Lee Child - Running Blind

She shook her head. “Save that stuff for the FBI, OK? You arranged it or provoked it or engineered it or whatever the correct phrase would be. You took him out, as surely as if you were standing right next to him with a gun.”

Reacher said nothing.

“And I told you not to do that,” she said.

Reacher said nothing.

“Deerfield knows you did it,” she said.

“He can’t prove it.”

“That doesn’t matter,” she said. “Don’t you see that? He can try to prove it. And he’s not kidding about the two years in jail. A suspicion of gang warfare? A thing like that, the courts will back him up all the way. Denial of bail, continuances, the prosecutors will really go to bat for him. It’s not an empty threat. He owns you now. Like I told you he would.”

Reacher said nothing.

“Why did you do it?”

He shrugged. “Lots of reasons. It needed doing.”

There was a long silence.

“Would my father have agreed with you?” Jodie asked.

“Leon?” Reacher said. He recalled the photographs in Cozo’s packet. The photographs of Petrosian’s handiwork. The dead women, displayed like centerfolds. Pieces missing, things inserted. “Are you kidding? Leon would have agreed with me in a heartbeat.”

“And would he have gone ahead and done what you did?”

“Probably.”

She nodded. “Yes, he probably would. But look around you, OK?”

“At what?”

“At everything. What do you see?”

He looked around. “An apartment.”

She nodded. “My apartment.”

“So?”

“Did I grow up here?”

“Of course not.”

“So where did I grow up?”

He shrugged. “All over the place, on Army bases, like I did.”

She nodded. “Where did you first meet me?”

“You know where. Manila. On the base.”

“Remember that bungalow?”

“Sure I do.”

She nodded. “So do I. It was tiny, it stank, and it had cockroaches bigger than my hand. And you know what? That was the best place I ever lived as a kid.”

“So?”

She was pointing at her briefcase. It was a leather pilot’s case, stuffed with legal paper, parked against the wall just inside the kitchen door. “What’s that?”

“Your briefcase.”

“Exactly. Not a rifle, not a carbine, not a flame-thrower. ”

“So?”

“So I live in a Manhattan apartment instead of base quarters, and I carry a briefcase instead of infantry weapons.”

He nodded. “I know you do.”

“But do you know why?”

“Because you want to, I guess.”

“Exactly. Because I want to . It was a conscious choice. My choice. I grew up in the Army, just like you did, and I could have joined up if I’d wanted to, just like you did. But I didn’t want to. I wanted to go to college and law school instead. I wanted to join a big firm and make partner. And why was that?”

“Why?”

“Because I wanted to live in a world with rules.”

“Plenty of rules in the Army,” he said.

“The wrong rules, Reacher. I wanted civilian rules. Civilized rules.”

“So what are you saying?”

“I’m saying I left the military all those years ago and I don’t want to be back in it now.”

“You’re not back in it.”

“But you make me feel that I am. Worse than the military. This thing with Petrosian? I don’t want to be in a world with rules like that. You know I don’t.”

“So what should I have done?”

“You shouldn’t have gotten into it in the first place. That night in the restaurant? You should have walked away and called the cops. That’s what we do here.”

“Here?”

“In the civilized world.”

He sat on her kitchen stool and leaned his forearms on her countertop. Spread his fingers wide and placed his palms down flat. The countertop was cold. It was some kind of granite, gray and shiny, milled to reveal tiny quartz speckles throughout its surface. The corners and angles were radiused into perfect quarter-circles. It was an inch thick, and probably very expensive. It was a civilized product. It belonged right there in a world where people agree to labor forty hours, or a hundred, or two hundred, and then exchange the remuneration they get for installations they hope will make their kitchens look nice, inside their expensive remodeled buildings high above Broadway.

“Why did you stop calling me?” she asked.

He looked down at his hands. They lay on the polished granite like the rough exposed roots of small trees.

“I figured you were safe,” he said. “I figured you were hiding out someplace.”

“You figured,” she repeated. “But you didn’t know.”

“I assumed,” he said. “I was taking care of Petrosian, I assumed you were taking care of yourself. I figured we know each other well enough to trust assumptions like that.”

“Like we were comrades,” she said softly. “In the same unit, a major and a captain maybe, in the middle of some tight dangerous mission, absolutely relying on each other to do our separate jobs properly.”

He nodded. “Exactly.”

“But I’m not a captain. I’m not in some unit. I’m a lawyer. A lawyer, in New York, all alone and afraid, caught up in something I don’t want to be caught up in.”

He nodded again. “I’m sorry.”

“And you’re not a major,” she said. “Not anymore. You’re a civilian. You need to get that straight.”

He nodded. Said nothing.

“And that’s the big problem, right?” she said. “We’ve both got the same problem. You’re getting me caught up in something I don’t want to be caught up in, and I’m getting you caught up in something you don’t want to be caught up in either. The civilized world. The house, the car, living somewhere, doing ordinary things.”

He said nothing.

“My fault, probably,” she said. “I wanted those things. God, did I want them. Makes it kind of hard for me to accept that maybe you don’t want them.”

“I want you,” he said.

She nodded. “I know that. And I want you . You know that too. But do we want each other’s lives?”

The hobo demon erupted in his head, cheering and screaming like a fan watching the winning run soar into the bleachers, bottom of the ninth. She said it! She said it! Now it’s right there, out in the open! So go for it! Jump on it! Just gobble it right up!

“I don’t know,” he said.

“We need to talk about it,” she said.

But there was no more talking to be done, not then, because the buzzer from the lobby started up an insistent squawk, like somebody was down there on the street leaning on the button. Jodie stood up and hit the door release and moved into the living room to wait. Reacher stayed on his stool at the granite counter, looking at the quartz sparkles showing between his fingers. Then he felt the elevator arrive and heard the apartment door open. He heard urgent conversation and fast light footsteps through the living room and then Jodie was back in the kitchen with Lisa Harper standing at her side.

HARPER WAS STILL in her second suit and her hair was still loose on her shoulders, but those were the only similarities with the last time he had seen her. Her long-limbed slowness was all wiped away by some kind of feverish tension, and her eyes were red and strained. He guessed she was as near to distraught as she was ever going to get.

“What?” he asked.

“Everything,” she said. “It’s all gone crazy.”

“Where?”

“Spokane,” she said.

“No,” he said.

“Yes,” she said. “Alison Lamarr.”

There was silence.

“Shit,” he whispered.

Harper nodded. “Yeah, shit.”