by Lee Child
But now she was changing her mind. She couldn’t wait any longer. Chester was killing himself with worry. So she was going to have to go ahead and do something about it. No use talking to him. His instinct was to conceal problems. He didn’t want to upset her. He would deny everything and the situation would keep on getting worse. So she had to go ahead and act alone. For his sake, as well as hers.
The obvious first step was to place the house with a realtor. Whatever the exact degree of trouble they were in, selling the house might be necessary. Whether it would be enough, she had no way of telling. It might solve the problem on its own, or it might not. But it was the obvious place to start.
A rich woman living in Pound Ridge like Marilyn has many contacts in the real estate business. One step down the status ladder, where the women are comfortable without being rich, a lot of them work for realtors. They keep it part-time and try to make it look like a hobby, like it was more connected with an enthusiasm for interior decoration than mere commerce. Marilyn could immediately list four good friends she could call. Her hand was resting on the phone as she tried to choose between them. In the end, she chose a woman called Sheryl, who she knew the least well of the four, but who she suspected was the most capable. She was taking this seriously, and her realtor needed to, as well. She dialed the number.
“Marilyn,” Sheryl answered. “How nice to talk to you. Can I help?”
Marilyn took a deep breath.
“We might be selling the house,” she said.
“And you’ve come to me? Marilyn, thank you. But why on earth are you guys thinking of selling? It’s so lovely where you are. Are you moving out of state?”
Marilyn took another deep breath. “I think Chester’s going broke. I don’t really want to talk about it, but I figure we need to start making contingency plans.”
There was no pause. No hesitation, no embarrassment.
“I think you’re very wise,” Sheryl said. “Most people hang on way too long, then they have to sell in a hurry, and they lose out.”
“Most people? This happens a lot?”
“Are you kidding? We see this all the time. Better to face it early and pick up the true value. You’re doing the right thing, believe me. But then women usually do, Marilyn, because we can handle this stuff better than men, can’t we?”
Marilyn breathed out and smiled into the phone. Felt like she was doing exactly the right thing, and like this was exactly the right person to be doing it with.
“I’ll list it right away,” Sheryl said. “I suggest an asking price a dollar short of two million, and a target of one-point-nine. That’s achievable, and it should spark something pretty quickly.”
“How quickly?”
“Today’s market?” Sheryl said. “With your location? Six weeks? Yes, I think we can pretty much guarantee an offer inside six weeks.”
DR. MCBANNERMAN WAS still pretty uptight about confidentiality issues, so although she gave up old Mr. and Mrs. Hobie’s address, she wouldn’t accompany it with a phone number. Jodie saw no legal logic in that, but it seemed to keep the doctor happy, so she didn’t bother arguing about it. She just shook hands and hustled back through the waiting area and outside to the car, with Reacher following behind her.
“Bizarre,” she said to him. “Did you see those people? In reception?”
“Exactly,” Reacher replied. “Old people, half-dead.”
“That’s what Dad looked like, toward the end. Just like that, I’m afraid. And I guess this old Mr. Hobie won’t look any different. So what were they up to together that people are getting killed over it?”
They got into the Bravada together and she leaned over from the passenger seat and unhooked her car phone. Reacher started the motor to run the air. She dialed information. The Hobies lived north of Garrison, up past Brighton, the next town on the railroad. She wrote their number in pencil on a scrap of paper from her pocketbook and then dialed it immediately. It rang for a long time, and then a woman’s voice answered.
“Yes?” the voice said, hesitantly.
“Mrs. Hobie?” Jodie asked.
“Yes?” the voice said again, wavering. Jodie pictured her, an old, infirm woman, gray, thin, probably wearing a flowery housecoat, gripping an ancient receiver in an old dark house smelling of stale food and furniture wax.
“Mrs. Hobie, I’m Jodie Garber, Leon Garber’s daughter.”
“Yes?” the woman said again.
“He died, I’m afraid, five days ago.”
“Yes, I know,” the old woman said. She sounded sad about it. “Dr. McBannerman’s receptionist told us at yesterday’s appointment. I was very sorry to hear about it. He was a good man. He was very nice to us. He was helping us. And he told us about you. You’re a lawyer. I’m very sorry for your loss.”
“Thank you,” Jodie said. “But can you tell me about whatever it was he was helping you with?”
“Well, it doesn’t matter now, does it?”
“Doesn’t it? Why not?”
“Well, because your father died,” the woman said. “You see, I’m afraid he was really our last hope.”
The way she said it, it sounded like she meant it. Her voice was low. There was a resigned fall at the end of the sentence, a sort of tragic cadence, like she’d given up on something long cherished and anticipated. Jodie pictured her, a bony hand holding the phone up to her face, a wet tear on a thin pale cheek.
“Maybe he wasn’t,” she said. “Maybe I could help you.”
There was a silence on the line. Just a faint hiss.
“Well, I don’t think so,” the woman said. “I’m not sure it’s the kind of thing a lawyer would normally deal with, you see.”
“What kind of thing is it?”
“I don’t think it matters now,” the woman said again.
“Can’t you give me some idea?”
