by Lee Child
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 with 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 i
t backhanded with his left and pulled it into his body and folded himself around it with his right hand swinging up and into position.
By then Reacher was operating unconsciously and instinctively. He was nearly thirty-nine years old, and his memory stretched back through maybe thirty-five of those years to the dimmest early fragments of his childhood, and that memory was filled with absolutely nothing except military service, his father’s, his friends’ fathers’, his own, his friends’. He had never known stability, he had never completed a year in the same school, he had never worked nine to five, Monday to Friday, he had never counted on anything at all except surprise and unpredictability. There was a portion of his brain developed way out of all proportion, like a grotesquely over-trained muscle, which made it seem to him entirely reasonable that he should step out of a door in a quiet New York suburban town and glance down at two men he had last seen two thousand miles away in the Keys crouching and swinging nine-millimeter pistols up in his direction. No shock, no surprise, no gasping freezing fear or panic. No pausing, no hesitation, no inhibitions. Just instant reaction to a purely mechanical problem laid out in front of him like a geometric diagram involving time and space and angles and hard bullets and soft flesh.
The heavy suitcase was in his left hand, swinging forward as he labored with it over the threshold. He did two things at once. First he kept the swing going, using all the new strength in his left shoulder to kick the case onward and outward. Second he windmilled his right arm backward and shoved Jodie in the chest, smashing her back inside the hallway. She staggered back a step and the moving suitcase caught the first bullet. Reacher felt it kick in his hand. He jerked it right to the end of its swing, leaning out into the porch like a hesitant diver over a cold pool, and it hit the left-hand guy a glancing blow in the face. He was half up and half down, crouching, unstable, and the blow from the case rolled him over and backward and out of the picture.
But Reacher didn’t see him go down, because his eyes were already on the other guy looping around the screen with his gun about fifteen degrees away from ready. Reacher used the momentum of the swinging suitcase to hurl himself forward. He let the handle pull out through his hooked fingertips and flip him into a dive with his right arm accelerating back past him straight out across the porch. The gun swung around and smacked him flat on his chest. He heard it fire and felt the muzzle blast sear his skin. The bullet launched sideways under his raised left arm and hit the distant garage about the same time his right elbow hit the guy in the face.
An elbow moving fast ahead of 250 pounds of diving body weight does a lot of damage. It glanced off the frame of the screen and caught the guy in the chin. The shock wave went back and up through the hinge of the jaw, which is a sturdy enough joint that the force was carried undiminished up into the guy’s brain. Reacher could tell from the rubbery way he fell across his back that he was out for a spell. Then the screen door was creaking shut against its spring and the left-hand guy was scrabbling sideways across the porch floorboards for his gun, which was skittering away from him. Jodie was framed in the doorway, bent double, hands clasped to her chest, gasping for breath. The old suitcase was toppling end over end out onto the front lawn.
Jodie was the problem. He was separated from her by about eight feet, and the left-hand guy was between the two of them. If he grabbed the skittering gun and lined it up to his right, he would be lined up on her. Reacher heaved the unconscious guy out of the way and threw himself at the door. Batted the screen back and fell inside. Dragged Jodie a yard into the hallway and slammed the door shut. It kicked and banged three times as the guy fired after him and dust and wood splinters blasted out into the air. He clicked the lock and pulled Jodie across the floor to the kitchen.
“Can we get to the garage?”
“Through the breezeway,” she gasped.
It was June, so the storm windows were down and the breezeway was nothing but a wide passage with floor-to-ceiling screens on both sides. The left-hand guy was using an M9 Beretta, which would have started the day with fifteen rounds in the box. He’d fired four, one into the suitcase and three into the door. Eleven left, which was not a comforting thought when all that stood between you and them was a few square yards of nylon mesh.
“Car keys?”
She fumbled them out of her bag. He took them and closed them into his fist. The kitchen door had a glass panel with a view straight through the breezeway to an identical door exactly opposite, which led into the garage.
“Is that door locked?”
She nodded breathlessly. “The green one. Green for garage.”
He looked at the bunch of keys. There was an old Yale, dotted with a smear of green paint. He eased the kitchen door open and knelt and eased his head out, lower than would be expected. He craned around, both ways. No sign of the guy waiting outside. Then he selected the green key and held it pointed out in front of him like a tiny lance. Pushed to his feet and sprinted. Checked and slammed the key into the hole and turned it and yanked it back out. Pushed the door open and waved Jodie across after him. She fell into the garage and he slammed the door behind her. Locked it and listened. No sound.
