Jack Reacher 01 - Killing Floor

love with great tenderness, great energy, great joy. If somebody had told me then that I’d be back on the road the next morning, I’d have thought they were crazy. I told myself there were no problems. I was imagining them. And if there were problems, there were good reasons for them. Maybe the aftereffects of the stress and the adrenaline. Maybe the deep fatigue. Maybe because Roscoe had been a hostage. Maybe she was reacting like a lot of hostages do. They feel some kind of a faint jealousy against anybody who hadn’t been a hostage with them. Some kind of a faint resentment. Maybe that was feeding the guilt I was carrying for letting her get captured in the first place. Maybe a lot of things. I fell asleep certain we’d wake up happy and I’d stay there forever.

    WE DID WAKE UP HAPPY. WE SLEPT THROUGH UNTIL LATE afternoon. Then we spent a gorgeous couple of hours with the afternoon sun streaming in the window, dozing and stretching, kissing and laughing. We made love again. We were fueled up with the joy of being safe and alive and alone together. It was the best lovemaking we ever had. It was also the last. But we didn’t know that at the time.
    Roscoe took the Bentley up to Eno’s for some food. She was gone an hour and came back with news. She’d seen Finlay. She was talking about what was going to happen next. That was the big problem. It made the other tiny problems look like nothing at all.
    “You should see the station house,” she said. “Nothing left more than a foot high.”
    She put the food on a tray and we ate it sitting on the bed. Fried chicken.
    “All four warehouses burned down,” she said. “There was debris exploding all over the highway. The state police got involved. They had to get fire trucks all the way from Atlanta and Macon.”
    “State police are involved?” I said.
    She laughed.
    “Everybody’s involved,” she said. “It sort of snowballed. The Atlanta fire chief called in the bomb squad because of the explosions, because he didn’t know for sure what they were. The bomb squad can’t go anywhere without notifying the FBI, in case it’s terrorism, so the Bureau is interested. Then the National Guard got involved this morning.”
    “The National Guard?” I said. “Why?”
    “This is the best part,” she said. “Finlay says when the roof blew off the warehouse last night, the sudden updraft of air blew the money all over the place. Remember those burning pieces that kept landing on us? There are millions of dollar bills all over the place. Miles around. The wind blew them everywhere, in the fields, all over the highway. Most of them are partially burned, of course, but some of them aren’t. Soon as the sun came up, thousands of people came out of nowhere, swarming around all over the place, picking all the money up. So the National Guard was ordered in to disperse the crowds.”
    I ate some food. Thought about it.
    “Governor calls in the Guard, right?” I asked her.
    She nodded. Mouth full of chicken wing.
    “The governor’s involved,” she said. “He’s in town right now. And Finlay called the Treasury Department, because of Joe. They’re sending a team down here. I told you, it sort of snowballed.”
    “What the hell else?” I said.
    “Big problems here, of course,” she said. “Rumors are flying around. Everybody seems to know the Foundation is finished. Finlay says half of them are pretending they never knew what was going on, and the other half are mad as hell their thousand dollars a week is going to stop. You should have seen old Eno, when I picked up the food. Looked like he’s furious.”
    “Finlay worried?” I said.
    “He’s OK,” she said. “Busy, of course. We’re down to a four-person police department. Finlay, me, Stevenson and the desk man. Finlay says that’s half of what we need, because of the crisis, but twice as many as we can afford, because the Foundation subsidy is going to stop. But anyway, there’s nothing anybody can do about hiring and firing without the mayor’s approval, and we haven’t got a mayor anymore, have we?”
    I sat there on the bed, eating. The problems started bearing down on me. I hadn’t really seen them clearly before. But I was seeing them now. A huge question was forming in my mind. It was a question for Roscoe. I wanted to ask it straightaway and get her honest, spontaneous response. I didn’t want to give her any time to think about her answer.
    “Roscoe?” I said.
    She looked up