The Hard Way

  "Did he kidnap her?"

  Hobart nodded, slowly, painfully. "Drove her to the store, but didn't stop there. Just pulled a gun and kept on going, all the way to New Jersey. Killed her there."

  "Immediately?" Pauling asked.

  Hobart said, "Yes, immediately. She was dead a day before you ever even heard of her. There was nothing wrong with your procedures. He killed her that first morning and drove back and waited outside the store until it was time to sound the alarms."

  "Not possible," Pauling said. "His EZ-Pass records showed he hadn't used a bridge or a tunnel that day."

  "Give me a break," Hobart said. "You pull the tag off the windshield and put it in the foil packet they mailed it in. Then you use a cash lane."

  "Were you really in Philadelphia?" Reacher asked.

  "Yes, I really was," Hobart said.

  "Did you know what Knight was doing that day?"

  "No, I really didn't."

  "Who faked Anne's voice on the phone?" Pauling asked. "Who set up the ransom drop?"

  "Sometimes Knight would say it was a couple of his buddies. Sometimes he would say Lane took care of all of that."

  "Which version did you believe?"

  Hobart's head dropped to his chest and canted left. He stared toward the floor. Reacher asked, "Can I

  get you something?"

  "I'm just looking at your shoes," Hobart said. "I like nice shoes, too. Or at least I did."

  "You'll get prosthetics. You can wear shoes with them."

  "Can't afford them. Prosthetics, or shoes."

  Pauling said, "What was the truth about Anne Lane?"

  Hobart pulled his head back to the cushion so he could look straight up at Pauling. He smiled, sadly.

  "The truth about Anne Lane?" he said. "I thought about that a lot. Believe me, I obsessed over it. It became the central question of my life, because basically it was responsible for what was happening to me. The third birthday I spent in there, they took me back to the courtyard. The second choice was phrased slightly different. Long sleeves or short? Stupid question, really. Nobody ever chose short sleeves. I mean, who the hell would? I saw a thousand amputees in there and nobody ever took it above the elbow."

  Silence in the room.

  "The things you remember," Hobart said. "I remember the stink of the blood and the tar bucket and the pile of severed hands behind that big stone block. A bunch of black ones and one little white one."

  Pauling asked, "What was the truth about Anne?"

  "The waiting was the hardest part. I spent a year looking at my right hand. Doing things with it. Making a fist, spreading my fingers, scratching myself with my nails."

  "Why did Knight kill Anne Lane?"

  "They weren't having an affair. Not possible. Knight wasn't that type of a guy. I'm not saying he had scruples. He was just a little timid around women, that's all. He did OK with trash in bars or with hookers, but Anne Lane was way out of his league. She was classy, she had personality, she had energy, she knew

  who she was. She was intelligent. She wouldn't have responded to the kind of thing that Knight had to offer. Not in a million years. And Knight wouldn't have offered anything anyway, because Anne was the CO's wife. That's the biggest no-no of all time for an American fighting man. In the movies they show it maybe, but not in real life. Just wouldn't happen, and if it did, Knight would have been the last Marine on earth to try it."

  "You sure?"

  "I knew him very well. And he didn't have the kind of buddies that could have faked the voices.

  Certainly not a woman's voice. He had no women friends. He didn't have any friends outside of me and the unit. Not really. Not close enough for work like that. What Marine does? That's when I knew he was bullshitting. There was nobody he knew where he could just walk up to them and say, hey, help me out with this phony kidnap thing, why don't you?"

  "So why did he even try bullshitting you?"

  "Because he understood better than me that reality was over for us. There was really no difference between truth and fantasy for us at that point. They were of absolutely equal value. He was just amusing himself. Maybe he was trying to amuse me, too. But I was still analyzing stuff. He gave me a whole rainbow of reasons and details and facts and scenarios and I checked them over very carefully in my mind for five long years and the only story I really believed was that Lane set the whole thing up because Anne wanted out of the marriage. She wanted a divorce and she wanted alimony and Lane's ego couldn't take it. So he had her killed."

