Tripwire

“OK,” she said. “Where to first?”

Reacher shrugged. This was not his area of expertise. He had bought plenty of clothes in the last two years, because he had developed a habit of buying new stuff instead of washing the old stuff. It was a defensive habit. It defended him against carrying any kind of a big valise, and it defended him against having to learn the exact techniques of laundering. He knew about laundromats and dry cleaners, but he was vaguely worried about being alone in a laundromat and finding himself unsure of the correct procedures. And giving stuff to a dry cleaner implied a commitment to be back in the same physical location at some future time, which was a commitment he was reluctant to make. The most straightforward practice was to buy new and junk the old. So he had bought clothes, but exactly where he had bought them was hard for him to pin down. Generally he just saw clothes in a store window, went in and bought them, and came out again without really being sure of the identity of the establishment he had visited.

“There was a place I went in Chicago,” he said. “I think it was a chain store, short little name. Hole? Gap? Something like that. They had the right sizes.”

Jodie laughed. Linked her arm through his.

“The Gap,” she said. “There’s one right in here.”

The brass-and-glass doorway led straight into a department store. The air was cold and stank of soap and perfume. They passed through the cosmetics into an area with tables piled high with summer clothes in pastel cottons. Then out into the main thoroughfare of the mall. It was oval like a racetrack, ringed with small stores, the whole arrangement repeated on two more levels above them. The walks were carpeted and music was playing and people were swarming everywhere.

“I think the Gap’s upstairs,” Jodie said.

Reacher smelled coffee. One of the units opposite was done out as a coffee bar, like a street place in Italy. The inside walls were painted like outside walls, and the ceiling was flat black, so it would disappear like the sky. An inside place looking like an outside place, in an inside mall that was trying to look like an outside shopping street, except it had carpets.

“You want to get coffee?” he asked.

Jodie smiled and shook her head. “First we shop, then we get coffee.”

She led him toward an escalator. He smiled. He knew how she was feeling. He had felt the same, fifteen years before. She had come with him, nervous and tentative, on a routine visit to the glass house in Manila. Familiar territory to him, just routine, really nothing at all. But new and strange to her. He had felt busy and happy, and somehow educational. It had been fun being with her, showing her around. Now she was feeling the same thing. All this mall stuff was nothing to her. She had come home to America a long time ago and learned its details. Now he was the stranger in her territory.

“What about this place?” she called to him.

It wasn’t the Gap. It was some one-off store, heavily designed with weathered shingles and timbers rescued from some old barn. The clothes were made from heavy cottons and dyed in subdued colors, and they were artfully displayed in the beds of old farm carts with iron-banded wheels.

He shrugged. “Looks OK to me.”

She took his hand. Her palm felt cool and slim against his. She led him inside and put her hair behind her ears and bent and started looking through the displays. She did it the way he’d seen other women do it. She used little flicks of her wrist to put together assemblages of different items. A pair of pants, still folded, laid over the bottom half of a shirt. A jacket laid sideways over both of them, with the shirt peeping out at the top, and the pants showing at the bottom. Half-closed eyes, pursed lips. A shake of the head. A different shirt. A nod. Real shopping.

“What do you think?” she asked.

She had put together a pair of pants, khaki, but a little darker than most chinos. A shirt in a quiet check, greens and browns. A thin jacket in dark brown which seemed to match the rest pretty well. He nodded.

“Looks OK to me,” he said again.

The prices were handwritten on small tickets attached to the garments with string. He flicked one over with his fingernail.

“Christ,” he said. “Forget about it.”

“It’s worth it,” she said. “Quality’s good.”

“I can’t afford it, Jodie.”

The shirt on its own was twice what he had ever paid for a whole outfit. To dress in that stuff was going to cost him what he had earned in a day, digging pools. Ten hours, four tons of sand and rock and earth.

“I’ll buy them for you.”

He stood there with the shirt in his hands, uncertain.

“Remember the necklace?” she asked.

He nodded. He remembered. She had developed a passion for a particular necklace in a Manila jeweler’s. It was a plain gold thing, like a rope, vaguely Egyptian. Not really expensive, but out of her league. Leon was into some self-discipline thing with her and wouldn’t spring for it. So Reacher had bought it for her. Not for her birthday or anything, just because he liked her and she liked it.

“I was so happy,” she said. “I thought I was going to burst. I’ve still got it, I still wear it. So let me pay you back, OK?”

He thought about it. Nodded.

“OK,” he said.

She could afford it. She was a lawyer. Probably made a fortune. And it was a fair trade, looking at it in proportion, cost-versus-income, fifteen years of inflation.

“OK,” he said again. “Thanks, Jodie.”

“You need socks and things, right?”

They picked out a pair of khaki socks and a pair of white boxers. She went to a till and used a gold card. He took the stuff into a changing cubicle and tore off the price tickets and put everything on. He transferred his cash from his pants pocket and left the old clothes in the trash can. The new stuff felt stiff, but it looked pretty good in the mirror, against his tan. He came back out.

“Nice,” Jodie said. “Pharmacy next.”

“Then coffee,” he said.

He bought a razor and a can of foam and a toothbrush and toothpaste. And a small tube of burn ointment. Paid for it all himself and carried it in a brown paper bag. The walk to the pharmacy had taken them near a food court. He could see a rib place that smelled good.

“Let’s have di

“OK,” she said, and linked her arm through his again.

The di

“OK, home,” he said. “And we play it real cautious from here.”

They walked through the department store, through the displays in reverse, first the pastel summer cottons and then the fierce smell of the cosmetics. He stopped her inside the brass-and-glass doors and sca

“Which way would you normally go?”

“From here? FDR Drive, I guess.”

“OK,” he said. “Head out for LaGuardia, and we’ll come in down through Brooklyn. Over the Brooklyn Bridge.”

She looked at him. “You sure? You want to do the tourist thing, there are better places to go than the Bronx and Brooklyn.”

“First rule,” he said. “Predictability is unsafe. If you’ve got a route you’d normally take, today we take a different one.”

“You serious?”

“You bet your ass. I used to do VIP protection for a living.”

“I’m a VIP now?”

“You bet your ass,” he said again.

AN HOUR LATER it was dark, which is the best condition for using the Brooklyn Bridge. Reacher felt like a tourist as they swooped around the ramp and up over the hump of the span and lower Manhattan was suddenly there in front of them with a billion bright lights everywhere. One of the world’s great sights, he thought, and he had inspected most of the competition.