Tripwire Part 34

'Look at eleven down,' she said.

He looked.

'They can weigh heavy,' he read. 'Sixteen letters.'

'Responsibilities,' she said.

Marilyn and Chester Stone were huddled together on the left-hand sofa in front of the desk, because Hobie was in the bathroom, alone with the two cops. The thickset man in the dark suit sat on the opposite sofa with the shotgun resting in his lap. Tony was sprawled out next to him with his feet on the coffee table. Chester was inert, just staring into the gloom. Marilyn was cold and hungry, and terrified. Her eyes were darting all around the room. There was total silence from the bathroom.

'What's he doing in there with them?' she whispered.

Tony shrugged. 'Probably just talking to them right now.'

'About what?'

'Well, asking them questions about what they like and what they don't. In terms of physical pain, you understand. He likes to do that.'

'G.o.d, why?'

Tony smiled. 'He feels it's more democratic, you know, letting the victims decide their own fate.'

Marilyn shuddered. 'Oh G.o.d, can't he just let them go? They thought Sheryl was a battered wife, that's all. They didn't know anything about him.'

'Well, they'll know something about him soon,' Tony said. 'He makes them pick a number. They never know whether to pick high or low, because they don't know what it's for. They think it might please him, you know, if they pick right. They spend for ever trying to figure it out.'

'Can't he just let them go? Maybe later?'

Tony shook his head.

'No,' he said. 'He's very tense right now. This will relax him. Like therapy.'

Marilyn was silent for a long moment. But then she had to ask.

'What is the number for?' she whispered.

'How many hours it takes them to die,' Tony said. 'The ones who pick high get real p.i.s.sed when they find out.'

'You b.a.s.t.a.r.ds.'

'Some guy once picked a hundred, but we let him off with ten.'

'You b.a.s.t.a.r.ds.'

'But he won't make you pick a number. He's got other plans for you.'

Total silence from the bathroom.

'He's insane,' Marilyn whispered.

Tony shrugged. 'A little, maybe. But I like him. He's had a lot of pain in his life. I think that's why he's so interested in it.'

Marilyn stared at him in horror. Then the buzzer sounded at the oak door out to the elevator lobby. Very loud in the awful silence. Tony and the thickset man with the shotgun spun around and stared in that direction.

'Check it out,' Tony said.

He went into his jacket and came out with his gun. He held it steady on Chester and Marilyn. His partner with the shotgun jacked himself up out of the low sofa and stepped around the table to the door. He closed it behind him and the office went quiet again. Tony stood up and walked to the bathroom door. Knocked on it with the b.u.t.t of his gun and opened it a fraction and ducked his head inside.

'Visitors,' he whispered.

Marilyn glanced left and right. Tony was twenty feet from her, and he was the nearest. She jumped to her feet and s.n.a.t.c.hed a deep breath. Hurdled the coffee table and scrambled around the opposite sofa and made it all the way to the office door. She wrenched it open. The thickset man in the dark suit was on the far side of the reception area, talking to a short man framed in the doorway out to the elevator lobby.

'Help us!' she screamed to him.

The man stared over at her. He was dressed in dark blue pants and a blue shirt, with a short jacket open over it, the same blue as the pants. Some kind of uniform. There was a small design on the jacket, left side of the chest. He was carrying a brown grocery sack cradled in his arms.

'Help us!' she screamed again.

Two things happened. The thickset man in the dark suit darted forward and bundled the visitor all the way inside and slammed the door after him. And Tony grabbed Marilyn from behind with a strong arm around her waist. He dragged her backward into the office. She arched forward against the pressure of his arms. She was bending herself double and fighting.

'G.o.d's sake, help us!'

Tony lifted her off her feet. His arm was bunching under her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. The short dress was riding up over her thighs. She was kicking and struggling. The short man in the blue uniform was staring. Her shoes came off. Then the short man was smiling. He walked forward into the office after her, stepping carefully over her abandoned shoes, carrying his grocery sack.

'Hey, I'd like to get me a piece of that,' he said.

'Forget it,' Tony gasped from behind her. 'This one's off limits, time being.'

'Pity,' the new guy said. 'Not every day you see a thing like that.'

Tony struggled with her all the way back to the sofa. Dumped her down next to Chester. The new guy shrugged wistfully and emptied the grocery sack on the desk. Bricks of cash money thumped out on the wood. The bathroom door opened and Hobie stepped into the room. His jacket was off and his shirt sleeves were rolled up to the elbow. On the left was a forearm. It was knotted with muscle and thick with dark hair. On the right was a heavy leather cup, dark brown," worn and shiny, with straps riveted to it running away up into the shirt sleeve. The bottom of the cup was narrowed to a neck, with the bright steel hook coming down out of it, running straight for six or eight inches and then curving around to the point.

'Count the money, Tony,' Hobie said.

Marilyn jerked upright. Turned to face the new guy.

'He's got two cops in there,' she said urgently. 'He's going to kill them.'

The guy shrugged at her.

'Suits me,' he said. 'Kill them all, is what I say.'

She stared at him blankly. Tony moved behind the desk and sorted through the bricks of money. He stacked them neatly and counted out loud, moving them from one end of the desk to the other.

'Forty thousand dollars.'

'So where are the keys?' the new guy asked.

Tony rolled open the desk drawer. These are for the Benz.'

He tossed them to the guy and went into his pocket for another bunch.

'And these are for the Tahoe. It's in the garage downstairs.'

'What about the BMW?' the guy asked.

'Still up in Pound Ridge,' Hobie called across the room.

'Keys?' the guy asked.

