Tripwire Part 39

He came back to the closet with coffee in his hand and stood there with the door open, looking at what was on the rail. As a cop, he had always been a pants-and-jacket type of guy. Grey flannels, checked sportcoat. He had favoured tweed, although he wasn't strictly Irish. In the summer, he had tried linen jackets, but they wrinkled too easily and he had settled on thin polyester blends. But none of those outfits was going to do on a day when he had to show up somewhere looking like David Forster, high-priced attorney. He was going to have to use his wedding suit.

It was a plain black Brooks Brothers, bought for family weddings and christenings and funerals. It was fifteen years old, and being Brooks Brothers didn't look a whole lot different from contemporary items. It was a little loose on him, because losing his wife's cooking had brought his weight down in a hurry. The pants were a little wide by East Village standards, but that was OK because he planned on wearing two ankle holsters. William Curry was a guy who believed in being prepared. David Forster had said probably won't be anything involved at all, and if it worked out that way he would be happy enough, but a twenty-year man from the NYPD's worst years tends to get cautious when he hears a promise like that. So he planned on using both ankle holsters and putting his big.357 in the small of his back.

He put the suit in a plastic cover he had picked up somewhere and added a white shirt and his quietest tie. He threaded the.357 holster on to a black leather belt and put it in a bag with the two ankle holsters. He put three handguns in his briefcase, the.357 long-barrelled Magnum and two.38 snub-nosed Smith and Wessons for the ankles. He sorted twelve rounds for each gun into a box and packed it beside the guns. He stuffed a black sock into each of his black shoes and stowed them with the holsters. He figured he would get changed after an early lunch. No point in wearing the stuff all morning and showing up looking like a limp rag.

He locked up the apartment and walked south to his office on Fletcher, carrying his luggage, stopping only to get a m.u.f.fin: banana and walnut, reduced fat.

Marilyn Stone woke up at seven o'clock. She was bleary-eyed and tired. They had been kept out of the bathroom until well after midnight. It had to be cleaned. The thickset guy in the dark suit did it. He came out in a bad temper and made them wait until the floor dried. They sat in the dark and the silence, numb and cold and hungry, too sickened to think about asking for something to eat. Tony made Marilyn plump up the sofa pillows. She guessed he planned to sleep there. Bending over in her short dress and preparing his bed was a humiliation. She patted the pillows into place while he smiled at her.

The bathroom was cold. It was damp everywhere and smelled of disinfectant. The towels had been folded and stacked next to the sink. She put them in two piles on the floor and she and Chester curled up on them without a word. Beyond the door, the office was silent. She didn't expect to sleep. But she must have, because she awoke with a clear sense of a new day beginning.

There were sounds in the office. She had rinsed her face and was standing upright when the thickset guy brought coffee. She took her mug without a word and he left Chester's on the ledge under the mirror. Chester was still on the floor, not asleep, just lying there inert. The guy stepped right over him on his way out.

'Nearly over,' she said.

'Just starting, you mean,' Chester said back. 'Where do we go next? Where do we go tonight?'

She was going to say home, thank G.o.d, but then she remembered he'd already realized that after about two-thirty they would have no home.

'A hotel, I guess,' she said.

'They took my credit cards.'

Then he went quiet. She looked at him. 'What?'

'It's never going to be over,' he said. 'Don't you see that? We're witnesses. To what they did to those cops. And Sheryl. How can they just let us walk away?'

She nodded, a small vague movement of her head, and looked down at him with disappointment. She was disappointed because he finally understood. Now he was going to be worried and frantic all day, and that would just make it harder.

It took five minutes to get the knot in the necktie neat, and then he slipped his jacket on. Dressing was the exact reverse of undressing, which meant the shoes came last. He could tie laces just about as fast as a two-handed person. The trick was to trap the loose end under the hook against the floor. Then he started in the bathroom. He rammed all the dirty laundry into a pillowcase and left it by the apartment door. He stripped the bed and balled the linen into another pillowcase. He put all the personal items he could find into a supermarket carrier. He emptied his closet into a garment bag. He propped the apartment door open and carried the pillowcases and the carrier to the refuse chute. Dropped them all down and clanged the slot closed after them. Dragged the garment bag out into the hallway and locked up the apartment and put the keys in an envelope from his pocket.

