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"Think you can?"
"It'll be easy. "
"You know a guy called Franklin?"
"Sure I do. "
"Ask him how easy it'll be. "
"That was different. You could have been anywhere. "
"You got the motor court staked out?"
There was a pause. Emerson said nothing.
"Keep your people there," Reacher said. "Maybe I'll be back. Or on the other hand, maybe I won't. "
"We'll find you. "
"Not a chance. You're not good enough. "
"Maybe we're tracing this call. "
"I'll save you the trouble. I'm outside a grocery called Martha's. "
"You should come in from the cold. "
"I'll trade," Reacher said. "Find out who placed the cone in the parking garage and then I'll think about coming in. "
"Barr placed the cone. "
"You know he didn't. His van isn't on the tapes. "
"So he used another vehicle. "
"He doesn't have another vehicle. "
"So he borrowed one. "
"From a friend?" Reacher said. "Maybe. Or maybe the friend placed the cone for him. Either way, you find that friend, and I'll think about coming in to talk to you. "
"There are hundreds of cars on those tapes. "
"You've got the resources," Reacher said.
"I don't trade," Emerson said.
"I think his name is Charlie," Reacher said. "Small guy, wiry black hair. "
"I don't trade," Emerson said again.
"I didn't kill the girl," Reacher said.
"Says you. "
"I liked her. "
"You're breaking my heart. "
"And you know I didn't stay at the Metropole last night. "
"Which is why you dumped her there. "
"And I'm not left-handed. "
"I don't follow. "
"Tell Bellantonio to talk to your ME. "
"We'll find you," Emerson said.
"You won't," Reacher said. "Nobody ever has before. "
Then he hung up and walked back to the street. Crossed the road and hiked half a block north and took cover behind a stack of unused concrete lane dividers in a vacant lot. He waited. Six minutes later two cruisers pulled up in front of Martha's grocery. Lights, but no sirens. Four cops spilled out. Two went in the store and two went to find the phone. Reacher watched them regroup on the sidewalk. Watched them search the alley and check around its corner. Watched them come back. Watched them admit defeat. He saw one of the four get on his radio for a short conversation full of defensive body language. Raised palms, shrugged shoulders. Then the conversation ended and Reacher slipped away east, heading back toward the Marriott.
The Zec had only a thumb and a single finger remaining on each hand. On the right was a stump of an index finger, blackened and gnarled by frostbite. He had once spent a week outdoors in the winter, wearing an old Red Army tunic, and the way its previous owner's water canteen had ridden on his belt had worn the fabric of the right pocket thinner than the left. On such trivial differences survival had hung. His left hand had been saved, and his right hand lost. He had felt his fingers die from the pinkie inward. He had taken his hand out of his pocket and let it freeze hard enough to go completely numb. Then he had chewed off the dead fingers before the gangrene could spread. He remembered dropping them to the ground, one by one, like small brown twigs.
His left hand retained the pinkie. The middle three fingers were missing. Two had been amputated by a sadist with garden shears. The Zec had removed the other himself, with a sharpened spoon, so as to be disqualified for labor in some machine shop or other. He couldn't recall the specifics, but he remembered a persuasive rumor that it was better to lose another finger than work on that particular detail. Something to do with the overseer.
Ruined hands. Just two of many souvenirs of another time, another place. He wasn't very aware of them anymore, but they made modern life difficult. Cell phones had gotten so damn small. Linsky's number was ten digits long, and it was a pig to dial. The Zec never retained a phone long enough to make it worth storing a number. That would be madness.
Eventually he got the number entered and he concentrated hard and pressed the call button with his left-hand pinkie. Then he juggled the phone into his other palm and cupped it near his ear. He didn't need to hold it close. His hearing was still excellent, which was a miracle all by itself.
"Yes?" Linsky said.
"They can't find him," the Zec said. "I shouldn't have told you to break off our own surveillance. My mistake. "
"Where have they looked?"
"Here and there. He stayed last night at the motor court. They've got it staked out, but I'm sure he won't go back. They've got a man at the lawyer's office. Other than that, they're stumbling around in the dark. "
"What do you want me to do?"
"I want you to find him. Use Chenko and Vladimir. And I'll send Raskin to you. Work together. Find him tonight and then call me. "
Reacher stopped two blocks short of the Marriott. He knew what Emerson would be doing. He had been Emerson for thirteen years. Emerson would be running down a mental list. Likely haunts, known associates. Likely haunts at this time of day would include eating places. So Emerson would be sending cars to diners and restaurants and cafes, including the salad place that Helen Rodin liked and the sports bar. Then he would move on to known associates, which pretty much limited him to Helen Rodin herself. He would have the lobby cop ride up to the fourth floor and knock on the office door.
