Tripwire

She leaned in and set the shower ru

“Go ahead,” she said. “It’ll do you good.”

He was numb. He just nodded and let the door handle go. Stood for a second and stripped off his undershirt and his boxers. Sat naked on the floor and took off his shoes and socks. She saw the yellow bruise on his side.

“They hit you?” she whispered.

He nodded again. Stood up and stepped into the stall. He stood under the torrent with his eyes closed and his mouth open. Then the water seemed to revive him. He found the soap and the shampoo and washed himself all over.

“Leave the water ru

It was true. The hot water was making the room comfortable. He stepped out and took a towel. Dabbed his face with it and wrapped it around his waist.

“And the noise means they can’t hear us talking,” she said. “And we need to talk, right?”

He shrugged, like there wasn’t much to talk about. “I don’t understand what you’re doing. There are no trustees. He’s going to find that out, and then he’ll just get mad.”

She was toweling her hair. She stopped and looked at him through the gathering cloud of steam. “We need a witness. Don’t you see that?”

“A witness to what?”

“To what happens,” she said. “David Forster will send some private detective over here, and what can Hobie do? We’ll just admit there is no trust, and then we’ll all of us go down to your bank, and we’ll hand Hobie the stock. In a public place, with a witness. A witness, and a sort of bodyguard. Then we can just walk away.”

“Will that work?”

“I think so,” she said. “He’s in some kind of a hurry. Can’t you see that? He’s got some kind of a deadline. He’s panicking. Our best bet is to delay as long as we can, and then just slip away, with a witness watching the whole thing and guarding us. Hobie will be too uptight about time to react.”

“I don’t understand,” he said again. “You mean this private dick will testify we were acting under duress? You mean so we can sue Hobie to get the stock back?”

She was quiet for a beat. Amazed. “No, Chester, we’re not going to sue anybody. Hobie gets the stock, and we forget all about it.”

He stared at her through the steam. “But that’s no good. That won’t save the company. Not if it means Hobie gets the stock and we’ve got no comeback.”

She stared back at him. “God’s sake, Chester, don’t you understand anything? The company is gone. The company is history, and you better face it. This is not about saving the damn company. This is about saving our lives.”

THE SOUP WAS wonderful and the pork was even better. His mother would have been proud of it. They shared a half bottle of Californian wine and ate in contented silence. The restaurant was the sort of place that gave you a long pause between the entree and the dessert. No rush to get you out and reclaim the table. Reacher was enjoying the luxury. Not something he was used to. He sprawled back in his chair and stretched his legs out. His ankles were rubbing against Jodie’s, under the table.

“Think about his parents,” he said. “Think about him, as a kid. Open up the encyclopedia to N for ‘normal American family’ and you’re going to see a picture of the Hobies, all three of them, staring right out at you. I accept that ‘Nam changed people. I can see it kind of expanding his horizons a little. They knew that, too. They knew he wasn’t going to come back and work for some dumb little print shop in Brighton. They saw him going down to the rigs, flying around the gulf for the oil companies. But he would have kept in touch, right? To some extent? He wouldn’t have just abandoned them. That’s real cruelty, cold and consistent for thirty straight years. You see anything in his record that makes him that kind of a guy?”

“Maybe he did something,” she said. “Something shameful. Maybe something like My Lai, you know, a massacre or something? Maybe he was ashamed to go home. Maybe he’s hiding a guilty secret.”

He shook his head impatiently. “It would be in his record. And he didn’t have the opportunity, anyway. He was a helicopter pilot, not an infantryman. He never saw the enemy close up.”

The waiter came back with his pad and pencil.

“Dessert?” he asked. “Coffee?”

They ordered raspberry sorbet and black coffee. Jodie drained the last of her wine. It shone dull red in the glass in the candlelight.

“So what do we do?”

“He died,” Reacher said. “We’ll get the definitive evidence, sooner or later. Then we’ll go back and tell the old folks they’ve wasted thirty years fretting about it.”

“And what do we tell ourselves? We were attacked by a ghost?”

He shrugged and made no reply to that. The sorbet arrived and they ate it in silence. Then the coffee came, and the check in a padded leather folder bearing the restaurant logo printed in gold. Jodie laid her credit card on it without looking at the total. Then she smiled.

“Great di

He smiled back. “Great company.”

“Let’s forget all about Victor Hobie for a while,” she said.

“Who?” he asked, and she laughed.

“So what shall we think about instead?” she said.

He smiled. “I was thinking about your dress.”

“You like it?”

“I think it’s great,” he said.

“What?”

“But it could look better. You know, maybe thrown in a heap on the floor.”

“You think so?”

“I’m pretty sure,” he said. “But that’s just a guess, right now. I’d need some experimental data. You know, a before-and-after comparison.”

She sighed in mock exhaustion. “Reacher, we need to be up at seven. Early flights, right?”

“You’re young,” he said. “If I can take it, you sure as hell can.”

She smiled. Scraped her chair back and stood up. Stepped away from the table and turned a slow turn in the aisle. The dress moved with her. It looked wonderful from the back. Her hair was gold against it in the candlelight. She stepped close and bent down and whispered in his ear.

“OK, that’s the before part. Let’s go before you forget the comparison.”

SEVEN O’CLOCK IN the morning in New York happened an hour before seven o’clock in the morning in St. Louis, and O’Hallinan and Sark spent that hour in the squad room pla

“You towed a black Suburban,” she said. “It got wrecked on lower Broadway couple of days ago. You doing anything about it?”

There was the sound of the guy scraping through a pile of paperwork.

“It’s in the pound. You got an interest in it?”

“We got a woman with a busted nose in the hospital, got delivered there in a Tahoe owned by the same people.”

“Maybe she was the driver. We had three vehicles involved, and we only got one driver. There was the Suburban that caused the accident, driver disappeared. Then there was an Olds Bravada which drove away into an alley, driver and passenger disappeared. The Suburban was corporate, some financial trust in the district.”