Tripwire Part 44

'It's July. You've been out three weeks.'

'Christ, I ought to feel hungry.'

She moved around the foot of the bed and came up on his left. Laid her hand on his forearm. It was turned palm up and there were tubes running into the veins of his elbow.

'They've been feeding you,' she said. 'I made sure you got what you like. You know, lots of glucose and saline.'

He nodded.

'Can't beat saline,' he said.

She went quiet.

'What?' he asked.

'Do you remember?'

He nodded again.

'Everything,' he said.

She swallowed.

'I don't know what to say,' she whispered. 'You took a bullet for me.'

'My fault,' he said. 'I was too slow, is all. I was supposed to trick him and get him first. But apparently I survived it. So don't say anything. I mean it. Don't ever mention it.'

'But I have to say thank you,' she whispered.

'Maybe I should say thank you,' he said. 'Feels good to know somebody worth taking a bullet for.'

She nodded, but not because she was agreeing. It was just random physical motion designed to stop her crying.

'So how am I?' he asked.

She paused for a long moment.

'I'll get the doctor,' she said quietly. 'He can tell you better than me.'

She went out and a guy in a white coat came in. Reacher smiled. It was the guy the Army had sent to finish him off at the end of his parade. He was a small wide hairy man who could have found work wrestling.

'You know anything about computers?' he asked.

Reacher shrugged and started worrying this was a coded lead-in to bad news about a brain injury, impairment, loss of memory, loss of function.

'Computers?' he said. 'Not really.'

'OK, try this,' the doctor said. 'Imagine a big Cray supercomputer humming away. We feed it everything we know about human physiology and everything we know about gunshot wounds and then we ask it to design us a male person best equipped to survive a thirty-eight in the chest. Suppose it hums away for a week. What does it come up with?'

Reacher shrugged again. 'I don't know.'

'A picture of you, my friend,' the doctor said. 'That's what. The d.a.m.n bullet didn't even make it into your chest. Your pectoral muscle is so thick and so dense it stopped it dead. Like a three-inch kevlar vest. It popped out the other side of the muscle wall and smashed a rib, but it went no farther.'

'So why was I out three weeks?' Reacher asked immediately. 'Not for a muscle wound or a broken rib, that's for d.a.m.n sure. Is my head OK?'

The doctor did a weird thing. He clapped his hands and punched the air. Then he stepped closer, beaming all over his face.

'I was worried about it,' he said. 'Real worried about it. Bad wound. I would have figured it for a nail gun, until they told me it was shotgun debris from manufactured furniture. It penetrated your skull and was about an eighth of an inch into your brain. Frontal lobe, my friend, bad place to have a nail. If I had to have a nail in my skull, the frontal lobe would definitely not be my first choice. But if I had to see a nail in anybody else's frontal lobe I'd pick yours, I guess, because you've got a skull thicker than Neanderthal man's. Anybody normal, that nail would have been all the way in, and that would have been thank you and good night.'

'So am I OK?' Reacher asked again.

'You just saved us ten thousand dollars in tests,' the doctor said happily. 'I told you the news about the chest, and what did you do? a.n.a.lytically? You compared it with your own internal database, realized it wasn't a very serious wound, realized it couldn't have needed three weeks of coma, remembered your other injury, put two and two together and asked the question you asked. Immediately. No hesitation. Fast, logical thinking, a.s.sembly of pertinent information, rapid conclusion, lucid questioning of the source of a possible answer. Nothing wrong with your head, my friend. Take that as a professional opinion.'

Reacher nodded slowly. 'So when can I get out of here?'

The doctor took the medical chart off the foot of the bed. There was a ma.s.s of paper clipped to a metal board. He riffled through it. 'Well, your health is excellent in general, but we better watch you a while. Couple more days, maybe.'

'Nuts to that,' Reacher said. 'I'm leaving tonight.'

The doctor nodded. 'Well, see how you feel in an hour.'