The garage was a large, dark space, open rafters, open framing, smelling of old motor oil and creosote. It was full of garage things, mowers and hoses and lawn chairs, but they were all old things, the belongings of a man who stopped buying new gizmos twenty years ago. So the main doors were just manual rollers that ran upward in curving metal tracks. No mechanism. No electric opener. The floor was smooth poured concrete, aged and swept to a shine. Jodie’s car was a new Oldsmobile Bravada, dark green, gold accents. It was crouched there in the dark, nose-in to the back wall. Badges on the tailgate, boasting about four-wheel drive and a V-6 engine. The four-wheel drive would be useful, but how fast that V-6 started would be crucial.
“Get in the back,” he whispered. “Down on the floor, OK?”
She crawled in headfirst, and lay down across the transmission hump. He crossed the garage and found the key to the door out to the yard. Opened it up and peered out and listened. No movement, no sound. Then he came back to the car and slid the key in and switched on the ignition so he could rack the electric seat all the way back to the end of its runners.
“I’ll be there in a minute,” he whispered.
Garber’s tool area was as tidy as his desk had been. There was an eight-by-four pegboard with a full set of household tools neatly arranged on it. Reacher selected a heavy carpenter’s hammer and lifted it down. Stepped out of the door to the yard and threw the hammer overarm, diagonally right over the house, to send it crashing into the undergrowth he had seen at the front. He counted to five to give the guy time to hear it and react to it and run toward it from wherever he was currently hiding. Then he ducked back inside to the car. Stood alongside the open door and turned the key, arm’s length. Fired it up. The engine started instantly. He dodged backward and flung the roller door up. It crashed along its metal track. He threw himself into the driver’s seat and smashed the selector into reverse and stamped on the pedal. All four tires howled and then bit on the smooth concrete and the vehicle shot backward out of the garage. Reacher glimpsed the guy with the Beretta, way off to his left on the front lawn, spinning to look at them. He accelerated all the way up the driveway and lurched backward into the road. Braked fiercely and spun the wheel and found drive and took off in a haze of blue tire smoke.
He accelerated hard for fifty yards and then lifted off the gas. Coasted to a gentle stop just beyond the neighbor’s driveway. Selected reverse again and idled backward into it and down into the plantings. Straightened up and killed the motor. Behind him, Jodie struggled up off the floor and stared.
“Hell are we doing here?” she said.
“Waiting.”
“For what?”
“For them to get out of there.”
She gasped, halfway between outrage and astonishment.
“We’re not waiting, Reacher, we’re going straight to
the police with this.”
He turned the key again to give him power to operate the window. Buzzed it all the way down, so he could listen to the sounds outside.
“I can’t go to the police with this,” he said, not looking at her.
“Why the hell can’t you?”
“Because they’ll start looking at me for Costello.”
“You didn’t kill Costello.”
“You think they’ll be ready and willing to believe that?”
“They’ll have to believe it, because it wasn’t you, simple as that.”
“Could take them time to find somebody looks better for it.”
She paused. “So what are you saying?”
“I’m saying it’s all-around advantageous I stay away from the police.”
She shook her head. He saw it in the mirror.
“No, Reacher, we need the police for this.”
He kept his eyes on hers, in the mirror.
“Remember what Leon used to say? He used to say hell, I am the police.”
“Well, he was, and you were. But that was a long time ago.”
“Not so long ago, for either of us.”
She went quiet. Sat forward. Leaned toward him. “You don’t want to go to the police, right? That’s it, isn’t it? Not that you can’t, you just damn well don’t want to.”
He half turned in the driver’s seat so he could look straight at her. He saw her eyes drop to the burn on his shirt. There was a long teardrop shape there, a black sooty stain, gunpowder particles tattooed into the cotton. He undid the buttons and pulled the shirt open. Squinted down. The same teardrop shape was burned into his skin, the hairs frizzed and curled, a blister already puffing up, getting red and angry. He licked his thumb and pressed it on the blister and grimaced.
“They mess with me, they answer to me.”
She stared at him. “You’re totally unbelievable, you know that? You’re just as bad as my father was. We should go to the police, Reacher.”
