Tripwire (Page 35)
He concentrated on Victor’s letters to his folks. There were twenty-seven of them in total, thirteen from his training postings and fourteen from Vietnam. They bore out everything he’d heard from Ed Steven. Accurate grammar, accurate spelling, plain, terse phrasing. The same handwriting used by everybody educated in America between the twenties and the sixties, but with a backward slant. A left-handed person. None of the twenty-seven letters ran more than a few lines over the page. A dutiful person. A person who knew it was considered impolite to end a personal letter on the first page. A polite, dutiful, left-handed, dull, conventional, normal person, solidly educated, but no kind of a rocket scientist.
The girl brought him the burger. It was adequate in itself, but very different from the gigantic feast depicted in the photograph on the menu. The slaw was floating in whitened vinegar in a crimped paper cup, and the onion rings were bloated and uniform, like small brown automobile tires. The Swiss was sliced so thin it was transparent, but it tasted like cheese.
The photograph taken after the passing-out parade down at Rucker was harder to interpret. The focus was off, and the peak of his cap put Victor’s eyes into deep shadow. His shoulders were back, and his body was tense. Bursting with pride, or embarrassed by his mother? It was hard to tell. In the end, Reacher voted for pride, because of the mouth. It was a tight line, slightly down at the edges, the sort of mouth that needs firm control from the facial muscles to stop a huge joyful grin. This was a photograph of a guy at the absolute peak of his life so far. Every goal attained, every dream realized. Two weeks later, he was overseas. Reacher shuffled through the letters for the note from Mobile. It was written from a bunk, before sailing. Mailed by a company clerk in Alabama. Sober phrases, a page and a quarter. Emotions tightly checked. It communicated nothing at all.
He paid the check and left the girl a two-dollar tip for being so cheerful. Would she have written home a page-and-a-quarter of tight-assed nothingness the day she was sailing off to war? No, but she would never sail off to war. Victor’s helicopter went down maybe seven years before she was born, and Vietnam was just something she had suffered through in eleventh-grade history class.
It was way too early to head straight back to Wall Street. Jodie had said seven o’clock. At least two hours to kill, minimum. He slid into the Taurus and put the air on high to blow the heat away. Then he flattened the Hertz map on the stiff leather of the folder and traced a route away from Brighton. He could take Route 9 south to the Bear Mountain Parkway, the Bear east to the Taconic, the Taconic south to the Sprain, and the Sprain would dump him out on the Bronx River Parkway. That road would take him straight down to the Botanical Gardens, which was a place he had never been, and a place he was pretty keen to visit.
MARILYN GOT TO her lunch a little after three o’clock. She had checked the cleaning crew’s work before she let them leave, and they had done a perfect job. They had used a steam-cleaner on the hall rug, not because it was dirty, but because it was the best way of raising up the dents in the pile left by the credenza’s feet. The steam swelled the wool fibers, and after a thorough vacuuming nobody was ever going to know a heavy piece of furniture had once rested there.
She took a long shower and wiped out the stall with a kitchen towel to leave the tiling dry and shiny. She combed her hair and left it to air-dry. She knew the June humidity would put a slight curl in it. Then she got dressed, which involved one garment only. She put on Chester’s favorite thing, a dark pink silk sheath which worked best with nothing on underneath. It came just above the knee, and although it wasn’t exactly tight, it clung in all the right places, as if it had been made for her, which in fact it had been, although Chester wasn’t aware of that. He thought it was just a lucky off-the-peg accident. She was happy to let him think that, not because of the money, but because it felt a little, well, brazen to admit to having such a sexy thing custom-made. And the effect on him was, frankly, brazen. It was like a trigger. She used it when she thought he needed rewarding. Or deflecting. And he was going to need deflecting tonight. He was going to arrive home and find his house up for sale and his wife in charge. Any old way she looked at it, it was going to be a difficult evening, and she was prepared to use any advantage she could to get through it, brazen or not.
She chose the Gucci heels which matched the sheath’s color and made her legs look long. Then she went down to the kitchen and ate her lunch, which was an apple and a square of reduced-fat cheese, and then she went back upstairs and brushed her teeth again and thought about makeup. Being naked under the dress and with her hair down in a natural style, the way to go was really no makeup at all, but she was prepared to admit she was just a little way past being able to get away with that, so she set out on the long haul of making herself up so she would look like she hadn’t troubled to.
