by Lee Child
“This is fun, isn’t it?” she said.
“For us, maybe,” he said. “Not for the Hobies.”
They made three trips together to three separate banks and wound up at a fourth, where she made the final deposit and bought a cashier’s check made out to Mr. T. and Mrs. M. Hobie in the sum of $19,650. The bank guy put it in a creamy envelope and she zipped it into her pocketbook. Then they walked back to Broadway together, holding hands, so she could pack for the trip. She put the bank envelope in her bureau and he got on the phone and established that United from JFK was the best bet for St. Louis, that time of day.
“Cab?” she asked.
He shook his head. “We’ll drive.”
The big V-8 made a hell of a sound in the basement garage. He blipped the throttle a couple of times and grinned. The torque rocked the heavy vehicle, side to side on its springs.
“The price of their toys,” Jodie said.
He looked at her.
“You never heard that?” she said. “Difference between the men and the boys is the price of their toys?”
He blipped the motor and grinned again. “Price on this was a dollar.”
“And you just blipped away two dollars in gas,” she said.
He shoved it in drive and took off up the ramp. Worked around east to the Midtown Tunnel and took 495 to the Van Wyck and down into the sprawl of JFK.
“Park in short-term,” she said. “We can afford it now, right?”
He had to leave the Steyr and the silencer behind. No easy way to get through the airport security hoops with big metal weapons in your pocket. He hid them under the driver’s seat. They left the Lincoln in the lot right opposite the United building and five minutes later were at the counter buying two business-class one-ways to St. Louis. The expensive tickets entitled them to wait in a special lounge, where a uniformed steward served them good coffee in china cups with saucers, and where they could read The Wall Street Journal without paying for it. Then Reacher carried Jodie’s bag down the jetway into the plane. The business-class seats were two-on-a-side, the first half-dozen rows. Wide, comfortable seats. Reacher smiled.
“I never did this before,” he said.
He slid into the window seat. He had room to stretch out a little. Jodie was lost in her seat. There was room enough for three of her, side by side. The attendant brought them juice before the plane even taxied. Minutes later they were in the air, wheeling west across the southern tip of Manhattan.
TONY CAME BACK into the office with a shiny red Talbot’s bag and a brown Bally carrier hanging by their rope handles from his clenched fist. Marilyn carried them into the bathroom and five minutes later Sheryl came out. The new skirt was the right size, but the wrong color. She was smoothing it down over her hips with vague movements of her hands. The new shoes didn’t match the skirt and they were too big. Her face looked awful. Her eyes were blank and acquiescent, like Marilyn had told her they should be.
“What are you going to tell the doctors?” Hobie called to her.
Sheryl looked away and concentrated on Marilyn’s script. “I walked into a door,” she said.
Her voice was low and nasal. Dull, like she was still in shock.
“Are you going to call the cops?”
She shook her head. “No, I’m not going to do that.”
Hobie nodded. “What would happen if you did?”
“I don’t know,” she replied. Blank and dull.
“Your friend Marilyn would die, in terrible pain. You understand that?”
He raised the hook and let her focus on it from across the room. Then he came out from behind the desk. Walked around and stood directly behind Marilyn. Used his left hand to lift her hair aside. His hand brushed her skin. She stiffened. He touched her cheek with the curve of the hook. Sheryl nodded, vaguely.
“Yes, I understand that,” she said.
I HAD TO be done quickly, because although Sheryl was now in her new skirt and shoes, Chester was still in his boxers and undershirt. Tony made them both wait in reception until the freight elevator arrived, and then he hustled them along the corridor and inside. He stepped out in the garage and scanned ahead. Hustled them over to the Tahoe and pushed Chester into the backseat and Sheryl into the front. He fired it up and locked the doors. Took off up the ramp and out to the street.
He could recall offhand maybe two dozen hospitals in Manhattan, and as far as he knew most of them had emergency rooms. His instinct was to drive all the way north, maybe up to Mount Sinai on 100th Street, because he felt it would be safer to put some distance between themselves and wherever Sheryl was going to be. But they were tight for time. To drive all the way uptown and back was going to take an hour, maybe more. An hour they couldn’t spare. So he decided on St. Vincent’s on Eleventh Street and Seventh Avenue. Bellevue, over on Twenty-seventh and First, was better geographically, but Bellevue was usually swarming with cops, for one reason or another. That was his experience. They practically lived there. So St. Vincent’s it would be. And he knew St. Vincent’s had a big, wide area facing the ER entrance, where Greenwich Avenue sliced across Seventh. He remembered the layout from when they had gone out to capture Costello’s secretary. A big, wide area, almost like a plaza. They could watch her all the way inside, without having to stop too close.
The drive took eight minutes. He eased into the curb on the west side of Seventh and clicked the button to unlock the doors.
“Out,” he said.
She opened the door and slid down to the sidewalk. Stood there, uncertain. Then she moved away to the crosswalk, without looking back. Tony leaned over and slammed the door behind her. Turned in his seat toward Stone.
“So watch her,” he said.
