Lee Child - [Jack Reacher 01-16]

by Jack Reacher Series (epub)

  “Lane was covering his ass. Tying up the loose ends. And he was avoiding being in someone else’s debt. That was the main thing, really. Ultimately that was the true reason. A guy like Lane, his ego couldn’t take that, either. Being grateful to someone.”

  Silence in the room.

  “What happened to Knight in the end?” Reacher asked.

  “His fourth birthday,” Hobart said. “He didn’t go for the bucket. He didn’t want to go on. The pussy just quit on me. Some damn jarhead he was.”

  CHAPTER 42

  TEN MINUTES LATER Dee Marie Graziano got home. The squawk box in the hallway sounded and she asked for help carrying packages up the stairs. Reacher went down four flights and hauled four grocery bags back up to the apartment. Dee Marie unpacked them in the kitchen. She had bought a lot of soup, and Jell-O, and painkillers, and antiseptic creams.

  Reacher said, “We heard that Kate Lane had a visitor in the Hamptons.”

  Dee Marie said nothing.

  “Was it you?” Reacher asked.

  “I went to the Dakota first,” she said. “But the doorman told me they were away.”

  “So then you went.”

  “Two days later. We decided that I should. It was a long day. Very expensive.”

  “You went there to warn Anne Lane’s successor.”

  “We thought she should be told what her husband was capable of doing.”

  “How did she react?”

  “She listened. We walked on the sand and she listened to what I had to say.”

  “That was all?”

  “She took it all in. Didn’t react much.”

  “How definite were you?”

  “I said we had no proof. Equally I said we had no doubt.”

  “And she didn’t react?”

  “She just took it all in. Gave it a fair hearing.”

  “Did you tell her about your brother?”

  “It’s a part of the story. She listened to it. Didn’t say much. She’s beautiful and she’s rich. People like that are different. If it’s not happening to them, it’s not happening at all.”

  “What happened to your husband?”

  “Vinnie? Iraq happened to Vinnie. Fallujah. A roadside booby-trap.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “They told me he was killed instantly. But they always say that.”

  “Sometimes it’s true.”

  “I hope it was. Just that one time.”

  “The Corps or private?”

  “Vinnie? The Corps. Vinnie hated private contractors.”

  * * *

  Reacher left Dee Marie in the kitchen and stepped back into the living room. Hobart’s head was laid back and his lips were stretched in a grimace. His neck was thin and bulging with ligaments. His torso was painfully wasted and looked bizarrely long in proportion to the stumps of his limbs.

  “You need anything?” Reacher asked him.

  Hobart said, “Silly question.”

  “What would the three of clubs mean to you?”

  “Knight.”

  “How so?”

  “Three was his lucky number. Club was his nickname in the Corps. Because of how he liked to party, and because of the pun on his name. Knight Club, nightclub, like that. They called him Club, back in the day.”

  “He left a playing card on Anne Lane’s body. The three of clubs.”

  “He did? He told me that. I didn’t believe him. I thought it was embellishment. Like a book or a movie.”

  Reacher said nothing.

  “I need the bathroom,” Hobart said. “Tell Dee.”

  “I’ll do it,” Reacher said. “Let’s give Dee a break.”

  He stepped over and bunched the front of Hobart’s shirt and hauled him upright. Slipped an arm behind his shoulders. Ducked down and caught him under the knees and lifted him up off the sofa. He was incredibly light. Probably close to a hundred pounds. Not much of him left.

  Reacher carried Hobart to the bathroom and grabbed the front of his shirt again one-handed and held him vertical in the air like a rag doll. Undid his pants and eased them down.

  “You’ve done this before,” Hobart said.

  “I was an MP,” Reacher said. “I’ve done everything before.”

  * * *

  Reacher put Hobart back on the sofa and Dee Marie fed him more soup. Used the same damp cloth to clean his chin.

  Reacher said, “I need to ask you both one important question. I need to know where you’ve been and what you’ve been doing for the last four days.”

