by Lee Child
Sheryl made no reply. She was either asleep, or pretending to be. O’Hallinan and Sark pulled the curtain and walked away to the desk. The doctor looked up at them. O’Hallinan shook her head.
“Complete denial,” she said.
“Walked into a door,” Sark said. “A door who was probably juiced up, weighs about two hundred pounds and swings a baseball bat.”
The doctor shook her head. “Why on earth do they protect the bastards?”
A nurse looked up. “I saw her come in. It was really weird. I was on my cigarette break. She got out of a car, way on the far side of the street. Walked herself all the way in. Her shoes were too big, you notice that? There were two guys in the car, watched her every step of the way, and then they took off in a big hurry.”
“What was the car?” Sark asked.
“Big black thing,” the nurse said.
“You recall the plate?”
“What am I, Mr. Memory?”
O’Hallinan shrugged and started to move away.
“But it’ll be on the video,” the nurse said suddenly.
“What video?” Sark asked.
“Security camera, above the doors. We stand right underneath it, so the management can’t clock how long we take out there. So what we see, it sees, too.”
The exact time of Sheryl’s arrival was recorded in the paperwork at the desk. It took just a minute to wind the tape back to that point. Then another minute to run her slow walk in reverse, backward across the ambulance circle, across the plaza, across the sidewalk, through the traffic, into the front of a big black car. O’Hallinan bent her head close to the screen.
“Got it,” she said.
JODIE CHOSE THE hotel for the night. She did it by finding the travel section in the nearest bookstore to the NPRC building. She stood there and leafed through the local guides until she found a place recommended in three of them.
“It’s funny, isn’t it?” she said. “We’re in St. Louis here, and the travel section has more guides to St. Louis than anyplace else. So how is that a travel section? Should be called the stay-at-home section.”
Reacher was a little nervous. This method was new to him. The sort of places he normally patronized never advertised in books. They relied on neon signs on tall poles, boasting attractions that had stopped being attractions and had become basic human rights about twenty years ago, such as air and cable and a pool.
“Hold this,” she said.
He took the book from her and kept his thumb on the page while she squatted down and opened her carry-on. She rooted around and found her mobile phone. Took the book back from him and stood right there in the aisle and called the hotel. He watched her. He had never called a hotel. The places he stayed always had a room, no matter when. They were delirious if their occupancy rates ever made it above 50 percent. He listened to Jodie’s end of the conversation and heard her mentioning sums of money that would have bought him a bed for a month, given a little haggling.
“OK,” she said. “We’re in. It’s their honeymoon suite. Four-poster bed. Is that neat, or what?”
He smiled. The honeymoon suite.
“We need to eat,” he said. “They serve dinner there?”
She shook her head and thumbed through the book to the restaurant section.
“More fun to go someplace else for dinner,” she said. “You like French?”
He nodded. “My mother was French.”
She checked the book and used the mobile again and reserved a table for two at a fancy place in the historic section, near the hotel.
“Eight o’clock,” she said. “Gives us time to look around a little. Then we can check in at the hotel and get freshened up.”
“Call the airport,” he said. “We need early flights out. Dallas-Fort Worth should do it.”
“I’ll do that outside,” she said. “Can’t call the airport from a bookstore.”
He carried her bag and she bought a gaudy tourist map of St. Louis and they stepped out into the heat of the late-afternoon sun. He looked at the map and she called the airline from the sidewalk and reserved two business-class seats to Texas, eight-thirty in the morning. Then they set out to walk the banks of the Mississippi where it ran through the city.
They strolled arm in arm for ninety minutes, which took them about four miles, all the way around to the historic part of town. The hotel was a medium-sized old mansion set on a wide, quiet street lined with chestnut trees. It had a big door painted shiny black and oak floors the color of honey. Reception was an antique mahogany desk standing alone in the corner of the hallway. Reacher stared at it. The places he normally stayed, reception was behind a wire grille or boxed in with bulletproof Plexiglas. An elegant lady with white hair ran Jodie’s card through the swipe machine and the charge slip came chattering out. Jodie bent to sign it and the lady handed Reacher a brass key.