“No, I think it’s all over now,” the woman said, like her old heart was breaking.
Then there was silence again. Jodie glanced out through the windshield at McBannerman’s office. “But how was my father able to help you? Was it something he especially knew about? Was it because he was in the Army? Is that what it was? Something connected with the Army?”
“Well, yes, it was. That’s why I’m afraid you wouldn’t be able to help us, as a lawyer. We’ve tried lawyers, you see. We need somebody connected with the Army, I think. But thank you very much for offering. It was very generous of you.”
“There’s somebody else here,” Jodie said. “He’s with me, right now. He used to work with my father, in the Army. He’d be willing to help you out, if he can.”
There was silence on the line again. Just the same faint hiss, and breathing. Like the old woman was thinking. Like she needed time to adjust to some new considerations.
“His name is Major Reacher,” Jodie said into the silence. “Maybe my father mentioned him? They served together for a long time. My father sent for him, when he realized he wouldn’t be able to carry on any longer.”
“He sent for him?” the woman repeated.
“Yes, I think he thought he would be able to come and take over for him, you know, keep on with helping you out.”
“Was this new person in the military police, too?”
“Yes, he was. Is that important?”
“I’m really not sure,” the woman said.
She went quiet again. She was breathing close to the phone.
“Can he come here to our house?” she asked suddenly.
“We’ll both come,” Jodie said. “Would you like us to come right away?”
There was silence again. Breathing, thinking.
“My husband’s just had his medication,” the woman said. “He’s sleeping now. He’s very sick, you know.”
Jodie nodded in the car. Opened and closed her spare hand in frustration.
“Mrs. Hobie, can’t you tell us what this is about?”
Silence. Breathing, thinking.
“I should let my husb
and tell you. I think he can explain it better than me. It’s a long story, and I sometimes get confused.”
“OK, when will he wake up?” Jodie asked. “Should we come by a little later?”
There was another pause.
“He usually sleeps right through, after his medication,” the old woman said. “It’s a blessing, really, I think. Can your father’s friend come first thing in the morning?”
HOBIE USED THE tip of his hook to press the intercom buzzer on his desk. Leaned forward and called through to his receptionist. He used the guy’s name, which was an unusual intimacy for Hobie, generally caused by stress.
“Tony?” he said. “We need to talk.”
Tony came in from his brass-and-oak reception counter in the lobby and threaded his way around the coffee table to the sofa.
“It was Garber who went to Hawaii,” he said.
“You sure?” Hobie asked him.
Tony nodded. “On American, White Plains to Chicago, Chicago to Honolulu, April fifteenth. Returned the next day, April sixteenth, same route. Paid by Amex. It’s all in their computer.”
“But what did he do there?” Hobie said, more or less to himself.
“We don’t know,” Tony muttered. “But we can guess, can’t we?”
There was an ominous silence in the office. Tony watched the unburned side of Hobie’s face, waiting for a response.
“I heard from Hanoi,” Hobie said, into the silence.
“Christ, when?”
“Ten minutes ago.”
“Jesus, Hanoi?” Tony said. “Shit, shit, shit.”
“Thirty years,” Hobie said. “And now it’s happened.”
Tony stood up and walked around behind the desk. Used
his fingers to push two slats of the window blind apart. A bar of afternoon sunlight fell across the room.
“So you should get out now. Now it’s way, way too dangerous.”
Hobie said nothing. He clasped his hook in the fingers of his left hand.
“You promised,” Tony said urgently. “Step one, step two. And they’ve happened. Both steps have happened now, for God’s sake.”
“It’ll still take them some time,” Hobie said. “Won’t it? Right now, they still don’t know anything.”
Tony shook his head. “Garber was no fool. He knew something. If he went to Hawaii, there was a good reason for it.”
Hobie used the muscle in his left arm to guide the hook up to his face. He ran the smooth, cold steel over the scar tissue there. Time to time, pressure from the hard curve could relieve the itching.
“What about this Reacher guy?” he asked. “Any progress on that?”
Tony squinted out through the gap in the blind, eighty-eight floors up.
“I called St. Louis,” he said. “He was a military policeman, too, served with Garber the best part of thirteen years. They’d had another inquiry on the same subject, ten days ago. I’m guessing that was Costello.”
“So why?” Hobie asked. “The Garber family pays Costello to chase down some old Army buddy? Why? What the hell for?”
“No idea,” Tony said. “The guy’s a drifter. He was digging swimming pools down where Costello was.”
Hobie nodded, vaguely. He was thinking hard.
“A military cop,” he said to himself. “Who’s now a drifter.”
“You should get out,” Tony said again.
“I don’t like the military police,” Hobie said.
“I know you don’t.”
“So what’s the interfering bastard doing here?”
“You should get out,” Tony said for the third time.
Hobie nodded.
“I’m a flexible guy,” he said. “You know that.”
Tony let the blind fall back into place. The room went dark. “I’m not asking you to be flexible. I’m asking you to stick to what you planned all along.”
“I changed the plan. I want the Stone score.”
Tony came back around the desk and took his place on the sofa. “Too risky to stick around for it. Both calls are in now. Vietnam and Hawaii, for Christ’s sake.”
