The Reacher Experiment

by Jude Hardin

  “I need to borrow your cell phone,” Wahlman said.

  “Did you find the card?”

  Wahlman nodded. He pulled the crumpled and stained business card out of his pocket and handed it to her, along with the magnifying glass.

  “See if you can make out the second to the last number,” he said. “In the meantime, there’s another call I need to make.”

  Wahlman actually needed to make two other calls before he tried Fake Drake. One to the front desk to check out of his room, and one to his bank to see why the hotel had rejected his debit card.

  Allison handed him her cell phone, and then she walked over to the nightstand to examine the business card under the lamp.

  Wahlman punched in the number for the front desk.

  “Guest services. May I help you?”

  “This is Rock Wahlman, four sixty-two. I’ve decided not to take the room after all.”

  “Is there a problem, sir?”

  “There’s no problem with the room. I have some urgent business back home, and I’m going to have to leave town sooner than expected.”

  “So you want to check out right now?”

  “Yes.”

  “You realize that your card will be charged for the full—”

  “I know,” Wahlman said. “That’s fine. Just go ahead and close everything out.”

  There was a pause and a flurry of keyboard clicks, and then the clerk cheerfully informed Wahlman that he had been checked out of the room and to please visit again soon and to have a nice day.

  Wahlman disconnected and punched in the 800 number for his bank. A robot asked him for his account number and personal identification number and gave him a list of things he could do over the phone, including the option to hold for a period of time that might exceed thirty minutes in order to speak to a real live human being.

  Wahlman didn’t feel like waiting. He felt like slamming the phone down on the floor and stomping it into a million pieces.

  Allison must have sensed his frustration.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  “They want me to stand here with my thumb up my ass for half an hour. This is why I usually do all my banking in person.”

  “If you want, I can put it on speakerphone while you wait.”

  He walked over to where she was standing and handed her the phone. She tapped the display screen a couple of times, activating a built-in stereo speaker system that you probably could have carried around on a dime. This time, Wahlman remembered the name of the song playing, a country blues number called “A Tomorrow Like Yesterday.” It was one of his favorites.

  “Thanks,” he said. “Were you able to make out that second-to-the-last digit on the back of the business card?”

  “I think it’s a two. But I’m not sure. Anyway, there are only ten possibilities. You can try one at a time until the guy you want to talk to picks up.”

  “Fake Drake.”

  “Yes. Fake Drake. You can use my room phone if you want to.”

  “I’m afraid the hotel will show up on his caller ID. I went ahead and checked out of my room, by the way. So I’ll need to stay here again tonight.”

  “Okay. Why are you calling your bank?”

  “There was a problem with my debit card. Don’t worry. I’ll get it straightened out.”

  “You’re still going to be able to pay me tomorrow, right?”

  “I hope so.”

  “What do you mean you hope so? You saw the kind of people I’m dealing with. I have to have that money.”

  “What were you planning to do before I made the offer to pay you?” Wahlman asked.

  “Beg for more time. But after what happened a while ago—”

  “Tanner’s not going to give you more time. Does he know where you’re staying?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Good. Anyway, there’s no reason to start panicking yet. I should be able to give you the money tomorrow. Then you can pay Tanner and be done with him.”

  “That’s what I thought was going to happen,” Allison said. “Now I’m getting nervous again.”

  The music coming from the phone stopped abruptly, replaced by a woman who apologized for the wait. She identified herself as Brenda and asked how she could be of assistance today.

  Allison tapped the speakerphone off, picked up the device and handed it to Wahlman.

  He put it to his ear.

  “I had some trouble with my debit card a while ago,” he said.

  “What kind of trouble?”

  “Insufficient funds. Which doesn’t make sense, because I know for a fact that there’s plenty of money in the account.”

  “What’s your account number?”

  Wahlman gave her the number, and a few seconds later she told him his balance.

  “That’s not right,” Wahlman said. “It’s off by about seven thousand dollars.”

  “I’m showing an online transfer of exactly seven thousand dollars at five-fourteen this morning.”

  “Transfer to where?”

  “Looks like a business account. It’s at another bank.”

  “I never authorized a transfer,” Wahlman said. “Someone stole my money.”

  “The only way that’s possible is if they knew your user name and password and the answers to your security questions. Do you know of anyone who might have had access to that information?”

  Wahlman did in fact know of someone who had access to that information. Mike Chilton. His best friend. The one person in the world he trusted unequivocally. House keys, passwords, insurance policies. He and Mike Chilton had each other’s back on all that stuff.

  Wahlman was still concerned about the money, but more than anything he was concerned about Mike. His immediate thought was that Fake Drake had gotten to him somehow.

  “I’m going to have to call you back,” Wahlman said.

  “That’s fine,” Brenda said. “I’ll be here until nine tonight.”

  She gave Wahlman her personal extension, told him that he still might have to wait on hold for a while, but that at least he wouldn’t be routed to a different representative.

  “Thanks,” Wahlman said.

  He disconnected and immediately tried to call Mike Chilton.

  No answer.

