'So why was she in your car?' O'Hallinan asked.

'We were up at Grand Central, dropping a client there. We found her on the sidewalk, kind of lost. She was off the train from Mount Kisco, and just kind of wandering about. We offered her a ride to the hospital, which seemed to be what she needed. So we dropped her at St Vincent's, because it's on the way back here.'

'Bellevue is nearer Grand Central,' O'Hallinan said.

'I don't like the traffic over there,' Tony said neutrally. 'St Vincent's was more convenient.'

'And you didn't wonder about what had happened to her?' Sark asked. 'How she came by the injuries?'

'Well, naturally we wondered,' Tony said. 'We asked her about it, but she couldn't speak, because of the injuries. That's why we didn't recognize the name.'

O'Hallinan stood there, unsure. Sark took a step forward.

'You found her on the sidewalk?'

Tony nodded. 'Outside Grand Central.' '

'She couldn't speak?'

'Not a word.'

'So how do you know she was off the Kisco train?'

The only grey area in the rehearsals had been picking the exact moment to drop the defence and start the offence. It was a subjective issue. They had trusted that when it came, they would recognize it. And they did. The thickset man stood up and crunched a round into the shotgun's chamber and levelled it across the counter.

'Freeze!' he screamed.

A nine-millimetre pistol appeared in Tony's hand. Sark and O'Hallinan stared at it and glanced back at the shotgun and jerked their arms upward. Not a rueful little gesture like in the movies. They stretched them violently upward like their lives depended on touching the acoustic tile directly above their heads. The guy with the shotgun came up from the rear and jammed the muzzle hard into Sark's back and Tony stepped around behind O'Hallinan and did the same thing with his pistol. Then a third man came out from the darkness and paused in the office doorway.

'I'm Hook Hobie,' he said.

They stared at him. Said nothing. Their gazes started on his disfigured face and travelled slowly down to the empty sleeve.

'Which of you is which?' Hobie asked.

No reply. They were staring at the hook. He raised it and let it catch the light.

'Which of you is O'Hallinan?'

O'Hallinan ducked her head in acknowledgement. Hobie turned.

'So you're Sark.'

Sark nodded. Just a fractional inclination of his head.

'Undo your belts,' Hobie said. 'One at a time. And be quick.'

Sark went first. He was quick. He dropped his hands and wrestled with his buckle. The heavy belt thumped to the floor at his feet. He stretched up again for the ceiling.

'Now you,' Hobie said to O'Hallinan.

She did the same thing. The heavy belt with the revolver and the radio and the handcuffs and the nightstick thumped on the carpet. She stretched her hands back up, as far as they would go. Hobie used the hook. He leaned down and swept the point through both buckles and swung the belts up in the air, posing like a fisherman at the end of a successful day on the riverbank. He reached around and used his good hand to pull the two sets of handcuffs out of their worn leather cups.

'Turn around.'

They turned and faced the guns head-on.

'Hands behind you.'

It is possible for a one-armed man to put handcuffs on a victim, if the victim stands still, wrists together. Sark and O'Hallinan stood very still indeed. Hobie clicked one wrist at a time, and then tightened all four cuffs against their ratchets until he heard gasps of pain from both of them. Then he swung the belts high enough not to drag on the floor and walked back inside the office.

'Come in,' he called.

He walked around behind the desk and laid the belts on it like items for close examination. He sat heavily in his chair and waited while Tony lined up the prisoners in front of him. He left them in silerice while he emptied their belts. He unstrapped their revolvers and dropped them in a drawer. Took out their radios and fiddled with the volume controls until they were hissing and crackling loudly. He squared them together at the end of the desktop with their antennas pointed towards the wall of windows. He inclined his head for a moment and listened to the squelch of radio atmospherics. Then he turned back and pulled both nightsticks out of the loops on the belts. He placed one on the desk and hefted the other in his left hand and examined it closely. It was the modern kind, with a handle, and a telescopic section below. He peered at it, interested.

'How does this work, exactly?'

Neither Sark nor O'Hallinan replied. Hobie played with the stick for a second, and then he glanced at the thickset guy, who jabbed the shotgun forward and hit Sark in the kidney.

'I asked you a question,' Hobie said to him.

'You swing it,' he muttered. 'Swing it, and sort of flick it.'

He needed s.p.a.ce, so he stood up. Swung the stick and flicked it like he was cracking a whip. The telescopic section snapped out and locked into place. He grinned with the unburned half of his face. Collapsed the mechanism and tried again. Grinned again. He took to pacing big circles around the desk, swinging the stick and cracking it open. He did it vertically, and then horizontally. He used more and more force. He spun tight circles, flashing the stick. He whipped it backhanded and the mechanism sprang open and he whirled and smashed it into O'Hallinan's face.