“Enjoy your stay, Mr. Jacob,” she said.
The honeymoon suite was the whole of the attic. It had the same honey oak floor, thickly varnished to a high shine, with antique rugs scattered across it. The ceiling was a complicated geometric arrangement of slopes and dormer windows. There was a sitting room at one end with two sofas in pale floral patterns. The bathroom was next, and then the bedroom area. The bed was a gigantic four-poster, swathed in the same floral fabric and high off the ground. Jodie jumped up and sat there, her hands under her knees, her legs swinging in space. She was smiling and the sun was in the window behind her. Reacher put her bag down on the floor and stood absolutely still, just looking at her. Her shirt was blue, somewhere between the blue of a cornflower and the blue of her eyes. It was made from soft material, maybe silk. The buttons looked like small pearls. The first two were undone. The weight of the collar was pulling the shirt open. Her skin showed through at the neck, paler honey than the oak floor. The shirt was small, but it was still loose around her body. It was tucked deep into her belt. The belt was black leather, cinched tight around her tiny waist. The free end was long, hanging down outside the loops on her jeans. The jeans were old, washed many times and immaculately pressed. She wore her shoes on bare feet. They were small blue penny loafers, fine leather, low heels, probably Italian. He could see the soles as she swung her legs. The shoes were new. Barely worn at all.
“What are you looking at?” she asked.
She held her head at an angle, shy and mischievous.
“You,” he said.
The buttons were pearls, exactly like the pearls from a necklace, taken off the string and sewn individually onto the shirt. They were small and slippery under his clumsy fingers. There were five of them. He fiddled four of them out through their buttonholes and gently tugged the shirt out of the waistband of her jeans and undid the fifth. She held up her hands, left and right in turn, so he could undo the cuffs. He eased the shirt backward off her shoulders. She was wearing nothing underneath it.
She leaned forward and started on his buttons. She started from the bottom. She was dextrous. Her hands were small and neat and quick. Quicker than his had been. His cuffs were already open. His wrists were too wide for any storebought cuff to close over them. She smoothed her hands up over the slab of his chest and pushed the shirt away with her forearms. It fell off his shoulders and she tugged it down over his arms. It fell to the floor with the sigh of cotton and the lazy click of buttons on wood. She traced her finger across the teardrop-shaped burn on his chest.
“You bring the salve?”
“No,” he said.
She locked her arms around his waist and bent her head down and kissed the wound. He felt her mouth on it, firm and cool against the tender skin. Then they made love for the fifth time in fifteen years, in the four-poster bed at the top of the old mansion while the sun in the window fell away west toward Kansas.
THE NYPD’S DOMESTIC Violence Unit borrowed squad-room space wherever it could find it, which was currently in a large upstairs room above the administrative offices at One Police Plaza. O’Hallinan and Sark got back t
here an hour before the end of their shift. That was the paperwork hour, and they went straight to their desks and opened their notebooks to the start of the day and began typing.
They reached their visit to the St. Vincent’s ER with fifteen minutes to go. They wrote it up as a probable incident with a non-cooperative victim. O’Hallinan spooled the form out of her typewriter and noticed the Tahoe’s plate number scrawled at the bottom of her notebook page. She picked up the phone and called it in to the Department of Motor Vehicles.
“Black Chevrolet Tahoe,” the clerk told her. “Registered to Cayman Corporate Trust with an address in the World Trade Center.”
O’Hallinan shrugged to herself and wrote it all down in her notebook. She was debating whether to put the form back in the typewriter and add the information to it when the DMV clerk came back on the line.
“I’ve got another tag here,” he said. “Same registered owner abandoned a black Chevrolet Suburban on lower Broadway yesterday. Three-vehicle moving traffic incident. Fifteenth Precinct towed the wreck.”
