“Run it all again. Triple-check.”
“Don’t sweat it, chief. It adds up.”
“Just do it, OK?”
The guy nodded. It was Stone’s company, after all. He ran it again, the whole calculation, beginning to end, and it came out just the same. Hobie’s one-point-one disappeared as the blizzard of paychecks cleared, the two suppliers went hungry, the interest got paid, the payments came in from the wholesalers, Hobie got his one-point- one back, the suppliers got paid late, and the sheet ended up showing the same trivial seven-thousand-dollar surplus in their favor.
“Don’t sweat it,” the guy said again. “It works out.”
Stone was staring at the screen, wondering if that spare seven grand would buy Marilyn a trip to Europe. Probably not. Not a six-week trip, anyway. And it would alert her. It would worry her. She’d ask him why he was making her go. And he’d have to tell her. She was very smart. Smart enough to get it out of him, one way or another. And then she would refuse to go to Europe, and she would end up lying awake every night for six weeks, too.
THE SUITCASE WAS still there, lying on the front lawn. There was a bullet hole punched in one end. No exit hole. The bullet must have gone through the leather, through the sturdy plywood carcass, and burned to a stop against the packed paper inside. Reacher smiled and carried it back to join Jodie over at the garage.
They left the jeep on the blacktop apron and went in the same way they had come out. Closed up the roller door and walked through to the breezeway. Locked the inside door behind them with the green key and walked through to the kitchen. Locked that door behind them and stepped past Jodie’s abandoned garment bag in the hallway. Reacher carried the suitcase into the living room. More space and more light there than in the den.
He opened the case and lifted the concertina files out onto the floor. The bullet fell out with them and bounced on the rug. It was a standard nine-millimeter Parabellum, full copper jacket. Slightly flattened on the nose from the impact with the old plywood, but otherwise unmarked. The paper had slowed it to a complete stop in the space of about eighteen inches. He could see the hole punched all the way through half the files. He weighed the bullet in his palm, and then he saw Jodie at the door, watching him. He tossed the bullet to her. She caught it, one- handed.
“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.
Reacher grinned back at her and squeezed her arm again. Then he leafed through the medical junk and picked out a letterhead.
“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.