He stepped close and stretched up to a valve on the bottom of one of the IV bags. Clicked it a notch and tapped a tube with his finger. Watched carefully and nodded and walked back out of the room. He pa.s.sed Jodie in the doorway. She was walking in with a guy in a seersucker jacket. He was about fifty, pale, short grey hair. Reacher watched him and thought a buck gets ten this is the Pentagon guy.

'Reacher, this is General Mead,' Jodie said.

'Department of the Army,' Reacher said.

The guy in the jacket looked at him, surprised. 'Have we met?'

Reacher shook his head. 'No, but I knew one of you would be sniffing around, soon as I was up and running.'

Mead smiled. 'We've been practically camped out here. To put it bluntly, we'd like you to keep quiet about the Carl Allen situation.'

'Not a chance,' Reacher said.

Mead smiled again and waited. He was enough of an Army bureaucrat to know the steps. Leon used to say something for nothing, that's a foreign language.

'The Hobies,' Reacher said. 'Fly them down to DC first cla.s.s, put them up in a five-star hotel, show them their boy's name on the Wall and make sure there's a s.h.i.tload of bra.s.s in full dress uniform saluting like crazy the whole time they're doing it. Then I'll keep quiet.'

Mead nodded.

'It'll be done,' he said. He got up unbidden and went back outside. Jodie sat down on the foot of the bed.

'Tell me about the police,' Reacher said. 'Have I got questions to answer?'

She shook her head.

'Allen was a cop killer,' she said. 'You stick around NYPD territory and you'll never get another ticket in your life. It was self-defence, everybody's cool.'

'What about my gun? It was stolen.'

'No, it was Allen's gun. You wrestled it away from him. Roomful of witnesses saw you do it.'

He nodded slowly. Saw the spray of blood and brains all over again as he shot him. A pretty good shot, he thought. Dark room, stress, a nail in his head, a.38 slug in his chest, bull's-eye. Pretty d.a.m.n close to the perfect shot. Then he saw the hook again, up at Jodie's face, hard steel against the honey of her skin.

'You OK?' he asked her.

'I'm fine,' she said.

'You sure? No bad dreams?'

'No bad dreams. I'm a big girl now.'

He nodded again. Recalled their first night together. A big girl. Seemed like a million years ago.

'But are you OK?' she asked him back.

'The doctor thinks so. He called me Neanderthal man.'

'No, seriously.'

'How do I look?'

'I'll show you,' she said.

She ducked away to the bathroom and came back with the mirror from the wall. It was a round thing, framed in plastic. She propped it on his legs and he steadied it with his right hand and looked. He still had a fearsome tan. Blue eyes. White teeth. His head had been shaved. The hair had grown back an eighth of an inch. On the left of his face was a peppering of scars. The nail hole in his forehead was lost among the debris of a long and violent life. He could make it out because it was redder and newer than the rest, but it was no bigger than the mark half an inch away where his brother Joe had caught him with a shard of gla.s.s in some long-forgotten childhood dispute over nothing, in the same exact year Hobie's Huey went down. He tilted the mirror and saw broad strapping over his chest, snowy white against the tan. He figured he had lost maybe thirty pounds. Back to 220, his normal weight. He handed the mirror back to Jodie and tried to sit up. He was suddenly dizzy.

'I want to get out of here,' he said.

'You sure?' she asked.

He nodded. He was sure, but he felt very sleepy. He put his head back on the pillow, just temporarily. He was warm and the pillow was soft. His head weighed a ton and his neck muscles were powerless to move it. The room was darkening. He swivelled his eyes upward and saw the IV bags hanging in the far distance above him. He saw the valve the doctor had adjusted. He had clicked it. He remembered the plastic sound. There was writing on the IV bag. The writing was upside down. He focused on it. Concentrated hard. The writing was green. It said morphine.

's.h.i.t,' he whispered, and the room spun away into total darkness.

When he opened his eyes again, the sun had moved backward. It was earlier in the day. Morning, not afternoon. Jodie was sitting in her chair by the window, reading. The same book. She was half an inch further through it. Her dress was blue, not yellow.

