Tripwire

medical chart off the foot of the bed. There was a mass of paper clipped to a metal board. He riffed it through. “Well, your health is excellent in general, but we better watch you a while. Couple more days, maybe.”
    “Nuts to that,” Reacher said. “I’m leaving tonight.”
    The doctor nodded. “Well, see how you feel in an hour.”
    He stepped close and stretched up to a valve on the bottom of one of the IV bags. Clicked it a notch and tapped a tube with his finger. Watched carefully and nodded and walked back out of the room. He passed Jodie in the doorway. She was walking in with a guy in a seersucker jacket. He was about fifty, pale, short gray hair. Reacher watched him and thought a buck gets ten this is the Pentagon guy.
    “Reacher, this is General Mead,” Jodie said.
    “Department of the Army,” Reacher said.
    The guy in the jacket looked at him, surprised. “Have we met?”
    Reacher shook his head. “No, but I knew one of you would be sniffing around, soon as I was up and running.”
    Mead smiled. “We’ve been practically camped out here. To put it bluntly, we’d like you to keep quiet about the Carl Allen situation.”
    “Not a chance,” Reacher said.
    Mead smiled again and waited. He was enough of an Army bureaucrat to know the steps. Leon used to say something for nothing, that’s a foreign language.
    “The Hobies,” Reacher said. “Fly them down to D.C. first class, put them up in a five-star hotel, show them their boy’s name on the Wall and make sure there’s a shitload of brass in full-dress uniform saluting like crazy the whole time they’re doing it. Then I’ll keep quiet.”
    Mead nodded.
    “It’ll be done,” he said. He got up unbidden and went back outside. Jodie sat down on the foot of the bed.
    “Tell me about the police,” Reacher said. “Have I got questions to answer?”
    She shook her head.
    “Allen was a cop killer,” she said. “You stick around NYPD territory and you’ll never get another ticket in your life. It was self-defense, everybody’s cool.”
    “What about my gun? It was stolen.”
    “No, it was Allen’s gun. You wrestled it away from him. Roomful of witnesses saw you do it.”
    He nodded slowly. Saw the spray of blood and brains all over again as he shot him. A pretty good shot, he thought. Dark room, stress, a nail in his head, a .38 slug in his chest, bull’s-eye. Pretty damn close to the perfect shot. Then he saw the hook again, up at Jodie’s face, hard steel against the honey of her skin.
    “You OK?” he asked her.
    “I’m fine,” she said.
    “You sure? No bad dreams?”
    “No bad dreams. I’m a big girl now.”
    He nodded again. Recalled their first night together. A big girl. Seemed like a million years ago.
    “But are you OK?” she asked him back.
    “The doctor thinks so. He called me Neanderthal man.”
    “No, seriously.”
    “How do I look?”
    “I’ll show you,” she said.
    She ducked away to the bathroom and came back with the mirror from the wall. It was a round thing, framed in plastic. She propped it on his legs and he steadied it with his right hand and looked. He still had a fearsome tan. Blue eyes. White teeth. His head had been shaved. The hair had grown back an eighth of an inch. On the left of his face was a peppering of scars. The nail hole in his forehead was lost among the debris of a long and violent life. He could make it out because it was redder and newer than the rest, but it was no bigger than the mark a half-inch away where his brother, Joe, had caught him with a shard of glass in some long-forgotten childhood dispute over nothing, in the same exact year Hobie’s Huey went down. He tilted the mirror and saw broad strapping over his chest, snowy white against the tan. He figured he had lost maybe thirty pounds. Back to 220, his normal weight. He handed the mirror back to Jodie and tried to sit up. He was suddenly dizzy.
    “I want to get out of here,” he said.
    “You sure?” she asked.
    He nodded. He was sure, but he felt very sleepy. He put his head back on the pillow, just temporarily. He was warm and the pillow was soft. His head weighed a ton and his neck muscles were powerless to move it. The room was darkening. He swiveled his eyes upward and saw the IV bags hanging in the far distance above him. He saw the valve the doctor had adjusted. He had clicked it. He remembered the plastic sound. There was writing on the IV bag. The writing was upside down. He focused on it.