'I like this thing,' he said.

She was swaying backward, but Tony jabbed her upright with his pistol. Her knees gave way and she fell forward in a heap, pressed up against the front of the desk, arms cuffed tight behind her, bleeding from the mouth and nose.

'What did Sheryl tell you?' Hobie asked.

Sark was staring down at O'Hallinan.

'She said she walked into a door,' he muttered.

'So why the h.e.l.l are you bothering me? Why are you here?'

Sark moved his gaze upward. Looked Hobie full in the face.

'Because we didn't believe her. It was clear somebody beat on her. We followed up on the Tahoe plate, and it looks like it led us to the right place.'

The office went silent. Nothing except the hiss and the squelch from the police radios on the end of the desk. Hobie nodded.

'Exactly the right place,' he said. 'There was no door involved.'

Sark nodded back. He was a reasonably courageous man. The Domestic Violence Unit was no kind of safe refuge for cowards. By definition it involved dealing with men who had the capacity for brutal violence. And Sark was as good at dealing with them as anybody.

'This is a big mistake,' he said quietly.

'In what way?' Hobie asked interested.

'This is about what you did to Sheryl, is all. It doesn't have to be about anything else. You really shouldn't mix anything else in with it. It's a big step up to violence against police officers. It might be possible to work something out about the Sheryl issue. Maybe there was provocation there, you know, some mitigating circ.u.mstance. But you keep on' messing with us, then we can't work anything out. Because you're just digging yourself into bigger trouble.'

He paused and watched carefully for the response. The approach often worked. Self-interest on the part of the perpetrator often made it work. But there was no response from Hobie. He said nothing. The office was silent. Sark was shaping the next gambit on his lips when the radios crackled and some distant despatcher came over the air and sentenced him to death.

'Five one and five two, please confirm your current location.'

Sark was so conditioned to respond that his hand jerked towards where his belt had been. It was stopped short by the handcuff. The radio call died into silence. Hobie was staring into s.p.a.ce.

'Five one, five two, I need your current location, please.'

Sark was staring at the radios in horror. Hobie followed his gaze and smiled.

'They don't know where you are,' he said.

Sark shook his head. Thinking fast. A courageous man.

'They know where we are. They know we're here. They want confirmation, is all. They check we're where we're supposed to be, all the time.'

The radios crackled again. 'Five one, five two, respond, please.'

Hobie stared at Sark. O'Hallinan was struggling to her knees and staring towards the radios. Tony moved his pistol to cover her.

'Five one, five two, do you copy?'

The voice slid under the sea of static and then came back stronger.

'Five one, five two, we have a violent domestic emergency at Houston and Avenue D. Are you anywhere near that vicinity?'

Hobie smiled.

'That's two miles from here,' he said. 'They have absolutely no idea where you are, do they?'

Then he grinned. The left side of his face folded into unaccustomed lines, but on the right the scar tissue stayed tight, like a rigid mask.

FOURTEEN

For the first time in his life, Reacher was truly comfortable in a plane. He had been flying since birth, first as a soldier's kid and then as a soldier himself, millions of miles in total, but all of them hunched in roaring spartan military transports or folded into hard civilian seats narrower than his shoulders. Travelling first cla.s.s on a scheduled airline was a completely new luxury.

The cabin was dramatic. It was a calculated insult to the pa.s.sengers who filed down the jet way and glanced into it before shuffling along the aisle to their own mean accommodations. It was cool and pastel in first cla.s.s, with four seats to a row where there were ten in coach. Arithmetically, Reacher figured that made each seat two and a half times as wide, but they felt better than that. They felt enormous. They felt like sofas, wide enough for him to squirm left and right without bruising bis hips against the arms. And the leg room was amazing. He could slide right down and stretch right out without touching the seat in front. He could hit the b.u.t.ton and recline almost horizontal without bothering the guy behind. He operated the mechanism a couple of times like a kid with a toy, and then he settled on a sensible halfway position and opened the in-flight magazine, which was crisp and new and not creased and sticky like the ones they were reading forty rows back.

Jodie was lost in her own seat, with her shoes off and her feet tucked up under her, the same magazine open on her lap and a gla.s.s of chilled champagne at her elbow. The cabin was quiet. They were a long way forward of the engines, and their noise was muted to a hiss no louder than the hiss of the air coming through the vents in the overhead. There was no vibration. Reacher was watching the sparkling gold wine in Jodie's gla.s.s, and he saw no tremor on its surface.