  "Why would Lane want Knight dead if all he had done was act on Lane's own orders?"

  "Lane was covering his ass. Tying up the loose ends. And he was avoiding being in someone else's debt. That was the main thing, really. Ultimately that was the true reason. A guy like Lane, his ego couldn't take that, either. Being grateful to someone."

  Silence in the room.

  "What happened to Knight in the end?" Reacher asked.

  "His fourth birthday," Hobart said. "He didn't go for the bucket. He didn't want to go on. The pussy just quit on me. Some damn jarhead he was.

  CHAPTER

  42

  TEN MINUTES LATER Dee Marie Graziano got home. The squawk box in the hallway sounded and

  she asked for help carrying packages up the stairs. Reacher went down four flights and hauled four grocery bags back up to the apartment. Dee Marie unpacked them in the kitchen. She had bought a lot of soup, and Jell-O, and painkillers, and antiseptic creams.

  Reacher said, "We heard that Kate Lane had a visitor in the Hamptons." Dee Marie said nothing.

  "Was it you?" Reacher asked.

  "I went to the Dakota first," she said. "But the doorman told me they were away."

  "So then you went."

  "Two days later. We decided that I should. It was a long day. Very expensive."

  "You went there to warn Anne Lane's successor."

  "We thought she should be told what her husband was capable of doing."

  "How did she react?"

  "She listened. We walked on the sand and she listened to what I had to say."

  "That was all?"

  "She took it all in. Didn't react much."

  "How definite were you?"

  "I said we had no proof. Equally I said we had no doubt."

  "And she didn't react?"

  "She just took it all in. Gave it a fair hearing."

  "Did you tell her about your brother?"

  "It's a part of the story. She listened to it. Didn't say much. She's beautiful and she's rich. People like that are different. If it's not happening to them, it's not happening at all."

  "What happened to your husband?"

  "Vinnie? Iraq happened to Vinnie. Fallujah. A roadside booby-trap."

  "I'm sorry."

  "They told me he was killed instantly. But they always say that."

  "Sometimes it's true."

  "I hope it was. Just that one time."

  "The Corps or private?"

  "Vinnie? The Corps. Vinnie hated private contractors."

  Reacher left Dee Marie in the kitchen and stepped back into the living room. Hobart's head was laid back and his lips were stretched in a grimace. His neck was thin and bulging with ligaments. His torso was painfully wasted and looked bizarrely long in proportion to the stumps of his limbs.

  "You need anything?" Reacher asked him. Hobart said, "Silly question."

  "What would the three of clubs mean to you?"

  "Knight."

  "How so?"

  "Three was his lucky number. Club was his nickname in the Corps. Because of how he liked to party, and because of the pun on his name. Knight Club, nightclub, like that. They called him Club, back in the day."

  "He left a playing card on Anne Lane's body. The three of clubs."

  "He did? He told me that. I didn't believe him. I thought it was embellishment. Like a book or a movie." Reacher said nothing.

  "I need the bathroom," Hobart said. "Tell Dee."

  "I'll
do it," Reacher said. "Let's give Dee a break."

  He stepped over and bunched the front of Hobart's shirt and hauled him upright. Slipped an arm behind his shoulders. Ducked down and caught him under the knees and lifted him up off the sofa. He was incredibly light. Probably close to a hundred pounds. Not much of him left.

  Reacher carried Hobart to the bathroom and grabbed the front of his shirt again one-handed and held him vertical in the air like a rag doll. Undid his pants and eased them down.

  "You've done this before," Hobart said.

  "I was an MP," Reacher said. "I've done everything before."

  Reacher put Hobart back on the sofa and Dee Marie fed him more soup. Used the same damp cloth to clean his chin.

  Reacher said, "I need to ask you both one important question. I need to know where you've been and what you've been doing for the last four days."

