Running Blind (The Visitor)

I get something out of it too.”
    Blake nodded. “You find the guy, I’ll speak to Deerfield up in New York, get the Petrosian thing forgotten about.”
    “Plus a fee.”
    “How much?”
    “Whatever you think is appropriate.”
    Blake nodded again. “I’ll think about it. And Harper goes with you, because right now the Petrosian thing ain’t forgotten about.”
    “OK. I can live with that. If she can.”
    “She doesn’t get a choice,” Blake said. “What else?”
    “Set me up with Cozo. I’ll start in New York. I’ll need information from him.”
    Blake nodded. “I’ll call him. You can see him tonight. ”
    Reacher shook his head. “Tomorrow morning. Tonight, I’m going to see Jodie.”

21
    THE MEETING BROKE up in a sudden burst of energy. Blake took the elevator one floor down, back to his office to place the call to James Cozo in New York. Poulton had calls of his own to make to the Bureau office in Spokane, where the local guys were checking with parcel carriers and car rental operations. Harper went up to the travel desk to organize airline tickets. Reacher was left alone in the seminar room, sitting at the big table, ignoring the television, staring at a fake window like he was looking out at a view.
    He sat like that for nearly twenty minutes, just waiting. Then Harper came back in. She was carrying a thick sheaf of new paperwork.
    “More bureaucracy,” she said. “If we pay you, we’ve got to insure you. Travel desk regulations.”
    She sat down opposite him and took a pen from her inside pocket.
    “Ready for this?” she said.
    He nodded.
    “Full name?” she asked.
    “Jack Reacher,” he said.
    “That the whole thing?”
    He nodded. “That’s it.”
    “Not a very long name, is it?”
    He shrugged. Said nothing. She wrote it down. Two words, eleven letters, in a space which ran the whole width of the form.
    “Date of birth?”
    He told her. Saw her calculating his age. Saw surprise in her face.
    “Older or younger?” he asked.
    “Than what?”
    “Than you thought.”
    She smiled. “Oh, older. You don’t look it.”
    “Bullshit,” he said. “I look about a hundred. Certainly I feel about a hundred.”
    She smiled again. “You probably clean up pretty good. Social Security number?”
    His generation of servicemen, it was the same as his military ID. He rattled through it in the military manner, random monotone sounds representing whole numbers between zero and nine.
    “Full address?”
    “No fixed abode,” he said.
    “You sure?”
    “Why wouldn’t I be?”
    “What about Garrison?”
    “What about it?”
    “Your house,” she said. “That would be your address, right?”
    He stared at her. “I guess so. Sort of. I never really thought about it.”
    She stared back. “You own a house, you’ve got an address, wouldn’t you say?”
    “OK, put Garrison.”
    “Street name and number?”
    He dredged it up from his memory and told her.
    “Zip?”
    He shrugged. “I don’t know.”
    “You don’t know your own zip code?”
    He was quiet for a second. She looked at him.
    “You’ve got it real bad, haven’t you?” she said.
    “Got what?”
    “Whatever. Call it denial, I guess.”
    He nodded, slowly. “Yes, I guess I’ve got it real bad.”
    “So what are you going to do about it?”
    “I don’t know. Maybe I’ll get used to it.”
    “Maybe you won’t.”
    “What would you do?”
    “People should do what they really want,” she said. “I think that’s important.”
    “Is that what you do?”
    She nodded. “My folks wanted me to stay in Aspen. They wanted me to be a teacher or something. I wanted to be in law enforcement. It was a big battle.”
    “It’s not my parents doing this to me. They’re dead.”
    “I know. It’s Jodie.”
    He shook his head. “No, it’s not Jodie. It’s me. I’m doing this to myself.”
    She nodded again. “OK.”
    The room went quiet.
    “So what should I do?” he asked.
    She shrugged, warily. “I’m not the person to ask.”
    “Why not?”
    “I might not give the answer you want.”
    “Which is?”
    “You want me to say you should stay with Jodie. Settle down and be happy.”
    “I do?”
    “I think so.”
    “But you can’t say that?”
    She shook her head.
    “No, I can’t,” she said. “I had a boyfriend. It was pretty serious. He was a cop in Aspen. There’s always tension, you know, between cops and the Bureau. Rivalry. Silly, really, no reason for it, but it’s there. It spread into