Lee Child - The Hard Way

Silence in the room.

“The things you remember,” Hobart said. “I remember the stink of the blood and the tar bucket and the pile of severed hands behind that big stone block. A bunch of black ones and one little white one.”

Pauling asked, “What was the truth about Anne?”

“The waiting was the hardest part. I spent a year looking at my right hand. Doing things with it. Making a fist, spreading my fingers, scratching myself with my nails.”

“Why did Knight kill Anne Lane?”

“They weren’t having an affair. Not possible. Knight wasn’t that type of a guy. I’m not saying he had scruples. He was just a little timid around women, that’s all. He did OK with trash in bars or with hookers, but Anne Lane was way out of his league. She was classy, she had personality, she had energy, she knew who she was. She was intelligent. She wouldn’t have responded to the kind of thing that Knight had to offer. Not in a million years. And Knight wouldn’t have offered anything anyway, because Anne was the CO’s wife. That’s the biggest no-no of all time for an American fighting man. In the movies they show it maybe, but not in real life. Just wouldn’t happen, and if it did, Knight would have been the last Marine on earth to try it.”

“You sure?”

“I knew him very well. And he didn’t have the kind of buddies that could have faked the voices. Certainly not a woman’s voice. He had no women friends. He didn’t have any friends outside of me and the unit. Not really. Not close enough for work like that. What Marine does? That’s when I knew he was bullshitting. There was nobody he knew where he could just walk up to them and say, hey, help me out with this phony kidnap thing, why don’t you?”

“So why did he even try bullshitting you?”

“Because he understood better than me that reality was over for us. There was really no difference between truth and fantasy for us at that point. They were of absolutely equal value. He was just amusing himself. Maybe he was trying to amuse me, too. But I was still analyzing stuff. He gave me a whole rainbow of reasons and details and facts and scenarios and I checked them over very carefully in my mind for five long years and the only story I really believed was that Lane set the whole thing up because Anne wanted out of the marriage. She wanted a divorce and she wanted alimony and Lane’s ego couldn’t take it. So he had her killed.”

“Why would Lane want Knight dead if all he had done was act on Lane’s own orders?”

“Lane was covering his ass. Tying up the loose ends. And he was avoiding being in someone else’s debt. That was the main thing, really. Ultimately that was the true reason. A guy like Lane, his ego couldn’t take that, either. Being grateful to someone.”

Silence in the room.

“What happened to Knight in the end?” Reacher asked.

“His fourth birthday,” Hobart said. “He didn’t go for the bucket. He didn’t want to go on. The pussy just quit on me. Some damn jarhead he was.”

TEN MINUTES LATERDee Marie Graziano got home. The squawk box in the hallway sounded and she asked for help carrying packages up the stairs. Reacher went down four flights and hauled four grocery bags back up to the apartment. Dee Marie unpacked them in the kitchen. She had bought a lot of soup, and Jell-O, and painkillers, and antiseptic creams.

Reacher said, “We heard that Kate Lane had a visitor in the Hamptons.”

Dee Marie said nothing.

“Was it you?” Reacher asked.

“I went to the Dakota first,” she said. “But the doorman told me they were away.”

“So then you went.”

“Two days later. We decided that I should. It was a long day. Very expensive.”

“You went there to warn Anne Lane’s successor.”

“We thought she should be told what her husband was capable of doing.”

“How did she react?”

“She listened. We walked on the sand and she listened to what I had to say.”

“That was all?”

“She took it all in. Didn’t react much.”

“How definite were you?”

“I said we had no proof. Equally I said we had no doubt.”

“And she didn’t react?”

“She just took it all in. Gave it a fair hearing.”

“Did you tell her about your brother?”

“It’s a part of the story. She listened to it. Didn’t say much. She’s beautiful and she’s rich. People like that are different. If it’s not happening to them, it’s not happening at all.”

“What happened to your husband?”

“Vinnie? Iraq happened to Vinnie. Fallujah. A roadside booby-trap.”

“I’m sorry.”

“They told me he was killed instantly. But they always say that.”

“Sometimes it’s true.”

“I hope it was. Just that one time.”

“The Corps or private?”

“Vinnie? The Corps. Vinnie hated private contractors.”

Reacher left Dee Marie in the kitchen and stepped back into the living room. Hobart’s head was laid back and his lips were stretched in a grimace. His neck was thin and bulging with ligaments. His torso was painfully wasted and looked bizarrely long in proportion to the stumps of his limbs.

“You need anything?” Reacher asked him.

Hobart said, “Silly question.”

“What would the three of clubs mean to you?”

“Knight.”

“How so?”

“Three was his lucky number. Club was his nickname in the Corps. Because of how he liked to party, and because of the pun on his name. Knight Club, nightclub, like that. They called him Club, back in the day.”

“He left a playing card on Anne Lane’s body. The three of clubs.”

“He did? He told me that. I didn’t believe him. I thought it was embellishment. Like a book or a movie.”

Reacher said nothing.

“I need the bathroom,” Hobart said. “Tell Dee.”

“I’ll do it,” Reacher said. “Let’s give Dee a break.”

He stepped over and bunched the front of Hobart’s shirt and hauled him upright. Slipped an arm behind his shoulders. Ducked down and caught him under the knees and lifted him up off the sofa. He was incredibly light. Probably close to a hundred pounds. Not much of him left.

Reacher carried Hobart to the bathroom and grabbed the front of his shirt again one-handed and held him vertical in the air like a rag doll. Undid his pants and eased them down.

“You’ve done this before,” Hobart said.

“I was an MP,” Reacher said. “I’ve done everything before.”

Reacher put Hobart back on the sofa and Dee Marie fed him more soup. Used the same damp cloth to clean his chin.

Reacher said, “I need to ask you both one important question. I need to know where you’ve been and what you’ve been doing for the last four days.”

Dee Marie answered. No guile, no hesitation, nothing phony or overrehearsed. Just a slightly incoherent and therefore completely convincing pieced-together narrative account of four random days from an ongoing nightmare. The four days had started with Hobart in Saint Vincent’s hospital. Dee Marie had taken him to the ER the night before with a severe malaria relapse. The ER doctor had admitted him for forty-eight hours of IV medication. Dee Marie had stayed with him most of the time. Then she had brought him home in a taxi and carried him on her back up the four flights of stairs. They had been alone in the apartment since then, eating what was in the kitchen cupboards, doing nothing, seeing nobody, until their door had smashed open and Reacher had ended up in the middle of their living room.

“Why are you asking?” Hobart said.

“The new Mrs. Lane was kidnapped. And her kid.”

“You thought I did it?”

“For a spell.”