Stone was already watching her. He saw the traffic stop and the walk light change. He saw her step forward with the crowd, dazed. She walked slower than the others, shuffling in her big shoes. Her hand was up at her face, masking it. She reached the opposite sidewalk well after the walk light changed back to DON’T. An impatient truck pulled right and eased around her. She walked on toward the hospital entrance. Across the wide sidewalk. Then she was in the ambulance circle. A pair of double doors ahead of her. Scarred, floppy plastic doors. A trio of nurses standing next to them, on their cigarette break, smoking. She walked past the nurses, straight to the doors, slowly. She pushed at them, tentatively, both hands. They opened. She stepped inside. The doors fell shut behind her.
“OK, you see that?”
Stone nodded. “Yes, I saw it. She’s inside.”
Tony checked his mirror and fought his way out into the traffic stream. By the time he was a hundred yards south, Sheryl was waiting in the triage line, going over and over in her head what Marilyn had told her to do.
IT WAS A short and cheap cab ride from the St. Louis Airport to the National Personnel Records Center building, and familiar territory for Reacher. Most of his Stateside tours of duty had involved at least one trip through the archives, searching backward in time for one thing or another. But this time, it was going to be different. He would be going in as a civilian. Not the same thing as going in dressed in a major’s uniform. Not the same thing at all. He was clear on that.
Public access is controlled by the counter staff in the lobby. The whole archive is technically part of the public record, but the staff take a lot of trouble to keep that fact well obscured. In the past Reacher had agreed with that tactic, no hesitation. Military records can be very frank, and they need to be read and interpreted in strict context. He’d always been very happy they were kept away from the public. But now he was the public, and he was wondering how it was going to play. There were millions of files piled up in dozens of huge storerooms, and it would be very easy to wait days or weeks before anything got found, even with the staff running around like crazy and looking exactly like they were doing their absolute best. He had seen it happen before, from the inside, many times. It was a very plausible act. He had watched it, with a wry smile on his face.
The forms were access requests. Jodie filled in her last name as Jacob and requested all and any information on Major Jack-none-Reacher, U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Division. Reacher took the pencil from her and asked for all and any information on Lieutenant General Leon Jerome Garber. He slid both forms back to the master sergeant, who glanced at them and dropped them in her out-tray. She rang a bell at her elbow and went back to work. The idea was some private would hear the bell, come pick up the forms, and start the patient search for the files.
“Who’s working supervisor today?” Reacher asked.
It was a direct question. The sergeant looked for a way to avoid answering it, but she couldn’t find one.
“Major Theodore Conrad,” she said, reluctantly.
Reacher nodded. Conrad? Not a name he recalled.
“Would you tell him we’d like to meet with him, just briefly? And would you have those files delivered to his office?”
The way he said it was exactly halfway between a pleasant, polite request and an unspoken command. It was a tone of voice he had always found very useful with master sergeants. The woman picked up the phone and made the call.
“He’ll have you shown upstairs,” she said, like in her opinion she was amazed Conrad was doing them such a massive favor.
“No need,” Reacher said. “I know where it is. I’ve been there before.”
He showed Jodie the way, up the stairs from the lobby to a spacious office on the second floor. Major Theodore Conrad was waiting at the door. Hot-weather uniform, his name on an acetate plate above his breast pocket. He looked like a friendly guy, but maybe slightly soured by his posting. He was about forty-five, and to still be a major on the second floor of the NPRC at forty-five meant he was going nowhere in a hurry. He paused, because a private was racing along the hallway toward him with two thick files in his hand. Reacher smiled to himself. They were getting the A-grade service. When this place wanted to be quick, it could be real quick. Conrad took the files and dismissed the runner.
“So what can I do for you folks?” he asked. His accent was slow and muddy, like the Mississippi where it originated, but it was hospitable enough.
“Well, we need your best help, Major,” Reacher said. “And we’re hoping if you read those files, maybe you’ll feel willing to give it up.”
Conrad glanced at the files in his hand and stood aside and ushered them into his office. It was a quiet, paneled space. He showed them to a matched pair of leather armchairs and stepped around his desk. Sat down and squared the files on his blotter, one on top of the other. Opened the first, which was Leon’s, and started skimming.
It took him ten minutes to see what he needed. Reacher and Jodie sat and gazed out of the window. The city baked under a white sun. Conrad finished with the files and studied the names on the request forms. Then he glanced up.
“Two very fine records,” he said. “Very, very impressive. And I get the point. You’re obviously Jack-none-Reacher himself, and I’m guessing Mrs. Jodie Jacob here is the Jodie Garber referred to in the file as the general’s daughter. Am I right?”
Jodie nodded and smiled.
“I thought so,” Conrad said. “And you think being family, so to speak, will buy you better and faster access to the archive?”
Reacher shook his head solemnly.
“It never crossed our minds,” he said. “We know all access requests are treated with absolute equality.”
Conrad smiled, and then he laughed out loud.
“You kept a straight face,” he said. “Very, very good. You play much poker? You damn well should, you know. So how can I help you folks?”
“We need what you’ve got on a Victor Truman Hobie,” Reacher said.
“Vietnam?”
“You familiar with him?” Reacher asked, surprised.