He detoured to the concierge's desk and left the envelope of keys for the real-estate guy. Used the stairway to the parking garage and carried the garment bag over to the Cadillac. He locked it into the trunk and walked around to the driver's door. Slid inside and leaned over with his left hand and fired it up. Squealed around the garage and up into the daylight. He drove south on Fifth, carefully averting his eyes until he was clear of the park and safe in the bustling canyons of Midtown.

He leased three bays under the World Trade Center, but the Suburban was gone, and the Tahoe was gone, so they were all empty when he arrived. He put the Cadillac in the middle slot and left the garment bag in the trunk. He figured he would drive the Cadillac to LaGuardia and abandon it in the long-term parking lot. Then he would take a cab to JFK, carrying the bag, looking like any other transfer pa.s.senger in a hurry. The car would sit there until the weeds grew up under it, and if anybody ever got suspicious they would comb through the LaGuardia manifests, not JFK's. It meant writing off the Cadillac along with the lease on the offices, but he was always comfortable about spend- ing money when he got value for it, and saving his life was about the best value he could think of getting.

He used the express elevator from the garage and was in his bra.s.s-and-oak reception area ninety seconds later. Tony was behind the chest-high counter, drinking coffee, looking tired.

'Boat?' Hobie asked him.

Tony nodded. 'It's at the broker's. They'll wire the money. They want to replace the rail, where that a.s.shole damaged it with the cleaver. I told them OK, just deduct it from the proceeds.'

Hobie nodded back. 'What else?'

Tony smiled, at an apparent irony. 'We got more money to move. The first interest payment just came in from the Stone account. Eleven thousand dollars, right on time. Conscientious little a.s.shole, isn't he?'

Hobie smiled back. 'Robbing Peter to pay Paul, only now Peter and Paul are the same d.a.m.n guy. Wire it down to the islands at start of business, OK?'

Tony nodded and read a note. 'Simon called from Hawaii again. They made the plane. Right now they're over the Grand Canyon somewhere.'

'Has Newman found it yet?' Hobie asked.

Tony shook his head. 'Not yet. He's going to start looking this morning. Reacher pushed him into doing it. Sounds like a smart guy.'

'Not smart enough,' Hobie said. 'Hawaii's five hours behind, right?'

'It'll be this afternoon. Call it he starts at nine, spends a couple of hours looking, that's four o'clock our time. We'll be out of here.'

Hobie smiled again. 'I told you it would work out. Didn't I tell you it would work out? Didn't I tell you to relax and let me do the thinking?'

Reacher woke up at seven o'clock on his watch, which was still set to St Louis time as far as he could remember, which made it three o'clock in the morning back in Hawaii, and six in Arizona or Colorado or wherever they were seven miles above, and already eight in New York. He stretched in his seat and stood up and stepped over Jodie's feet. She was curled in her chair, and a stewardess had covered her with a thin plaid blanket. She was fast asleep, breathing slow, her hair over her face. He stood in the aisle for a moment and watched her sleep. Then he went for a walk.

He walked through business cla.s.s, and on into coach. The lights were dimmed and it got more crowded the farther back he walked. The tiny seats were packed with people huddled under blankets. There was a smell of dirty clothes. He walked right down to the rear of the plane and looped around through the galley past a quiet huddle of cabin staff leaning on the aluminium lockers. He walked back up the other aisle, through coach, into business cla.s.s. He paused there a second and scanned the pa.s.sengers. There were men and women in suits, jackets discarded, ties pulled down. There were laptop computers open. Briefcases stood on unoccupied seats, bulging with folders with plastic covers and comb bindings. Reading lights were focused on tray tables. Some of the people were still working, late in the night or early in the morning, depending on where you measured it from.