  Dee Marie answered. No guile, no hesitation, nothing phony or overrehearsed. Just a slightly incoherent and therefore completely convincing pieced-together narrative account of four random days from an ongoing nightmare. The four days had started with Hobart in Saint Vincent’s hospital. Dee Marie had taken him to the ER the night before with a severe malaria relapse. The ER doctor had admitted him for forty-eight hours of IV medication. Dee Marie had stayed with him most of the time. Then she had brought him home in a taxi and carried him on her back up the four flights of stairs. They had been alone in the apartment since then, eating what was in the kitchen cupboards, doing nothing, seeing nobody, until their door had smashed open and Reacher had ended up in the middle of their living room.

  “Why are you asking?” Hobart said.

  “The new Mrs. Lane was kidnapped. And her kid.”

  “You thought I did it?”

  “For a spell.”

  “Think again.”

  “I already have.”

  “Why would I?”

  “For revenge. For money. The ransom was exactly half the Burkina Faso payment.”

  “I would have wanted all of it.”

  “Me too.”

  “But I wouldn’t have gone after a woman and a kid.”

  “Me either.”

  “So why pick me out?”

  “We got a basic report on you and Knight. We heard about mutilations. No specific details. Then we heard about a guy with no tongue. We put two and two together and made three. We thought it was you.”

  “No tongue?” Hobart said. “I wish. I’d take that deal.” Then he said, “But no tongue is a South American thing. Brazil, Colombia, Peru. Maybe Sicily in Europe. Not Africa. You can’t get a machete in somebody’s mouth. Lips, maybe. I saw that, sometimes. Or ears. But not the tongue.”

  “We apologize,” Pauling said.

  “No harm, no foul,” Hobart said.

  “We’ll have the door fixed.”

  “I’d appreciate that.”

  “And we’ll help you if we can.”

  “I’d appreciate that, too. But see to the woman and the child first.”

  “We think we’re already too late.”

  “Don’t say that. It depends who took them. Where there’s hope, there’s life. Hope kept me going, five hard years.”

  * * *

  Reacher and Pauling left Hobart and Dee Marie right there, together on their battered sofa, the bowl of soup half-gone. They walked down four flights to the street and stepped out into the afternoon shadows of a fabulous late-summer day. Traffic ground past on the street, slow and angry. Horns blared and sirens barked. Fast pedestrians swerved by on the sidewalk.

  Reacher said, “Eight million stories in the naked city.”

  Pauling said, “We’re nowhere.”

  CHAPTER 43

  REACHER LED PAULING north on Hudson, across Houston, to the block between Clarkson and Leroy. He said, “I think the man with no tongue lives near this spot.”

  “Twenty thousand people live near this spot,” Pauling said.

  Reacher didn’t reply.

  “What now?” Pauling said.

  “Back to the hard way. We wasted some time, that’s all. Wasted some energy. My fault entirely. I was stupid.”

  “How?”

  “Did you see how Hobart was dressed?”

  “Cheap new denims.”

  “The guy I saw driving the cars away was wearing old denims. Both
times. Old, soft, washed, worn, faded, comfortable denims. The Soviet super said the same thing. And the old Chinese man. No way was the guy I saw just back from Africa. Or back from anywhere. It takes ages to get jeans and a shirt looking like that. The guy I saw has been safe at home for five years doing his laundry, not jammed up in some hellhole jail.”

  Pauling said nothing.

  “You can split now,” Reacher said. “You got what you wanted. Anne Lane wasn’t your fault. She was dead before you ever even heard of her. You can sleep at night.”

  “But not well. Because I can’t touch Edward Lane. Hobart’s testimony is meaningless.”

  “Because it’s hearsay?”

  “Hearsay is sometimes OK. Knight’s dying declaration would be admissible, because the court would assume he had no motive to lie from his deathbed.”

  “So what’s the problem?”

  “There was no dying declaration. There were dozens of random fantasies spun over a four-year period. Hobart chose to back one of them, that’s all. And he freely admits that both he and Knight were as good as insane most of the time. I’d be laughed out of court, literally.”

