Lee Child - Tripwire

“You should come with me,” he said.

“Why? To help?”

He nodded. “Yes, help me with these old folks. They’ll talk to you, because you’re Leon’s daughter.”

“You want me with you because I’m Leon’s daughter?”

He nodded again. She spotted a cab and waved it down.

“Wrong answer, Reacher,” she said.

HE ARGUED WITH her, but he got nowhere. Her mind was made up, and she wouldn’t change it. The best he could do was to get her to solve his immediate problem and rent him a car, with her gold card and her license. They took the cab up to midtown and found a Hertz office. He waited outside in the sun for a quarter hour and then she came around the block in a brand-new Taurus and picked him up. She drove all the way back downtown on Broadway. They passed by her building and passed by the scene of the ambush three blocks south. The damaged vehicles were gone. There were shards of glass in the gutter and oil stains on the blacktop, but that was all. She drove on south and parked next to a hydrant opposite her office door. Left the motor running and racked the seat all the way back, ready for the change of driver.

“OK,” she said. “You’ll pick me up here, about seven o’clock?”

“That late?”

“I’m starting late,” she said. “I’ll have to finish late.”

“Don’t leave the building, OK?”

He got out on the sidewalk and watched her all the way inside. There was a broad paved area in front of the building. She skipped across it, bare legs flashing and dancing under the dress. She turned and smiled and waved. Pushed sideways through the revolving door, swinging her heavy case. It was a tall building, maybe sixty stories. Probably dozens of suites rented to dozens of separate firms, maybe hundreds. But the situation looked like it might be safe enough. There was a wide reception counter immediately inside the revolving door. A line of security guys sitting behind it, and behind them was a solid glass screen, wall to wall, floor to ceiling, with one opening in it, operated by a buzzer under their counter. Behind the screen were the elevators. No way in, unless the security guys saw fit to let you in. He nodded to himself. It might be safe enough. Maybe. It would depend on the diligence of the doormen. He saw her talking to one of them, head bent, blond hair falling forward. Then she was walking to the door in the screen, waiting, pushing it. She went through to the elevators. Hit a button. A door slid open. She backed in, levering her case over the threshold with both hands. The door slid shut.

He waited out on the paved area for a minute. Then he hurried across and shouldered in through the revolving door. Strode over to the counter like he did it every day of his life. Picked on the oldest security guy. The oldest ones are usually the most sloppy. The younger ones still entertain hopes of advancement.

“They want me up at Spencer Gutman,” he said, looking at his watch.

“Name?” the old guy asked.

“Lincoln,” Reacher said.

The guy was grizzled and tired, but he did what he was supposed to do. He picked a clipboard out of a slot and studied it.

“You got an appointment?”

“They just paged me,” Reacher said. “Some kind of a big hurry, I guess.”

“Lincoln, like the car?”

“Like the president,” Reacher said.

The old guy nodded and ran a thick finger down a long list of names.

“You’re not on the list,” he said. “I can’t let you in, without your name on the list.”

“I work for Costello,” Reacher said. “They need me upstairs, like right now.”

“I could call them,” the guy said. “Who paged you?”

Reacher shrugged. “Mr. Spencer, I guess. He’s who I usually see.”

The guy looked offended. Placed the clipboard back in its slot.

“Mr. Spencer died ten years ago,” he said. “You want to come in, you get yourself a proper appointment, OK?”

Reacher nodded. The place was safe enough. He turned on his heel and headed back to the car.

MARILYN STONE WAITED until Chester’s Mercedes was out of sight and then she ran back to the house and got to work. She was a serious woman, and she knew a possible six-week gap between listing and closing was going to need some serious input.

Her first call was to the cleaning service. The house was already perfectly clean, but she was going to move some furniture out. She took the view that presenting a house slightly empty of furniture created an impression of spaciousness. It made it seem even larger than it was. And it avoided trapping a potential buyer into preconceptions about what would look good, and what wouldn’t. For instance, the Italian credenza in the hallway was the perfect piece for that hallway, but she didn’t want a potential buyer to think the hallway wouldn’t work any other way. Better to just have nothing there, and let the buyer’s imagination fill the gap, maybe with a piece she already had.

So if she was going to move furniture out, she needed the cleaning service to attend to the spaces left behind. A slight lack of furniture created a spacious look, but obvious gaps created a sad look. So she called them, and she called the moving and storage people, too, because she was going to have to put the displaced stuff somewhere. Then she called the pool service, and the gardeners. She wanted them there every morning until further notice, for an hour’s work every day. She needed the yard looking absolutely at its best. Even at this end of the market, she knew curb appeal was king.

Then she tried to remember other stuff she’d read, or things people had told her about. Flowers, of course, in vases, all over the place. She called the florist. She remembered somebody saying saucers of window cleaner neutralized all the little stray smells any house generates. Something to do with the ammonia. She remembered reading that putting a handful of coffee beans in a hot oven made a wonderful welcoming smell. So she put a new packet in her utensil drawer, ready. She figured if she put some in the oven each time Sheryl called to say she was on her way over with clients, that would be timing it about right, in terms of aroma.

CHESTER STONE’S DAY started out in the normal way. He drove to work at the usual time. The Benz was as soothing as ever. The sun was shining, as it should be in June. The drive into the city was normal. Normal traffic, no more, no less. The usual rose vendors and paper sellers in the toll plazas. The slackening congestion down the length of Manhattan, proving he’d timed it just right, as he usually did. He parked in his normal leased slot under his building and rode the elevator up to his offices. Then his day stopped being normal.

The place was deserted. It was as if his company had vanished overnight. The staff had all disappeared, instinctively, like rats from a sinking ship. A single phone was trilling on a distant desk. Nobody was sitting there to answer it. The computers were all turned off. The monitor screens were dull gray squares, reflecting the strip lights in the ceiling. His own inner office was always quiet, but now there was a strange hush lying over it. He walked in and heard a sound like a tomb.

“I’m Chester Stone,” he said into the silence.

He said it just to be making some noise in the place, but it came out like a croak. There was no echo, because the thick carpeting and the fiberboard walls soaked up the sound like a sponge. His voice just disappeared in the void.

“Shit,” he said.

He was angry. Mostly with his secretary. She had been with him a long time. She was the sort of employee he expected to stand up and be loyal, with a shy hand on his shoulder, a gleam in her eye, a promise to stay and beat the odds whatever the hell they were. But she’d done the same thing as all the others. She’d heard the rumors coming out of the finance department, the company was bust, the paychecks would bounce, and she’d dumped some old files out of a carton and boxed up the photos of her damn nephews in their cheap brass frames and her ratty old spider plant from her desk and her junk from her drawers and carried it all home on the subway to her neat little apartment, wherever the hell that was. Her neat little apartment, decorated and furnished with his paychecks from when the times were good. She would be sitting there now, in her bathrobe, drinking coffee slowly, an unexpected morning off, never to return to him, maybe leafing through the vacancies in the back of the newspaper, choosing her next port of call.