He guessed these were middle-ranking people. A long way from the bottom, but nowhere near the top. In Army terms, these were the majors and the colonels. They were the civilian equivalents of himself. He had finished a major, and might be a colonel now if he'd stayed in uniform. He leaned on a bulkhead and looked at the backs of the bent heads and thought Leon made me, and now he's changed me. Leon had boosted his career. He hadn't created it, but he had made it what it became. There was no doubt about that. Then the career ended and the drifting began, and now the drifting was ended, too, because of Leon. Not just because of Jodie. Because of Leon's last will and testament. The old guy had bequeathed him the house, and the bequest had sat there like a time bomb, waiting to anchor him. Because the vague promise was enough to do it. Before, settling down had seemed theoretical. It was a distant country he knew he would never visit. The journey there was too long to manage. The fare was too high. The sheer difficulty of insinuating himself into an alien lifestyle was impossibly great. But Leon's bequest had kidnapped him. Leon had kidnapped him and dumped him right on the border of the distant country. Now his nose was pressed right up against the fence. He could see life waiting for him on the other side. Suddenly it seemed insane to turn back and hike the impossible distance in the other direction. That would turn drifting into a conscious choice, and conscious choice would turn drifting into something else completely. The whole point of drifting was happy pa.s.sive acceptance of no alternatives. Having alternatives ruined it. And Leon had handed him a ma.s.sive alternative. It sat there, still and amiable above the rolling Hudson, waiting for him. Leon must have smiled as he sat and wrote out that provision. He must have grinned and thought let's see how you get out of this one, Reacher. He stared at the laptops and the comb-bound folders and winced inside. How was he going to cross the border of the distant country without getting issued with all this stuff? The suits and the ties and the black plastic battery-driven devices? The lizard-skin cases and the memorandums from the main office? He shuddered and found himself paralysed against the bulkhead, panicking, not breathing, completely unable to move. He recalled a day not more than a year ago, stepping out of a truck at a crossroads near a town he had never heard of in a state he had never been. He had waved the driver away and thrust his hands deep in his pockets and started walking, with a million miles behind him and a million miles ahead of him. The sun was shining and the dust was kicking up off his feet as he walked and he had smiled with the joy of being alone with absolutely no idea where he was headed.

But he also recalled a day nine months after that. Realizing he was running out of money, thinking hard. The cheapest motels still required some small amount of dollars. The cheapest diners, likewise. He had taken the job in the Keys, intending to work a couple of weeks. Then he had taken the evening job, too, and he was still working both of them when Costello came calling three whole months later. So the reality was that drifting was already over. He was already a working man. No point in denying it. Now it was just a question of where and how much and for who. He smiled. Like prost.i.tution, he thought. No going back. He relaxed a little and pushed off the bulkhead and padded back through to first cla.s.s. The guy with the striped shirt and the arms the same length as Victor Hobie's was awake and watching him. He nodded a greeting. Reacher nodded back and headed for the bathroom. Jodie was awake when he got back to his seat. She was sitting up straight, combing her hair with her fingers.

'Hi, Reacher,' she said.

'Hey, Jodie,' he said back.

He bent and kissed her on the lips. Stepped over her feet and sat down.

'Feel OK?' he asked.

She ducked her head in a figure eight to put her hair behind her shoulders.

'Not bad. Not bad at all. Better than I thought I would. Where did you go?'

'I took a walk,' he said. 'I went back to see how the other half lives.'

'No, you were thinking. I noticed that about you fifteen years ago. You always go walking when you have something to think about.'

'I do?' he said, surprised. 'I didn't know that.'

'Of course you do,' she said. 'I noticed it. I used to watch every detail about you. I was in love with you, remember?'

'What else do I do?'

