Tripwire

later?”
    There was another pause.
    “He usually sleeps right through, after his medication,” the old woman said. “It’s a blessing, really, I think. Can your father’s friend come first thing in the morning?”
    HOBIE USED THE tip of his hook to press the intercom buzzer on his desk. Leaned forward and called through to his receptionist. He used the guy’s name, which was an unusual intimacy for Hobie, generally caused by stress.
    “Tony?” he said. “We need to talk.”
    Tony came in from his brass-and-oak reception counter in the lobby and threaded his way around the coffee table to the sofa.
    “It was Garber who went to Hawaii,” he said.
    “You sure?” Hobie asked him.
    Tony nodded. “On American, White Plains to Chicago, Chicago to Honolulu, April fifteenth. Returned the next day, April sixteenth, same route. Paid by Amex. It’s all in their computer.”
    “But what did he do there?” Hobie said, more or less to himself.
    “We don’t know,” Tony muttered. “But we can guess, can’t we?”
    There was an ominous silence in the office. Tony watched the unburned side of Hobie’s face, waiting for a response.
    “I heard from Hanoi,” Hobie said, into the silence.
    “Christ, when?”
    “Ten minutes ago.”
    “Jesus, Hanoi?” Tony said. “Shit, shit, shit.”
    “Thirty years,” Hobie said. “And now it’s happened.”
    Tony stood up and walked around behind the desk. Used
    his fingers to push two slats of the window blind apart. A bar of afternoon sunlight fell across the room.
    “So you should get out now. Now it’s way, way too dangerous.”
    Hobie said nothing. He clasped his hook in the fingers of his left hand.
    “You promised,” Tony said urgently. “Step one, step two. And they’ve happened. Both steps have happened now, for God’s sake.”
    “It’ll still take them some time,” Hobie said. “Won’t it? Right now, they still don’t know anything.”
    Tony shook his head. “Garber was no fool. He knew something. If he went to Hawaii, there was a good reason for it.”
    Hobie used the muscle in his left arm to guide the hook up to his face. He ran the smooth, cold steel over the scar tissue there. Time to time, pressure from the hard curve could relieve the itching.
    “What about this Reacher guy?” he asked. “Any progress on that?”
    Tony squinted out through the gap in the blind, eighty-eight floors up.
    “I called St. Louis,” he said. “He was a military policeman, too, served with Garber the best part of thirteen years. They’d had another inquiry on the same subject, ten days ago. I’m guessing that was Costello.”
    “So why?” Hobie asked. “The Garber family pays Costello to chase down some old Army buddy? Why? What the hell for?”
    “No idea,” Tony said. “The guy’s a drifter. He was digging swimming pools down where Costello was.”
    Hobie nodded, vaguely. He was thinking hard.
    “A military cop,” he said to himself. “Who’s now a drifter.”
    “You should get out,” Tony said again.
    “I don’t like the military police,” Hobie said.
    “I know you don’t.”
    “So what’s the interfering bastard doing here?”
    “You should get out,” Tony said for the third time.
    Hobie nodded.
    “I’m a flexible guy,” he said. “You know that.”
    Tony let the blind fall back into place. The room went dark. “I’m not asking you to be flexible. I’m asking you to stick to what you planned all along.”
    “I changed the plan. I want the Stone score.”
    Tony came back around the desk and took his place on the sofa. “Too risky to stick around for it. Both calls are in now. Vietnam and Hawaii, for Christ’s sake.”
    “I know that,” Hobie said. “So I changed the plan again.”
    “Back to what it was?”
    Hobie shrugged and shook his head. “A combination. We get out, for sure, but only after I nail Stone.”
    Tony sighed and laid his hands palm-up on the upholstery. “Six weeks is way, way too long. Garber already went to Hawaii, for Christ’s sake. He was some kind of a hotshot general. And obviously he knew stuff, or why would he go out there?”
    Hobie was nodding. His head was moving in and out of a thin shaft of light that picked up the crude gray tufts of his hair. “He knew stuff, I accept that. But he took sick and died. The stuff he knew died with him. Otherwise why would his daughter resort to some half-assed private dick and some unemployed drifter?”
    “So what are you saying?”
    Hobie slipped