Tripwire

had settled on a certain sum of money she needed every year, and he couldn’t see getting it any lower than she had gotten it. The whole deal added up to maybe thirty thousand dollars a year, which meant earning maybe fifty, to take account of income taxes and the cost of five days a week traveling back and forth to wherever the hell he was going to earn it.
    “I don’t know,” he said again.
    “Plenty of things you could do.”
    “Like what?”
    “You’ve got talents. You’re a hell of an investigator, for instance. Dad always used to say you’re the best he ever saw.”
    “That was in the Army.” he said. “That’s all over now.”
    “Skills are portable, Reacher. There’s always demand for the best.”
    Then she looked up, a big idea in her face. “You could take over Costello’s business. He’s going to leave a void. We used him all the time.”
    “That’s great. First I get the guy killed, then I steal his business.”
    “It wasn’t your fault,” she said. “You should think about it.”
    So he looked back down at California and thought about it. Thought about Costello’s well-worn leather chair and his aging, comfortable body. Thought about sitting in his pastel room with its pebble glass windows, spending his whole life on the telephone. Thought about the cost of running the Greenwich Avenue office and hiring a secretary and providing her with new computers and telephone consoles and health insurance and paid vacations. All on top of running the Garrison place. He would be working ten months of the year before he got ahead by a single dollar.
    “I don’t know,” he said again. “I’m not sure I want to think about it.”
    “You’re going to have to.”
    “Maybe,” he said. “But not necessarily right now.”
    She smiled like she understood and they lapsed back into silence. The plane hissed onward and the stewardess came back with the drinks cart. Jodie got a refill of champagne and Reacher took a can of beer. He flipped through the airline magazine. It was full of bland articles about nothing much in particular. There were advertisements for financial services and small, complicated gadgets, all of which were black and ran on batteries. He arrived at the section where the airline’s operational fleet was pictured in little colored drawings. He found the plane they were on and read about its passenger capacity and its range and the power of its engines. Then he arrived at the crossword in back. It filled a page and looked pretty hard. Jodie was already there in her own copy, ahead of him.
    “Look at eleven down,” she said.
    He looked.
    “They can weigh heavy,” he read. “Sixteen letters.”
    “Responsibilities,” she said.
    MARILYN AND CHESTER Stone were huddled together on the left-hand sofa in front of the desk, because Hobie was in the bathroom, alone with the two cops. The thickset man in the dark suit sat on the opposite sofa with the shotgun resting in his lap. Tony was sprawled out next to him with his feet on the coffee table. Chester was inert, just staring into the gloom. Marilyn was cold and hungry, and terrified. Her eyes were darting all around the room. There was total silence from the bathroom.
    “What’s he doing in there with them?” she whispered.
    Tony shrugged. “Probably just talking to them right now.”
    “About what?”
    “Well, asking them questions about what they like and what they don’t. In terms of physical pain, you understand. He likes to do that.”
    “God, why?”
    Tony smiled. “He feels it’s more democratic, you know, letting the victims decide their own fate.”
    Marilyn shuddered. “Oh God, can’t he just let them go? They thought Sheryl was a battered wife, that’s all. They didn’t know anything about him.”
    “Well, they’ll know something about him soon,” Tony said. “He makes them pick a number. They never know whether to pick high or low, because they don’t know what it’s for. They think they might please him, you know, if they pick right. They spend forever trying to figure it out.”
    “Can’t he just let them go? Maybe later?”
    Tony shook his head.
    “No,” he said. “He’s very tense right now. This will relax him. Like therapy.”
    Marilyn was silent for a long moment. But then she had to ask.
    “What is the number for?” she whispered.
    “How many hours it takes them to die,” Tony said. “The ones who pick high get real pissed when they find that out.”
    “You