The Hard Way Part 26

PAULING ASKED, "Did Knight confess that to you directly?"

Hobart didn't answer. Just waved the stump of his right wrist, weakly, vaguely, a dismissive little gesture.

"Did Knight confess to killing Anne Lane?"

Hobart said, "He confessed to about a hundred thousand different things." Then he smiled, ruefully. "You had to be there. You had to know how it was. Knight was raving for four years. He was completely out of his mind for three. Me too, probably."

"So how was it?" Pauling asked. "Tell us."

Dee Marie Graziano said, "I don't want to hear this again. I can't hear this again. I'm going out."

Pauling opened her purse and took out her wallet. Peeled off part of her wad. Didn't count it. Just handed the sheaf of bills straight to Dee Marie.

"Get stuff," she said. "Food, medicine, whatever you need."

Dee Marie said, "You can't buy his testimony."

"I'm not trying to," Pauling said. "I'm trying to help, that's all."

"I don't like charity."

"Then get over it," Reacher said. "Your brother needs everything he can get."

"Take it, Dee," Hobart said. "Be sure to get something for yourself."

Dee Marie shrugged, then took the money. Jammed it in the pocket of her shift and collected her keys and walked out. Reacher heard the front door open. The hinges squealed where he had damaged them. He stepped into the hallway.

"We should call a carpenter," Pauling said, from behind him.

"Call that Soviet super from Sixth Avenue," Reacher said. "He looked competent and I'm sure he moonlights."

"You think?"

Reacher whispered, "He was with the Red Army in Afghanistan. He won't freak when he sees a guy with no hands and no feet."

"You talking about me?" Hobart called.

Reacher followed Pauling back to the living room and said, "You're lucky to have a sister like that."

Hobart nodded. The same slow, painful movement.

"But it's hard on her," he said. "You know, with the bathroom and all. She has to see things a sister shouldn't see."

"Tell us about Knight. Tell us about the whole d.a.m.n thing."

Hobart laid his head back on the sofa cushion. Stared up at the ceiling. With his sister gone, he seemed to relax. His ruined body settled and quieted.

"It was one of those unique moments," he said. "Suddenly we were sure we were alone, outnumbered ten thousand to two, dead of night, in no man's land, in the middle of a country we had no right be in. I mean, you think you've been in deep s.h.i.t before, and then you realize you have absolutely no conception of how deep s.h.i.t can really be. At first we didn't do anything. Then we just looked at each other. That was the last moment of true peace I ever felt. We looked at each other and I guess we just took an unspoken decision to go down fighting. Better to die, we figured. We all have to die sometime, and that looked like as good an occasion as any. So we started firing. I guess we figured they'd lay some mortar rounds on us and that would be that. But they didn't. They just kept on coming, tens and twenties, and we just kept on firing, putting them down. Hundreds of them. But they kept on coming. Now I guess it was a tactic. We started to have equipment problems, like they knew we would. Our M60 barrels overheated. We started to run short of ammunition. We only had what we had been able to carry. When they sensed it, they all charged. OK, I thought, bring it on. I figured bullets or bayonets right there in the hole would be as good as mortar rounds from a distance."

He closed his eyes and the little room went quiet.

"But?" Reacher said.

Hobart opened his eyes. "But it didn't happen that way. They got to the lip of the hole and stopped and just stood there. Waited in the moonlight. Watched us floundering around looking for fresh clips. We didn't have any. Then the crowd parted and some kind of an officer walked through. He looked down at us and smiled. Black face, white teeth, in the moonlight. It hit us then. We thought we'd been in deep s.h.i.t before, but that was nothing. This was deep s.h.i.t. We'd just killed hundreds of their guys and we were about to be captured."

"How did it go down?"

"Surprisingly well, at the beginning. They stole everything of any value immediately. Then they slapped us around a little bit for a minute, but it was really nothing. I had worse from the NCOs in boot camp. We had these little Stars and Stripes patches on our BDUs, and I thought maybe they counted for something. The first few days were chaos. We were chained all the time, but that was more out of necessity than cruelty. They had no jail facilities. They had nothing, really. They'd been living in the bush for years. No infrastructure. But they fed us. Appalling food, but it was the same as they were eating, and it's the thought that counts. Then after a week it was clear the coup had succeeded, so they all moved into O-Town proper and took us with them and put us in the city prison. We were in a separate wing for about four weeks. We figured they were maybe negotiating with Washington. They fed us and left us alone. We could hear bad stuff elsewhere in the building, but we figured we were special. So altogether the first month was a day at the beach compared to what came later."