  “But you believed him.”

  Pauling nodded. “No question.”

  “So you can settle for half a loaf. Patti Joseph, too. I’ll drop by and tell her.”

  “Would you be happy with half a loaf?”

  “I said you can split. Not me. I’m not quitting yet. My agenda is getting longer and longer by the minute.”

  “I’ll stick with it, too.”

  “Your choice.”

  “I know. You want me to?”

  Reacher looked at her. Answered honestly. “Yes, I do.”

  “Then I will.”

  “Just don’t get all scrupulous on me. This thing isn’t going to be settled in any court of law with any dying declarations.”

  “How is it going to be settled?”

  “The first colonel I really fell out with, I shot him in the head. And so far I like Lane a lot less than that guy. That guy was practically a saint compared to Lane.”

  “I’ll come with you to Patti Joseph’s.”

  “No, I’ll meet you there,” Reacher said. “Two hours from now. We should travel separately.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m going to try to get killed.”

  * * *

  Pauling said she would be in the Majestic’s lobby in two hours and headed for the subway. Reacher started walking north on Hudson, not fast, not slow, center of the left-hand sidewalk. Twelve stories above him and ten yards behind his left shoulder was a north-facing window. It had heavy black cloth taped behind it. The cloth had been peeled back across a quarter of its width to make a tall narrow slit, as if a person in the room had wanted at least a partial view of the city.

  * * *

  Reacher crossed Morton, and Barrow, and Christopher. On West 10th he started zigzagging through the narrow tree-lined Village streets, east for a block, then north, then west, then north again. He made it to the bottom of Eighth Avenue and walked north for a spell and then started zigzagging again where the Chelsea side streets were quiet. He stopped in the lee of a brownstone’s front steps and bent down and retied his shoes. Walked on and stopped again behind a big square plastic trash bin and studied something on the ground. At West 23rd Street he turned east and then north again on Eighth. Stuck to the center of the left-hand sidewalk and slow-marched onward. Patti Joseph and the Majestic lay a little more than two miles ahead in a dead-straight line, and he had a whole hour to get there.

  * * *

  Thirty minutes later at Columbus Circle, Reacher entered Central Park. Daylight was fading. Shadows had been long, but now they were indistinct. The air was still warm. Reacher stuck to the paths for a spell and then he stepped off and walked a haphazard and unofficial route through the trees. He stopped and leaned against one trunk, facing north. Then another, facing east. He got back on the path and found an empty bench and sat down with his back to the stream of people walking past. He waited there until the clock in his head told him it was time to move.

  * * *

  Reacher found Lauren Pauling waiting in one of a group of armchairs in the Majestic’s lobby. She had freshened up. She looked good. She had qualities. Reacher found himself thinking that Kate Lane might have ended up looking like that, twenty years down the road.

  “I stopped by and asked that Russian super,” she said. “He’ll go over later tonight to fix the door.”

  “Good,” Reacher said.

  “You didn’t get killed,” she said.

  He sat down beside her.

  “Something else I got wrong,” he said. “I’ve been assuming there was inside help from one of Lane’s crew. But now I don’t think there can have been. Yesterday morning Lane offered me a million bucks. This morning when he lost hope he told me to find the bad guys. Seek and destroy. He was about as serious as a man can get. Anyone watching from the inside would have to assume I was pretty well motivated. And I’ve shown them that I’m at least partially competent. But nobody has tried to stop me. And they would try, wouldn’t they? Any kind of an inside ally would be expected to. But they haven’t. I just spent two hours strolling through Manhattan. Side streets, quiet places, Central Park. I kept stopping and turning my back. I gave whoever it might be a dozen chances to take me out. But nobody tried.”

  “Would they have been on your tail?”

  “That’s why I wanted to start between Clarkson and Leroy. That’s got to be some kind of a base camp. They could have picked me up there.”

  “How could they have done this whole thing without inside help?”

