Tripwire

“Souvenir,” he said.

She juggled it like it was hot and dropped it in the fireplace. Joined him on the rug, kneeling hip to hip beside him in front of the mass of paper. He caught her perfume, something he did not recognize, but something subtle and intensely feminine. The sweatshirt was too big on her, large and shapeless, but somehow it emphasized her figure. The sleeves finished halfway down the backs of her hands, almost at her fingers. Her Levi’s were cinched in tight around her tiny waist with a belt, and her legs left them slightly empty. She looked fragile, but he could remember the strength in her arms. Thin, but wiry. She bent to look at the files, and her hair fell forward, and he caught the same soft smell he recalled from fifteen years previously.

“What are we looking for?” she asked.

He shrugged. “We’ll know when we find it, I guess.”

They looked hard, but they found nothing. There was nothing there. Nothing current, nothing significant. Just a mass of household paper, looking suddenly old and pathetic as it charted its way through a domestic life that was now over. The most recent item was the will, on its own in a separate slot, sealed into an envelope with neat writing on it. Neat, but slightly slow and shaky, the writing of a man just back from the hospital after his first heart attack. Jodie took it out to the hallway and slipped it into the pocket of her garment bag.

“Any unpaid bills?” she called.

There was a slot marked PENDING. It was empty.

“Can’t see any,” he called back. “There’ll be a few coming in, I guess, right? Do they come in monthly?”

She gave him a look from the doorway and smiled.

“Yes, they do,” she said. “Monthly, every month.”

There was a slot marked MEDICAL. It was overstuffed with receipted bills from the hospital and the clinic and sheaves of efficient correspondence from the insurance provider. Reacher leafed through it all.

“Christ, is that what this stuff costs?”

Jodie came back and bent to look.

“Sure it is,” she said. “Have you got insurance?”

He looked at her, blankly.

“I think maybe the VA gives it to me, at least for a period.”

“You should check it out,” she said. “Make sure.”

He shrugged. “I feel OK.”

“So did Dad,” she said. “For sixty-three and a half straight years.”

She knelt beside him again, and he saw her eyes cloud over. He laid his hand on her arm, gently.

“Hell of a day, right?” he said.

She nodded and blinked. Then she came up with a small, wry smile.

“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 gri

“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 hell 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 honor 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 title. 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 color 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 space, 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, assuming 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 assembly 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.