by Lee Child
“Can’t do it,” he said. “They’ll throw me in jail.”
“We should,” she said again.
But she said it weakly. He shook his head and said nothing back. Watched her closely. She was a lawyer, but she was also Leon’s daughter, and she knew how things worked outside in the real world. She was quiet for a long spell, and then she shrugged helplessly and put her hand on her breastbone, like it was tender.
“You OK?” he asked her.
“You hit me kind of hard,” she said.
I could rub it better, he thought.
“Who were those guys?” she asked.
“The two who killed Costello,” he said.
She nodded. Then she sighed. Her blue eyes glanced left and right.
“So where are we going?”
He relaxed. Then he smiled. “Where’s the last place they’ll look for us?”
She shrugged. Took her hand off her chest and used it to smooth her hair.
“Manhattan?” she said.
“The house,” he said. “They saw us run, they won’t expect us to double back.”
“You’re crazy, you know that?”
“We need the suitcase. Leon might have made notes.”
She shook her head, dazed.
“And we need to close the place up again. We can’t leave the garage open. It’ll end up full of raccoons. Whole families of the bastards.”
Then he held up his hand. Put his finger to his lips. There was the sound of a motor starting up. Maybe a big V-8, maybe two hundred yards away. There was the rattle of big tires on a distant stony driveway. The burble of acceleration. Then a black shape flashed across their view. A big black jeep, aluminum wheels. A Yukon or a Tahoe, depending on whether it said GMC on the back, or Chevrolet. Two guys in it, dark suits, one of them driving and the other slumped back in his seat. Reacher stuck his head all the way out of the window and listened to the sound as it died to silence in the direction of town.
CHESTER STONE WAITED in his own office suite more than an hour, and then he called downstairs and had the finance director contact the bank and check on the operating account. It showed a one-point-one-million-dollar credit, wired in fifty minutes ago from the Cayman office of a Bahamas-owned trust company.
“It’s there,” the finance guy said. “You did the trick, chief.”
Stone gripped the phone and wondered exactly what trick he had done.
“I’m coming down,” he said. “I want to go over the figures.”
“The figures are good,” the finance guy said. “Don’t worry about it.”
“I’m coming down anyway,” Stone said.
He rode the elevator two floors down and joined the finance guy in his plush inner office. Entered the password and called up the secret spreadsheet. Then the finance guy took over and typed in the new balance available in the operating account. The software ran the calculation and came up exactly level, six weeks into the future.
“See?” the guy said. “Bingo.”
“What about the interest payment?” Stone asked.
“Eleven grand a week, six weeks? Kind of steep, isn’t it?”
“Can we pay it?”
The guy nodded confidently. “Sure we can. We owe two suppliers seventy-three grand. We got it, ready to go. If we lose the invoices, get them to re-submit, we free that cash up for a spell.”
He tapped the screen and indicated a provision against received invoices.
“Seventy-three grand, minus eleven a week for six weeks, gives us seven grand to spare. We should go out to dinner a couple of times.”
“Run it again, OK?” Stone said. “Double-check.”
The guy gave him a look, but he ran it again. He took out the one-point-one, ended up in the red, put it back in again, and ended up balanced. He canceled the provision against the invoices, subtracted eleven thousand every seven days, and ended the six-week period with an operating surplus of seven thousand dollars.
“Close,” he said. “But the right side of close.”
“How do we repay the principal?” Stone asked. “We need one-point-one million available at the end of the six weeks.”
“No problem,” the guy said. “I’ve got it all figured. We’ll have it in time.”
“Show me, OK?”
“OK, see here?” He was tapping the screen on a different line, where payments due in from customers were listed. “These two wholesalers owe us exactly one-point-one-seven-three, which exactly matches the principal plus the lost invoices, and it’s due exactly six weeks from now.”
“Will they pay on time?”
The guy shrugged. “Well, they always have.”
Stone stared at the screen. His eyes moved up and down, left and right.