'In the house, I guess,' Hobie said. 'She didn't bring a pocketbook, and it doesn't look like she's concealing them about her person, does it?'

The guy stared at Marilyn's dress and smiled an ugly smile, all lips and tongue.

'There's something in there, that's for d.a.m.n sure. But it don't look like keys.'

She looked at him in disgust. The design on his jacket said Mo's Motors. It was embroidered in red silk. Hobie walked across the room and stood directly behind her. He leaned forward and brought the hook around into her line of vision. She stared at it, close up. She shuddered.

'Where are the keys?' he asked.

'The BMW is mine,' she said.

'Not any more it isn't.'

He moved the hook closer. She could smell the metal and the leather.

'I could search her,' the new guy called. 'Maybe she is concealing them after all. I can think of a couple of interesting places to look.'

She shuddered.

'Keys,' Hobie said to her softly.

'Kitchen counter,' she whispered back.

Hobie took the hook away and walked around in front of her, smiling. The new guy looked disappointed. He nodded to confirm he'd heard the whisper and walked slowly to the door, jingling the Benz keys and the Tahoe keys in his hands.

'Pleasure doing business,' he said as he walked.

Then he paused at the door and looked back, straight at Marilyn.

'You completely sure that's off limits, Hobie?

Seeing as how we're old friends and all? Done a lot of business together?'

Hobie shook his head like he meant it. 'Forget about it. This one's mine.'

The guy shrugged and walked out of the office, swinging the keys. The door closed behind him and they heard the second thump of the lobby door a moment later. Then there was elevator whine and the office fell silent again. Hobie glanced at the stacks of dollar bills on the desk and headed back to the bathroom. Marilyn and Chester were kept side by side on the sofa, cold, sick and hungry. The light coming in through the c.h.i.n.ks in the blinds faded away to the yellow dullness of evening, and the silence from the bathroom continued until a point Marilyn guessed was around eight o'clock in the evening. Then it was shattered by screaming.

The plane chased the sun west but lost time all the way and arrived on Oahu three hours in arrears, in the middle of the afternoon. The first-cla.s.s cabin was emptied ahead of business cla.s.s and coach, which meant Reacher and Jodie were the first people outside the terminal and into the taxi line. The temperature and the humidity out there were similar to Texas, but the damp had a saline quality to it because of the Pacific close by. And the light was calmer. The jagged green mountains and the blue of the sea bathed the island with the jewelled glow of the Tropics. Jodie put her dark gla.s.ses on again and gazed beyond the airport fences with the mild curiosity of somebody who had pa.s.sed through Hawaii a dozen times in her father's service days without ever really stopping there. Reacher did the same. He had used it as a Pacific stepping-stone more times than he could count, but he had never served in Hawaii.

The taxi waiting at the head of the line was a replica of the one they'd used at Dallas-Fort Worth, a clean Caprice with the air roaring full blast and the driver's compartment decorated halfway between a religious shrine and a living room. They disappointed the guy by asking him for the shortest ride available on Oahu, which was the half-mile hop around the perimeter road to the Hickam Air Force Base entrance. The guy glanced backward at the line of cars behind him, and Reacher saw him thinking about the better fares the other drivers would get.

'Ten-dollar tip in it for you,' he said.

The guy gave him the same look the ticket clerk at Dallas-Fort Worth had used. A fare that was going to leave the meter stuck on the basic minimum, but a ten-dollar tip? Reacher saw a photograph of what he guessed was the guy's family, taped to the vinyl of the dash. A big family, dark smiling children and a dark smiling woman in a cheerful print dress, all standing in front of a clean simple home with something vigorous growing in a dirt patch to the right. He thought about the Hobies, alone in the dark silence up in Brighton with the hiss of the oxygen bottle and the squeak of the worn wooden floors. And Rutter, in the dusty squalor of his Bronx storefront.

'Twenty dollars,' he said. 'If we get going right now, OK?'

'Twenty dollars?' the guy repeated, amazed.

'Thirty. For your kids. They look nice.'

The guy grinned in the mirror and touched his fingers to his lips and laid them gently on the shiny surface of the photograph. He swung the cab through the lane changes on to the perimeter track and came off again more or less immediately, eight hundred yards into the journey, outside a military gate which looked identical to the one fronting Fort 'Wolters. Jodie opened the door and stepped out into the heat and Reacher went into his pocket and came out with his roll of cash. Top bill was a fifty, and he peeled it off and pushed it through the little hinged door in the Plexiglas.

'Keep it.'

Then he pointed at the photograph. 'That your house?'

The driver nodded.

'Is it holding up OK? Anything need fixing on it?'

The guy shook his head. 'Tip-top condition.'

'The roof OK?'

'No problems at all.'

Reacher nodded. 'Just checking.'

He slid across the vinyl and joined Jodie on the blacktop. The taxi moved off through the haze, back towards the civilian terminal. There was a faint breeze coming off the ocean. Salt in the air. Jodie pushed the hair off her face and looked around.

'Where are we going?'

'CIL-HI,' Reacher said. 'It's right inside here.'

He p.r.o.nounced it phonetically, and it made her smile.

'Silly?' she repeated. 'So what's that?'

'C, I, L, H, I,' he said. 'Central Identification Laboratory, Hawaii. It's the Department of the Army's main facility.'

'For what?'

'I'll show you for what,' he said.

Then he paused. 'At least I hope I will.'

They walked up to the gatehouse and waited at the window. There was a sergeant inside, same uniform, same haircut, same suspicious expression on his face as the guy at Wolters. He made them wait in the heat for a second, and then he slid the window back. Reacher stepped forward and gave their names.