Tripwire

her head, and she felt weak and sleepy.
    “I walked into a door,” she whispered.
    “The edge of a door is vertical,” Sark said, patiently. “There would be damage to your chin and your brow as well, wouldn’t there? It stands to reason, doesn’t it? If a vertical thing had depressed your cheekbones, it would have hit your brow and your chin pretty hard as well, wouldn’t it?”
    He gazed at the X rays, sadly.
    “We can help you,” O’Hallinan said. “You tell us all about it, and we can keep it from happening again. We can keep him from doing this to you again.”
    “I want to sleep now,” Sheryl whispered.
    O’Hallinan leaned forward and spoke softly. “Would it help if my partner left? You know, just you and me talking?”
    “I walked into a door,” Sheryl whispered. “Now I want to go to sleep.”
    O’Hallinan nodded, wisely and patiently. “I’ll leave you my card. So if you want to talk to me when you wake up, you can just call me, OK?”
    Sheryl nodded vaguely and O’Hallinan slipped a card from her pocket and bent down and placed it on the cabinet next to the bed.
    “Don’t forget, we can help you,” she whispered.
    Sheryl made no reply. She was either asleep, or pretending to be. O’Hallinan and Sark pulled the curtain and walked away to the desk. The doctor looked up at them. O’Hallinan shook her head.
    “Complete denial,” she said.
    “Walked into a door,” Sark said. “A door who was probably juiced up, weighs about two hundred pounds and swings a baseball bat.”
    The doctor shook her head. “Why on earth do they protect the bastards?”
    A nurse looked up. “I saw her come in. It was really weird. I was on my cigarette break. She got out of a car, way on the far side of the street. Walked herself all the way in. Her shoes were too big, you notice that? There were two guys in the car, watched her every step of the way, and then they took off in a big hurry.”
    “What was the car?” Sark asked.
    “Big black thing,” the nurse said.
    “You recall the plate?”
    “What am I, Mr. Memory?”
    O’Hallinan shrugged and started to move away.
    “But it’ll be on the video,” the nurse said suddenly.
    “What video?” Sark asked.
    “Security camera, above the doors. We stand right underneath it, so the management can’t clock how long we take out there. So what we see, it sees, too.”
    The exact time of Sheryl’s arrival was recorded in the paperwork at the desk. It took just a minute to wind the tape back to that point. Then another minute to run her slow walk in reverse, backward across the ambulance circle, across the plaza, across the sidewalk, through the traffic, into the front of a big black car. O’Hallinan bent her head close to the screen.
    “Got it,” she said.
    JODIE CHOSE THE hotel for the night. She did it by finding the travel section in the nearest bookstore to the NPRC building. She stood there and leafed through the local guides until she found a place recommended in three of them.
    “It’s funny, isn’t it?” she said. “We’re in St. Louis here, and the travel section has more guides to St. Louis than anyplace else. So how is that a travel section? Should be called the stay-at-home section.”
    Reacher was a little nervous. This method was new to him. The sort of places he normally patronized never advertised in books. They relied on neon signs on tall poles, boasting attractions that had stopped being attractions and had become basic human rights about twenty years ago, such as air and cable and a pool.
    “Hold this,” she said.
    He took the book from her and kept his thumb on the page while she squatted down and opened her carry-on. She rooted around and found her mobile phone. Took the book back from him and stood right there in the aisle and called the hotel. He watched her. He had never called a hotel. The places he stayed always had a room, no matter when. They were delirious if their occupancy rates ever made it above 50 percent. He listened to Jodie’s end of the conversation and heard her mentioning sums of money that would have bought him a bed for a month, given a little haggling.
    “OK,” she said. “We’re in. It’s their honeymoon suite. Four-poster bed. Is that neat, or what?”
    He smiled. The honeymoon suite.
    “We need to eat,” he said. “They serve dinner there?”
    She shook her head and thumbed through the book to the restaurant section.
    “More fun to go someplace else for dinner,” she said.