Tripwire

They were looking at her, patiently. She tried to giggle again. They were looking at the patient, patiently. The man was balding. The illuminated ceiling was reflected in his shiny forehead. The woman had a tight perm, dyed orange, like a carrot. She was older than he was. She must have been fifty. She was a mother. Sheryl could tell that. She was gazing down with a kind expression, like a mother would.

“Can we sit down?” the woman asked.

Sheryl nodded. The thick liquid was buzzing in her temples, and it was confusing her. The woman scraped a chair across the floor and sat down on Sheryl’s right, away from the IV stand. The man sat directly behind her. The woman leaned toward the bed, and the man leaned the other way, so his head was visible in a line behind hers. They were close, and it was a struggle to focus on their faces.

“I’m Officer O’Hallinan,” the woman said.

Sheryl nodded again. The name suited her. The gingery hair, the heavy face, the heavy body, she needed an Irish name. And a lot of New York cops were Irish. Sheryl knew that. Sometimes it was like a family trade. One generation would follow the other.

“I’m Officer Sark,” the man said, from behind her.

He was pale. He had the sort of pale white skin that looks papery. He had shaved, but there was gray shadow showing. His eyes were deep set, but kindly. They were in a web of lines. He was an uncle. Sheryl was sure of that. He had nephews and nieces who liked him.

“We want you to tell us what happened,” the woman called O’Hallinan said.

Sheryl closed her eyes. She couldn’t really remember what happened. She knew she had stepped in through Marilyn’s door. She remembered the smell of rug shampoo. She remembered thinking that was a mistake. Maybe the client would wonder what needed covering up. Then she was suddenly on her back on the hallway floor with agony exploding from her nose.

“Can you tell us what happened?” the man called Sark asked.

“I walked into a door,” she whispered. Then she nodded, like she was confirming it to them. It was important. Marilyn had told her no police. Not yet.

“Which door?”

She didn’t know which door. Marilyn hadn’t told her. It was something they hadn’t talked about. Which door? She panicked.

“Office door,” she said.

“Is your office here in the city?” O’Hallinan asked.

Sheryl made no reply. She just stared blankly into the woman’s kindly face.

“Your insurance carrier says you work up in Westchester,” Sark said. “At a real estate broker in Pound Ridge.”

Sheryl nodded, cautiously.

“So you walked into your office door in Westchester,” O’Hallinan said. “And now you’re in the hospital fifty miles away in New York City.”

“How did that happen, Sheryl?” Sark asked.

She made no reply. There was silence inside the curtain area. Hissing and buzzing in her temples.

“We can help, you know,” O’Hallinan said. “That’s why we’re here. We’re here to help you. We can make sure this doesn’t happen again.”

Sheryl nodded again, cautiously.

“But you have to tell us how it came about. Does he do this often?”

Sheryl stared at her, confused.

“Is that why you’re down here?” Sark asked. “You know, new hospital, no records from the other times? If we were to ask up in Mount Kisco or White Plains, what would we find? Would we find they know you up there? From before, maybe? From the other times he’s done this to you?”

“I walked into a door,” Sheryl whispered.

O’Hallinan shook her head. “Sheryl, we know you didn’t.”

She stood up and peeled the X-ray films off the light box on the wall. Held them up to the light from the ceiling, like a doctor would.

“Here’s your nose,” she said, pointing. “Here’s your cheekbones, and here’s your brow, and here’s your chin. See here? Your nose is broken, and your cheekbones, Sheryl. There’s a depressed fracture. That’s what the doctor is calling it. A depressed fracture. The bones are pushed down below the level of your chin and your brow. But your chin and your brow are OK. So this was done by something horizontal, wasn’t it? Something like a bat? Swinging sideways?”

Sheryl stared at the films. They were gray and milky. Her bones looked like vague blurred shapes. Her eye sockets were enormous. The painkiller buzzed in her head, and she felt weak and sleepy.

“I walked into a door,” she whispered.

“The edge of a door is vertical,” Sark said, patiently. “There would be damage to your chin and your brow as well, wouldn’t there? It stands to reason, doesn’t it? If a vertical thing had depressed your cheekbones, it would have hit your brow and your chin pretty hard as well, wouldn’t it?”

He gazed at the X rays, sadly.

“We can help you,” O’Hallinan said. “You tell us all about it, and we can keep it from happening again. We can keep him from doing this to you again.”

“I want to sleep now,” Sheryl whispered.

O’Hallinan leaned forward and spoke softly. “Would it help if my partner left? You know, just you and me talking?”

“I walked into a door,” Sheryl whispered. “Now I want to go to sleep.”

O’Hallinan nodded, wisely and patiently. “I’ll leave you my card. So if you want to talk to me when you wake up, you can just call me, OK?”

Sheryl nodded vaguely and O’Hallinan slipped a card from her pocket and bent down and placed it on the cabinet next to the bed.

“Don’t forget, we can help you,” she whispered.

Sheryl made no reply. She was either asleep, or pretending to be. O’Hallinan and Sark pulled the curtain and walked away to the desk. The doctor looked up at them. O’Hallinan shook her head.

“Complete denial,” she said.

“Walked into a door,” Sark said. “A door who was probably juiced up, weighs about two hundred pounds and swings a baseball bat.”

The doctor shook her head. “Why on earth do they protect the bastards?”

A nurse looked up. “I saw her come in. It was really weird. I was on my cigarette break. She got out of a car, way on the far side of the street. Walked herself all the way in. Her shoes were too big, you notice that? There were two guys in the car, watched her every step of the way, and then they took off in a big hurry.”

“What was the car?” Sark asked.

“Big black thing,” the nurse said.

“You recall the plate?”

“What am I, Mr. Memory?”

O’Hallinan shrugged and started to move away.

“But it’ll be on the video,” the nurse said suddenly.

“What video?” Sark asked.

“Security camera, above the doors. We stand right underneath it, so the management can’t clock how long we take out there. So what we see, it sees, too.”

The exact time of Sheryl’s arrival was recorded in the paperwork at the desk. It took just a minute to wind the tape back to that point. Then another minute to run her slow walk in reverse, backward across the ambulance circle, across the plaza, across the sidewalk, through the traffic, into the front of a big black car. O’Hallinan bent her head close to the screen.

“Got it,” she said.

JODIE CHOSE THE hotel for the night. She did it by finding the travel section in the nearest bookstore to the NPRC building. She stood there and leafed through the local guides until she found a place recommended in three of them.

“It’s fu

Reacher was a little nervous. This method was new to him. The sort of places he normally patronized never advertised in books. They relied on neon signs on tall poles, boasting attractions that had stopped being attractions and had become basic human rights about twenty years ago, such as air and cable and a pool.

“Hold this,” she said.

He took the book from her and kept his thumb on the page while she squatted down and opened her carry-on. She rooted around and found her mobile phone. Took the book back from him and stood right there in the aisle and called the hotel. He watched her. He had never called a hotel. The places he stayed always had a room, no matter when. They were delirious if their occupancy rates ever made it above 50 percent. He listened to Jodie’s end of the conversation and heard her mentioning sums of money that would have bought him a bed for a month, given a little haggling.