  Dee Marie answered. No guile, no hesitation, nothing phony or overrehearsed. Just a slightly incoherent and therefore completely convincing pieced-together narrative account of four random days from an ongoing nightmare. The four days had started with Hobart in Saint Vincent's hospital. Dee Marie had taken him to the ER the night before with a severe malaria relapse. The ER doctor had admitted him for

  forty-eight hours of IV medication. Dee Marie had stayed with him most of the time. Then she had brought him home in a taxi and carried him on her back up the four flights of stairs. They had been alone in the apartment since then, eating what was in the kitchen cupboards, doing nothing, seeing nobody, until their door had smashed open and Reacher had ended up in the middle of their living room.

  "Why are you asking?" Hobart said.

  "The new Mrs. Lane was kidnapped. And her kid."

  "You thought I did it?"

  "For a spell."

  "Think again."

  "I already have."

  "Why would I?"

  "For revenge. For money. The ransom was exactly half the Burkina Faso payment."

  "I would have wanted all of it."

  "Me too."

  "But I wouldn't have gone after a woman and a kid."

  "Me either."

  "So why pick me out?"

  "We got a basic report on you and Knight. We heard about mutilations. No specific details. Then we heard about a guy with no tongue. We put two and two together and made three. We thought it was you."

  "No tongue?" Hobart said. "I wish. I'd take that deal." Then he said, "But no tongue is a South American thing. Brazil, Colombia, Peru. Maybe Sicily in Europe. Not Africa. You can't get a machete in somebody's mouth. Lips, maybe. I saw that, sometimes. Or ears. But not the tongue."

  "We apologize," Pauling said.

  "No harm, no foul," Hobart said.

  "We'll have the door fixed."

  "I'd appreciate that."

  "And we'll help you if we can."

  "I'd appreciate that, too. But see to the woman and the child first."

  "We think we're already too late."

  "Don't say that. It depends who took them. Where there's hope, there's life. Hope kept me going, five hard years."

  Reacher and Pauling left Hobart and Dee Marie right there, together on their battered sofa, the bowl of soup half-gone. They walked down four flights to the street and stepped out into the afternoon shadows of a fabulous late-summer day. Traffic ground past on the street, slow and angry. Horns blared and sirens barked. Fast pedestrians swerved by on the sidewalk.

  Reacher said, "Eight million stories in the naked city." Pauling said, "We're nowhere."

  CHAPTER

  43

  REACHER LED PAULING north on Hudson, across Houston, to the block between Clarkson and

  Leroy. He said, "I think the man with no tongue lives near this spot."

  "Twenty thousand people live near this spot," Pauling said. Reacher didn't reply.

  "What now?" Pauling said.

  "Back to the hard way. We wasted some time, that's all. Wasted some energy. My fault entirely. I was stupid."

  "How?"

  "Did you see how Hobart was dressed?"

  "Cheap new denims."

  "The guy I saw driving the cars away was wearing old denims. Both times. Old, soft, washed, worn, faded, comfortable denims. The Soviet super said the same thing. And the old Chinese man. No way was the guy I saw just back from Africa. Or back from anywhere. It takes ages to get jeans and a shirt looking like that. The guy I saw has been safe at home for five years doing his laundry, not jammed up in some hellhole jail."

  Pauling said nothing.

  "You can split now," Reacher said. "You got what you wanted. Anne Lane wasn't your fault. She was dead before you ever even heard of her. You can sleep at night."

  "But not well. Because I can't touch Edward Lane. Hobart's testimony is meaningless."

  "Because it's hearsay?"

  "Hearsay is sometimes OK. Knight's dying declaration would be admissible, because the court would assume he had no motive to lie from his deathbed."

  "So what's the problem?"

  "There was no dying declaration. There were dozens of random fantasies spun over a four-year period. Hobart chose to back one of them, that's all. And he freely admits that both he and Knight were as good as insane most of the time. I'd be laughed out of court, literally."

  "But you believed him."

  Pauling nodded. "No question."

  "So you can settle for half a loaf. Patti Joseph, too. I'll drop by and tell her."