It took her twenty minutes; and then she did her nails, toes too, because she felt that counted when it was likely her shoes would be coming off early. Then she dabbed her favorite perfume on, enough to be noticed without being overwhelming. Then the phone rang. It was Sheryl.
"Marilyn?" she said. "Six hours on the market, and you’ve got a nibble!"
"I have? But who? And how?"
"I know, the very first day, before you’re even listed anywhere, isn’t it wonderful? It’s a gentleman who’s relocating with his family, and he was cruising the area, getting a feel for it, and he saw your sign. He came straight over here for the particulars. Are you ready? Can I bring him right over?"
"Wow, right now? Already? This is quick, isn’t it? But yes, I guess I’m ready. Who is it, Sheryl? You think he’s a serious buyer?"
"Definitely I do, and he’s only here today. He has to go back west tonight."
"OK, well, bring him on over, I guess. I’ll be ready."
She realized she must have been rehearsing the whole routine, unconsciously, without really being aware of it. She moved fast, but she wasn’t flustered. She hung up the phone and ran straight down to the kitchen and switched the oven on low. Spooned a heap of coffee beans onto a saucer and placed them on the middle shelf. Shut the oven door and turned to the sink. Dropped the apple core into the waste disposal and stacked the plate in the dishwasher. Wiped the sink down with a paper towel and stood back, hands on hips, scanning the room. She walked to the window and angled the blind until the light caught the shine on the floor.
"Perfect," she said to herself.
She ran back up the stairs and started at the top of the house. She ducked into every room, scanning, checking, adjusting flowers, angling blinds, plumping pillows. She turned lamps on everywhere. She had read that to turn them on after the buyer was already in the room was a clear message the house was gloomy. Better to have them on from the outset, which was a clear message of cheerful welcome.
She ran back down the stairs. In the family room, she opened the blind all the way to show off the pool. In the den, she turned on the reading lamps and tilted the blind almost closed, to give a dark, comfortable look. Then she ducked into the living room. Shit, Chester’s side-table was still there. right next to where his armchair had been. How could she have missed that? She grabbed it two-handed and ran with it to the basement stairs. She heard Sheryl’s car on the gravel. She opened the basement door and ran down and dumped the table and ran back up. Closed the door on it and ducked into the powder room. Straightened the guest towel and dabbed at her hair and checked herself in the mirror. God! She was wearing her silk sheath. With nothing underneath. The silk was clinging to her skin. What the hell was this poor guy going to think?
The doorbell rang. She was frozen. Did she have time to change? Of course not. They were at the door, right now, ringing the bell. A jacket or something? The doorbell rang again. She took a breath and shook her hips to loosen the fabric and walked down the hall. Took another breath and opened the door.
Sheryl beamed in at her, but Marilyn was already looking at the buyer. He was a tallish man, maybe fifty or fifty-five, gray, in a dark suit, standing side-on, looking out and back at the plantings along the driveway. She glanced down at his shoes, because Chester always said wealth and breeding shows up on the feet. These looked pretty good. Heavy Oxfords, polished to a shine. She started a smile. Was this going to be it? Sold within six hours? That would be a hell of a thing. She smiled a quick conspirator’s smile with Sheryl and turned to the man.
"Come in," she said brightly, and held out her hand.
He turned back from the garden to face her. He stared straight at her, frankly and blatantly. She felt naked under his gaze. She practically was naked. But she found herself staring right back at him, because he was terribly burned. One side of his head was just a mass of shiny pink scars. She kept her polite smile frozen in place and kept her hand extended toward him. He paused. Brought his hand up to meet it. But it wasn’t a hand. It was a shining metal hook. Not an artificial hand, not a clever prosthetic device, just a wicked metal curve made of gleaming steel.
REACHER WAS AT the curb outside the sixty-story building on Wall Street ten minutes before seven o’clock. He kept the motor running and scanned a triangle that had its point on the building’s exit door and spread sideways across the plaza past the distance where somebody could get to her before he could. There was nobody inside the triangle who worried him. Nobody static, nobody watching, just a thin stream of office workers jostling out to the street, jackets over their arms, bulky briefcases in their hands. Most of them were making a left on the sidewalk, heading for the subway. Some of them were threading through the cars at the curb, looking for cabs out in the traffic stream.