Tripwire

paces and bent and kissed him gently on the lips.
    “St. Vincent’s,” he said. “You told me, but I was confused.”
    She nodded.
    “You were full of morphine,” she said. “They were pumping it in like crazy. Your bloodstream would have kept all the addicts in New York happy.”
    He nodded. Glanced at the sun in the window. It looked like afternoon.
    “What day is it?”
    “It’s July. You’ve been out three weeks.”
    “Christ, I ought to feel hungry.”
    She moved around the foot of the bed and came up on his left. Laid her hand on his forearm. It was turned palm-up and there were tubes running into the veins of his elbow.
    “They’ve been feeding you,” she said. “I made sure you got what you like. You know, lots of glucose and saline.”
    He nodded.
    “Can’t beat saline,” he said.
    She went quiet.
    “What?” he asked.
    “Do you remember?”
    He nodded again.
    “Everything,” he said.
    She swallowed.
    “I don’t know what to say,” she whispered. “You took a bullet for me.”
    “My fault,” he said. “I was too slow, is all. I was supposed to trick him and get him first. But apparently I survived it. So don’t say anything. I mean it. Don’t ever mention it.”
    “But I have to say thank you,” she whispered.
    “Maybe I should say thank you,” he said. “Feels good to know somebody worth taking a bullet for.”
    She nodded, but not because she was agreeing. It was just random physical motion designed to keep her from crying.
    “So how am I?” he asked.
    She paused for a long moment.
    “I’ll get the doctor,” she said quietly. “He can tell you better than me.”
    She went out and a guy in a white coat came in. Reacher smiled. It was the guy the Army had sent to finish him off at the end of his parade. He was a small, wide, hairy man who could have found work wrestling.
    “You know anything about computers?” he asked.
    Reacher shrugged and started worrying this was a coded lead-in to bad news about a brain injury, impairment, loss of memory, loss of function.
    “Computers?” he said. “Not really.”
    “OK, try this,” the doctor said. “Imagine a big Cray supercomputer humming away. We feed it everything we know about human physiology and everything we know about gunshot wounds and then we ask it to design us a male person best equipped to survive a thirty-eight in the chest. Suppose it hums away for a week. What does it come up with?”
    Reacher shrugged again. “I don’t know.”
    “A picture of you, my friend,” the doctor said. “That’s what. The damn bullet didn’t even make it into your chest. Your pectoral muscle is so thick and so dense it stopped it dead. Like a three-inch kevlar vest. It popped out the other side of the muscle wall and smashed a rib, but it went no farther.”
    “So why was I out three weeks?” Reacher asked immediately. “Not for a muscle wound or a broken rib, that’s for damn sure. Is my head OK?”
    The doctor did a weird thing. He clapped his hands and punched the air. Then he stepped closer, beaming all over his face.
    “I was worried about it,” he said. “Real worried about it. Bad wound. I would have figured it for a nail gun, until they told me it was shotgun debris from manufactured furniture. It penetrated your skull and was about an eighth inch into your brain. Frontal lobe, my friend, bad place to have a nail. If I had to have a nail in my skull, the frontal lobe would definitely not be my first choice. But if I had to see a nail in anybody else’s frontal lobe I’d pick yours, I guess, because you’ve got a skull thicker than Neanderthal man’s. Anybody normal, that nail would have been all the way in, and that would have been thank you and good night.”
    “So am I OK?” Reacher asked again.
    “You just saved us ten thousand dollars in tests,” the doctor said happily. “I told you the news about the chest, and what did you do? Analytically? You compared it with your own internal database, realized it wasn’t a very serious wound, realized it couldn’t have needed three weeks of coma, remembered your other injury, put two and two together and asked the question you asked. Immediately. No hesitation. Fast, logical thinking, assembly of pertinent information, rapid conclusion, lucid questioning of the source of a possible answer. Nothing wrong with your head, my friend. Take that as a professional opinion.”
    Reacher nodded slowly. “So when can I get out of here?”
    The doctor took the