wagon. A trio of frightened longshoremen loaded the coffin inside and he drove it cross-country all the way to New York City, and twenty-nine years later he was still there, with the Bangkok craftsman’s handiwork lying on the floor beside his bed, where it had lain every night for the last eleven thousand nights.

  He rolled over onto his front and reached down with his left hand and picked it up. Sat up in bed and laid it across his knees and reached out to take the baby’s sock from his nightstand. Ten past six in the morning. Another day of his life.

  WILLIAM CURRY WOKE up at six-fifteen. It was an old habit from working the day shift on the detective squads. He had inherited the lease on his grandmother’s apartment two floors above Beekman Street. It wasn’t a great apartment, but it was cheap, and it was convenient for most of the precinct houses below Canal. So he had moved in after his divorce and stayed there after his retirement. His police pension covered the rent and the utilities and the lease on his one-room office on Fletcher. So the income from his fledgling private bureau had to cover his food and his alimony. And then when he got established and built it up bigger, it was supposed to make him rich.

  Six-fifteen in the morning, the apartment was cool. It was shaded from the early sun by taller buildings nearby. He put his feet on the linoleum and stood up and stretched. Went to the kitchen counter and set the coffee going. Headed to the bathroom and washed up. It was a routine that had always gotten him to work by seven o’clock, and he stuck to it.

  He came back to the closet with coffee in his hand and stood there with the door open, looking at what was on the rail. As a cop, he had always been a pants-and-jacket type of guy. Gray flannels, checked sportcoat. He had favored tweed, although he wasn’t strictly Irish. In the summer, he had tried linen jackets, but they wrinkled too easily and he had settled on thin polyester blends. But none of those outfits was going to do on a day when he had to show up somewhere looking like David Forster, high-priced attorney. He was going to have to use his wedding suit.

  It was a plain black Brooks Brothers, bought for family weddings and christenings and funerals. It was fifteen years old, and being Brooks Brothers didn’t look a whole lot different from contemporary items. It was a little loose on him, because losing his wife’s cooking had brought his weight down in a hurry. The pants were a little wide by East Village standards, but that was OK because he planned on wearing two ankle holsters. William Curry was a guy who believed in being prepared. David Forster had said probably won’t be anything involved at all, and if it worked out that way he would be happy enough, but a twenty-year man from the NYPD’s worst years tends to get cautious when he hears a promise like that. So he planned on using both ankle holsters and putting his big .357 in the small of his back.

  He put the suit in a plastic cover he had picked up somewhere and added a white shirt and his quietest tie. He threaded the .357 holster onto a black leather belt and put it in a bag with the two ankle holsters. He put three handguns in his briefcase, the .357 long-barreled Magnum and two .38 snub-nosed Smith and Wessons for the ankles. He sorted twelve rounds for each gun into a box and packed it beside the guns. He stuffed a black sock into each of his black shoes and stowed them with the holsters. He figured he would get changed after an early lunch. No point in wearing the stuff all morning and showing up looking like a limp rag.

  He locked up the apartment and walked south to his office on Fletcher, carrying his luggage, stopping only to get a muffin, banana and walnut, reduced fat.

  MARILYN STONE WOKE up at seven o’clock. She was bleary-eyed and tired. They had been kept out of the bathroom until well after midnight. It had to be cleaned. The thickset guy in the dark suit did it. He came out in a bad temper and made them wait until the floor dried. They sat in the dark and the silence, numb and cold and hungry, too sickened to think about asking for something to eat. Tony made Marilyn plump up the sofa pillows. She guessed he planned to sleep there. Bending over in her short dress and preparing his bed was a humiliation. She patted the pillows into place while he smiled at her.

  The bathroom was cold. It was damp everywhere and smelled of disinfectant. The towels had been folded and stacked next to the sink. She put them in two piles on the floor and she and Chester curled up on them without a word. Beyond the door, the office was silent. She didn’t expect to sleep. But she must have, because she awoke with a clear sense of a new day beginning.

  There were sounds in the office. She had rinsed her face and was standing upright when the thickset guy brought coffee. She took her mug without a word and he left Chester’s on the ledge under the mirror. Chester was still on the floor, not asleep, just lying there inert. The guy stepped right over him on his way out.

  “Nearly over,” she said.

  “Just starting, you mean,” Chester said back. “Where do we go next? Where do we go tonight?”

  She was going to say home, thank God, but then she remembered he’d already realized that after about two-thirty they would have no home.

  “A hotel, I guess,” she said.

  “They took my credit cards.”

  Then he went quiet. She looked at him. “What?”

  “It’s never going to be over,” he said. “Don’t you see that? We’re witnesses. To what they did to those cops. And Sheryl. How can they just let us walk away?”