'It's tomorrow,' he said.

She closed the book and stood up. Stepped over and bent and kissed his lips. He kissed her back and clamped his teeth and pulled the IV needles out of his arm and dropped them over the side of the bed. They started a steady drip on to the floor. He hauled himself upright against the pillows and smoothed a hand over his bristly scalp.

'How do you feel?' she asked.

He sat still in the bed and concentrated on a slow survey up his body, starting with his toes and ending with the top of his head.

'Fine,' he said.

'There are people here to see you,' she said. 'They heard you'd come around.'

He nodded and stretched. He could feel the chest wound. It was on the left. There was weakness there. He reached up with his left hand to the IV stand. It was a vertical stainless-steel bar with a spiral curl at the top where the bags slipped on. He put his hand over the curl and squeezed hard. He felt bruising in his elbow where the needles had been and sensitivity in his chest where the bullet had been, but the steel spiral still flattened from round to oval. He smiled.

'OK, send them in,' he said.

He knew who they were before they got inside. He could tell by the sound. The wheels on the oxygen cart squeaked. The old lady stood aside and let her husband enter first. She was wearing a brand-new dress. He was in the same old blue serge suit. He wheeled the cart past her and paused. He kept hold of the handle with his left hand and drew his right up into a trembling salute. He held it for a long moment and Reacher replied with the same. He threw his best parade-ground move and held it steady, meaning every second of it. Then he snapped it down and the old guy wheeled the cart slowly towards him with his wife fussing behind.

They were changed people. Still old, still feeble, but serene. Knowing your son is dead is better than not knowing, he guessed. He tracked back to Newman's windowless lab in Hawaii and recalled Allen's casket with Victor Hobie's skeleton in it. Victor Hobie's old bones. He remembered them pretty well. They were distinctive. The smooth arch of the brow, the high round cranium. The even white teeth. The long, clean limbs. It was a n.o.ble skeleton.

'He was a hero, you know.'

The old man nodded.

'He did his duty.'

'Much more than that,' Reacher replied. 'I read his record. I talked with General DeWitt. He was a brave flyer who did more than his duty. He saved a lot of lives with his courage. If he'd lived, he'd have three stars now. He'd be General Victor Truman Hobie, with a big command somewhere, or a big job in the Pentagon.'

It was what they needed to hear, but it was still true. The old woman put her thin, pale hand over her husband's and they sat in silence, eyes moist and focused eleven thousand miles away. They were telling themselves stories of what might have been. The past stretched away straight and uncomplicated and now it was neatly amputated by a n.o.ble combat death, leaving only honest dreams ahead of it. They were recounting those dreams for the first time, because now they were legitimate. Those dreams were fortifying them just like the oxygen hissing in and out of the bottle in time with the old man's ragged breathing.

'I can die happy now,' he said.

Reacher shook his head.

'Not yet you can't,' he said. 'You have to go see the Wall. His name will be there. I want you to bring me a photograph of it.'

The old man nodded and his wife smiled a watery smile.

'Miss Garber told us you might be living over in Garrison,' she said. 'You might be our neighbour.'

Reacher nodded.

'It's possible,' he said.

'Miss Garber is a fine young woman.'

'Yes, ma'am, she is.'

'Stop your nonsense,' the old man said to her. Then they told him they couldn't stay, because their neighbour had driven them down and had to get back. Reacher watched them all the way out to the corridor. Soon as they were gone, Jodie came in, smiling.

'The doctor says you can leave.'

'So can you drive me? Did you get a new car yet?'

She shook her head. 'Just arental. No time for shopping. Hertz brought me a Mercury. It's got satellite navigation.'

He stretched his arms above his head and flexed his shoulders. They felt OK. Surprisingly good. His ribs were fine. No pain.

'I need clothes,' he said. 'I guess those old ones got ruined.'

She nodded. 'Nurses sliced them off with scissors.'