  He left a message, clicked off and handed the phone to Allison. She set it on the nightstand and plugged it into its charger.

  “What’s going on?” she asked.

  “I need to go to Florida,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “Someone transferred most of the money out of my account. I need to find out about that, and I need to make sure my friend Mike is okay.”

  “Why would your friend Mike not be okay?”

  “He’s the only person besides me who knows my password. I’m afraid—”

  “Maybe someone hacked into the account,” Allison said.

  “It’s possible. And Mike does have a habit of turning his phone off sometimes, so I’m not ready to go into panic mode just yet. Whatever the case, I need to go home and straighten everything out.”

  “Where in Florida do you live?”

  Wahlman told her the name of the town.

  “It’s inland,” he said. “Between Jacksonville and Gainesville.”

  “How far is that from here?”

  “About ten hours.”

  “What about me?”

  “I was thinking you might want to come with me.”

  Allison glanced toward the window. She took a deep breath.

  “Will we be back by tomorrow?” she asked.

  “I don’t see how.”

  “I need to give Tanner that money tomorrow.”

  “He might have to wait another day or two. Go ahead and get your stuff together. I’m going to walk downstairs and use one of the desktops to change my password.”

  Wahlman left the room and took the stairs down to the first floor. While he was down there, he used the payphone to call Detective Collins. He wanted to let h
im know he was leaving New Orleans for a couple of days, and he wanted to give him Allison’s cell phone number in case there were any new developments he needed to know about.

  He was especially interested in the results of the DNA tests. With recent advances in processing, preliminary results were usually available within twenty-four hours, and Wahlman was anxious to find out how he and Darrell Renfro—and Jack Reacher—were related.

  15

  Collins wasn’t in, so Wahlman left a message with the administrative assistant there in the office suite. The one with the short brown hair and the stylish glasses. Tori something or another.

  “I’ll be sure he gets the message,” she said.

  “Thanks,” Wahlman said.

  “No problem. Have a good one.”

  Wahlman disconnected, took the stairs back up to the fourth floor. As he approached Allison’s room, he noticed that the door was ajar. Not much, just a crack. Just a razor-thin slit, but enough to allow a wedge of light to spill out into the hallway, enough to subtly announce that the door had not been properly secured.

  Wahlman knew for a fact that he hadn’t left it that way.

  And he was fairly certain that Allison wouldn’t have left it that way.

  Which meant that there was a good possibility that someone else had been in the room.

  Or that someone else was still in the room.

  There was no way for Wahlman to know for sure who the someone else was, but three distinct possibilities immediately came to mind: NOPD detectives investigating the shooting at the sandwich shop, in which case Allison was probably very nervous but still physically okay; some more of Tanner’s hired muscle, in which case Allison was definitely very nervous and maybe not physically okay; assassins sent by Fake Drake, in which case Allison was dead.

  Wahlman pulled the .38 from his waistband, tiptoed to the threshold, leaned in and cupped his free hand against the painted steel door, hoping to hear the calm and reasonable voices of police detectives out searching for potential witnesses.

  Nothing.

  Total silence.

  Which meant that it wasn’t the cops. If it had been the cops, there would have been voices. Cops don’t hang around when there’s nothing left to say. Not in Wahlman’s experience. When there’s nothing left to say, cops leave. Every time. No exceptions.

  Which narrowed the distinct possibilities down to two: Tanner’s guys, or Fake Drake’s guys.

  Wahlman stepped back and pushed the door open a few inches with his finger.

  “Allison. You in there?”

  Nothing.

  Total silence.

  And then a click. Metallic. Like maybe a switchblade opening or a pair of handcuffs locking, or the hammer of a pistol being pulled back.

  Wahlman pushed the door all the way open with his foot, walked into the room with his arms outstretched, both hands wrapped tightly around the grips of the revolver, sweeping left and then right and then left again, sweeping past the drapes and the bed and the long wooden unit that served as a desk and a dresser and a TV stand, sweeping past the framed prints bolted to the walls and the vanity and the mirror in the little alcove that led to the bathroom, unable to determine the origin of the click, seeing nothing out of the ordinary except that Allison wasn’t there.

  Unless she was in the bathroom.

  Wahlman walked to the alcove and knocked on the door.

  “Rock? Is that you?”

  A sense of relief washed over Wahlman like a warm breeze.

  “Why was your door open?” he asked.

  “My door was open?”

  “Yeah. So instead of me moseying on in, it could have been—”

  “I can barely hear you. I’ll be out in a minute.”

  Wahlman slid the gun back into his waistband, walked over to the bed and sat down. Then he noticed that the door to the room was still open, so he got up and closed it. Remembering that there were still a couple of beers in the refrigerator, he walked over there and got one out and twisted the cap off and chugged about half of it on his way back to the bed. He sat down again and grabbed Allison’s cell phone from the nightstand and tried to call Mike Chilton. Still no answer.

  Allison walked out of the bathroom with a towel around her head.

  “I figured you’d be ready to go by now,” Wahlman said.

