Tripwire Part 9

'Unbelievable,' she said. 'I bury" the old man, I get shot at by a couple of murderers, I break the law by failing to report so many felonies I can't even count them, and then I get talked into hooking up with some wild man aiming to run some kind of a vigilante deal. You know what Dad would have said to me?'

'What?'

She pursed her lips and lowered her voice into a close imitation of Garber's good-natured growl. 'All in a day's work, girl, all in a day's work. That's what he would have said to me.'

Reacher grinned back at her and squeezed her arm again. Then he leafed through the medical junk and picked out a letterhead.

'Let's go find this clinic,' he said.

There was a lot of debate going on inside the Tahoe about whether they should go back at all. Failure was not a popular word in Hobie's vocabulary. It might be better just to take off and disappear. Just get the h.e.l.l out. It was an attractive prospect. But they were pretty sure Hobie would find them. Maybe not soon, but he would find them. And that was not an attractive prospect.

So they turned their attention to damage limitation. It was clear what they had to do. They made the necessary stops and wasted a plausible amount of time in a diner just off the southbound side of Route 9. By the time they had battled the traffic back down to the southern tip of Manhattan, they had their whole story straight.

'It was a no-brainer,' the first guy said. 'We waited for hours, which is why we're so late back. Problem was there was a whole bunch of soldiers there, kind of ceremonial, but they had rifles all over the place.'

'How many?' Hobie asked.

'Soldiers?' the second guy said. 'At least a dozen. Maybe fifteen. They were all milling around, so it was hard to count them exactly. Some kind of honour guard.'

'She left with them,' the first guy said. 'They must have escorted her down from the cemetery, and then she went back somewhere with them afterward.'

'You didn't think to follow?'

'No way we could,' the second guy said. 'They were driving slow, a long line of cars. Like a funeral procession? They'd have made us in a second. We couldn't just tag on the end of a funeral procession, right?'

'What about the big guy from the Keys?'

'He left real early. We just let him go. We were watching for Mrs Jacob. It was pretty clear by then which one she was. She stayed around, then she left, all surrounded by this bunch of military.'

'So what did you do then?'

'We checked the house,' the first guy said. 'Locked up tight. So we went into the town and checked the property t.i.tle. Everything's listed in the public library. The place was registered to a guy called Leon Garber. We asked the librarian what she knew, and she just handed us the local newspaper. Page three, there was a story about the guy. Just died, heart trouble. Widower, only surviving relative is his daughter Jodie, the former Mrs Jacob, who is a young but very eminent financial attorney with Spencer Gutman Ricker and Talbot of Wall Street, and who lives on Lower Broadway right here in New York City.'

Hobie nodded slowly, and tapped the sharp end of his hook on the desk, with a jittery little rhythm.

'And who was this Leon Garber, exactly? Why all the soldiers at his wake?'

'Military policeman,' the first guy said.

The second guy nodded. 'Mustered out with three stars and more medals than you can count, served forty years, Korea, Vietnam, everywhere.'

Hobie stopped tapping. He sat still and the colour drained out of his face, leaving his skin dead white, all except for the shiny pink burn scars that glowed vivid in the gloom.

'Military policeman,' he repeated quietly.

He sat for a long time with those words on his lips. He just sat and stared into s.p.a.ce, and then he lifted his hook off the desk and rotated it in front of his eyes, slowly, examining it, allowing the thin beams of light from the blinds to catch its curves and contours. It was trembling, so he took it in his left hand and held it still.

'Military policeman,' he said again, staring at the hook. Then he transferred his gaze to the two men on the sofas.

'Leave the room,' he said to the second guy.

The guy glanced once at his partner and went out and closed the door softly behind him. Hobie pushed back in his chair and stood up. Came out from behind the desk and stepped over and stopped still, directly behind the first guy, who just sat there on his sofa, not moving, not daring to turn around and look.