  She nodded, a small, vague movement of her head, and looked down at him with disappointment. She was disappointed because he finally understood. Now he was going to be worried and frantic all day, and that would just make it harder.

  IT TOOK FIVE minutes to get the knot in the necktie neat, and then he slipped his jacket on. Dressing was the exact reverse of undressing, which meant the shoes came last. He could tie laces just about as fast as a two-handed person. The trick was to trap the loose end under the hook against the floor.

  Then he started in the bathroom. He rammed all the dirty laundry into a pillowcase and left it by the apartment door. He stripped the bed and balled the linen into another pillowcase. He put all the personal items he could find into a supermarket carrier. He emptied his closet into a garment bag. He propped the apartment door open and carried the pillowcases and the carrier to th
e refuse chute. Dropped them all down and clanged the slot closed after them. Dragged the garment bag out into the hallway and locked up the apartment and put the keys in an envelope from his pocket.

  He detoured to the concierge’s desk and left the envelope of keys for the real-estate guy. Used the stairway to the parking garage and carried the garment bag over to the Cadillac. He locked it into the trunk and walked around to the driver’s door. Slid inside and leaned over with his left hand and fired it up. Squealed around the garage and up into the daylight. He drove south on Fifth, carefully averting his eyes until he was clear of the park and safe in the bustling canyons of Midtown.

  He leased three bays under the World Trade Center, but the Suburban was gone, and the Tahoe was gone, so they were all empty when he arrived. He put the Cadillac in the middle slot and left the garment bag in the trunk. He figured he would drive the Cadillac to LaGuardia and abandon it in the long-term parking lot. Then he would take a cab to JFK, carrying the bag, looking like any other transfer passenger in a hurry. The car would sit there until the weeds grew up under it, and if anybody ever got suspicious they would comb through the LaGuardia manifests, not JFK’s. It meant writing off the Cadillac along with the lease on the offices, but he was always comfortable about spending money when he got value for it, and saving his life was about the best value he could think of getting.

  He used the express elevator from the garage and was in his brass-and-oak reception area ninety seconds later. Tony was behind the chest-high counter, drinking coffee, looking tired.

  “Boat?” Hobie asked him.

  Tony nodded. “It’s at the broker’s. They’ll wire the money. They want to replace the rail, where that asshole damaged it with the cleaver. I told them OK, just deduct it from the proceeds.”

  Hobie nodded back. “What else?”

  Tony smiled, at an apparent irony. “We got more money to move. The first interest payment just came in from the Stone account. Eleven thousand dollars, right on time. Conscientious little asshole, isn’t he?”

  Hobie smiled back. “Robbing Peter to pay Paul, only now Peter and Paul are the same damn guy. Wire it down to the islands at start of business, OK?”

  Tony nodded and read a note. “Simon called from Hawaii again. They made the plane. Right now they’re over the Grand Canyon somewhere.”

  “Has Newman found it yet?” Hobie asked.

  Tony shook his head. “Not yet. He’s going to start looking this morning. Reacher pushed him into doing it. Sounds like a smart guy.”

  “Not smart enough,” Hobie said. “Hawaii’s five hours behind, right?”

  “It’ll be this afternoon. Call it he starts at nine, spends a couple of hours looking, that’s four o’clock our time. We’ll be out of here.”

  Hobie smiled again. “I told you it would work out. Didn’t I tell you it would work out? Didn’t I tell you to relax and let me do the thinking?”

  REACHER WOKE UP at seven o’clock on his watch, which was still set to St. Louis time as far as he could remember, which made it three o’clock in the morning back in Hawaii, and six in Arizona or Colorado or wherever they were seven miles above, and already eight in New York. He stretched in his seat and stood up and stepped over Jodie’s feet. She was curled in her chair, and a stewardess had covered her with a thin plaid blanket. She was fast asleep, breathing slow, her hair over her face. He stood in the aisle for a moment and watched her sleep. Then he went for a walk.

  He walked through business class, and on into coach. The lights were dimmed and it got more crowded the farther back he walked. The tiny seats were packed with people huddled under blankets. There was a smell of dirty clothes. He walked right down to the rear of the plane and looped around through the galley past a quiet huddle of cabin staff leaning on the aluminum lockers. He walked back up the other aisle, through coach, into business class. He paused there a second and scanned the passengers. There were men and women in suits, jackets discarded, ties pulled down. There were laptop computers open. Briefcases stood on unoccupied seats, bulging with folders with plastic covers and comb bindings. Reading lights were focused on tray tables. Some of the people were still working, late in the night or early in the morning, depending on where you measured it from.