“Who’s dealing with it? You got a name at Fifteenth?”
“Sorry, no.”
O’Hallinan hung up and called traffic in the Fifteenth Precinct, but it was shift change at the end of the day and she got no further with it. She scrawled a reminder to herself and dropped it in her in-tray. Then the clock ticked around to the top of the hour and Sark stood up opposite her.
“And we’re out of here,” he said. “All work and no play makes us dull people, right?”
“Right,” she said. “You want to get a beer?”
“At least a beer,” Sark said. “Maybe two beers.”
“Steady,” she said.
THEY TOOK A long shower together in the honeymoon suite’s spacious bathroom. Then Reacher sprawled in his towel on a sofa and watched her get ready. She went into her bag and came out with a dress. It was the same line as the yellow linen shift she’d worn to the office, but it was midnight blue and silk. She slipped it over her head and wriggled it down into place. It had a simple scoop neck and came just above the knee. She wore it with the same blue loafers. She patted her hair dry with the towel and combed it back. Then she went into the bag again and came out with the necklace he’d bought her in Manila.
“Help me with this?”
She lifted her hair away from her neck and he bent to fasten the clasp. The necklace was a heavy gold rope. Probably not real gold, not at the price he’d paid, although anything was possible in the Philippines. His fingers were wide and his nails were scuffed and broken from the physical labor with the shovel. He held his breath and needed two attempts to close the catch. Then he kissed her neck and she let her hair fall back into place. It was heavy and damp and smelled like summer.
“Well, I’m ready at least,” she said.
She grinned and tossed him his clothes from the floor and he put them on, with the cotton dragging against his damp skin. He borrowed her comb and ran it through his hair. In the mirror he caught a glimpse of her behind him. She looked like a princess about to go out to dinner with her gardener.
“They might not let me in,” he said.
She stretched up and smoothed the back of his collar down over the new exaggerated bulk of his deltoid muscle.
“How would they keep you out? Call the National Guard?”
It was a four-block walk to the restaurant. A June evening in Missouri, near the river. The air was soft and damp. The stars were out above them, in an inky sky the color of her dress. The chestnut trees rustled in a slight, warm breeze. The streets got busier. There were the same trees, but cars were moving and parking under them. Some of the buildings were still hotels, but some of them were smaller and lower, with painted signs showing restaurant names in French. The signs were lit with aimed spotlights. No neon anywhere. The place she’d picked was called La Prefecture. He smiled and wondered if lovers in a minor city in France were eating in a place called “the Municipal Offices,” which was the literal translation, as far as he recalled.
But it was a pleasant enough place. A boy from somewhere in the Midwest trying a French accent greeted them warmly and showed them to a table in a candlelit porch overlooking the rear garden. There was a fountain with underwater lighting playing softly and the trees were lit with spotlamps fastened to their trunks. The tablecloth was linen and the silverware was silver. Reacher ordered American beer and Jodie ordered Pernod and water.
“This is nice, isn’t it?” she said.
He nodded. The night was warm and still, and calm.
“Tell me how you feel,” he said.
She looked at him, surprised. “I feel good.”
“Good how?”
She smiled, shyly. “Reacher, you’re fishing.”
He smiled back. “No, I’m just thinking about something. You feel relaxed?”
She nodded.
“Safe?”
She nodded again.
“Me too,” he said. “Safe and relaxed. So what does that mean?”
The boy arrived with the drinks on a silver tray. The Pernod was in a tall glass and he served it with an authentic French water jug. The beer was in a frosted mug. No long-neck bottles in a place like this.
“So what does it mean?” Jodie asked.
She splashed water into the amber liquid and it turned milky. She swirled the glass to mix it. He caught the strong aniseed smell.
“It means whatever is happening is small,” he said. “A small operation, based in New York. We felt nervous there, but we feel safe here.”
He took a long sip of the beer.
“That’s just a feeling,” she said. “Doesn’t prove anything.”
