Ли Чайлд - No Middle Name

The woman was very cold.

Reacher asked the cop, ‘How close is your vehicle?’

‘Further than the house.’

‘Only one choice then. I’ll carry her, and you carry her bag.’

‘Why is she even here? I thought a diamond was missing. Is someone injured?’

‘The daughter of the house is having a baby, all by herself. And the diamond isn’t missing. But we’ll worry about that later.’

‘Who are you?’

‘I was passing by. I thought they might give me a cup of coffee. Or even Christmas dinner.’

‘Why would they?’

‘I thought it might be a tradition.’

‘What did they say?’

‘They were preoccupied.’

Reacher lifted the woman into his arms. He stood up and turned around and set off back the way he had come. The cop floundered behind, shorter than Reacher, unable to use his premade footholds, and therefore slower. Reacher hustled hard, trying to generate surplus body heat, pressing the doctor close, trying to transfer it to her. She was coming around slowly. Reacher pounded onward. Then she woke up the rest of the way fast, and she started struggling in panic.

‘We’re on our way,’ Reacher panted. ‘She’s holding out for you.’

‘What time is it?’

‘About three hours later than you figured it would be.’

‘Who are you?’

‘Long story. Starts with a Dutchwoman. But that part’s not important now.’

‘Have the contractions started?’

‘Little ones, maybe. But no screaming or yelling yet. But she’s all alone.’

‘The stepmother has a phobia. I think she had a bad experience of her own.’

‘She said she never had kids.’

‘People like that usually do.’

Reacher turned in at the gate, and staggered for balance, and set off down the driveway, galumphing from one old footprint to the next, the policeman huffing and puffing twenty steps back. They made it to the door, which opened immediately, into a flurry of hot towels and warmed blankets. Eventually the doctor passed herself fit and hurried up the stairs. The house seemed to breathe out and relax. The colonel took up a position in the upstairs hallway, pacing back and forth in a traditional style, an about-to-be grandfather just as nervous as he must have been a generation before, as an about-to-be father.

The about-to-be step-grandmother got herself halfway up the stairs, holding the rail all the way, and then she stopped, unable to go further. But she kept on gazing upward. Just waiting.

The cop joined Reacher in the back corner of the downstairs hallway, and said, ‘Now tell me about the diamond.’

Reacher said, ‘It was described as a pendant. It was the first wife’s, not the second. As rich as these folks are, it must have been big enough and heavy enough to notice if it’s not there any more. So she didn’t lose it when they went out to dinner, which they did, because they’re in party clothes, and the cook left yesterday, before the snow. The daughter didn’t go with them tonight, but she saw them when they got back, because there was a big hoo-hah about her mother’s diamond, during which the stepmother no doubt took it off. Then later it’s missing, and because it was a big hoo-hah she doesn’t specifically remember taking it off, so she projects backward and thinks it was lost at the dinner party or a coat-check boy stole it.’

‘So where is it?’

‘The daughter picked it up. Her mother’s diamond. Partly a defensive instinct, but mostly because she was about to have a baby all alone, and she wanted the comfort of clutching something of her mother’s. Like a good-luck charm. They wasted your time. You’ll find it in her hand or under her pillow.’

‘Her baby’s being born on Christmas Day.’

‘So are a third of a million others. Don’t make a big deal out of it.’

‘You should go look in the kitchen. The cook will have prepared in advance. They won’t be eating today. Too nervous. You could get your Christmas dinner after all.’

And Reacher did, alone in Trout Hall’s basement kitchens, while above him the others waited. Then he left, and he never found out who was born there that day.

Just a few minutes before the terrifying opening of Gone Tomorrow, Jack Reacher stops at a bar in lower Manhattan and notices a rich young Russian girl who seems to be in danger.

SHE WAS ABOUT nineteen. No older. Maybe younger. An insurance company would have given her sixty more years to live. I figured a more accurate projection was thirty-six hours, or thirty-six minutes if things went wrong from the get-go.

She was blonde and blue-eyed, but not American. American girls have a glow, a smoothness, from many generations of plenty. This girl was different. Her ancestors had known Fardship and fear. That inheritance was in her face and her body and her movements. Her eyes were wary. Her body was lean. Not the kind of lean you get from a diet, but the Darwinian kind of lean you get when your grandparents had no food, and either starved or didn’t. Her movements were fragile and tense, a little alert, a little nervous, even though on the face of it she was having as good a time as a girl could get.

She was in a New York bar, drinking beer, listening to a band, and she was in love with the guitar player. That was clear. The part of her gaze that wasn’t wary was filled with adoration, and it was all aimed in his direction. She was probably Russian. She was rich. She was alone at a table near the stage and she had a pile of ATM-fresh twenties in front of her and she was paying for each new bottle with one of them and she wasn’t asking for change. The waitresses loved her. There was a guy further back in the room, wedged on an upholstered bench, staring at her. Her bodyguard, presumably. He was a tall wide man with a shaved head and a black T-shirt under a black suit. He was a part of the reason she was drinking beer in a city bar at the age of nineteen or less. It wasn’t the kind of glossy place that had a policy about underage rich girls, either for or against. It was a scruffy dive on Bleecker Street, staffed by skinny kids trying to make tuition money, and I guessed they had looked at her and her minder and taken a snap decision against trouble and in favour of tips.

I watched her for a minute, and then I looked away. My name is Jack Reacher, and once I was a military cop, with heavy emphasis on the past tense. I have been out nearly as long as I was in. But old habits die hard. I had stepped into the bar the same way I always step anywhere, which is carefully. One thirty in the morning. I had ridden the A train to West 4th and walked south on Sixth Avenue and made the left on Bleecker and checked the sidewalks. I wanted music, but not the kind that drives large numbers of patrons outside to smoke. The smallest knot of people was next to a place with half a flight of stairs leading up to its door. There was a shiny black Mercedes sedan parked on the kerb, with a driver behind the wheel. The music coming out of the place was filtered and dulled by the walls but I could hear an agile bass line and some snappy drumming. So I walked up the stairs and paid a five-dollar cover and shouldered my way inside.

Two exits. One the door I had just come through, the other indicated at the end of a long dark restroom corridor way in back. The room was narrow and about ninety feet deep. A bar on the left at the front, then some upholstered horseshoe benches, then a cluster of freestanding tables on what on other nights might have been a dance floor. Then the stage, with the band on it.

The band looked like it had been put together by accident after a misfiling incident at a talent agency. The bass player was a stout old black guy in a suit with a vest. He was plucking away at an upright bass fiddle. The drummer could have been his uncle. He was a big old guy sprawled comfortably behind a small simple kit. The singer was also a harmonica player and was older than the bass player and younger than the drummer and bigger than either one. Maybe sixty, built for comfort, not for speed.