"What came later?"

"Evidently they gave up on Washington or stopped thinking we were special because they took us out of the separate wing and tossed us in with some of the others. And that was bad. Real bad. Incredible overcrowding, filth, disease, no clean water, almost no food. We were skeletons inside a month. Savages after two. I went six months without even lying down, the first cell was so crowded. We were ankle deep in s.h.i.t, literally. There were worms. At night the place crawled with them. People were dying from disease and starvation. Then they put us on trial."

"You had a trial?"

"I guess it was a trial. War crimes, probably. I had no idea what they were saying."

"Weren't they speaking French?"

"That's for government and diplomacy. The rest of them speak tribal languages. It was just two hours of noise to me, and then they found us guilty. They took us back to the big house and we found out that the part we'd already been in was the VIP accommodations. Now we were headed for general population, which was a whole lot worse. Two months later I figured I was about as low as I could go. But I was wrong. Because then I had a birthday."

"What happened on your birthday?"

"They gave me a present."

"Which was?"

"A choice."

"Of what?"

"They hauled out about a dozen guys. I guess we all shared the same birthday. They took us to a courtyard. First thing I noticed was a big bucket of tar on a propane burner. It was bubbling away. Real hot. I remembered the smell from when I was a kid, from when they were blacktopping roads where I lived. My mother believed some old superst.i.tion that said if a kid sniffed the tar smell it would protect him from getting coughs and colds. She would send us out to chase the trucks. So I knew the smell real well. Then I saw next to the bucket was a big stone block, all black with blood. Then some big guard grabbed a machete and started screaming at the first guy in line. I had no idea what he was saying. The guy next to me spoke a little English and translated for me. He said we had a choice. Three choices, actually. To celebrate our birthdays we were going to lose a foot. First choice, left or right. Second choice, long pants or short pants. That was a kind of joke. It meant we could be cut above the knee or below. Our choice. Third choice, we could use the bucket or not. Our choice. You plunge the stump in there, the boiling tar seals the arteries and cauterizes the wound. Choose not to, and you bleed out and die. Our choice. But the guard said we had to choose fast. We weren't allowed to mess around and hold up the queue behind us."

Silence in the tiny room. n.o.body spoke. There was no sound at all, except faint incongruous New York City sirens in the far distance.

Hobart said, "I chose left, long pants, and yes to the bucket."

CHAPTER 41

FOR A LONG time the small room stayed quiet as a tomb. Hobart rolled his head from side to side to ease his neck. Reacher sat down in a small chair near the window.

Hobart said, "Twelve months later on my next birthday I chose right, long pants, and yes to the bucket."

Reacher said, "They did this to Knight, too?"

Hobart nodded. "We thought we had been close before. But some things really bring you together."

Pauling was leaning up in the kitchen doorway, white as a sheet. "Knight told you about Anne Lane?"

"He told me about a lot of things. But remember, we were doing seriously hard time. We were sick and starving. We had infections. We had malaria and dysentery. We were out of our heads for weeks at a time with fevers."

"What did he tell you?"

"He told me he shot Anne Lane in New Jersey."

"Did he tell you why?"

"He gave me a whole bunch of different reasons. Different day, different reason. Sometimes it was that he had been having an affair with her, and she broke it off, and he got mad. Other times it was that Lane was mad at her and asked him to do it. Other times he said he was working for the CIA. Once he said she was an alien from another planet.''

"Did he kidnap her?"

Hobart nodded, slowly, painfully. "Drove her to the store, but didn't stop there. Just pulled a gun and kept on going, all the way to New Jersey. Killed her there."

"Immediately?" Pauling asked.

Hobart said, "Yes, immediately. She was dead a day before you ever even heard of her. There was nothing wrong with your procedures. He killed her that first morning and drove back and waited outside the store until it was time to sound the alarms."

"Not possible," Pauling said. "His EZ-Pa.s.s records showed he hadn't used a bridge or a tunnel that day."

"Give me a break," Hobart said. "You pull the tag off the windshield and put it in the foil packet they mailed it in. Then you use a cash lane."