He wore a size sixteen collar, which made his neck a fraction over five inches in diameter, a.s.suming a human neck is more or less a uniform cylinder, which was an approximation Hobie had always been happy to make. Hobie's hook was a simple steel curve, like a capital letter J, generously sized. The inside diameter of the curve was four and three-quarter inches. He moved fast, darting the hook out and forcing it over the guy's throat from behind. He stepped back and pulled with all his strength. The guy threw himself upward and backward, his fingers scrabbling under the cold metal to relieve the gagging pressure. Hobie smiled and pulled harder. The hook was riveted to a heavy leather cup and a matching shaped corset, the cup over the remains of his forearm, the corset buckled tight over his bicep above his elbow. The forearm a.s.sembly was just a stabilizer. It was the upper corset, smaller than the bulge of his elbow joint, that took all the strain and made it impossible for the hook to be separated from the stump. He pulled until the gagging turned to fractured wheezing and the redness in the guy's face began to turn blue. Then he eased off an inch and bent close to the guy's ear.

'He had a big bruise on his face. What the h.e.l.l was that about?'

The guy was wheezing and gesturing wildly. Hobie twisted the hook, which relieved the pressure on the guy's voice box, but brought the tip up into the soft area under his ear.

'What the h.e.l.l was that about?' he asked again.

The guy knew that with the hook at that angle any extra rearward pressure was going to put the tip right through his skin into that vulnerable triangle behind the jaw. He didn't know much about anatomy, but he knew he was half an inch away from dying.

'I'll tell you,' he wheezed. 'I'll tell you.'

Hobie kept the hook in position, twisting it every time the guy hesitated, so that the whole true story took no longer than three minutes, beginning to end.

'You failed me,' Hobie said.

'Yes, we did,' the guy gasped. 'But it was his fault. He got all tangled up behind the screen door. He was useless.'

Hobie jerked the hook.

'As opposed to what? Like he's useless and you're useful?'

'It was his fault,' the guy gasped again. 'I'm still useful.'

'You're going to have to prove that to me.'

'How?' the guy wheezed. 'Please, how? Just tell me.'

'Easy. You can do something for me.'

'Yes,' the guy gasped. 'Yes, anything, please.'

'Bring me Mrs Jacob,' Hobie screamed at him.

'Yes,' the guy screamed back.

'And don't screw up again,' Hobie screamed.

'No,' the guy gasped. 'No, we won't, I promise.'

Hobie jerked the hook again, twice, in time with his words.

'Not we. Just you. Because you can do something else for me.'

'What?' the guy wheezed. 'Yes, what? Anything.'

'Get rid of your useless partner,' Hobie whispered. 'Tonight, on the boat.'

The guy nodded as vigorously as the hook would allow his head to move. Hobie leaned forward and slipped the hook away. The guy collapsed sideways, gasping and retching into the fabric on the sofa.

'And bring me his right hand,' Hobie whispered. 'To prove it.'

They found that the clinic Leon had been attending was not really a place in its own right, but just an administrative unit within a giant private hospital facility serving the whole of lower Putnam County. There was a ten-storey white building set in parkland, with medical practices of every description cl.u.s.tered around its base. Small roads snaked through tasteful landscaping and led to little culs-de-sac ringed with low offices for the doctors and the dentists. Anything the professions couldn't handle in the offices got transferred to rented beds inside the main building. Thus the cardiology clinic was a notional ent.i.ty, made up of a changing population of doctors and patients depending on who was sick and how bad they were. Leon's own correspondence showed he had been seen in several different physical locations, ranging from the ICU at the outset, to the recovery ward, then to one of the outpatient offices, then back to the ICU for his final visit.

The name of the supervising cardiologist was the only constant feature throughout the paperwork, a Dr McBannerman, who Reacher pictured in his mind as a kindly old guy, white hair, erudite, wise and sympathetic, maybe of ancient Scottish extraction, until Jodie told him she had met with her several times and she was a woman from Baltimore aged about thirty-five. He was driving Jodie's jeep around the small curving roads, while she was scanning left and right for the correct office. She recognized it at the end of a cul-de-sac, a low brick structure, white trim, somehow glowing with an antiseptic halo like medical buildings do. There were half a dozen cars parked outside, with one spare slot which Reacher backed into.

The receptionist was a heavy old busybody who welcomed Jodie with a measure of sympathy. She invited them to wait in McBannerman's inner office, which earned them glares from the other patients in the waiting room. The inner office was an inoffensive place, pale and sterile and silent, with a token examination table and a large coloured cutaway diagram of the human heart on the wall behind the desk. Jodie was staring up at it like she was asking so which part finally failed? Reacher could feel his own heart, huge and muscular and thumping gently in his chest. He could feel the blood pumping and the pulses ticking in his wrists and his neck.

