“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 dinner,” she said.
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 planning their shift. The overnight messages were stacked deep in the in-trays. There were calls from the hospitals, and reports from night-shift beat cops who had gone out to domestic disturbances. They all needed sifting and evaluating, and an itinerary had to be worked out, based on geography and urgency. It had been an average night in New York City, which meant O’Hallinan and Sark compiled a list of twenty-eight brand-new cases that required their attention, which meant the call to the Fifteenth Precinct traffic squad got delayed until ten minutes to eight in the morning. O’Hallinan dialed the number and reached the desk sergeant on the tenth ring.
“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.”
“Cayman Corporate Trust?” O’Hallinan asked. “That’s who owns our Tahoe.”
“Right,” the guy said. “The Bravada is down to a Mrs. Jodie Jacob, but it was reported stolen prior. That’s not your woman with the busted nose, is it?”
“Jodie Jacob? No, our woman is Sheryl somebody.”
“OK, probably the Suburban driver. Is she small?”
“Small enough, I guess,” O’Hallinan said. “Why?”
“The airbag deployed,” the guy said. “Possible a small woman could get injured that way, by the airbag. It happens.”
“You want to check it out?”
“No, our way of thinking, we got their vehicle, they want it, they’ll come to us.”
O’Hallinan hung up and Sark looked at her inquiringly.
“So what’s that about?” he asked. “Why would she say she walked into a door if it was really a car wreck?”
O’Hallinan shrugged. “Don’t know. And why would a real-estate woman from Westchester be driving for a firm out of the World Trade Center?”
“Could explain the injuries,” Sark said. “The airbag, maybe the rim of the steering wheel, that could have done it to her.”
“Maybe,” O’Hallinan said.
“So should we check it out?”
“We should try, I guess, because if it was a car wreck it makes it a closed instead of a probable.”
“OK, but don’t write it down anywhere, because if it wasn’t a car wreck it’ll make it open and pending again, which will be a total pain in the ass later.”
They stood up together and put their notebooks in their uniform pockets. Used the stairs and enjoyed the morning sun on the way across the yard to their cruiser.
THE SAME SUN rolled west and made it seven o’clock in St. Louis. It came in through an attic dormer and played its low beam across the four-poster from a new direction. Jodie had gotten up first, and she was in the shower. Reacher was alone in the warm bed, stretching out, aware of a muffled chirping sound somewhere in the room.