  “I have absolutely no idea.”

  “You’ll figure it out.”

  “Say that again.”

  “Why? You need inspiration?”

  “I just like the sound of your voice.”

  “You’ll figure it out,” Pauling said, low and husky, like she had been getting over laryngitis for the last thirty years.

  * * *

  They checked in at the desk and then rode up to seven in the elevator. Patti Joseph was out in the corridor, waiting for them. There was a little awkwardness when she and Pauling met. Patti had spent five years thinking Pauling had failed her sister, and Pauling had spent the same five years thinking pretty much the same thing. So there was ice to break. But the implied promise of news helped Patti thaw. And Reacher figured Pauling had plenty of experience with grieving relatives. Any investigator does.

  “Coffee?” Patti said, before they were even in through the door.

  “I thought you’d never ask,” Reacher said.

  Patti went to the kitchen to set up the machine and Pauling walked straight to the window. Looked at the stuff on the sill, and then checked the view. Raised her eyebrows in Reacher’s direction and gave a small shrug that said: Weird, but I’ve seen weirder.

  “So what’s up?” Patti called through.

  Reacher said, “Let’s wait until we’re all sitting down.” And ten minutes later they all were, with Patti Joseph in tears. Tears of grief, tears of relief, tears of closure.

  Tears of anger.

  “Where is Knight now?” she asked.

  “Knight died,” Reacher said. “And he died hard.”

  “Good. I’m glad.”

  “No argument from me.”

  “What are we going to do about Lane?”

  “That remains to be seen.”

  “I should call Brewer.”

  “Brewer can’t do anything. There’s truth here, but there’s no evidence. Not the kind that a cop or a prosecutor needs.”

  “You should tell the other guys about Hobart. Tell them what Lane did to their buddy. Send them down there to see for themselves.”

  “Might not work. They might not care. Guys that were likely to care wouldn’t have obeyed the order in Africa in the first place. And now, even if they did care, the best way to deal with their own guilt would be to stay in denial. They’ve had fiv
e years’ practice.”

  “But it might be worth it. To see with their own eyes.”

  “We can’t risk it. Not unless we know for sure ahead of time what their reactions would be. Because Lane will assume Knight spilled the beans in prison. Therefore Lane will see Hobart as a loose end now. And a threat. Therefore Lane will want Hobart dead now. And Lane’s guys will do whatever the hell Lane tells them to. So we can’t risk it. Hobart’s a sitting duck, literally. A puff of wind would blow him away. And his sister would get caught in the crossfire.”

  “Why are you here?”

  “To give you the news.”

  “Not here. In New York, in and out of the Dakota.”

  Reacher said nothing.

  “I’m not a fool,” Patti said. “I know what goes on. Who knows more than me? Who possibly could? And I know that the day after I stop seeing Kate Lane and Jade anymore, you show up and people put bags in cars and you hide in the back seat and you come here to interrogate Brewer about the last time one of Edward Lane’s wives disappeared.”

  Reacher asked, “Why do you think I’m here?”

  “I think he’s done it again.”

  Reacher looked at Pauling and Pauling shrugged like maybe she agreed Patti deserved to hear the story. Like somehow she had earned the right through five long years of fidelity to her sister’s memory. So Reacher told her everything he knew. Told her all the facts, all the guesses, all the assumptions, all the conclusions. When he finished she just stared at him.

  She said: “You think it’s real this time because of how good an actor he is?”

  “No, I think nobody’s that good of an actor.”

  “Hello? Adolf Hitler? He could work himself into all kinds of phony rages.”

  Patti stood up and stepped over to an armoire drawer and pulled out a packet of photographs. Checked the contents and tossed the packet into Reacher’s lap. A fresh new envelope. A one-hour service. Thirty-six exposures. He thumbed through the stack. Top picture was of himself, face-on, coming out of the Dakota’s lobby, preparing to turn toward the subway on Central Park West. Early this morning, he thought. The B train to Pauling’s office.