Tripwire

“Hey, Jodie,” he said.

She turned her head and looked at him. Searched his face for something and when she found it she smiled.

“Hey yourself,” she said. She dropped the book and stood up. Walked three paces and bent and kissed him gently on the lips.

“St. Vincent’s,” he said. “You told me, but I was confused.”

She nodded.

“You were full of morphine,” she said. “They were pumping it in like crazy. Your bloodstream would have kept all the addicts in New York happy.”

He nodded. Glanced at the sun in the window. It looked like afternoon.

“What day is it?”

“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 ru

“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 keep her from 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 damn 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 damn 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 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? Analytically? 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, assembly 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 mass of paper clipped to a metal board. He riffed it through. “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 passed Jodie in the doorway. She was walking in with a guy in a seersucker jacket. He was about fifty, pale, short gray 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 ru

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 D.C. first class, put them up in a five-star hotel, show them their boy’s name on the Wall and make sure there’s a shitload of brass 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-defense, 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 damn 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 a half-inch away where his brother, Joe, had caught him with a shard of glass 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.