'You clench your left hand when you're angry or tense. You keep your right hand loose, probably from weapons training. When you're bored, you play music in your head. I could see it in your fingers, like you're playing along on a piano or something. The tip of your nose moves a little bit when you talk.'

'It does?'

'Sure it does,' she said. 'What were you thinking about?'

He shrugged.

'This and that,' he said.

'The house, right?' she said. 'It's bothering you, isn't it? And me. Me and the house, tying you down, like that guy in the book, Gulliver? You know that book?'

He smiled. 'He's a guy gets captured by tiny little people when he's asleep. They peg him down flat with hundreds of tiny little ropes.'

'You feel that way?'

He paused a beat. 'Not about you.'

But the pause had been a fraction of a second too long. She nodded.

'It's different than being alone, right?' she said. 'I know, I was married. Somebody else to take into account all the time? Somebody to worry about?'

He smiled. 'I'll get used to it.'

She smiled back. 'And there's the house, right?'

He shrugged. 'Feels weird.'

'Well, that's between you and Leon,' she said. 'I want you to know I'm not putting demands on you, either way. About anything. It's your life, and your house. You should do exactly what you want, no pressure.'

He nodded. Said nothing.

'So you going to look for Hobie?'

He shrugged again. 'Maybe. But it's a h.e.l.l of a task.'

'Bound to be angles,' she said. 'Medical records and things? He must have a prosthesis. And if he's burned, too, there'll be records of that. And you wouldn't miss him in the street, would you? A one-armed man, all burned up?'

He nodded. 'Or I could just wait for him to find me. I could just hang out in Garrison until he sends his boys back.'

Then he turned to the window and stared out at his pale reflection against the darkness and realized I'm just accepting he's alive. I'm just accepting I was wrong. He turned back to Jodie.

'Will you give me the mobile? Can you manage without it today? In case Nash finds something and calls me? I want to hear right away, if he does.'

She held his gaze for a long moment, and then she nodded. Leaned down and unzipped her carry-on. Took out the phone and handed it to him.

'Good luck,' she said.

He nodded and put the phone in his pocket.

'I never used to need luck,' he said.

Nash Newman did not wait until nine o'clock in the morning to start the search. He was a meticulous man, attentive to tiny detail as much in his ethics as in his professional speciality. This was an unofficial search, undertaken out of compa.s.sion for a troubled friend, so it couldn't be done on company time. A private matter had to be settled privately.

So he got out of bed at six, watching the faint red glow of tropical dawn starting beyond the mountains. He made coffee and dressed. By six-thirty he was in his office. He figured he would give it two hours. Then he would have breakfast in the mess and start his proper work on time at nine.

He rolled open a desk drawer and lifted out Victor Hobie's medical records. Leon Garber had a.s.sembled them after patient enquiries in doctors' and dentists' offices in Putnam County. He had bundled them into an old military police folder and secured it shut with an old canvas strap. The strap had been red, but age had faded it to dusty pink. There was a fiddly metal buckle.

He undid the buckle. Opened the folder. The top sheet was a release signed by both the Hobie parents in April. Underneath it was ancient history. He had scanned thousands of files similar to this one, and he could effortlessly place the boys they referred to in terms of their age, their geographic location, their parents' income, their ability at sports, all the numerous factors that affect a medical history. Age and location worked together. A new dental treatment might start out in California and sweep the country like a fashion, so the thirteen-year-old boy getting it in Des Moines had to have been born five years later than the thirteen-year-old boy getting it in Los Angeles. Their parents' income dictated whether they got it at all. The high school football stars had treatment for torn shoulders, the softball players had cracked wrists, the swimmers had chronic ear infections.

