The Hard Way

Vinnie hated private contractors.”

----

    Reacher left Dee Marie in the kitchen and stepped back into the living room. Hobart’s head was laid back and his lips were stretched in a grimace. His neck was thin and bulging with ligaments. His torso was painfully wasted and looked bizarrely long in proportion to the stumps of his limbs.
    “You need anything?” Reacher asked him.
    Hobart said, “Silly question.”
    “What would the three of clubs mean to you?”
    “Knight.”
    “How so?”
    “Three was his lucky number. Club was his nickname in the Corps. Because of how he liked to party, and because of the pun on his name. Knight Club, nightclub, like that. They called him Club, back in the day.”
    “He left a playing card on Anne Lane’s body. The three of clubs.”
    “He did? He told me that. I didn’t believe him. I thought it was embellishment. Like a book or a movie.”
    Reacher said nothing.
    “I need the bathroom,” Hobart said. “Tell Dee.”
    “I’ll do it,” Reacher said. “Let’s give Dee a break.”
    He stepped over and bunched the front of Hobart’s shirt and hauled him upright. Slipped an arm behind his shoulders. Ducked down and caught him under the knees and lifted him up off the sofa. He was incredibly light. Probably close to a hundred pounds. Not much of him left.
    Reacher carried Hobart to the bathroom and grabbed the front of his shirt again one-handed and held him vertical in the air like a rag doll. Undid his pants and eased them down.
    “You’ve done this before,” Hobart said.
    “I was an MP,” Reacher said. “I’ve done everything before.”

----

    Reacher put Hobart back on the sofa and Dee Marie fed him more soup. Used the same damp cloth to clean his chin.
    Reacher said, “I need to ask you both one important question. I need to know where you’ve been and what you’ve been doing for the last four days.”
    Dee Marie answered. No guile, no hesitation, nothing phony or overrehearsed. Just a slightly incoherent and therefore completely convincing pieced-together narrative account of four random days from an ongoing nightmare. The four days had started with Hobart in Saint Vincent’s hospital. Dee Marie had taken him to the ER the night before with a severe malaria relapse. The ER doctor had admitted him for forty-eight hours of IV medication. Dee Marie had stayed with him most of the time. Then she had brought him home in a taxi and carried him on her back up the four flights of stairs. They had been alone in the apartment since then, eating what was in the kitchen cupboards, doing nothing, seeing nobody, until their door had smashed open and Reacher had ended up in the middle of their living room.
    “Why are you asking?” Hobart said.
    “The new Mrs. Lane was kidnapped. And her kid.”
    “You thought I did it?”
    “For a spell.”
    “Think again.”
    “I already have.”
    “Why would I?”
    “For revenge. For money. The ransom was exactly half the Burkina Faso payment.”
    “I would have wanted all of it.”
    “Me too.”
    “But I wouldn’t have gone after a woman and a kid.”
    “Me either.”
    “So why pick me out?”
    “We got a basic report on you and Knight. We heard about mutilations. No specific details. Then we heard about a guy with no tongue. We put two and two together and made three. We thought it was you.”
    “No tongue?” Hobart said. “I wish. I’d take that deal.” Then he said, “But no tongue is a South American thing. Brazil, Colombia, Peru. Maybe Sicily in Europe. Not Africa. You can’t get a machete in somebody’s mouth. Lips, maybe. I saw that, sometimes. Or ears. But not the tongue.”
    “We apologize,” Pauling said.
    “No harm, no foul,” Hobart said.
    “We’ll have the door fixed.”
    “I’d appreciate that.”
    “And we’ll help you if we can.”
    “I’d appreciate that, too. But see to the woman and the child first.”
    “We think we’re already too late.”
    “Don’t say that. It depends who took them. Where there’s hope, there’s life. Hope kept me going, five hard years.”

----

    Reacher and Pauling left Hobart and Dee Marie right there, together on their battered sofa, the bowl of soup half-gone. They walked down four flights to the street and stepped out into the afternoon shadows of a fabulous late-summer day. Traffic ground past on the street, slow and angry. Horns blared and sirens barked. Fast pedestrians swerved by on the sidewalk.
    Reacher said, “Eight million stories in