“Cab?” she asked.

He shook his head. “We’ll drive.”

The big V-8 made a hell of a sound in the basement garage. He blipped the throttle a couple of times and grinned. The torque rocked the heavy vehicle, side to side on its springs.

“The price of their toys,” Jodie said.

He looked at her.

“You never heard that?” she said. “Difference between the men and the boys is the price of their toys?”

He blipped the motor and grinned again. “Price on this was a dollar.”

“And you just blipped away two dollars in gas,” she said.

He shoved it in drive and took off up the ramp. Worked around east to the Midtown Tunnel and took 495 to the Van Wyck and down into the sprawl of JFK.

“Park in short-term,” she said. “We can afford it now, right?”

He had to leave the Steyr and the silencer behind. No easy way to get through the airport security hoops with big metal weapons in your pocket. He hid them under the driver’s seat. They left the Lincoln in the lot right opposite the United building and five minutes later were at the counter buying two business-class one-ways to St. Louis. The expensive tickets entitled them to wait in a special lounge, where a uniformed steward served them good coffee in china cups with saucers, and where they could read The Wall Street Journal without paying for it. Then Reacher carried Jodie’s bag down the jetway into the plane. The business-class seats were two-on-a-side, the first half-dozen rows. Wide, comfortable seats. Reacher smiled.

“I never did this before,” he said.

He slid into the window seat. He had room to stretch out a little. Jodie was lost in her seat. There was room enough for three of her, side by side. The attendant brought them juice before the plane even taxied. Minutes later they were in the air, wheeling west across the southern tip of Manhattan.

TONY CAME BACK into the office with a shiny red Talbot’s bag and a brown Bally carrier hanging by their rope handles from his clenched fist. Marilyn carried them into the bathroom and five minutes later Sheryl came out. The new skirt was the right size, but the wrong color. She was smoothing it down over her hips with vague movements of her hands. The new shoes didn’t match the skirt and they were too big. Her face looked awful. Her eyes were blank and acquiescent, like Marilyn had told her they should be.

“What are you going to tell the doctors?” Hobie called to her.

Sheryl looked away and concentrated on Marilyn’s script. “I walked into a door,” she said.

Her voice was low and nasal. Dull, like she was still in shock.

“Are you going to call the cops?”

She shook her head. “No, I’m not going to do that.”

Hobie nodded. “What would happen if you did?”

“I don’t know,” she replied. Blank and dull.

“Your friend Marilyn would die, in terrible pain. You understand that?”

He raised the hook and let her focus on it from across the room. Then he came out from behind the desk. Walked around and stood directly behind Marilyn. Used his left hand to lift her hair aside. His hand brushed her skin. She stiffened. He touched her cheek with the curve of the hook. Sheryl nodded, vaguely.

“Yes, I understand that,” she said.

I HAD TO be done quickly, because although Sheryl was now in her new skirt and shoes, Chester was still in his boxers and undershirt. Tony made them both wait in reception until the freight elevator arrived, and then he hustled them along the corridor and inside. He stepped out in the garage and scanned ahead. Hustled them over to the Tahoe and pushed Chester into the backseat and Sheryl into the front. He fired it up and locked the doors. Took off up the ramp and out to the street.

He could recall offhand maybe two dozen hospitals in Manhattan, and as far as he knew most of them had emergency rooms. His instinct was to drive all the way north, maybe up to Mount Sinai on 100th Street, because he felt it would be safer to put some distance between themselves and wherever Sheryl was going to be. But they were tight for time. To drive all the way uptown and back was going to take an hour, maybe more. An hour they couldn’t spare. So he decided on St. Vincent’s on Eleventh Street and Seventh Avenue. Bellevue, over on Twenty-seventh and First, was better geographically, but Bellevue was usually swarming with cops, for one reason or another. That was his experience. They practically lived there. So St. Vincent’s it would be. And he knew St. Vincent’s had a big, wide area facing the ER entrance, where Greenwich Avenue sliced across Seventh. He remembered the layout from when they had gone out to capture Costello’s secretary. A big, wide area, almost like a plaza. They could watch her all the way inside, without having to stop too close.

The drive took eight minutes. He eased into the curb on the west side of Seventh and clicked the button to unlock the doors.

“Out,” he said.

She opened the door and slid down to the sidewalk. Stood there, uncertain. Then she moved away to the crosswalk, without looking back. Tony leaned over and slammed the door behind her. Turned in his seat toward Stone.

“So watch her,” he said.

Stone was already watching her. He saw the traffic stop and the walk light change. He saw her step forward with the crowd, dazed. She walked slower than the others, shuffling in her big shoes. Her hand was up at her face, masking it. She reached the opposite sidewalk well after the walk light changed back to DON’T. An impatient truck pulled right and eased around her. She walked on toward the hospital entrance. Across the wide sidewalk. Then she was in the ambulance circle. A pair of double doors ahead of her. Scarred, floppy plastic doors. A trio of nurses standing next to them, on their cigarette break, smoking. She walked past the nurses, straight to the doors, slowly. She pushed at them, tentatively, both hands. They opened. She stepped inside. The doors fell shut behind her.

“OK, you see that?”

Stone nodded. “Yes, I saw it. She’s inside.”

Tony checked his mirror and fought his way out into the traffic stream. By the time he was a hundred yards south, Sheryl was waiting in the triage line, going over and over in her head what Marilyn had told her to do.

IT WAS A short and cheap cab ride from the St. Louis Airport to the National Personnel Records Center building, and familiar territory for Reacher. Most of his Stateside tours of duty had involved at least one trip through the archives, searching backward in time for one thing or another. But this time, it was going to be different. He would be going in as a civilian. Not the same thing as going in dressed in a major’s uniform. Not the same thing at all. He was clear on that.

Public access is controlled by the counter staff in the lobby. The whole archive is technically part of the public record, but the staff take a lot of trouble to keep that fact well obscured. In the past Reacher had agreed with that tactic, no hesitation. Military records can be very frank, and they need to be read and interpreted in strict context. He’d always been very happy they were kept away from the public. But now he was the public, and he was wondering how it was going to play. There were millions of files piled up in dozens of huge storerooms, and it would be very easy to wait days or weeks before anything got found, even with the staff running around like crazy and looking exactly like they were doing their absolute best. He had seen it happen before, from the inside, many times. It was a very plausible act. He had watched it, with a wry smile on his face.

So they paused in the hot Missouri sunshine after they paid off the cab and agreed on how to do it. They walked inside and saw the big sign: One File at a Time. They lined up in front of the clerk and waited. She was a heavy woman, middle-aged, dressed in a master sergeant’s uniform, busy with the sort of work designed to achieve nothing at all except to make people wait until it was done. After a long moment she pushed two blank forms across the counter and pointed to where a pencil was tied down to a desk with a piece of string.