Lee Child - Tripwire

“Same as Victor Hobie,” she said. “Remember the file?”

Reacher nodded. Glanced diagonally across at the pale forearm resting along the seat. The guy was thin, and he could see the prominent knob of bone at the wrist, standing out in the dimness. There was slim muscle and freckled skin and bleached hair. The radius bone was visible, running all the way back to the elbow. Hobie had left six inches of his radius bone behind at the crash site. Reacher counted with his eyes. up from the guy’s wrist joint. Six inches took him halfway to the elbow.

“About half and half, right?” Jodie said.

“A little more than half,” Reacher said. “The stump would have needed trimming. They’d have filed it down where it was splintered, I guess. If he survived.”

The guy two rows ahead turned sleepily and pulled his arm in close to his body and out of sight, like he knew they were talking about it.

“He survived,” Jodie said. “He’s in New York, trying to stay hidden.”

Reacher leaned the other way and rested his forehead on the cold plastic of the porthole.

“I would have bet my life he isn’t,” he said.

He kept his eyes open, but there was nothing to see out of the window. Just black night sky all the way down to the black night ocean, seven miles below.

“Why does it bother you so much?” she asked, in the quiet.

He turned forward and stared at the empty seat six feet in front of him.

“Lots of reasons,” he said.

“Like what?”

He shrugged. “Like everything, like a great big depressing spiral. It was a professional call. My gut told me something, and it looks like I was wrong.”

She laid her hand gently on his forearm, where the muscle narrowed a little above his wrist. “Being wrong isn’t the end of the world.”

He shook his head. “Sometimes it isn’t, sometimes it is. Depends on the issue, right? Somebody asks me who’s going to win the Series, and I say the Yankees, that doesn’t matter, does it? Because how can I know stuff like that? But suppose I was a sportswriter who was supposed to know stuff like that? Or a professional gambler? Suppose baseball was my life? Then it’s the end of the world if I start to screw up.”

“So what are you saying?”

“I’m saying judgments like that are my life. It’s what I’m supposed to be good at. I used to be good at it. I could always depend on being right.”

“But you had nothing to go on.”

“Bullshit, Jodie. I had a whole lot to go on. A whole lot more than I sometimes used to have. I met with the guy’s folks, I read his letters, I talked with his old friend, I saw his record, I talked with his old comrade-in-arms, and everything told me this was a guy who definitely could not behave the way he clearly did behave. So I was just plain wrong, and that bums me up, because where does it leave me now?”

“In what sense?”

“I’ve got to tell the Hobies,” he said. “It’ll kill them stone dead. You should have met them. They worshiped that boy. They worshiped the military, the patriotism of it all, serving your country, the whole damn thing. Now I’ve got to walk in there and tell them their boy is a murderer and a deserter. And a cruel son who left them twisting in the wind for thirty long years. I’ll be walking in there and killing them stone dead, Jodie. I should call ahead for an ambulance.”

He lapsed into silence and turned back to the black porthole.

“And?” she said.

He turned back to face her. “And the future. What am I going to do? I’ve got a house, I need a job. What kind of a job? I can’t put myself about as an investigator anymore, not if I’ve started getting things completely ass-backward all of a sudden. The timing is wonderful, right? My professional capabilities have turned to mush right at the exact time I need to find work. I should go back to the Keys and dig pools the rest of my life.”

“You’re being too hard on yourself. It was a feeling, was all. A gut feeling that turned out wrong.”

“Gut feelings should turn out right,” he said. “Mine always did before. I could tell you about a dozen times when I stuck to gut feelings, no other reason than I felt them. They saved my life, time to time.”

She nodded, without speaking.

“And statistically I should have been right,” he said. “You know how many men were officially unaccounted for after ’Nam? Only about five. Twenty-two hundred missing, but they’re dead, we all know that. Eventually Nash will find them all, and tick them all off. But there were five guys left we can’t categorize. Three of them changed sides and stayed on in the villages afterward, gone native. One disappeared in Thailand. One of them was living in a hut under a bridge in Bangkok. Five loose ends out of a million men, and Victor Hobie is one of them, and I was wrong about him.”

“But you weren’t really wrong,” she said. “You were judging the old Victor Hobie, is all. All that stuff was about Victor Hobie before the war and before the crash. War changes people. The only witness to the change was DeWitt, and he went out of his way not to notice it.”

He shook his head again. “I took that into account, or at least I tried to. I didn’t figure it could change him that much.”

“Maybe the crash did it,” she said. “Think about it, Reacher. What was he, twenty-one years old? Twenty-two, something like that? Seven people died, and maybe he felt responsible. He was the captain of the ship, right? And he was disfigured. He lost his arm, and he was probably burned, too. That’s a big trauma for a young guy, physical disfigurement, right? And then in the field hospital, he was probably woozy with drugs, terrified of going back.”

“They wouldn’t have sent him back to combat,” Reacher said.

Jodie nodded. “Yes, but maybe he wasn’t thinking straight. The morphine, it’s like being high, right? Maybe he thought they were going to send him straight back. Maybe he thought they were going to punish him for losing the helicopter. We just don’t know his mental state at the time. So he tried to get away, and he hit the orderly on the head. Then later he woke up to what he’d done. Probably felt terrible about it. That was my gut feeling, all along. He’s hiding out, because of a guilty secret. He should have turned himself in, because nobody was going to convict him of anything. The mitigating circumstances were too obvious. But he hid out, and the longer it went on, the worse it got. It kind of snowballed.”

“Still makes me wrong,” he said. “You’ve just described an irrational guy. Panicky, unrealistic, a little hysterical. I had him down as a plodder. Very sane, very rational, very normal. I’m losing my touch.”

The giant plane hissed on imperceptibly. Six hundred miles an hour through the thin air of altitude, and it felt like it was suspended immobile. A spacious pastel coccoon, hanging there seven miles up in the night sky, going nowhere at all.

“So what are you going to do?” she asked.

“About what?”

“The future?”

He shrugged again. “I don’t know.”

“What about the Hobies?”

“I don’t know,” he said again.

“You could try to find him,” she said. “You know, convince him no action would be taken now. Talk some sense into him. Maybe you could get him to meet with his folks again.”

“How could I find him? The way I feel right now, I couldn’t find the nose on my face. And you’re so keen on making me feel better, you’re forgetting something.”

“What?”

“He doesn’t want to be found. Like you figured, he wants to stay hidden. Even if he started out real confused about it, he evidently got the taste for it later. He had Costello killed, Jodie. He sent people after us. So he could stay hidden.”