The Hard Way

CHAPTER 37

REACHER BENT FORWARD and listened again. “Straight ahead. A woman, talking.” Then he straightened up and stepped back. “What’s the layout going to be?”

“A short hallway,” Pauling whispered. “Narrow for six feet, until it clears the bathroom. Then maybe it opens out to the living room. The living room will be maybe twelve feet long. The back wall will have a window on the left into the light well. Kitchen door on the right. The kitchen will be bumped out to the back. Maybe six or seven feet deep.”

Reacher nodded. Worst case, the woman was in the kitchen, a maximum twenty-five feet away down a straight and direct line of sight to the door. Worse than worst case, she had a loaded gun next to her on the countertop and she knew how to shoot.

Pauling asked, “Who’s she talking to?”

Reacher whispered, “I don’t know.”

“It’s them, isn’t it?”

“They’d be nuts to still be here.”

“Who else can it be?”

Reacher said nothing.

Pauling asked, “What do you want to do?”

“What would you do?”

“Get a warrant. Call a SWAT team. Full body armor and a battering ram.”

“Those days are gone.”

“Tell me about it.”

Reacher took another step back. Pointed at 4R’s door.

“Wait there,” he said. “If you hear shooting, call an ambulance. If you don’t, follow me in six feet behind.”

“You’re just going to knock?”

“No,” Reacher said. “Not exactly.”

He took another step back. He was six feet five inches tall and weighed about two hundred and fifty pounds. His shoes were bench-made by a company called Cheaney, from Northampton in England. Smarter buys than Church’s, which were basically the same shoes but with a premium tag for the name. The style Reacher had chosen was called Tenterden, which was a brown semi-brogue made of heavy pebbled leather. Size twelve. The soles were heavy composite items bought in from a company called Dainite. Reacher hated leather soles. They wore out too fast and stayed wet too long after rain. Dainites were better. Their heels were a five-layer stack an inch and a quarter thick. The Cheaney leather welt, the Dainite welt, two slabs of hard Cheaney leather, and a thick Dainite cap.

Each shoe on its own weighed more than two pounds.

4L’s door had three keyholes. Three locks. Probably good ones. Maybe a chain inside. But door furniture is only as good as the wood it is set into. The door itself was probably hundred-year-old Douglas fir. Same for the frame. Cheap to start with, damp and swelled all through a hundred summers, dry and shrunken all through a hundred winters. A little eaten-out and wormy.

“Stand by now,” Reacher whispered.

He put his weight on his back foot and stared at the door and bounced like a high jumper going for a record. Then he launched. One pace, two. He smashed his right heel into the door just above the knob and wood splintered and dust filled the air and the door smashed open and he continued running without breaking stride. Two paces put him in the center of the living room. He stopped dead there. Just stood still and stared. Lauren Pauling crowded in behind him and stopped at his shoulder.

Just stared.

The apartment was laid out exactly as Pauling had predicted. A dilapidated kitchen dead ahead, a twelve-foot living room on the left with a worn-out sofa and a dim window onto a light well. The air was hot and still and foul. In the kitchen doorway stood a heavyset woman in a shapeless cotton shift. She had long brown hair parted in the center of her head. In one hand she held an open can of soup and in the other she held a wooden spoon. Her eyes and her mouth were open wide in bewilderment and surprise. She was trying to scream, but shock had punched all the air out of her lungs.

In the living room, horizontal on the worn-out sofa, was a man.

Not a man Reacher had ever seen before.

This man was sick. Prematurely old. He was savagely emaciated. He had no teeth. His skin was yellow and glittered with fever. All that was left of his hair were long wisps of gray.

He had no hands.

He had no feet.

Pauling said, “Hobart?”

There was nothing left that could surprise the man on the sofa. Not anymore. With a lot of effort he just moved his head and said, “Special Agent Pauling. It’s a pleasure to see you again.”

He had a tongue. But with nothing else but gums in his mouth his speech was mumbled and indistinct. And weak. And faint. But he could talk. He could talk just fine.

Pauling looked at the woman and said, “Dee Marie Graziano?”

“Yes,” the woman said.

“My sister,” Hobart said.

Pauling turned back to him. “What the hell happened to you?”

“Africa,” Hobart said. “Africa happened to me.”

He was wearing stiff new denims, dark blue. Jeans, and a shirt. The sleeves and the pant legs were rolled to clear the stumps of his wrists and his shins, which were all smeared with a clear salve of some kind. The amputations were crude and brutal. Reacher could see the end of a yellow forearm bone protruding like a broken piano key. There was no stitching of the severed flesh. No reconstruction. Mostly just a thick mass of scarring. Like burns.

“What happened?” Pauling asked again.

“Long story,” Hobart said.

“We need to hear it,” Reacher said.

“Why? The FBI is here to help me now? After kicking down my sister’s door?”

“I’m not FBI,” Reacher said.

“Me either,” Pauling said. “Not anymore.”

“So what are you now?”

“A private investigator.”

Hobart’s eyes moved to Reacher’s face. “And you?”

“The same,” Reacher said. “More or less. Freelance. I don’t have a license. I used to be an MP.”

Nobody spoke for a minute.

“I was making soup,” Dee Marie Graziano said.

Pauling said, “Go ahead. Please. Don’t let us hold you up.”

Reacher stepped back through the hallway and pushed the shattered door as far shut as it would go. When he got back to the living room Dee Marie was in the kitchen with a flame under a saucepan. She was pouring the soup from the can into it. Stirring the soup with the spoon as it flowed. Pauling was still staring at the broken abbreviated man on the sofa.

“What happened to you?” she asked him for the third time.

“First he eats,” Dee Marie called.