Tripwire
resemblance.
“That’s me,” Hobie confirmed, following his gaze.
“World War Two?” Reacher asked.
The old man nodded. Sadness in his eyes.
“I never went overseas,” he said. “I volunteered well ahead of the draft, but I had a weak heart, even back then. They wouldn’t let me go. So I did my time in a storeroom in New Jersey.”
Reacher nodded. Hobie had his arm behind him, fiddling with the cylinder valve, increasing the oxygen flow.
“I’ll bring the coffee now,” the old lady said. “And the cake.”
“Can I help you with anything?” Reacher asked her.
“No, I’ll be fine,” she said, and swished slowly out of the room.
“Sit down, Major, please,” Tom Hobie said.
Reacher nodded and sat down in the silence, in a small armchair near enough to catch the old guy’s fading voice. He could hear the rattle of his breathing. Nothing else, just a faint hiss from the top of the oxygen bottle and the clink of china from the kitchen. Patient domestic sounds. The window had a venetian blind, lime green plastic, tilted down against the light. The river was out there somewhere, presumably beyond an overgrown yard, maybe thirty miles upstream of Leon Garber’s place.
“Here we are,” Mrs. Hobie called from the hallway.
She was on her way back into the room with a wheeled cart. There was a matching china set stacked on it, cups and saucers and plates, with a small milk jug and a sugar bowl. The linen cover was off the platter, revealing a pound cake, drizzled with some kind of yellow icing. Maybe lemon. The old percolator was there, smelling of coffee.
“How do you like it?”
“No milk, no sugar,” Reacher said.
She poured coffee into a cup, her thin wrist quivering with the effort. The cup rattled in its saucer as she passed it across. She followed it with a quarter of the cake on a plate. The plate shook. The oxygen bottle hissed. The old man was rehearsing his story, dividing it up into bites, taking in enough oxygen to fuel each one of them.
“I was a printer,” he said suddenly. “I ran my own shop. Mary worked for a big customer of mine. We met and were married in the spring of ‘47. Our son was born in the June of ‘48.”
He turned away and ran his glance along the line of photographs.
“Our son, Victor Truman Hobie.”
The parlor fell quiet, like an observance.
“I believed in duty,” the old man said. “I was unfit for active service, and I regretted it. Regretted it bitterly, Major. But I was happy to serve my country any way I could, and I did. We brought our son up the same way, to love his country and to serve it. He volunteered for Vietnam.”
Old Mr. Hobie closed his mouth and sucked oxygen through his nose, once, twice, and then he leaned down to the floor beside him and came up with a leather-bound folder. He spread it across his bony legs and opened it up. Took out a photograph and passed it across. Reacher juggled his cup and his plate and leaned forward to take it from the shaking hand. It was a faded color print of a boy in a backyard. The boy was maybe nine or ten, stocky, toothy, freckled, grinning, wearing a metal bowl upside down on his head, with a toy rifle shouldered, his stiff denim trousers tucked into his socks to resemble the look of fatigues buckled into gaiters.
“He wanted to be a soldier,” Mr. Hobie said. “Always. It was his ambition. I approved of it at the time, of course. We were unable to have other children, so Victor was on his own, the light of our lives, and I thought that to be a soldier and to serve his country was a fine ambition for the only son of a patriotic father.”
There was silence again. A cough. A hiss of oxygen. Silence.
“Did you approve of Vietnam, Major?” Hobie asked suddenly.
Reacher shrugged.
“I was too young to have much of an opinion,” he said. “But knowing what I know now, no, I wouldn’t have approved of Vietnam.”
“Why not?”
“Wrong place,” Reacher said. “Wrong time, wrong reasons, wrong methods, wrong approach, wrong leadership. No real backing, no real will to win, no coherent strategy.”
“Would you have gone?”
Reacher nodded.
“Yes, I would have gone,” he said. “No choice. I was the son of a soldier, too. But I would have been jealous of my father’s generation. Much easier to go to World War Two.”
“Victor wanted to fly helicopters,” Hobie said. “He was passionate about it. My fault again, I’m afraid. I took him to a county fair, paid two
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