The Hard Way

“Wait with us,” Lane said.

“I need to sleep,” Reacher said. “Three or four hours.”

“Use Jade’s room,” Lane said.

Reacher nodded and headed off through the interior hallways to Jade’s room. The nightlight was still burning. The room smelled faintly of baby powder and clean skin. The bed was way too small for a guy Reacher’s size. Too small for any guy, really. It was some kind of a half-sized piece, probably from a specialized children’s boutique. There was an attached bathroom carved out of another maid’s room. A sink, a toilet, a tub with a shower over it. The shower head was on a sliding pole. It was set about three feet above the drain hole. The shower curtain was clear plastic with yellow ducks on it.

Reacher slid the head all the way to the top and stripped and took a fast shower, with a cake of pink soap shaped like a strawberry, and baby shampoo. No tears, the bottle said. I wish, he thought. Then he dried himself on a small pink towel and put the tiny fragrant pajamas on a chair and took the pillow and the sheet and the comforter off the bed and made himself a bivouac on the floor. He cleared bears and dolls out of his way. The bears were all plush and new and the dolls looked untouched. He moved the desk a foot to one side to make room and all the papers fell off it. Drawings, in crayon on cheap paper. Trees, like bright green lollipops on brown sticks, with a big gray building beyond. The Dakota, from Central Park, maybe. There was another of three stick figures, one much smaller than the others. The family, maybe. Mother, daughter, stepfather. Mother and daughter were smiling but Lane was drawn with black holes in his mouth like someone had punched half his teeth out. There was a picture of an airplane low in the sky. Green earth below, a stripe of blue above, a yellow ball for the sun. The plane’s fuselage was shaped like a sausage and had three portholes with faces in them. The wings were drawn as if from above. Like the plane was in a panic turn. The last picture was of the family again, but twice over. Two Lanes close together and side by side, two Kates, two Jades. It was like looking at the second picture again with double vision.

Reacher restacked the papers neatly and switched out the nightlight. Burrowed into the bedclothes. They covered him from his chest to his knees. He could smell baby shampoo. From his own hair, or from Jade’s pillow. He wasn’t sure. He set the alarm in his head for five in the morning. He closed his eyes, breathed once, breathed twice, and fell asleep, on a floor made hard and dense and solid by three feet of Central Park clay.

Reacher woke as pla

“Three hours to go,” Groom said. “Think they’re going to call?”

“I don’t know,” Reacher said. “Do you think they will?”

Groom didn’t reply. Just drummed his fingers on the counter as he waited for the machine to finish. Reacher waited with him. Then Burke came in. He looked like he hadn’t slept. He didn’t say anything. Nothing pleasant, nothing hostile. He just acted like the previous evening had never existed. Groom filled three mugs with coffee. Took one, and left the room. Burke took one and followed him. Reacher drank his sitting on the counter. The clock on the wall oven said five-ten. He figured it was a little slow. He felt it was closer to a quarter past.

Time for ex-Special Agent Lauren Pauling’s wake-up call.

He stopped in the living room on his way out. Lane was still in the same chair. Immobile. Still upright. Still composed. Still stoic. Real or phony, either way, it was one hell of a display of endurance. Gregory and Perez and Kowalski were asleep on sofas. Addison was awake but inert. Groom and Burke were drinking their coffee.

“I’m going out,” Reacher said.

“Another walk?” Burke asked, sourly.

“Breakfast,” Reacher said.

The old guy in the lobby was still on duty. Reacher nodded to him and turned right on 72nd and headed for Broadway. Nobody came after him. He found a pay phone and used coins from his pocket and the card from his shoe and dialed Pauling’s cell. He figured she would keep it switched on, top of her nightstand, near her pillow.

She answered on the third ring.

“Hello?” she said.

Rusty voice, not sleepy, just not yet used today. Maybe she lived alone.

Reacher asked, “You heard the name Reacher recently?”

“Should I have?” Pauling asked back.

“It will save us a lot of time if you just say yes. From A

“Yes,” Pauling said. “Late yesterday.”

“I need an early appointment,” Reacher said.

“You’re Reacher?”

“Yes, I am. Half an hour, at your office?”

“You know where it is?”

“Brewer gave me your card.”

“Half an hour,” Pauling said.

And so half an hour later Reacher was standing on a West 4th Street sidewalk, with a cup of coffee in one hand and a doughnut in the other, watching Lauren Pauling walk toward him.

CHAPTER 23

REACHER KNEW IT was Lauren Pauling walking toward him because of the way her eyes were fixed on his face. Clearly Brewer had passed on his physical description as well as his name. So Pauling was looking for a tall, wide, blond, untidy man waiting near her office door, and Reacher was the only possibility that morning on West 4th Street.

Pauling herself was an elegant woman of about fifty. Or maybe a little more, in which case she was carrying it well. Brewer had said she’s cute too, and he had been right. She was about an inch taller than average, dressed in a black pencil skirt that fell to her knees. Black hose, black shoes with heels. An emerald green blouse that could have been silk. A rope of big fake pearls at her neck. Hair frosted gold and blonde. It fell in big waves to her shoulders. Green eyes that smiled. A look on her face that said: I’m very pleased to meet you but let’s get straight to the good stuff. Reacher could imagine the kind of team meetings she must have run for the Bureau.

“Jack Reacher, I presume,” she said.

Reacher shoved his doughnut between his teeth and wiped his fingers on his pants and shook her hand. Then he waited at her shoulder as she unlocked her street door. Watched as she deactivated an alarm with a keypad in the lobby. The keypad was a standard three-by-three cluster with the zero alone at the bottom. She was right-handed. She used her middle finger, index finger, ring finger, index finger, without moving her hand much. Brisk, decisive motion. Like typing. Probably 8461, Reacher thought. Dumb or distracted to let me see. Distracted, probably. She can’t be dumb. But it was the building’s alarm. Not her personal choice of numbers. So she hadn’t given away her home system or her ATM card.

“Follow me,” she said.

Reacher followed her up a narrow staircase to the second floor. He finished his doughnut on the way. She unlocked a door and led him into an office. It was a two-room suite. Waiting room first, and then a back room for her desk and two visitor chairs. Very compact, but the décor was good. Good taste, careful application. Full of the kind of expensive stuff a solo professional leases to create an impression of confidence in a client. A little bigger, it could have been a lawyer’s place, or a cosmetic surgeon’s.

“I spoke to Brewer,” she said. “I called him at home after you called me. I woke him up. He wasn’t very happy about that.”

“I can imagine,” Reacher said.

“He’s curious about your motives.”

Lauren Pauling’s voice was low and husky, like she had been recovering from laryngitis for the last thirty years. Reacher could have sat and listened to it all day long.