Then he would take a chance on Eileen Hutton.
So Reacher stopped two blocks short of the Marriott and looked around for a place to wait. He found one behind a shoe store. There was a three-sided corral made of head-high brick walls shielding a shoulder-high plastic garbage receptacle from public view. Reacher stepped in and found that if he leaned his shoulder on the trash can he could see a yard-wide sliver of the Marriott's main door. He wasn't uncomfortable. And it was the best-smelling garbage dump he had ever been in. The can smelled of fresh cardboard and new shoes. Better than the kind of place you find behind a fish store.
He figured if Emerson was efficient he would have to wait less than thirty minutes. Very efficient, less than twenty. Average, somewhere up around an hour. He leaned on the trash can and passed the time. It wasn't late but the streets were already quiet. There were very few people out and about. He watched, and waited. Then the smell of new leather from the discarded shoe boxes distracted him. It started him thinking about footwear. Maybe he should drop by the store sometime and pick out a brand-new pair. He stuck his foot out and looked down. The boat shoes he had on were soft and light and the soles were thin. They had been fine for Miami. Not so good for his current situation. He could foresee a time when he would appreciate something heavier.
Then he looked down again. Rocked back and brought his feet together and took the same pace forward. And stopped. He tried it again with his other foot, and stopped again, like a freeze-frame of a man walking. He stared down, with something in the back of his min
d. Something from Bellantonio's evidence. Something among all those hundreds of printed pages.
Then he looked up again, because he sensed movement in the corner of his eye at the Marriott's door two blocks away. He saw a squad car's hood. It moved into his field of view and dipped once as it braked and stopped. Then two cops appeared, in uniform, walking forward. He glanced at his watch. Twenty-three minutes. He smiled. Emerson was good, but not unbelievable. The cops went in through the door. They would spend five minutes with the desk clerk. The clerk would give up Hutton's room number without a fight. Generally speaking, hotel clerks from small heartland cities weren't ACLU activists. And guests were gone tomorrow, but the local PD was always there.
So the cops would go to Hutton's room. They would knock on her door. Hutton would let them in. She had nothing to hide. The cops would poke around and be on their way. Ten minutes, tops, beginning to end.
Reacher checked his watch again, and waited.
The cops were back out after eight minutes. They paused outside the doors, tiny figures far in the distance. One of them ducked his head to his collar and used his radio, calling in a negative progress report, listening for the next destination. The next likely haunt. The next known associate. Pure routine. Have a fun evening, boys, Reacher thought. Because I'm going to. That's for damn sure. He watched them drive off and waited another minute in case they were driving his way. Then he stepped out of the brick corral and headed for Eileen Hutton.
Grigor Linsky waited in his car in a fire lane in a supermarket parking lot, framed against a window that was entirely pasted over with a gigantic orange advertisement for ground beef at a very low price. Old and spoiled, Linsky thought. Or full of Listeria. The kind of thing the Zec and I would once have killed to eat. And killed was the truth. Linsky had no illusions. None at all. The Zec and he were bad people made worse by experience. Their shared suffering had conferred no grace or nobility. Quite the reverse. Men in their situation inclined toward grace and nobility had died within hours. But the Zec and he had survived, like sewer rats, by abandoning inhibition, by fighting and clawing, by betraying those stronger than themselves, by dominating those weaker.
And they had learned. What works once works always.
Linsky watched in his mirror and saw Raskin's car coming toward him. It was a Lincoln Town Car, the old square style, black and dusty, listing like a holed battleship. It stopped nose-to-tail with him and Raskin got out. He looked exactly like what he was, which was a second-rate Moscow hoodlum. Square build, flat face, cheap leather jacket, dull eyes. Forty-some years old. A stupid man, in Linsky's opinion, but he had survived the Red Army's last hurrah in Afghanistan, which had to count for something. Plenty of people smarter than Raskin hadn't come back whole, or come back at all. Which made Raskin a survivor, which was the quality that meant more than any other to the Zec.
Raskin opened the rear door and slid into the back seat behind Linsky. He didn't speak. Just handed over four copies of Emerson's Wanted poster. A delivery from the Zec. How the Zec had gotten the posters, Linsky wasn't sure. But he could make a guess. The posters themselves were pretty good. The likeness was pretty accurate. It would serve its purpose.
"Thank you," Linsky said politely.
Raskin didn't respond.
