Ли Чайлд - Этаж смерти with W_cat

[ 1119] “You’re happy with my alibi, right?” I said.

[ 1120] He saw where I was going. Like we were colleagues on a knotty case. He flashed me a brief grin.

[ 1121] “It held up,” he said. “You were in Tampa when this was going down.”

[ 1122] “OK,” I said. “And is Chief Morrison comfortable with that?”

[ 1123] “He doesn’t know about it,” Finlay said. “He’s not answering his phone.”

[ 1124] “I don’t want any more convenient mistakes,” I said. “The fat moron said he saw me up there. I want him to know that won’t fly anymore.”

[ 1125] Finlay nodded. Picked up the phone on the desk and dialed a number. I heard the faint purr of the ring tone from the earpiece. It rang for a long time and cut off when Finlay put the phone back down.

[ 1126] “Not at home,” he said. “Sunday, right?”

Then he pulled the phone book out of a drawer. Opened it to H. Looked up Hubble’s number on Beckman Drive. Dialed it and got the same result. A lot of ring tone and nobody home. Then he tried the mobile number. An electronic voice started to tell him the phone was switched off. He hung up before it finished.

[ 1127] “I’m going to bring Hubble in, when I find him,” Finlay said. “He knows stuff he should be telling us. Until then, not a lot I can do, right?”

[ 1128] I shrugged. He was right. It was a pretty cold trail. The only spark that Finlay knew about was the panic Hubble had shown on Friday.

[ 1129] “What are you going to do, Reacher?” he asked me.

[ 1130] “I’m going to think about that,” I said.

[ 1131] Finlay looked straight at me. Not unfriendly, but very serious, like he was trying to communicate an order and an appeal with a single stern eye-to-eye gaze.

[ 1132] “Let me deal with this, OK?” he said. “You’re going to feel pretty bad, and you’re going to want to see justice done, but I don’t want any independent action going on here, OK? This is police business. You’re a civilian. Let me deal with it, OK?”

[ 1133] I shrugged and nodded. Stood up and looked at them both.

[ 1134] “I’m going for a walk,” I said.

[ 1135] I LEFT THE TWO OF THEM THERE AND STROLLED THROUGH the squad room. Pushed out through the glass doors into the hot afternoon. Wandered through the parking lot and crossed the wide lawn in front, over as far as the bronze statue. It was another tribute to Caspar Teale, whoever the hell he had been. Same guy as on the village green on the southern edge of town. I leaned up against his warm metal flank and thought.

[ 1136] The United States is a giant country. Millions of square miles. Best part of three hundred million people. I hadn’t seen Joe for seven years, and he hadn’t seen me, but we’d ended up in exactly the same tiny spot, eight hours apart. I’d walked within fifty yards of where his body had been lying. That was one hell of a big coincidence. It was almost unbelievable. So Finlay was doing me a big favor by treating it like a coincidence. He should be trying to tear my alibi apart. Maybe he already was. Maybe he was already on the phone to Tampa, checking again.

[ 1137] But he wouldn’t find anything, because it was a coincidence. No point going over and over it. I was only in Margrave because of a crazy last-minute whim. If I’d taken a minute longer looking at the guy’s map, the bus would have been past the cloverleaf and I’d have forgotten all about Margrave. I’d have gone on up to Atlanta and never known anything about Joe. It might have taken another seven years before the news caught up with me. So there was no point getting all stirred up about the coincidence. The only thing I had to do was to decide what the hell I was going to do about it.

[ 1138] I was about four years old before I caught on to the loyalty thing. I suddenly figured I was supposed to watch out for Joe the way he was watching out for me. After a while, it became second nature, like an automatic thing. It was always in my head to scout around and check he was OK. Plenty of times I would run out into some new schoolyard and see a bunch of kids trying it on with the tall skinny newcomer. I’d trot over there and haul them off and bust a few heads. Then I’d go back to my own buddies and play ball or whatever we were doing. Duty done, like a routine. It was a routine which lasted twelve years, from when I was four right up to the time Joe finally left home. Twelve years of that routine must have left faint tracks in my mind, because forever afterward I always carried a faint echo of the question: where’s Joe? Once he was grown up and away, it didn’t much matter where he was. But I was always aware of the faint echo of that old routine. Deep down, I was always aware I was supposed to stand up for him, if I was needed.

[ 1139] But now he was dead. He wasn’t anywhere. I leaned up against the statue in front of the station house and listened to the tiny voice inside my head saying: you’re supposed to do something about that.

[ 1140] THE STATION HOUSE DOOR SUCKED OPEN. I SQUINTED through the heat and saw Roscoe step out. The sun was behind her and it lit her hair like a halo. She scanned around and saw me leaning on the statue in the middle of the lawn. Started over towards me. I pushed off the warm bronze.

[ 1141] “You OK?” she asked me.

[ 1142] “I’m fine,” I said.

[ 1143] “You sure?” she said.

[ 1144] “I’m not falling apart,” I said. “Maybe I should be, but I’m not. I just feel numb, to be honest.”

[ 1145] It was true. I wasn’t feeling much of anything. Maybe it was some kind of a weird reaction, but that was how I felt. No point in denying it.

[ 1146] “OK,” Roscoe said. “Can I give you a ride somewhere?”

[ 1147] Maybe Finlay had sent her out to keep track of me, but I wasn’t about to put up a whole lot of objections to that. She was standing there in the sun looking great. I realized I liked her more every time I looked at her.

[ 1148] “Want to show me where Hubble lives?” I asked her.

[ 1149] I could see her thinking about it.

[ 1150] “Shouldn’t we leave that to Finlay?” she said.

[ 1151] “I just want to see if he’s back home yet,” I said. “I’m not going to eat him. If he’s there, we’ll call Finlay right away, OK?”

[ 1152] “OK,” she said. She shrugged and smiled. “Let’s go.”

[ 1153] We walked together back over the lawn and got into her police Chevy. She started it up and pulled out of the lot. Turned left and rolled south through the perfect little town. It was a gorgeous September day. The bright sun turned it into a fantasy. The brick sidewalks were glowing and the white paint was blinding. The whole place was quiet and basking in the Sunday heat. Deserted.

[ 1154] Roscoe hung a right at the little village green and made the turn into Beckman Drive. Skirted around the square with the church on it. The cars were gone and the place was quiet. Worship was over. Beckman opened out into a wide tree-lined residential street, set on a slight rise. It had a rich feel. Cool and shady and prosperous. It was what real-estate people mean when they talk about location. I couldn’t see the houses. They were set far back behind wide grassy shoulders, big trees, high hedges. Their driveways wound out of sight. Occasionally I glimpsed a white portico or a red roof. The farther out we got, the bigger the lots became. Hundreds of yards between mailboxes. Enormous mature trees. A solid sort of a place. But a place with stories hiding behind the leafy facades. In Hubble’s case, some sort of a desperate story which had caused him to reach out to my brother. Some sort of a story which had got my brother killed.

[ 1155] Roscoe slowed at a white mailbox and turned left into the drive of number twenty-five. About a mile from town, on the left, its back to the afternoon sun. It was the last house on the road. Up ahead, peach groves stretched into the haze. We nosed slowly up a winding driveway around massed banks of garden. The house was not what I had imagined. I had pictured a big white place, like a normal house, but bigger. This was more splendid. A palace. It was huge. Every detail was expensive. Expanses of gravel drive, expanses of velvet lawn, huge exquisite trees, everything shining and dappled in the blazing sun. But there was no sign of the dark Bentley I’d seen up at the prison. It looked like there was nobody home.