“I know that,” Hobie said. “So I changed the plan again.”
“Back to what it was?”
Hobie shrugged and shook his head. “A combination. We get out, for sure, but only after I nail Stone.”
Tony sighed and laid his hands palm-up on the upholstery. “Six weeks is way, way too long. Garber already went to Hawaii, for Christ’s sake. He was some kind of a hotshot general. And obviously he knew stuff, or why would he go out there?”
Hobie was nodding. His head was moving in and out of a thin shaft of light that picked up the crude gray tufts of his hair. “He knew stuff, I accept that. But he took sick and died. The stuff he knew died with him. Otherwise why would his daughter resort to some half-assed private dick and some unemployed drifter?”
“So what are you saying?”
Hobie slipped his hook below the level of the desktop and cupped his chin with his good hand. He let the fingers spread upward, over the scars. It was a pose he used subconsciously, when he was aiming to look accommodating and unthreatening.
“I can’t give up on the Stone score,” he said. “You can see that, right? It’s just sitting there, begging to be eaten up. I give up on that, I couldn’t live with myself the whole rest of my life. It would be cowardice. Running is smart, I agree with you, but running too early, earlier than you really need to, that’s cowardice. And I’m not a coward, Tony, you know that, right?”
“So what are you saying?” Tony asked again.
“We do both things together, but accelerated. Because I agree with you, six weeks is way too long. We need to get out before six weeks. But we aren’t going without the Stone score, so we speed things up.”
“OK, how?”
“I put the stock in the market today,” Hobie said. “It’ll hit the floor ninety minutes before the closing bell. That should be long enough to get the message through to the banks. Tomorrow morning, Stone will be coming here all steamed up. I won’t be here tomorrow, so you’ll tell him what we want, and what we’ll do if we don’t get it. We’ll have the whole nine yards within a couple of days, tops. I’ll presell the Long Island assets so we don’t hit any delay out there. Meanwhile, you’ll close things down here.”
“OK, how?” Tony asked again.
Hobie looked around the dim office, all four corners.
“We’ll just walk away from this place. Wastes six months of lease, but what the hell. Those two assholes playing at being my enforcers will be no problem. One of them is wasting the other tonight, and you’ll work with him until he gets hold of this Mrs. Jacob for me, whereupon you’ll waste her and him together. Sell the boat, sell the vehicles, and we’re out of here, no loose ends. Call it a week. Just a week. I think we can give ourselves a week, right?”
Tony nodded. Leaned forward, relieved at the prospect of action.
“What about this Reacher guy? He’s still a loose end.”
Hobie shrugged in his chair. “I’ve got a separate plan for him.”
“We won’t find him,” Tony said. “Not just the two of us. Not within a week. We don’t have the time to go out searching around for him.”
“We don’t need to.”
Tony stared at him. “We do, boss. He’s a loose end, right?”
Hobie shook his head. Then he dropped his hand away from his face and came out from under the desktop with his hook. “I’ll do this the efficient way. No reason to waste my energy finding him. I’ll let him find me. And he will. I know what military cops are like.”
“And then what?”
Hobie smiled.
“Then he leads a long and happy life,” he said. “Thirty more years at least.”
“SO WHAT NOW?” Reacher asked.
They were still in the lot outside McBannerman’s long, low office, engine idling, air roaring to combat, the sun beating down on the Bravada’s dark green paint. The vents were angled a
ll over the place, and he was catching Jodie’s subtle perfume mixed in with the freon blast. Right at that moment, he was a happy guy, living an old fantasy. Many times in the past he’d speculated about how it would feel to be within touching distance of her when she was all grown up. It was something he had never expected to experience. He had assumed he would lose track of her and never see her again. He had assumed his feelings would just die away, over time. But there he was, sitting right next to her, breathing in her fragrance, taking sideways glances at her long legs sprawling down into the foot well. He had always assumed she would grow up pretty spectacular. Now he was feeling a little guilty for underestimating how beautiful she would become. His fantasies had not done her justice.
“It’s a problem,” she said. “I can’t go up there tomorrow. I can’t take more time out. We’re very busy right now, and I’ve got to keep on billing the hours.”
Fifteen years. Was that a long time or a short time? Does it change a person? It felt like a short time to him. He didn’t feel radically different from the person he had been fifteen years before. He was the same person, thinking the same way, capable of the same things. He had acquired a thick gloss of experience during those years, he was older, more burnished, but he was the same person. He felt she had to be different. Had to be, surely. Her fifteen years had been a greater leap, through bigger transitions. High school, college, law school, marriage, divorce, the partnership track, hours to bill. So now he felt he was in uncharted waters, unsure of how to relate to her, because he was dealing with three separate things, all competing in his head: the reality of her as kid, fifteen years ago, and then the way he had imagined she would turn out, and then the way she really had turned out. He knew all about two of those things, but not the third. He knew the kid. He knew the adult he’d invented inside his head. But he didn’t know the reality, and it was making him unsure, because suddenly he wanted to avoid making any stupid mistakes with her.
“You’ll have to go by yourself,” she said. “Is that OK?”