  “I’ve been feeling kind of icky since this morning, when I had to sit out in the car all that time. I thought I better take a shower before we hit the road.”

  “How’s your headache?”

  “Better. Thanks.”

  “Why was your door open?”

  “I don’t know. You must not have closed it all the way when you left the room a while ago.”

  “I closed it all the way.”

  “You’re sure about that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then I don’t know. Maybe the maid came by while I was in the—”

  Before Allison was able to finish her sentence, before she was able to say shower, the drapes parted and a man with a sound-suppressed semiautomatic pistol stepped forward and drilled two rounds into her chest.

  Wahlman rolled off the bed and hit the floor a split second before two more bullets thudded into the mattress. He grabbed the revolver from his waistband and raised it over the edge of the bed like a periscope and started firing in the general direction of the assailant, the reports from the .38 booming out like cannon fire in the enclosed space. Wahlman squeezed off all six rounds, reached into his pocket and pulled out a handful of shells, thinking it was useless, almost certain that he was going to die before he had a chance to reload, but doing it anyway, because there was no point in not doing it, no point in just lying there and waiting for the assassin to step around the corner of the bed and finish him off.

  Wahlman pushed the cartridges into the chambers one-by-one, his heart thumping like a boxer on a speed bag. He managed to load all six of the bullets, and then he waited and wondered why he wasn’t dead yet. A few seconds ticked by, and then a few more, and then Wahlman leaned up and peaked over the top of the mattress and saw that the bad guy was on the floor next to Allison and that the top of his skull was missing.

  Wahlman stood and walked over to Allison and checked her for a pulse, knowing just by looking at her that she didn’t have one but checking anyway, also knowing that the six shots he’d fired had made a lot of noise and that he needed to get out of there in a hurry.

  He took a deep breath, trying to think everything through, trying not to panic. The digital clock on the nightstand said 2:47. Which meant that there probably weren’t many people around. Especially on a Monday. The weekend crowd was long gone and the housekeeping associates had finished with their cleaning duties and the people checking in for the night weren’t in their rooms yet. The tourists in town for the week were out and about doing touristy things, and the business people were out and about pitching their crummy little products that nobody needed or sitting around bored out of their minds in a meeting somewhere or out doing whatever else those kinds of people did all day. The rooms seemed to be pretty well insulated, so it was possible nobody had noticed the six earsplitting shots from Wahlman’s gun.

  Possible, but there was no point in sticking around to find out.

  Wahlman grabbed Allison’s cell phone and charging cable and the business card with Fake Drake’s number on it from the nightstand and jammed it all into his pocket. He kicked the pistol away from the bad guy’s hand, bent over and picked it up and wiped the blood off with some tissues from the little chrome dispenser on the front of the vanity. He unzipped his suitcase and tossed the pistol in there and zipped it back up and grabbed it by the handle and walked to the door. He looked out the peephole, and then he opened the door and stepped out into the hallway and headed for the stairs.

  16

  It was almost two o’clock Tuesday morning by the time Wahlman made it to his house in Florida. He usually referred to the little place as a cabin, which he thought sounded marginall
y better than shack. Five hundred square feet, board-and-batten siding, metal roof. There was one small bedroom and a small living room and a small kitchen, and a bathroom with an enormous cast iron claw foot tub that was probably two hundred years old and probably weighed five hundred pounds. The exterior was situated so that the back of the house faced the road. There was no back door, but there was a window on the back side of the house, and Wahlman could see that the kitchen light he’d left on was still on.

  He stopped and got his mail out of the box, steered into the gravel driveway and around to the wooden deck in front. Switched the engine off and the headlights and sat there for a while and stared down the slope toward the lake, which was glistening calmly in the moonlight.

  For ten and a half hours he’d been wondering why the assailant had waited for Allison to come out of the bathroom before he attacked. At first Wahlman thought the guy must have been one of Fake Drake’s hit men, maybe part of the same team that had tried to kill him at the sandwich shop, maybe part of the same team that had been successful in killing Darrell Renfro out on I-10. But if that was the case, the way it went down didn’t make much sense. Why didn’t the assassin step out from behind the drapes and finish his business as soon as Wahlman walked into the room?

  So maybe it wasn’t one of Fake Drake’s guys after all. Maybe it was one of Tanner’s guys, out for revenge. But that didn’t make much sense either. Why kill Allison? Why kill someone who owes you money? Seemed like a good way to never get paid.

  After turning it over in his mind a thousand times, it seemed to Wahlman that he should be the one lying in a puddle of blood on the hotel room floor right now and that Allison should be the one still breathing. That was the way it seemed, but of course that wasn’t the way it was.

  He decided not to think about it anymore right now. He was exhausted. He needed sleep. Maybe he would be able to think a little more clearly in the morning.

  He got out of the truck and grabbed his suitcase from the back, climbed the four wooden steps and crossed the deck, unlocked the nice set of French doors he’d installed two years ago and walked inside. The cabin had that strange feel to it that all houses have after you’ve been away for a while, quiet and still and kind of foreign.