“Run it all again. Triple-check.”
“Don’t sweat it, chief. It adds up.”
“Just do it, OK?”
The guy nodded. It was Stone’s company, after all. He ran it again, the whole calculation, beginning to end, and it came out just the same. Hobie’s one-point-one disappeared as the blizzard of paychecks cleared, the two suppliers went hungry, the interest got paid, the payments came in from the wholesalers, Hobie got his one-point-one back, the suppliers got paid late, and the sheet ended up showing the same trivial seven-thousand-dollar surplus in their favor.
“Don’t sweat it,” the guy said again. “It works out.”
Stone was staring at the screen, wondering if that spare seven grand would buy Marilyn a trip to Europe. Probably not. Not a six-week trip, anyway. And it would alert her. It would worry her. She’d ask him why he was making her go. And he’d have to tell her. She was very smart. Smart enough to get it out of him, one way or another. And then she would refuse to go to Europe, and she would end up lying awake every night for six weeks, too.
THE SUITCASE WAS still there, lying on the front lawn. There was a bullet hole punched in one end. No exit hole. The bullet must have gone through the leather, through the sturdy plywood carcass, and burned to a stop against the packed paper inside. Reacher smiled and carried it back to join Jodie over at the garage.
They left the jeep on the blacktop apron and went in the same way they had come out. Closed up the roller door and walked through to the breezeway. Locked the inside door behind them with the green key and walked through to the kitchen. Locked that door behind them and stepped past Jodie’s abandoned garment bag in the hallway. Reacher carried the suitcase into the living room. More space and more light there than in the den.
He opened the case and lifted the concertina files out onto the floor. The bullet fell out with them and bounced on the rug. It was a standard nine-millimeter Parabellum, full copper jacket. Slightly flattened on the nose from the impact with the old plywood, but otherwise unmarked. The paper had slowed it to a complete stop in the space of about eighteen inches. He could see the hole punched all the way through half the files. He weighed the bullet in his palm, and then he saw Jodie at the door, watching him. He tossed the bullet to her. She caught it, one-handed.
“Souvenir,” he said.
She juggled it like it was hot and dropped it in the fireplace. Joined him on the rug, kneeling hip to hip beside him in front of the mass of paper. He caught her perfume, something he did not recognize, but something subtle and intensely feminine. The sweatshirt was too big on her, large and shapeless, but somehow it emphasized her figure. The sleeves finished halfway down the backs of her hands, almost at her fingers. Her Levi’s were cinched in tight around her tiny waist with a belt, and her legs left them slightly empty. She looked fragile, but he could remember the strength in her arms. Thin, but wiry. She bent to look at the files, and her hair fell forward, and he caught the same soft smell he recalled from fifteen years previously.
“What are we looking for?” she asked.
He shrugged. “We’ll know when we find it, I guess.”
They looked hard, but they found nothing. There was nothing there. Nothing current, nothing significant. Just a mass o
f household paper, looking suddenly old and pathetic as it charted its way through a domestic life that was now over. The most recent item was the will, on its own in a separate slot, sealed into an envelope with neat writing on it. Neat, but slightly slow and shaky, the writing of a man just back from the hospital after his first heart attack. Jodie took it out to the hallway and slipped it into the pocket of her garment bag.
“Any unpaid bills?” she called.
There was a slot marked PENDING. It was empty.
“Can’t see any,” he called back. “There’ll be a few coming in, I guess, right? Do they come in monthly?”
She gave him a look from the doorway and smiled.
“Yes, they do,” she said. “Monthly, every month.”
There was a slot marked MEDICAL. It was overstuffed with receipted bills from the hospital and the clinic and sheaves of efficient correspondence from the insurance provider. Reacher leafed through it all.
“Christ, is that what this stuff costs?”
Jodie came back and bent to look.
“Sure it is,” she said. “Have you got insurance?”
He looked at her, blankly.