Chenko and Vladimir showed up two minutes later, in Chenko's Cadillac. Chenko was driving. Chenko always drove. He parked behind Raskin's Lincoln. Three large black cars, all in a line. Jack Reacher's funeral procession. Linsky smiled to himself. Chenko and Vladimir got out of their car and walked forward, one small and dark, the other big and fair. They got into Linsky's own Cadillac, Chenko in the front, Vladimir in the back next to Raskin, so that counting clockwise there was Linsky in the driver's seat, then Chenko, then Vladimir, then Raskin. The proper pecking order, instinctively obeyed. Linsky smiled again and handed out three copies of the poster. He kept one for himself, even though he didn't need it. He had seen Jack Reacher many times already.
"We're going to start over," he said. "Right from the beginning. We can assume the police will have missed something. "
Reacher pulled the fire door open and removed the cardboard plug from the lock and put it in his pocket. He stepped inside and let the door latch behind him. He followed the back corridor to the elevator and rode up to three. Knocked on Hutton's door. He had a line in his head, from Jack Nicholson playing a hard-ass Marine colonel in some movie about Navy lawyers: Nothing beats a woman you have to salute in the morning.
Hutton took her time opening the door. He guessed she had settled down somewhere after getting rid of the cops. She hadn't expected to be disturbed again so soon. But eventually the door opened and she was standing there. She was wearing a robe, coming fresh out of the shower. The light behind her haloed her hair. The corridor was dim and the room looked warm and inviting.
"You came back," she said.
"Did you think I wouldn't?"
He stepped into the suite and she closed the door behind him.
"The cops were just here," she said.
"I know," he said. "I watched them all the way. "
"Where were you?"
"In a garbage dump two blocks away. "
"You want to wash up?"
"It was a very clean garbage dump. Behind a shoe store. "
"You want to go out to dinner?"
"I'd prefer room service," he said. "I don't want to be walking around more than I have to. "
"OK," she said. "That makes sense. Room service it is. "
"But not just yet. "
"Should I get dressed?"
"Not just yet. "
She paused a beat.
"Why not?" she said.
"Unfinished business," he said.
She said nothing.
"It's good to see you again," he said.
"It's been less than three hours," she said.
"I mean today," he said. "As a whole. After all this time. "
Then he stepped close and cupped her face in his hands. Pushed his fingertips into her hair like he used to and traced the contours of her cheekbones with his thumbs.
"Should we do this?" she said.
"Don't you want to?"
"It's been fourteen years," she said.
"Like riding a bicycle," he said.
"Think it will be the same?"
"It'll be better. "
"How much better?" she asked.
"We were always good," he said. "Weren't we? How much better could it get?"
She held still for a long moment. Then she put her hands behind his head. She pulled and he bent down and they kissed. Then again, harder. Then again, longer. Fourteen years melted away. Same taste, same feel. Same excitement. She pulled his shirt out of his pants and unbuttoned it from the bottom upward, urgently. When the last button was open she smoothed the flat of her hands over his chest, his shoulders, his back, down to his waistband, around to the front. His boat shoes came off easily. And his socks. He kicked his pants across the room and untied her belt. Her robe fell open.
"Damn, Hutton," he said. "You haven't changed a bit. "
"You either," she said.
Then they headed for the bed, stumbling, fast and urgent, locked together like an awkward four-legged animal.
Grigor Linsky took the south side of town. He checked the salad place and then cruised down to the docks. Turned around and quartered the narrow streets, covering three sides of every block, pausing at the turns to scan the sidewalks on the fourth. The Cadillac idled along. The power steering hissed at every corner. It was slow, patient work. But it wasn't a large city. There was no bustle. No crowds. And nobody could hide forever. That had been Grigor Linsky's experience.
Afterward Hutton lay in Reacher's arms and used her fingertips to trace a long slow inventory of the body she had known so well. It had changed in fourteen years. He had said You haven't changed a bit and she had said You either, but she knew
both of them had been generous. Nobody stays the same. The Reacher she had known in the desert had been younger and baked lean by the heat, as fluid and graceful as a greyhound. Now he was heavier, with knotted muscles as hard as old mahogany. The scars she remembered had smoothed out and faded and were replaced by newer marks. There were lines in his forehead. Lines around his eyes. But his nose was still straight and unbroken. His front teeth were still there, like trophies. She slid her hand down to his and felt his knuckles. They were large and hard, like walnut shells matted with scar tissue. Still a fighter, she thought. Still trading his hands for his nose and his teeth. She moved up to his chest. He had a hole there, left of center. Ruptured muscle, a crater big enough for the tip of her finger. A gunshot wound. Old, but new to her. Probably a. 38.
"New York," Reacher said. "Years ago. Everyone asks. "
"Everyone?"
"Who sees it. "
Hutton snuggled in closer. "How many people see it?"
He smiled. "You know, on beaches, stuff like that. "
"And in bed?"
"Locker rooms," he said.
"And in bed," she said again.
"I'm not a monk," he said.