'I could get accustomed to this,' he said.

She looked up and smiled.

'Not on your wages,' she said.

He nodded and went back to his arithmetic. He figured a day's earnings from digging swimming pools would buy him fifty miles of first-cla.s.s air travel. Cruising speed, that was about five minutes' worth of progress. Ten hours of work, all gone in five minutes. He was spending money 120 times faster than he had been earning it.

'What are you going to do?' she asked. 'When this is all over?'

'I don't know,' he said.

The question had been in the back of his mind ever since she told him about the house. The house itself sat there in his imagination, sometimes benign, sometimes threatening, like a trick picture that changed depending on how you tilted it against the light. Sometimes it sat there in the glow of the sun, comfortable, low and spreading, surrounded by its amiable jungle of a yard, and it looked like home. Other times, it looked like a gigantic millstone, requiring him to run and run and run just to stay level with the starting line. He knew people with houses. He had talked to them, with the same kind of detached interest he would talk to a person who kept snakes as pets or entered ballroom dancing compet.i.tions. Houses forced you into a certain lifestyle. Even if somebody gave you one for nothing, like Leon had, it committed you to a whole lot of different things. There were property taxes. He knew that. There was insurance, in case the place burned down or was blown away in a high wind. There was maintenance. People he knew with houses were always doing something to them. They would be replacing the heating system at the start of the winter, because it had failed. Or the bas.e.m.e.nt would be leaking water, and complicated things with excavations would be required. Roofs were a problem. He knew that. People had told him. Roofs had a finite life span, which surprised him. The shingles needed stripping off and replacing with new. Siding, also. Windows, too. He had known people who had put new windows in their houses. They had deliberated long and hard about what type to buy.

'Are you going to get a job?' Jodie asked.

He stared out through the oval window at southern California, dry and brown seven miles below him. What sort of a job? The house was going to cost him maybe ten thousand dollars a year in taxes and premiums and maintenance. And it was an isolated house, so he would have to keep Rutter's car, too. It was a free car, like the house, but it would cost him money just to own. Insurance, oil changes, inspections, t.i.tle, gasoline. Maybe another three grand a year. Food and clothes and utilities were on top of all that. And if he had a house, he would want other things. He would want a stereo. He would want Wynonna Judd's record, and a whole lot of others, too. He thought back to old Mrs Hobie's handwritten calculations. She had settled on a certain sum of money she needed every year, and he couldn't see getting it any lower than she had got it. The whole deal added up to maybe thirty thousand dollars a year, which meant earning maybe fifty, to take account of income taxes and the cost of five days a week travelling back and forth to wherever the h.e.l.l he was going to earn it.

'I don't know,' he said again.

'Plenty of things you could do.'

'Like what?'

'You've got talents. You're a h.e.l.l of an investigator, for instance. Dad always used to say you're the best he ever saw.'

'That was in the Army,' he said. 'That's all over now.'

'Skills are portable, Reacher. There's always demand for the best.'

Then she looked up, a big idea in her face. 'You could take over Costello's business. He's going to leave a void. We used him all the time.'

'That's great. First I get the guy killed, then I steal his business.'

'It wasn't your fault,' she said. 'You should think about it.'

So he looked back down at California and thought about it. Thought about Costello's well-worn leather chair and his ageing, comfortable body. Thought about sitting in his pastel room with its pebble-gla.s.s windows, spending his whole life on the telephone.

Thought about the cost of running the Greenwich Avenue office and hiring a secretary and providing her with new computers and telephone consoles and health insurance and paid vacations. All 'on top of running the Garrison place. He would be working ten months of the year before he got ahead by a single dollar.

'I don't know,' he said again. 'I'm not sure I want to think about it.'

'You're going to have to.'

'Maybe,' he said. 'But not necessarily right now.'

She smiled like she understood and they lapsed back into silence. The plane hissed onward and the stewardess came back with the drinks cart. Jodie got a refill of champagne and Reacher took a can of beer. He flipped through the airline magazine. It was full of bland articles about nothing much in particular. There were advertis.e.m.e.nts for financial services and small complicated gadgets, all of which were black and ran on batteries. He arrived at the section where the airline's operational fleet was pictured in little coloured drawings. He found the plane they were on and read about its pa.s.senger capacity and its range and the power of its engines. Then he arrived at the crossword in the back. It filled a page and looked pretty hard. Jodie was already there in her own copy, ahead of him.