“I think maybe the VA gives it to me, at least for a period.”
“You should check it out,” she said. “Make sure.”
He shrugged. “I feel OK.”
“So did Dad,” she said. “For sixty-three and a half straight years.”
She knelt beside him again, and he saw her eyes cloud over. He laid his hand on her arm, gently.
“Hell of a day, right?” he said.
She nodded and blinked. Then she came up with a small, wry smile.
“Unbelievable,” she said. “I bury the old man, I get shot at by a couple of murderers, I break the law by failing to report so many felonies I can’t even count them, and then I get talked into hooking up with some wild man aiming to run some kind of a vigilante deal. You know what Dad would have said to me?”
“What?”
She pursed her lips and lowered her voice into a close imitation of Garber’s good-natured growl. “All in a day’s work, girl, all in a day’s work. That’s what he would have said to me.”
Reacher grinned back at her and squeezed her arm again. Then he leafed through the medical junk and picked out a letterhead.
“Let’s go find this clinic,” he said.
THERE WAS A lot of debate going on inside the Tahoe about whether they should go back at all. Failure was not a popular word in Hobie’s vocabulary. It might be better just to take off and disappear. Just get the hell out. It was an attractive prospect. But they were pretty sure Hobie would find them. Maybe not soon, but he would find them. And that was not an attractive prospect.
So they turned their attention to damage limitation. It was clear what they had to do. They made the necessary stops and wasted a plausible amount of time in a diner just off the southbound side of Route 9. By the time they had battled the traffic back down to the southern tip of Manhattan, they had their whole story straight.
“It was a no-brainer,” the first guy said. “We waited for hours, which is why we’re so late back. Problem was there was a whole bunch of soldiers there, kind of ceremonial, but they had rifles all over the place.”
“How many?” Hobie asked.
“Soldiers?” the second guy said. “At least a dozen. Maybe fifteen. They were all milling around, so it was hard to count them exactly. Some kind of honor guard.”
“She left with them,” the first guy said. “They must have escorted her down from the cemetery, and then she went back somewhere with them afterward.”
“You didn’t think to follow?”
“No way we could,” the second guy said. “They were driving slow, a long line of cars. Like a funeral procession? They’d have made us in a second. We couldn’t just tag on the end of a funeral procession, right?”
“What about the big guy from the Keys?”
“He left real early. We just let him go. We were watching for Mrs. Jacob. It was pretty clear by then which one she was. She stayed around, then she left, all surrounded by this bunch of military.”
“So what did you do then?”
“We checked the house,” the first guy said. “Locked up tight. So we went into the town and checked the property title. Everything’s listed in the public library. The place was registered to a guy called Leon Garber. We asked the librarian what she knew, and she just handed us the local newspaper. Page three, there was a story about the guy. Just died, heart trouble. Widower, only surviving relative is his daughter, Jodie, the former Mrs. Jacob, who is a young but very eminent financial attorney with Spencer Gutman Ricker and Talbot of Wall Street, and who lives on lower Broadway right here in New York City.”
Hobie nodded slowly, and tapped the sharp end of his hook on the desk, with a jittery little rhythm.
“And who was this Leon Garber, exactly? Why all the soldiers at his wake?”
“Military policeman,” the first guy said.
The second guy nodded. “Mustered out with three stars and more medals than you can count, served forty years, Korea, Vietnam, everywhere.”
Hobie stopped tapping. He sat still and the color drained out of his face, leaving his skin dead white, all except for the shiny pink burn scars that glowed vivid in the gloom.
“Military policeman,” he repeated quietly.
He sat for a long time with those words on his lips. He just sat and stared into space, and then he lifted his hook off the desk and rotated it in front of his eyes, slowly, examining it, allowing the thin beams of light from the blinds to catch its curves and contours. It was trembling, so he took it in his left hand and held it still.
“Military policeman,” he said again, staring at the hook. Then he transferred his gaze to the two men on the sofas.
