The Hard Way

Dee.”
    “Maybe an efficiency,” Pauling said. “With a little kitchen. For the cooking.”
    “I can’t afford it,” Dee Marie said.
    The room went quiet and Reacher stepped out the front door and checked the hallway. Checked the stairwell. Nothing was happening. He came back inside and pulled the door as far closed as it would go. Turned left in the entry and walked past the bathroom to the bedroom. It was a small space nearly filled by a queen bed. He guessed Hobart slept there, because the night table was piled with tubes of antiseptic creams and bottles of over-the-counter painkillers. The bed was high. He pictured Dee Marie hoisting her brother on her back, turning around, reversing toward the bed, dumping him down on the mattress. He pictured her straightening him out, tucking him in. Then he pictured her heading for another night on the sofa.
    The bedroom window had a wood frame and the glass was streaked with soot. There were faded drapes, three-quarters open. Ornaments on the sill, and a color photograph of a Marine Lance Corporal. Vinnie, Reacher guessed. The dead husband. Blown to bits on a Fallujah roadside. Killed instantly, or not. He had the bill of his dress cap low on his brow and the colors in the picture were vivid and smoothed and airbrushed. An off-post photographer, Reacher guessed. Two prints for about a day’s pay, two cardboard mailers included, one for the mother and one for the wife or the girlfriend. There were similar pictures of Reacher somewhere in the world. For a spell every time he got promoted he would have a picture taken and send it to his mother. She never displayed them, because he wasn’t smiling. Reacher never smiled for the camera.
    He stepped close to the window and glanced north. Traffic flowed away from him like a river. He glanced south. Watched the traffic coming toward him.
    And saw a black Range Rover slowing and pulling in to the curb.
    License plate: OSC 19.
    Reacher spun around and was out of the bedroom in three long strides. Back in the living room after three more.
    “They’re here,” he said. “Now.”
    Silence for a split second.
    Then Pauling said, “Shit.”
    “What do we do?” Dee Marie said.
    “Bathroom,” Reacher said. “All of you. Now.”
    He stepped over to the sofa and grabbed the front of Hobart’s denim shirt and lifted him into the air. Carried him to the bathroom and laid him gently in the tub. Dee Marie and Pauling crowded in after him. Reacher pushed his way past them and back out to the hallway.
    “You can’t be out there,” Pauling said.
    “I have to be,” Reacher said. “Or they’ll search the whole place.”
    “They shouldn’t find you here.”
    “Lock the door,” Reacher said. “Sit tight and keep quiet.”
    He stood in the hallway and heard a click from the bathroom door and a second later the intercom buzzed from the street. He waited a beat and hit the button and said, “Yes?” Heard amplified traffic noise and then a voice. Impossible to tell whose it was.
    It said: “VA visiting nurse service.”
    Reacher smiled.
Nice,
he thought.
    He hit the button again and said, “Come on up.”
    Then he walked back to the living room and sat down on the sofa to wait.

CHAPTER 46
    REACHER HEARD LOUD creaking from the staircase.
Three people,
he guessed. He heard them make the turn and start up toward four. Heard them stop at the head of the stairs, surprised by the broken door. Then he heard the door open. There was a quiet metallic groan from a damaged hinge and after that there was nothing but the sound of footsteps in the foyer.
    First into the living room was Perez, the tiny Spanish guy.
    Then Addison, with the knife scar above his eye.
    Then Edward Lane himself.
    Perez stepped left and stopped dead and Addison stepped right and stopped dead and Lane moved into the center of the small static arc and stood still and stared.
    “The hell are you doing here?” he asked.
    “I beat you to it,” Reacher said.
    “How?”
    “Like I told you. I used to do this for a living. I could give you guys a mirror on a stick and I’d still be hours ahead of you.”
    “So where is Hobart?”
    “Not here.”
    “It was you who broke down the door?”
    “I didn’t have a key.”
    “Where is he?”
    “In the hospital.”
    “Bullshit. We just checked.”
    “Not here. In Birmingham, Alabama, or Nashville, Tennessee.”
    “How do you figure that?”
    “He needs specialized care. Saint Vincent’s recommended one of those