Running Blind (The Visitor)

door opened and a young man in a dark suit stepped out. Reacher and Harper stretched and unclipped their belts and opened their doors. Slid out and stood in the chill air with their breath clouding around them.
    “She’s in there, safe and sound,” the local guy said to them. “I was told to wait out here for you.”
    Harper nodded. “And then what?”
    “Then I stay out here,” the guy said. “You do all the talking. I’m security detail until the local cops take over, eight in the morning.”
    “The cops going to cover twenty-four hours a day?” Reacher asked.
    The guy shook his head, miserably.
    “Twelve,” he said. “I do the nights.”
    Reacher nodded. Good enough , he thought. The house was a big square clapboard structure, built side-on to the street so the front faced the view to the west. There was a generous front porch with gingerbread railings. The slope of the street made room for a garage under the house at the front. The garage door faced sideways, under the end of the porch. There was a short driveway. Then the land sloped upward, so that the rest of the basement would be dug into the hillside. The lot was small, surrounded with tall hurricane fencing marching up the rise. The yard was cultivated, with flowers everywhere, the color taken out of them by the silver moonlight.
    “She awake?” Harper asked.
    The local guy nodded. "She’s in there waiting for you.”

17
    A WALKWAY CAME off the driveway on the left and looped through the dark around some rockery plantings to a set of wide wooden steps in the center of the front porch. Harper skipped up them but Reacher’s weight made them creak in the night silence and before the echo of the sound came back from the hills the front door was open and Rita Scimeca was standing there watching them. She had one hand on the inside doorknob and a blank look on her face.
    “Hello, Reacher,” she said.
    “Scimeca,” he said back. “How are you?”
    She used her free hand to push her hair off her brow.
    “Reasonable,” she said. “Considering it’s three o’clock in the morning and the FBI has only just gotten around to telling me I’m on some kind of hit list with ten of my sisters, four of whom are already dead.”
    “Your tax dollars at work,” Reacher said.
    “So why the hell are you hanging with them?”
    He shrugged. “Circumstances didn’t leave me a whole lot of choice.”
    She gazed at him, deciding. It was cold on the porch. The night dew was beading on the painted boards. There was a thin low fog in the air. Behind Scimeca’s shoulder the lights inside her house burned warm and yellow. She looked at him a moment longer.
    “Circumstances?” she repeated.
    He nodded. “Didn’t leave me a whole lot of choice.”
    She nodded back. “Well, whatever, it’s kind of good to see you, I guess.”
    “Good to see you, too.”
    She was a tall woman. Shorter than Harper, but then most women were. She was muscular, not the compact way Alison Lamarr had been, but the lean, marathon-runner kind of way. She was dressed in clean jeans and a shapeless sweater. Substantial shoes on her feet. She had medium-length brown hair, worn in long bangs above bright brown eyes. She had heavy frown lines all around her mouth. It was nearly four years since he had last seen her, and she looked the whole four years older.
    "This is Special Agent Lisa Harper,” he said.
    Scimeca nodded once, warily. Reacher watched her eyes. A male agent, she’d have thrown him off the porch.
    “Hi,” Harper said.
    “Well, come on in, I guess,” Scimeca said.
    She still had hold of the doorknob. She was standing on the threshold, leaning forward, unwilling to step out. Harper stepped in and Reacher filed after her. The door closed behind them. They were in the hallway of a decent little house, newly painted, nicely furnished. Very clean, obsessively tidy. It looked like a home. Warm and cozy. A personal space. There were wool rugs on the floor. Polished antique furniture in gleaming mahogany. Paintings on the walls. Vases of flowers everywhere.
    “Chrysanthemums,” Scimeca said. “I grow them myself. You like them?”
    Reacher nodded.
    “I like them,” he said. “Although I couldn’t spell them.”
    “Gardening’s my new hobby,” Scimeca said. “I’ve gotten into it in a big way.”
    Then she pointed toward a front parlor.
    “And music,” she said. “Come see.”
    The room had quiet wallpaper and a polished wood floor. There was a grand piano