Victor Truman Hobie had very little at all. Newman read between the lines and pictured a healthy boy, properly fed, conscientiously cared for by dutiful parents. His health had been good. There had been colds and flu, and a bout of bronchitis at the age of eight. No accidents. No broken bones. Dental treatment had been very thorough. The boy had grown up through the era of aggressive dentistry. In Newman's experience, it was absolutely typical of any he had seen from the New York metropolitan area in the Fifties and early Sixties. Dentistry through that era consisted of a war on cavities. Cavities had to be hunted down. They were hunted with powerful X-rays, and when they were found they were enlarged with the drill and filled with amalgam. The result was a lot of trips to the dentist's office, which no doubt had been miserable for the young Victor Hobie, but from Newman's point of view the process had left him with a thick sheaf of films of the boy's mouth. They were good enough and clear enough and numerous enough to be potentially definitive.

He stacked the films and carried them out into the corridor. Unlocked the plain door in the cinder-block wall and walked past the aluminium caskets to the alcove at the far end. There was a computer terminal on a wide shelf, out of sight around a corner. He booted it up and clicked on the search menu. The screen scrolled down and revealed a detailed questionnaire.

Filling out the questionnaire was a matter of simple logic. He clicked on all bones and entered no CHILDHOOD BREAKS, POTENTIAL ADULT BREAKS. The kid didn't break his leg playing football at high school, but he might have broken it later in a training accident. Service medical records were sometimes lost. He spent a lot of time on the dental section of the questionnaire. He entered a full description of each tooth as last recorded. He marked the filled cavities, and against each good toqth he entered potential cavity. It was the only way to prevent mistakes. Simple logic. A good tooth can go bad later and need treatment, but a filled cavity can't ever disappear. He stared at the X-rays and against s.p.a.cing he entered even, and against size he entered even again. The rest of the questionnaire he left blank. Some diseases showed up in the skeleton, but not colds and flu and bronchitis.

He reviewed his work and at seven o'clock exactly he hit search. The hard disk whirred and chattered in the morning silence and the software started its patient journey through the database.

They landed ten minutes ahead of schedule, just before the peak of noon, East Coast time. They came in low over the glittering waters of Jamaica Bay and put down facing east before turning back and taxiing slowly to the terminal. Jodie reset her watch and was on her feet before the plane stopped moving, which was a transgression they don't chide you for in first cla.s.s.

'Let's go,' she said. 'I'm real tight for time.'

They were lined up by the door before it opened. Reacher carried her bag out into the jet way and she hurried ahead of him all the way through the terminal and outside. The Lincoln Navigator was still there in the short-term lot, big and black and obvious, and it cost fifty-eight of Rutter's dollars to drive it out.

'Do I have time for a shower?' she asked herself.

Reacher put his comment into hustling faster than he should along the Van Wyck. The Long Island Expressway was moving freely west to the tunnel. They were in Manhattan within twenty minutes of touching down and heading south on Broadway near her place within thirty.

'I'm still going to check it out,' he told her. 'Shower or no shower.'

She nodded. Being back in the city had brought back the worry.

'OK, but be quick.'

He limited it to stopping on the street outside her door and making a visual check of the lobby. n.o.body there. They dumped the car and went up to five and down the fire stairs to four. The building was quiet and deserted. The apartment was empty and undisturbed. The Mondrian copy glowed in the bright daylight. Twelve-thirty in the afternoon.

'Ten minutes,' she said. 'Then you can drive me to the office, OK?'

'How will you get to the meeting?'

'We have a driver,' she said. 'He'll take me.'

She ran through the living room to the bedroom, shedding clothes as she went.

'You need to eat?' Reacher called after her.

'No time,' she called back.

She spent five minutes in the shower and five minutes in the closet. She came out with a charcoal dress and a matching jacket.

'Find my briefcase, OK?' she yelled.

She combed her hair and used a hair dryer on it. Limited her make-up to a touch of eyeliner and lipstick. Checked herself in the mirror and ran back to the living room. He had her briefcase waiting for her. He carried it down to the car.

'Take my keys,' she said. 'Then you can get back in. I'll call you from the office and you can come pick me up.'

It took seven minutes to get opposite the little plaza outside her building. She slid out of the car at five minutes to one.

'Good luck,' Reacher called after her. 'Give them h.e.l.l.'