Tripwire

“And who was this Leon Garber, exactly? Why all the soldiers at his wake?”

“Military policeman,” the first guy said.

The second guy nodded. “Mustered out with three stars and more medals than you can count, served forty years, Korea, Vietnam, everywhere.”

Hobie stopped tapping. He sat still and the color drained out of his face, leaving his skin dead white, all except for the shiny pink burn scars that glowed vivid in the gloom.

“Military policeman,” he repeated quietly.

He sat for a long time with those words on his lips. He just sat and stared into space, and then he lifted his hook off the desk and rotated it in front of his eyes, slowly, examining it, allowing the thin beams of light from the blinds to catch its curves and contours. It was trembling, so he took it in his left hand and held it still.

“Military policeman,” he said again, staring at the hook. Then he transferred his gaze to the two men on the sofas.

“Leave the room,” he said to the second guy.

The guy glanced once at his partner and went out and closed the door softly behind him. Hobie pushed back in his chair and stood up. Came out from behind the desk and stepped over and stopped still, directly behind the first guy, who just sat there on his sofa, not moving, not daring to turn around and look.

He wore a size sixteen collar, which made his neck a fraction over five inches in diameter, assuming a human neck is more or less a uniform cylinder, which was an approximation Hobie had always been happy to make. Hobie’s hook was a simple steel curve, like a capital letter J, generously sized. The inside diameter of the curve was four and three-quarter inches. He moved fast, darting the hook out and forcing it over the guy’s throat from behind. He stepped back and pulled with all his strength. The guy threw himself upward and backward, his fingers scrabbling under the cold metal to relieve the gagging pressure. Hobie smiled and pulled harder. The hook was riveted to a heavy leather cup and a matching shaped corset, the cup over the remains of his forearm, the corset buckled tight over his bicep above his elbow. The forearm assembly was just a stabilizer. It was the upper corset, smaller than the bulge of his elbow joint, that took all the strain and made it impossible for the hook to be separated from the stump. He pulled until the gagging turned to fractured wheezing and the redness in the guy’s face began to turn blue. Then he eased off an inch and bent close to the guy’s ear.

“He had a big bruise on his face. What the hell was that about?”

The guy was wheezing and gesturing wildly. Hobie twisted the hook, which relieved the pressure on the guy’s voice box, but brought the tip up into the soft area under his ear.

“What the hell was that about?” he asked again.

The guy knew that with the hook at that angle any extra rearward pressure was going to put the tip right through his skin into that vulnerable triangle behind the jaw. He didn’t know much about anatomy, but he knew he was a half inch away from dying.

“I’ll tell you,” he wheezed. “I’ll tell you.”

Hobie kept the hook in position, twisting it every time the guy hesitated, so the whole true story took no longer than three minutes, beginning to end.

“You failed me,” Hobie said.

“Yes, we did,” the guy gasped. “But it was his fault. He got all tangled up behind the screen door. He was useless.”

Hobie jerked the hook.

“As opposed to what? Like he’s useless and you’re useful?”

“It was his fault,” the guy gasped again. “I’m still useful.”

“You’re going to have to prove that to me.”

“How?” the guy wheezed. “Please, how? Just tell me.”

“Easy. You can do something for me.”

“Yes,” the guy gasped. “Yes, anything, please.”

“Bring me Mrs. Jacob,” Hobie screamed at him.

“Yes,” the guy screamed back.

“And don’t screw up again,” Hobie screamed.

“No,” the guy gasped. “No, we won’t, I promise.”

Hobie jerked the hook again, twice, in time with his words.

“Not we. Just you. Because you can do something else for me.”

“What?” the guy wheezed. “Yes, what? Anything.”

“Get rid of your useless partner,” Hobie whispered. “Tonight, on the boat.”

The guy nodded as vigorously as the hook would allow his head to move. Hobie leaned forward and slipped the hook away. The guy collapsed sideways, gasping and retching into the fabric on the sofa.

“And bring me his right hand,” Hobie whispered. “To prove it.”

THEY FOUND THAT the clinic Leon had been attending was not really a place in its own right, but just an administrative unit within a giant private hospital facility serving the whole of lower Putnam County. There was a ten-story white building set in parkland, with medical practices of every description clustered around its base. Small roads snaked through tasteful landscaping and led to little cul-de-sacs ringed with low offices for the doctors and the dentists. Anything the professions couldn’t handle in the offices got transferred to rented beds inside the main building. Thus the cardiology clinic was a notional entity, made up of a changing population of doctors and patients depending on who was sick and how bad they were. Leon’s own correspondence showed he had been seen in several different physical locations, ranging from the ICU at the outset to the recovery ward, then to one of the outpatient offices, then back to the ICU for his final visit.

The name of the supervising cardiologist was the only constant feature throughout the paperwork, a Dr. McBannerman, who Reacher pictured in his mind as a kindly old guy, white hair, erudite, wise and sympathetic, maybe of ancient Scottish extraction, until Jodie told him she had met with her several times and she was a woman from Baltimore aged about thirty-five. He was driving Jodie’s jeep around the small, curving roads, while she was scanning left and right for the correct office. She recognized it at the end of a cul-de-sac, a low brick structure, white trim, somehow glowing with an antiseptic halo like medical buildings do. There were a half dozen cars parked outside, with one spare slot which Reacher backed into.

The receptionist was a heavy old busybody who welcomed Jodie with a measure of sympathy. She invited them to wait in McBannerman’s inner office, which earned them glares from the other patients in the waiting room. The inner office was an inoffensive place, pale and sterile and silent, with a token examination table and a large colored cutaway diagram of the human heart on the wall behind the desk. Jodie was staring up at it like she was asking so which part finally failed? Reacher could feel his own heart, huge and muscular and thumping gently in his chest. He could feel the blood pumping and the pulses ticking in his wrists and his neck.

They waited like that for ten minutes, and then the inner door opened and Dr. McBannerman stepped in, a plain dark-haired woman in a white coat, a stethoscope around her neck like a badge of office, and concern in her face.

“Jodie,” she said, “I’m terribly sorry about Leon.”

It was 99 percent genuine, but there was a stray edge of worry there, too. She’s worried about a malpractice suit, Reacher thought. The patient’s daughter was a lawyer, and she was right there in her office straight from the funeral ceremony. Jodie caught it, too, and she nodded, a reassuring little gesture.

“I just came to say thank you. You were absolutely wonderful, every step of the way. He couldn’t have had better care.”

McBannerman relaxed. The one percent of worry washed away. She smiled and Jodie glanced up at the big diagram again.

“So which part finally failed?” she asked.

McBannerman followed her gaze and shrugged gently.

“Well, all of it, really, I’m afraid. It’s a big complex muscle, it beats and it beats, thirty million times a year. If it lasts twenty-seven hundred million beats, which is ninety years, we call it old age. If it lasts only eighteen hundred million beats, sixty years, we call it premature heart disease. We call it America’s biggest health problem, but really all we’re saying is sooner or later, it just stops going.”