Running Blind (The Visitor)

battling the yard. Three months of unchecked growth had seen him outdoors every day with scythes and hoes and other unaccustomed tools in his hands. He had gone days at a time without even seeing Jodie. She had been tied up with legal cases. She had spent a week overseas, in England. He couldn’t recall for sure which week it had been. It was a lonely spell, his time absorbed with beating back rampant nature, a foot at a time.
    The start of fall, he’d transferred his energies inside the house. There were things to be done. But he’d done them all alone. Jodie had stayed in the city, working her way up the greasy pole. There were random nights together. But that was all. No trips anywhere, no ticket stubs, no hotel registers, no stamps in his passport. No alibis. He looked at the seven agents ranged against him.
    “I want my lawyer now,” he said.
    THE TWO LOCAL sentries took him back to the first room. His status had changed. This time they stayed inside with him, one standing on each side of the closed door. Reacher sat in the plastic garden chair and ignored them. He listened to the tireless fluttering of the ventilation inside the exposed trunking in the ceiling, and waited, thinking about nothing.
    He waited almost two hours. The two sentries stood patiently by the door, not looking at him, not speaking, never moving. He stayed in his chair, leaning back, staring at the ducts above his head. There were twin systems up there. One blew fresh air into the room and the other sucked stale air out. The layout was clear. He traced the flow with his eyes and imagined big lazy fans outside on the roof, turning slowly in opposite directions, making the building breathe like a lung. He imagined the spent breath from his body floating away into the Manhattan night sky and out toward the Atlantic. He imagined the damp molecules drifting and diffusing in the atmosphere, catching in the breeze. Two hours, they could be twenty miles offshore. Or thirty. Or forty. It would depend on the conditions. He couldn’t remember if it had been a windy night. He guessed not. He recalled the fog. Fog would blow away if there was a decent wind. So it was a still night, and therefore his spent breath was probably hanging sullenly in the air right above the lazy fans.
    Then there were people in the corridor outside and the door opened and the sentries stepped out and Jodie walked in. She blazed against the gray walls. She was wearing a pastel peach dress with a wool coat over it, a couple of shades darker. Her hair was still lightened from the summer sun. Her eyes were bright blue, and her skin was the color of honey. It was the middle of the night, and she looked as fresh as morning.
    “Hey, Reacher,” she said.
    He nodded and said nothing. He could see worry in her face. She stepped close and bent down and kissed him on the lips. She smelled like a flower.
    “You talk to them?” he asked her.
    “I’m not the right person to deal with this,” she said. “Financial law, yes, but criminal law, I’ve got no idea.”
    She waited in front of his chair, tall and slim, head cocked to one side, all her weight on one foot. Every new time he saw her, she looked more beautiful. He stood up and stretched, wearily.
    “There’s nothing to deal with,” he said.
    She shook her head. “Yes, there damn well is.”
    “I didn’t kill any women.”
    She stared at him. “Of course you didn’t. I know that. And they know that, or they’d have put you in handcuffs and leg irons and taken you straight down to Quantico, not dumped you in here. This must be about the other thing. They saw you do that. You put two guys in the hospital, with them watching.”
    “It’s not about that. They reacted too fast. This was set up before I even did the other thing. And they don’t care about the other thing. I’m not working the rackets. That’s all Cozo’s interested in, organized crime.”
    She nodded. “Cozo’s happy. Maybe more than happy. He’s got two punks off the street, no cost to himself. But it’s turned into a catch-22, don’t you see that? To convince Cozo, you had to make yourself out as a vigilante loner, and the more you made yourself out as a vigilante loner, the more you pushed yourself into this profile from Quantico. So whatever reason they brought you in for, you’re starting to confuse them.”
    “The profile is bullshit.”
    “They don’t think so.”
    “It has to be bullshit. It came up with me.”
    She shook her