Lee Child - The Hard Way

He doesn’t trust me , Reacher thought.

A Delta noncom doesn’t trust an MP.

Well, there’s a big surprise.

Reacher walked to the end of the block and took the stairs down to the subway. To the northbound platform. Used his Metrocard at the turnstile. He figured Burke wouldn’t have a Metrocard. Lane’s people drove everywhere. In which case Burke would be hung up at the machine, swiping his credit card or feeding creased bills into the slot. In which case the tail would fail at the first hurdle. If a train came soon.

Which it didn’t.

It was midnight, and the trains were well into their off-peak schedules. Average wait time was probably fifteen or twenty minutes. Reacher was ready to get lucky, but he didn’t. He turned and saw Burke collect a brand-new card from the machine and hang back, just waiting.

Reacher thought: He doesn’t want to be on the platform with me. He’s going to come through the turnstile at the last possible minute .

Reacher waited. There were twelve people waiting with him. A knot of three, a knot of two, seven people on their own. Mostly they were well dressed. They were folks going home after movies or restaurant meals, heading back to cheaper rents in the hundreds or all the way up in Hudson Heights.

The tunnel stayed quiet. The air was warm. Reacher leaned on a pillar and waited. Then he heard the rails start their strange metallic keening. A train, half a mile away. He saw a faint light in the darkness and felt the push of hot air. Then the noise built and twelve people on the platform shuffled forward.

Reacher shuffled backward.

He pressed himself into a maintenance recess the size of a phone booth. Stood still. A train rolled in, fast, long, loud, hissing and squealing. A 1 train, local. Shiny aluminum, bright windows. It stopped. People got off, people got on. Then Burke came through the turnstile and made it through the doors just before they closed. The train moved away, left to right, and Reacher saw Burke through the windows. He was walking forward, eyes front, hunting his quarry, car by car.

He would be all the way up in the Bronx, 242nd Street, Van Cortlandt Park, before he realized his quarry wasn’t on the train at all.

Reacher came out of the recess and brushed dirt off the shoulders of his shirt. Headed for the exit and up to the street. He was down two bucks, but he was alone, which was what he wanted to be.

The doorman at the Majestic called upstairs and pointed Reacher toward the elevator. Three minutes later he was shaking hands with Brewer, the cop. Patti Joseph was in the kitchen, making coffee. She had changed her clothes. Now she was wearing a dark pant suit, prim and proper. She had shoes on. She came out of the kitchen with two mugs, the same huge Wedgwood items she had used before. She gave one to Brewer and one to Reacher and said, “I’ll leave you guys to talk. May be easier if I’m not here. I’ll go for a walk. Nighttime is about the only time it’s safe for me to be out.”

Reacher said, “Burke will be coming out of the subway in about an hour.”

Patti said, “He won’t see me.”

Then she left, with a nervous glance back, as if her future was at stake. Reacher watched the door close behind her and turned and took a better look at Brewer. He was everything anyone would expect a New York City detective to be, except magnified a little. A little taller, a little heavier, longer hair, more unkempt, more energetic. He was about fifty. Or forty-something and prematurely gray.

“What’s your interest here?” he asked.

“I crossed paths with Edward Lane,” Reacher said. “And I heard Patti’s story. So I want to know what I’m getting into. That’s all.”

“Crossed paths how?”

“Lane wants to hire me for something.”

“What’s your line of work?”

“I was in the army,” Reacher said.

“It’s a free country,” Brewer said. “You can work for whoever you want.”

Then he sat down on Patti Joseph’s sofa like he owned it. Reacher stayed away from the window. The light was on and he would be visible from the street. He leaned on the wall near the lobby and sipped his coffee.

“I was a cop once myself,” he said. “Military police.”

“Is that supposed to impress me?”

“Plenty of your guys came from the same place as me. Do they impress you?”

Brewer shrugged.

“I guess I can give you five minutes,” he said.

“Bottom line,” Reacher said. “What happened five years ago?”

“I can’t tell you that,” Brewer said. “Nobody in the NYPD can tell you that. If it was a kidnap, that’s FBI business, because kidnapping is a federal crime. If it was a straightforward homicide, then that’s New Jersey business, because the body was found on the other side of the George Washington Bridge, and it hadn’t been moved postmortem. Therefore it was never really our case. Therefore we never really developed an opinion.”

“So why are you here?”

“Community relations. The kid is hurting, and she needs an ear. Plus she’s cute and she makes good coffee. Why wouldn’t I be here?”

“Your people must have gotten copied in on the paperwork.”

Brewer nodded.

“There’s a file,” he said.

“What’s in it?”

“Cobwebs and dust, mostly. The only thing anyone knows for sure is that Anne Lane died five years ago in New Jersey. She was a month decomposed when they found her. Not a pretty sight, apparently. But there was a definitive dental identification. It was her.”

“Where was this?”

“A vacant lot near the Turnpike.”

“Cause of death?”

“Fatal GSW to the back of her head. Large-caliber handgun, probably a nine, but impossible to be precise. She was out in the open. Rodents had been in and out the bullet hole. And rodents aren’t dumb. They figure they’re going to get fat on the good stuff inside, so they widen the hole before they go in. The bone was gnawed. But it was probably a nine, probably jacketed.”

“I hope you didn’t tell Patti all of that.”

“What are you? Her big brother? Of course I didn’t tell her all of that.”

“Anything else at the scene?”

“There was a playing card. The three of clubs. Shoved down the neck of her shirt, from the back. No forensics worth a damn, nobody knew what it meant.”

“Was it like a signature?”

“Or a tease. You know, some random crap to make everyone go blind trying to figure it out.”

“So what do you think?” Reacher said. “Kidnap or murder?”

Brewer yawned. “No reason to look for complications. You hear hoof beats, you look for horses, not zebras. A guy calls in that his wife has been kidnapped, you assume it’s true. You don’t start assuming it’s a complex plot to do away with her. And it was all plausible. There were real phone calls, there was real cash money in a bag.”

“But?”

Brewer went quiet for a moment. Took a long pull on his mug of coffee, swallowed, exhaled, rested his head back on the sofa.

“Patti kinds of sucks you in,” he said. “You know? Sooner or later you have to admit it’s just as plausible the other way around.”

“Gut feeling?”

“I just don’t know,” Brewer said. “Which is a weird feeling in itself, for me. I mean, sometimes I’m wrong, but I always know .”

“So what are you doing about it?”

“Nothing,” Brewer said. “It’s an ice-cold case outside of our jurisdiction. Hell will freeze over before the NYPD voluntarily books another unsolved homicide.”

“But you keep on showing up here.”

“Like I said, the kid needs an ear. Grief is a long and complicated process.”

“You do this for all the relatives?”