They waited like that for ten minutes, and then the inner door opened and Dr McBannerman stepped in, a plain dark-haired woman in a white coat, a stethoscope around her neck like a badge of office, and concern in her face.

'Jodie,' she said. 'I'm terribly sorry about Leon.'

It was 99 per cent genuine, but there was a stray edge of worry there, too. She's worried about a malpractice suit, Reacher thought. The patient's daughter was a lawyer, and she was right there in her office straight from the funeral ceremony. Jodie caught it too, and she nodded, a rea.s.suring little gesture.

'I just came to say thank you. You were absolutely wonderful, every step of the way. He couldn't have had better care.'

McBannerman relaxed. The 1 per cent of worry washed away. She smiled and Jodie glanced up at the big diagram again.

'So which part finally failed?' she asked.

McBannerman followed her gaze and shrugged gently.

'Well, all of it, really, I'm afraid. It's a big complex muscle, it beats and it beats, thirty million times a year. If it lasts twenty-seven hundred million beats, which is ninety years, we call it old age. If it lasts only eighteen hundred million beats, sixty years, we call it premature heart disease. We call it America's biggest health problem, but really all we're saying is sooner or later it just stops going.'

She paused and looked directly at Reacher. For a second he thought she had spotted some symptom he was displaying. Then he realized she was waiting for an introduction.

'Jack Reacher,' he said. 'I was an old friend of Leon's.'

She nodded slowly, like a puzzle had just been solved.

'The famous Major Reacher. He spoke about you, often.'

She sat and looked at him, openly interested. She scanned his face, and then her eyes settled on his chest. He wasn't sure if that was because of her professional speciality, or if she was looking at the scorch mark from the muzzle blast.

'Did he speak about anything else?' Jodie asked. 'I got the impression he was concerned about something.'

McBannerman turned to her, puzzled, like she was thinking well, all of my patients are concerned about something, like life and death.

'What sort of thing?'

'I don't really know,' Jodie said. 'Maybe something one of the other patients might have involved him with?'

McBannerman shrugged and looked blank, like she was about to dismiss it, but then they saw her remember.

'Well, he did mention something. He told me he had a new task.'

'Did he say what it was?'

McBannerman shook her head.

'He mentioned no details. Initially, it seemed to bore him. He was reluctant about it, at first. Like somebody had landed him with something tedious. But then he got a lot more interested, later. It got to where it was overstimulating him. His ECGs were way up, and I wasn't at all happy about it.'

'Was it connected to another patient?' Reacher asked her.

She shook her head again.

'I really don't know. It's possible, I guess. They spend a lot of time together, out there in reception. They talk to each other. They're old people, often bored and lonely, I'm afraid.'

It sounded like a rebuke. Jodie blushed.

'When did he first mention it?' Reacher asked, quickly.

'March?' McBannerman said. 'April? Soon after he became an outpatient, anyway. Not long before he went to Hawaii.'

Jodie stared at her, surprised. 'He went to Hawaii? I didn't know that.'

McBannerman nodded. 'He missed an appointment and I asked him what had happened, and he said he'd been to Hawaii, just a couple of days.'

'Hawaii? Why would he go to Hawaii without telling me?'

'I don't know why he went,' McBannerman said.

'Was he well enough to travel?' Reacher asked her.

She shook her head.

'No, and I think he knew it was silly. Maybe that's why he didn't mention it.'

'When did he become an outpatient?' Reacher asked.

'Beginning of March,' she said.

'And when did he go to Hawaii?'

'Middle of April, I think.'

'OK,' he said. 'Can you give us a list of your other patients during that period? March and April? People he might have talked to?'

McBannerman was already shaking her head.

'No, I'm sorry, I really can't do that. It's a confidentiality issue.'

She appealed to Jodie with her eyes, doctor to lawyer, woman to woman, a you-know-how-it-is sort of a look. Jodie nodded, sympathetically.

'Maybe you could just ask your receptionist? You know, see if she saw Dad talking with one of the others out there? That would just be conversational, third-party, no confidentiality issues involved. In my opinion, certainly.'