"Were you really in Philadelphia?" Reacher asked.

"Yes, I really was," Hobart said.

"Did you know what Knight was doing that day?"

"No, I really didn't."

"Who faked Anne's voice on the phone?" Pauling asked. "Who set up the ransom drop?"

"Sometimes Knight would say it was a couple of his buddies. Sometimes he would say Lane took care of all of that."

"Which version did you believe?"

Hobart's head dropped to his chest and canted left. He stared toward the floor. Reacher asked, "Can I get you something?"

"I'm just looking at your shoes," Hobart said. "I like nice shoes, too. Or at least I did."

"You'll get prosthetics. You can wear shoes with them."

"Can't afford them. Prosthetics, or shoes."

Pauling said, "What was the truth about Anne Lane?"

Hobart pulled his head back to the cushion so he could look straight up at Pauling. He smiled, sadly.

"The truth about Anne Lane?" he said. "I thought about that a lot. Believe me, I obsessed over it. It became the central question of my life, because basically it was responsible for what was happening to me. The third birthday I spent in there, they took me back to the courtyard. The second choice was phrased slightly different. Long sleeves or short? Stupid question, really. n.o.body ever chose short sleeves. I mean, who the h.e.l.l would? I saw a thousand amputees in there and n.o.body ever took it above the elbow."

Silence in the room.

"The things you remember," Hobart said. "I remember the stink of the blood and the tar bucket and the pile of severed hands behind that big stone block. A bunch of black ones and one little white one."

Pauling asked, "What was the truth about Anne?"

"The waiting was the hardest part. I spent a year looking at my right hand. Doing things with it. Making a fist, spreading my fingers, scratching myself with my nails."

"Why did Knight kill Anne Lane?"

"They weren't having an affair. Not possible. Knight wasn't that type of a guy. I'm not saying he had scruples. He was just a little timid around women, that's all. He did OK with trash in bars or with hookers, but Anne Lane was way out of his league. She was cla.s.sy, she had personality, she had energy, she knew who she was. She was intelligent. She wouldn't have responded to the kind of thing that Knight had to offer. Not in a million years. And Knight wouldn't have offered anything anyway, because Anne was the CO's wife. That's the biggest no-no of all time for an American fighting man. In the movies they show it maybe, but not in real life. Just wouldn't happen, and if it did, Knight would have been the last Marine on earth to try it."

"You sure?"

"I knew him very well. And he didn't have the kind of buddies that could have faked the voices. Certainly not a woman's voice. He had no women friends. He didn't have any friends outside of me and the unit. Not really. Not close enough for work like that. What Marine does? That's when I knew he was bulls.h.i.tting. There was n.o.body he knew where he could just walk up to them and say, hey, help me out with this phoney kidnap thing, why don't you?"

"So why did he even try bulls.h.i.tting you?"

"Because he understood better than me that reality was over for us. There was really no difference between truth and fantasy for us at that point. They were of absolutely equal value. He was just amusing himself. Maybe he was trying to amuse me, too. But I was still a.n.a.lyzing stuff. He gave me a whole rainbow of reasons and details and facts and scenarios and I checked them over very carefully in my mind for five long years and the only story I really believed was that Lane set the whole thing up because Anne wanted out of the marriage. She wanted a divorce and she wanted alimony and Lane's ego couldn't take it. So he had her killed."

"Why would Lane want Knight dead if all he had done was act on Lane's own orders?"

"Lane was covering his a.s.s. Tying up the loose ends. And he was avoiding being in someone else's debt. That was the main thing, really. Ultimately that was the true reason. A guy like Lane, his ego couldn't take that, either. Being grateful to someone."

Silence in the room.

"What happened to Knight in the end?" Reacher asked.

"His fourth birthday," Hobart said. "He didn't go for the bucket. He didn't want to go on. The p.u.s.s.y just quit on me. Some d.a.m.n jarhead he was.

CHAPTER 42

TEN MINUTES LATER Dee Marie Graziano got home. The squawk box in the hallway sounded and she asked for help carrying packages up the stairs. Reacher went down four flights and hauled four grocery bags back up to the apartment. Dee Marie unpacked them in the kitchen. She had bought a lot of soup, and Jell-O, and painkillers, and antiseptic creams.