“Leave the room,” he said to the second guy.
The guy glanced once at his partner and went out and closed the door softly behind him. Hobie pushed back in his chair and stood up. Came out from behind the desk and stepped over and stopped still, directly behind the first guy, who just sat there on his sofa, not moving, not daring to turn around and look.
He wore a size sixteen collar, which made his neck a fraction over five inches in diameter, assuming a human neck is more or less a uniform cylinder, which was an approximation Hobie had always been happy to make. Hobie’s hook was a simple steel curve, like a capital letter J, generously sized. The inside diameter of the curve was four and three-quarter inches. He moved fast, darting the hook out and forcing it over the guy’s throat from behind. He stepped back and pulled with all his strength. The guy threw himself upward and backward, his fingers scrabbling under the cold metal to relieve the gagging pressure. Hobie smiled and pulled harder. The hook was riveted to a heavy leather cup and a matching shaped corset, the cup over the remains of his forearm, the corset buckled tight over his bicep above his elbow. The forearm assembly was just a stabilizer. It was the upper corset, smaller than the bulge of his elbow joint, that took all the strain and made it impossible for the hook to be separated from the stump. He pulled until the gagging turned to fractured wheezing and the redness in the guy’s face began to turn blue. Then he eased off an inch and bent close to the guy’s ear.
“He had a big bruise on his face. What the hell was that about?”
The guy was wheezing and gesturing wildly. Hobie twisted the hook, which relieved the pressure on the guy’s voice box, but brought the tip up into the soft area under his ear.
“What the hell was that about?” he asked again.
The guy knew that with the hook at that angle any extra rearward pressure was going to put the tip right through his skin into that vulnerable triangle behind the jaw. He didn’t know much about anatomy, but he knew he was a half inch away from dying.
“I’ll tell you,” he wheezed. “I’ll tell you.”
Hobie kept the hook in position, twisting it every time the guy hesitated, so the whole true story took no lo
nger than three minutes, beginning to end.
“You failed me,” Hobie said.
“Yes, we did,” the guy gasped. “But it was his fault. He got all tangled up behind the screen door. He was useless.”
Hobie jerked the hook.
“As opposed to what? Like he’s useless and you’re useful?”
“It was his fault,” the guy gasped again. “I’m still useful.”
“You’re going to have to prove that to me.”
“How?” the guy wheezed. “Please, how? Just tell me.”
“Easy. You can do something for me.”
“Yes,” the guy gasped. “Yes, anything, please.”
“Bring me Mrs. Jacob,” Hobie screamed at him.
“Yes,” the guy screamed back.
“And don’t screw up again,” Hobie screamed.
“No,” the guy gasped. “No, we won’t, I promise.”
Hobie jerked the hook again, twice, in time with his words.
“Not we. Just you. Because you can do something else for me.”
“What?” the guy wheezed. “Yes, what? Anything.”
“Get rid of your useless partner,” Hobie whispered. “Tonight, on the boat.”
The guy nodded as vigorously as the hook would allow his head to move. Hobie leaned forward and slipped the hook away. The guy collapsed sideways, gasping and retching into the fabric on the sofa.
“And bring me his right hand,” Hobie whispered. “To prove it.”
THEY FOUND THAT the clinic Leon had been attending was not really a place in its own right, but just an administrative unit within a giant private hospital facility serving the whole of lower Putnam County. There was a ten-story white building set in parkland, with medical practices of every description clustered around its base. Small roads snaked through tasteful landscaping and led to little cul-de-sacs ringed with low offices for the doctors and the dentists. Anything the professions couldn’t handle in the offices got transferred to rented beds inside the main building. Thus the cardiology clinic was a notional entity, made up of a changing population of doctors and patients depending on who was sick and how bad they were. Leon’s own correspondence showed he had been seen in several different physical locations, ranging from the ICU at the outset to the recovery ward, then to one of the outpatient offices, then back to the ICU for his final visit.
