Running Blind

“There’s nothing I want more,” he said. “Like you want to make partner, I want to be free.”

“Free of me too?” she asked, quietly.

“Free of the house,” he said. “It’s a burden. Like an anchor. You’re not.”

She unwrapped her arms from his neck and propped herself on an elbow.

“I don’t believe you,” she said. “The house anchors you and you don’t like it, but I anchor you too, don’t I?”

“The house makes me feel bad,” he said. “You make me feel good. I only know how I feel.”

“So you’d sell the house but you’d stick around New York?”

He was quiet for a beat.

“I’d maybe move around a little,” he said. “You travel. You’re busy a lot of the time. We could make it work.”

“We’d drift apart.”

“I don’t think so.”

“You’d stay away longer and longer.”

He shook his head. “It’ll be the same as it’s been all year. Except I won’t have the house to worry about.”

“You’ve made up your mind, right?”

He nodded. “It’s driving me crazy. I don’t even know the zip code. Presumably because I don’t want to know, deep down.”

“You don’t need my permission,” she said again.

Then she was silent.

“You upset?” he asked, uselessly.

“Worried,” she said.

“It won’t change anything,” he said.

“So why do it?”

“Because I have to.”

She didn’t reply.

THEY FELL ASLEEP like that, in each other’s arms, with a strand of melancholy laced through the afterglow. Morning came and there was no time for more talk. Jodie showered and left with no breakfast and without asking him what he was doing or when he’d be back. He showered and dressed and locked up the apartment and rode down to the street and found Lisa Harper waiting for him. She was dressed in her third suit and she was leaning on the fender of the Bureau car. The day was bright with cold sun and the light was on her hair. The car was stopped at the curb with angry traffic swarming around it. The Bureau driver was motionless behind the wheel, staring straight ahead. The air was full of noise.

“You OK?” she asked.

He shrugged. “I guess.”

“So let’s go.”

The driver fought traffic twenty blocks uptown and went underground into the same crowded garage Lamarr had brought him to. They used the same elevator in the corner. Rode up to the twenty-first floor. Stepped out into the same quiet gray corridor. The driver preceded them like a host and pointed to his left.

“Third door,” he said.

James Cozo was behind his desk and looked as though he might have been there for an hour. He was in shirtsleeves. His jacket was on a hanger on a bentwood hat stand. He was watching television, political cable, an earnest reporter in front of the Capitol, rapid cutaways to the Hoover Building. The budget hearings.

“The return of the vigilante,” he said.

He nodded to Harper and closed a file. Muted the television sound and pushed back from his desk and rubbed his hands over his narrow face, like he was washing without water.

“So what do you want?” he asked.

“Addresses,” Reacher said. “For Petrosian’s boys.”

“The two you put in the hospital? They won’t be pleased to see you.”

“They’ll be pleased to see me leave.”

“You going to hurt them again?”

“Probably.”

Cozo nodded. “Suits me, pal.”

He pulled a file from a stack and rooted through it. Copied an address onto a slip of paper.

“They live together,” he said. “They’re brothers.”

Then he thought again and tore the paper into shreds. Reversed the open file on the desk and took a new sheet of paper. Tossed a pencil on top of it.

“You copy it,” he said. “Don’t want my handwriting anywhere near this, literally or metaphorically.”

The address was near Fifth, on Sixty-sixth Street.

“Nice neighborhood,” Reacher said. “Expensive.”

Cozo nodded again. “Lucrative operation.”

Then he smiled.

“Well, it was,” he said. “Until you got busy down in Chinatown.”

Reacher said nothing.

“Take a taxi,” Cozo said to Harper. “And you stay out of the way. No overt Bureau involvement here, OK?”

She nodded, reluctantly.

“Have fun,” Cozo said.

THEY WALKED OVER to Madison with Harper craning like a tourist. Caught a cab uptown and got out on the corner of Sixtieth Street.

“We’ll walk the rest of the way,” Reacher said.

“We?” Harper said. “Good. I want to stay involved.”

“You have to stay involved,” Reacher said. “Because I won’t get in without you.”

The address led them six blocks north to a plain, medium-height apartment building faced with gray brick. Metal window frames, no balconies. Air conditioners built through the walls under the windows. No awning over the sidewalk, no doorman. But it was clean and well kept.

“Expensive place?” Harper asked.

Reacher shrugged. “I don’t know. Not the most expensive, I guess. But they won’t be giving them away.”

The street door was open. The lobby was narrow, with hard stucco walls carefully streaked with paint so they looked a little like marble. There was a single elevator at the back of the lobby, with a narrow brown door.

The apartment they wanted was on the eighth floor. Reacher touched the elevator button and the door rolled back. The car was lined with bronze mirror on all four sides. Harper stepped in and Reacher crowded after her. Pressed 8. An infinite number of reflections rode up with them.

“You knock on their door,” Reacher said. “Get them to open up. They won’t if they see me in the spyhole.”

She nodded and the elevator stopped on 8. The door rolled back. They stepped out on a dull landing the same shape as the lobby. The apartment they were looking for was in the back of the building on the right.

Reacher stood flat against the wall and Harper stood in front of the door. She bent forward and then back to flip her hair off her face. Took a breath and raised her hand and knocked on the door. Nothing happened for a moment. Then Harper stiffened like she was under scrutiny. There was a rattle of chain from the inside and the door opened a crack.

“Building management,” Harper said. “I need to check the air conditioners.”

Wrong season, Reacher thought. But Harper was more than six feet tall and had blond hair more than a yard long and her hands in her pockets so the front of her shirt was pulled tight. The door pushed shut for a second and the chain rattled again and the door swung back. Harper stepped inside like she was accepting a gracious invitation.

Reacher peeled off the wall and followed her in before the door closed again. It was a small dark apartment with a view of the light well. Everything was brown, rugs, furniture, drapes. There was a small foyer opening to a small living room. The living room held a sofa and two armchairs, and Harper. And both of the guys Reacher had last seen leaving the alley behind Mostro’s.

“Hey, guys,” he said.