Tripwire

a pocketbook, and it doesn’t look like she’s concealing them about her person, does it?”
    The guy stared at Marilyn’s dress and smiled an ugly smile, all lips and tongue.
    “There’s something in there, that’s for damn sure. But it don’t look like keys.”
    She looked at him in disgust. The design on his jacket read Mo’s Motors. It was embroidered in red silk. Hobie walked across the room and stood directly behind her. He leaned forward and brought the hook around into her line of vision. She stared at it, close up. She shuddered.
    “Where are the keys?” he asked.
    “The BMW is mine,” she said.
    “Not anymore it isn’t.”
    He moved the hook closer. She could smell the metal and the leather.
    “I could search her,” the new guy called. “Maybe she is concealing them after all. I can think of a couple of interesting places to look.”
    She shuddered.
    “Keys,” Hobie said to her softly.
    “Kitchen counter,” she whispered back.
    Hobie took the hook away and walked around in front of her, smiling. The new guy looked disappointed. He nodded to confirm he’d heard the whisper and walked slowly to the door, jingling the Benz keys and the Tahoe keys in his hand.
    “Pleasure doing business,” he said as he walked.
    Then he paused at the door and looked back, straight at Marilyn.
    “You completely sure that’s off limits, Hobie? Seeing as how we’re old friends and all? Done a lot of business together?”
    Hobie shook his head like he meant it. “Forget about it. This one’s mine.”
    The guy shrugged and walked out of the office, swinging the keys. The door closed behind him and they heard the second thump of the lobby door a moment later. Then there was elevator whine and the office fell silent again. Hobie glanced at the stacks of dollar bills on the desk and headed back to the bathroom. Marilyn and Chester were kept side by side on the sofa, cold, sick, and hungry. The light coming in through the chinks in the blinds faded away to the yellow dullness of evening, and the silence from the bathroom continued until a point Marilyn guessed was around eight o’clock in the evening. Then it was shattered by screaming.
    I HE PLANE CHASED the sun west but lost time all the way and arrived on Oahu three hours in arrears, in the middle of the afternoon. The first-class cabin was emptied ahead of business class and coach, which meant Reacher and Jodie were the first people outside the terminal and into the taxi line. The temperature and the humidity out there were similar to Texas, but the damp had a saline quality to it because of the Pacific close by. And the light was calmer. The jagged green mountains and the blue of the sea bathed the island with the jeweled glow of the tropics. Jodie put her dark glasses on again and gazed beyond the airport fences with the mild curiosity of somebody who had passed through Hawaii a dozen times in her father’s service days without ever really stopping there. Reacher did the same. He had used it as a Pacific stepping-stone more times than he could count, but he had never served in Hawaii.
    The taxi waiting at the head of the line was a replica of the one they’d used at Dallas-Fort Worth, a clean Caprice with the air roaring full blast and the driver’s compartment decorated halfway between a religious shrine and a living room. They disappointed the guy by asking him for the shortest ride available on Oahu, which was the half-mile hop around the perimeter road to the Hickam Air Force Base entrance. The guy glanced backward at the line of cars behind him, and Reacher saw him thinking about the better fares the other drivers would get.
    “Ten-dollar tip in it for you,” he said.
    The guy gave him the same look the ticket clerk at Dallas-Fort Worth had used. A fare that was going to leave the meter stuck on the basic minimum, but a ten-dollar tip? Reacher saw a photograph of what he guessed was the guy’s family, taped to the vinyl of the dash. A big family, dark, smiling children and a dark, smiling woman in a cheerful print dress, all standing in front of a clean simple home with something vigorous growing in a dirt patch to the right. He thought about the Hobies, alone in the dark silence up in Brighton with the hiss of the oxygen bottle and the squeak of the worn wooden floors. And Rutter, in the dusty squalor of his Bronx storefront.
    “Twenty dollars,” he said. “If we get going right now, OK?”
    “Twenty dollars?” the guy repeated,