  He guessed these were middle-ranking people. A long way from the bottom, but nowhere near the top. In Army terms, these were the majors and the colonels. They were the civilian equivalents of himself. He had finished a major, and might be a colonel now if he’d stayed in uniform. He leaned on a bulkhead and looked at the backs of the bent heads and thought Leon made me, and now he’s changed me. Leon had boosted his career. He hadn’t created it, but he had made it what it became. There was no doubt about that. Then the career ended and the drifting began, and now the drifting was ended, too, because of Leon. Not just because of Jodie. Because of Leon’s last will and testament. The old guy had bequeathed him the house, and the bequest had sat there like a time bomb, waiting to anchor him. Because the vague promise was enough to do it. Before, settling down had seemed theoretical. It was a distant country he knew he would never visit. The journey there was too long to manage. The fare was too high. The sheer difficulty of insinuating himself into an alien lifestyle was impossibly great. But Leon’s bequest had kidnapped him. Leon had kidnapped him and dumped him right on the border of that distant country. Now his nose was pressed right up against the fence. He could see life waiting for him on the other side. Suddenly it seemed insane to turn back and hike the impossible distance in the other direction. That would turn drifting into a conscious choice, and conscious choice would turn drifting into something else completely. The whole point of drifting was happy, passive acceptance of no alternatives. Having alternatives ruined it. And Leon had handed him a massive alternative. It sat there, still and amiable above the rolling Hudson, waiting for him. Leon must have smiled as he sat and wrote out that provision. He must have grinned and thought let’s see how you get out of this one, Reacher.

  He stared at the laptops and the comb-bound folders and winced inside. How was he going to cross the border of the distant country without getting issued with all this stuff? The suits and the ties and the black plastic battery-driven devices? The lizard-skin cases and the memorandums from the main office? He shuddered and found himself paralyzed against the bulkhead, panicking, not breathing, completely unable to move. He recalled a day not more than a year ago, stepping out of a truck at a crossroads near a town he had never heard of in a state he had never been. He had waved the driver away and thrust his hands deep in his pockets and started walking, with a million miles behind him and a million miles ahead of him. The sun was shining and the dust was kicking up off his feet as he walked and he had smiled with the joy of being alone with absolutely no idea where he was headed.

  But he also recalled a day nine months after that. Realizing he was running out of money, thinking hard. The cheapest motels still required some small amount of dollars. The cheapest diners, likewise. He had taken the job in the Keys, intending to work a couple of weeks. Then he had taken the evening job, too, and he was still working both of them when Costello came calling three whole months later. So the reality was that drifting was already over. He was already a working man. No point in denying it. Now it was just a question of where and how much and for who. He smiled. Like prostitution, he thought. No going back. He relaxed a little and pushed off the bulkhead and padded back through to first class.

  The guy with the striped shirt and the arms the same length as Victor Hobie’s was awake and watching him. He nodded a greeting. Reacher nodded back and headed for the bathroom. Jodie was awake when he got back to his seat. She was sitting up straight, combing her hair with her fingers.

  “Hi, Reacher,” she said.

  “Hey, Jodie,” he said back.

  He bent and kissed her on the lips. Stepped over her feet and sat down.

  “Feel OK?” he asked.

  She ducked her head in a figure eight to put her hair behind h
er shoulders.

  “Not bad. Not bad at all. Better than I thought I would. Where did you go?”

  “I took a walk,” he said. “I went back to see how the other half lives.”

  “No, you were thinking. I noticed that about you fifteen years ago. You always go walking when you have something to think about.”

  “I do?” he said, surprised. “I didn’t know that.”

  “Of course you do,” she said. “I noticed it. I used to watch every detail about you. I was in love with you, remember?”

  “What else do I do?”

  “You clench your left hand when you’re angry or tense. You keep your right hand loose, probably from weapons training. When you’re bored, you play music in your head. I could see it in your fingers, like you’re playing along on a piano or something. The tip of your nose moves a little bit when you talk.”

  “It does?”

  “Sure it does,” she said. “What were you thinking about?”

  He shrugged.

  “This and that,” he said.

  “The house, right?” she said. “It’s bothering you, isn’t it? And me. Me and the house, tying you down, like that guy in the book, Gulliver? You know that book?”

  He smiled. “He’s a guy gets captured by tiny little people when he’s asleep. They peg him down flat with hundreds of tiny little ropes.”

  “You feel that way?”

  He paused a beat. “Not about you.”

  But the pause had been a fraction of a second too long. She nodded.

  “It’s different than being alone, right?” she said. “I know, I was married. Somebody else to take into account all the time? Somebody to worry about?”

  He smiled. “I’ll get used to it.”

  She smiled back. “And there’s the house, right?”