Conrad looked blank. “Never heard of him. But with Truman for a middle name, he was born somewhere between 1945 and 1952, wasn’t he? Which makes him too young for Korea and too old for the Gulf.”
Reacher nodded. He was starting to like Theodore Conrad. He was a sharp guy. He would have liked to pull his file to see what was keeping him a major, behind a desk out in Missouri at the age of forty-five.
“We’ll work in here,” Conrad said. “My pleasure.”
He picked up the phone and called directly to the storerooms, bypassing the master sergeant at the front desk. He winked at Reacher and ordered up the Hobie file. Then they sat in comfortable silence until the runner came in with the folder five minutes later.
“That was quick,” Jodie said.
“Actually it was a little slow,” Conrad said back. “Think about it from the private’s point of view. He hears me say H for Hobie, he runs to the H section, he locates the file by first and middle initials, he grabs it, he runs up here with it. My people are subject to the Army’s normal standards for physical fitness, which means he could probably run most of a mile in five minutes. And although this is a very big place, there was a lot less than a mile to cover in the triangle between his desk and the H section and this office, believe me. So he was actually a little slow. I suspect the master sergeant interrupted him, just to frustrate me.”
Victor Hobie’s file jacket was old and furred, with a printed grid on the cover where access requests were noted in neat handwriting. There were only two. Conrad traced the names with a finger.
“Requests by telephone,” he said. “General Garber himself, in March of this year. And somebody called Costello, calling from New York, beginning of last week. Why all the sudden interest?”
“That’s what we hope to find out,” Reacher said.
A combat soldier has a thick file, especially a combat soldier who did his fighting thirty years ago. Three decades is long enough for every report and every note to end up in exactly the right place. Victor Hobie’s paperwork was a compressed mass about two inches deep. The old furred jacket was molded tight around it. It reminded Reacher of Costello’s black leather wallet, which he’d seen in the Keys bar. He hitched his chair closer to Jodie’s and closer to the front edge of Conrad’s desk. Conrad laid the file down and reversed it on the shiny wood and opened it up, like he was displaying a rare treasure to interested connoisseurs.
MARILYN’S INSTRUCTIONS HAD been precise, and Sheryl followed them to the letter. The first step was get treatment. She went to the desk and then waited on a hard plastic chair in the triage bay. The St. Vincent’s ER was less busy than it sometimes is and she was seen within ten minutes by a woman doctor young enough to be her daughter.
“How did this happen?” the doctor asked.
“I walked into a door,” Sheryl said.
The doctor led her to a curtained area and sat her down on the examination table. Started checking the reflex responses in her limbs.
“A door? You absolutely sure about that?”
Sheryl nodded. Stuck to her story. Marilyn was counting on her to do that.
“It was half-open. I turned around, just didn’t see it.”
The doctor said nothing and shone a light into Sheryl’s left eye, then her right.
“Any blurring of your vision?”
Sheryl nodded. “A little.”
“Headache?”
“Like you wouldn’t believe.”
The doctor paused and studied the admission form.
“OK, we need X rays of the facial bones, obviously, but I also want a full skull film and a CAT scan. We need to see what exactly happened in there. Your insurance
is good, so I’m going to get a surgeon to take a look at you right away, because if you’re going to need reconstructive work it’s a lot better to start on that sooner rather than later, OK? So you need to get into a gown and lie down. Then I’ll put you on a painkiller to help with the headache.”
Sheryl heard Marilyn insist make the call before the painkiller, or you’ll fuzz out and forget.
“I need to get to a phone,” she said, worried.
“We can call your husband, if you want,” the doctor said, neutrally.
“No, I’m not married. It’s a lawyer. I need to call somebody’s lawyer.”
The doctor looked at her and shrugged.
“OK, down the hall. But be quick.”
Sheryl walked to the bank of phones opposite the triage bay. She called the operator and asked for collect, like Marilyn had told her to. Repeated the number she’d memorized. The phone was answered on the second ring.
“Forster and Abelstein,” a bright voice said. “How may we help you?”
“I’m calling on behalf of Mr. Chester Stone,” Sheryl said. “I need to speak with his attorney.”
“That would be Mr. Forster himself,” the bright voice said. “Please hold.”
While Sheryl was listening to the hold music, the doctor was twenty feet away, at the main desk, also making a call. Her call featured no music. Her call was to the NYPD’s Domestic Violence Unit.
“This is St. Vincent’s,” she was saying. ”I’ve got another one for you. This one says she walked into a damn door. Won’t even admit she’s married, much less he’s beating on her. You can come on down and talk to her anytime you want.”
THE FIRST ITEM in the file was Victor Hobie’s original application to join the Army. It was brown at the edges and crisp with age, handwritten in the same neat left-handed schoolboy script they had seen in the letters home to Brighton. It listed a summary of his education, his desire to fly helicopters, and not very much else. On the face of it, not an obvious rising star. But around that time for every one boy stepping up to volunteer, there were two dozen others buying one-way tickets on the Greyhound to Canada, so the Army recruiters had grabbed Hobie with both hands and sent him straight to the doctor.