He nodded. “No, but feelings are persuasive. And there’s some hard evidence. We were chased and attacked there, but nobody out here is paying any attention to us.”
“You been checking?” she asked, alarmed.
“I’m always checking,” he said. “We’ve been walking around, slow and obvious. Nobody’s been after us.”
“No manpower?”
He nodded again. “They had the two guys who went to the Keys and up to Garrison, and the guy driving the Suburban. My guess is that’s all they’ve got, or they’d be out here looking for us. So it’s a small unit, based in New York.”
She nodded.
“I think it’s Victor Hobie,” she said.
The waiter was back, with a pad and a pencil. Jodie ordered pate and lamb, and Reacher ordered soup and porc aux pruneaux, which had always been his Sunday lunch as a kid, anytime his mother could find pork and prunes in the distant places they were stationed. It was a regional dish from the Loire, and although his mother was from Paris she liked to make it for her sons because she felt it was a kind of shorthand introduction to her native culture.
“I don’t think it’s Victor Hobie,” he said.
“I think it is,” she said. “I think he survived the war somehow, and I think he’s been hiding out somewhere ever since, and I think he doesn’t want to be found.”
He shook his head. “I thought about that, too, right from the start. But the psychology is all wrong. You read his record. His letters. I told you what his old buddy Ed Steven said. This was a straight-arrow kid, Jodie. Totally dull, totally normal. I can’t believe he’d leave his folks hanging like that. For thirty years? Why would he? It just doesn’t jibe with what we know about him.”
“Maybe he changed,” Jodie said. “Dad always used to say Vietnam changed people. Usually for the worse.”
Reacher shook his head.
“He died,” he said. “Four miles west of An Khe, thirty years ago.”
“He’s in New York,” Jodie said. “Right now, trying to stay hidden.”
HE WAS ON his terrace, thirty floors up, leaning on the railing with his back to the park. He had a cordless phone pressed to his ear, and he was selling Chester Stone’s Mercedes to the guy out in Queens.
“There’s a BMW, too,” he was saying. “Eight-series coupe. It�
��s up in Pound Ridge right now. I’ll take fifty cents on the dollar for cash in a bag, tomorrow.”
He stopped and listened to the guy sucking in air through his teeth, like car guys always do when you talk to them about money.
“Call it thirty grand for the both of them, cash in a bag, tomorrow.”
The guy grunted a yes, and Hobie moved on down his mental list.
“There’s a Tahoe and a Cadillac. Call it forty grand, you can add either one of them to the deal. Your choice.”
The guy paused and picked the Tahoe. More resale in a four-wheel-drive, especially some way south, which is where Hobie knew he was going to move it. He clicked the phone off and went inside through the sliders to the living room. He used his left hand to open his little leather diary and kept it open by flattening it down with the hook. He clicked the button again and dialed a real estate broker who owed him serious money.
“I’m calling the loan,” he said.
He listened to the swallowing sounds as the guy started panicking. There was desperate silence for a long time. Then he heard the guy sit down, heavily.
“Can you pay me?”
There was no reply.
“You know what happens to people who can’t pay me?”
More silence. More swallowing.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “We can work something out. I got two properties to sell. A mansion up in Pound Ridge, and my apartment on Fifth. I want two million for the house, and three-point-five for the apartment. You get me that and I’ll write off the loan against your commission, OK?”
The guy had no choice but to agree. Hobie had him copy down the bank details in the Caymans and told him to wire the proceeds within a month.
“A month is pretty optimistic,” the guy said.
“How are your kids?” Hobie asked.
More swallowing.
“OK, a month,” the guy said.
Hobie clicked the phone off and wrote five million five hundred forty thousand dollars on the page where he had scored out three automobiles and two residences. Then he called the airline and inquired about flights to the coast, evening of the day after tomorrow. There was plenty of availability. He smiled. The ball was soaring right over the fence, heading for the fifth row of the bleachers. The outfielder was leaping like crazy, but he was absolutely nowhere near it.
