“Five one, five two, I need your current location, please. ”

Sark was staring at the radios in horror. Hobie followed his gaze and smiled.

“They don’t know where you are,” he said.

Sark shook his head. Thinking fast. A courageous man.

“They know where we are. They know we’re here. They want confirmation, is all. They check we’re where we’re supposed to be, all the time.”

The radios crackled again. “Five one, five two, respond please. ”

Hobie stared at Sark. O’Hallinan was struggling to her knees and staring toward the radios. Tony moved his pistol to cover her.

“Five one, five two, do you copy?”

The voice slid under the sea of static and then came back stronger.

“Five one, five two, we have a violent domestic emergency at Houston and Avenue D. Are you anywhere near that vicinity?”

Hobie smiled.

“That’s two miles from here,” he said. “They have absolutely no idea where you are, do they?”

Then he grinned. The left side of his face folded into unaccustomed lines, but on the right the scar tissue stayed tight, like a rigid mask.

14

FOR THE FIRST time in his life, Reacher was truly comfortable in an airplane. He had been flying since birth, first as a soldier’s kid and then as a soldier himself, millions of miles in total, but all of them hunched in roaring spartan military transports or folded into hard civilian seats narrower than his shoulders. Traveling first-class on a scheduled airline was a completely new luxury.

The cabin was dramatic. It was a calculated insult to the passengers who filed down the jetway and glanced into it before shuffling along the aisle to their own mean accommodations. It was cool and pastel in first class, with four seats to a row where there were ten in coach. Arithmetically, Reacher figured that made each seat two and a half times as wide, but they felt better than that. They felt enormous. They felt like sofas, wide enough for him to squirm left and right without bruising his hips against the arms. And the legroom was amazing. He could slide right down and stretch right out without touching the seat in front. He could hit the button and recline almost horizontally without bothering the guy behind. He operated the mechanism a couple of times like a kid with a toy, and then he settled on a sensible halfway position and opened the in-flight magazine, which was crisp and new and not creased and sticky like the ones they were reading forty rows back.

Jodie was lost in her own seat, with her shoes off and her feet tucked up under her, the same magazine open on her lap and a glass of chilled champagne at her elbow. The cabin was quiet. They were a long way forward of the engines, and their noise was muted to a hiss no louder than the hiss of the air coming through the vents in the overhead. There was no vibration. Reacher was watching the sparkling gold wine in Jodie’s glass, and he saw no tremor on its surface.

“I could get accustomed to this,” he said.

She looked up and smiled.

“Not on your wages,” she said.

He nodded and went back to his arithmetic. He figured a day’s earnings from digging swimming pools would buy him fifty miles of first-class air travel. Cruising speed, that was about five minutes’ worth of progress. Ten hours of work, all gone in five minutes. He was spending money 120 times faster than he had been earning it.

“What are you going to do?” she asked. “When this is all over?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

The question had been in the back of his mind ever since she told him about the house. The house itself sat there in his imagination, sometimes benign, sometimes threatening, like a trick picture that changed depending on how you tilted it against the light. Sometimes it sat there in the glow of the sun, comfortable, low and spreading, surrounded by its amiable jungle of a yard, and it looked like home. Other times, it looked like a gigantic millstone, requiring him to run and run and run just to stay level with the starting line. He knew people with houses. He had talked to them, with the same kind of detached interest he would talk to a person who kept snakes as pets or entered ballroom dancing competitions. Houses forced you into a certain lifestyle. Even if somebody gave you one for nothing, like Leon had, it committed you to a whole lot of different things. There were property taxes. He knew that. There was insurance, in case the place burned down or was blown away in a high wind. There was maintenance. People he knew with houses were always doing something to them. They would be replacing the heating system at the start of the winter, because it had failed. Or the basement would be leaking water, and complicated things with excavations would be required. Roofs were a problem. He knew that. People had told him. Roofs had a finite life span, which surprised him. The shingles needed stripping off and replacing with new. Siding, also. Windows, too. He had known people who had put new windows in their houses. They had deliberated long and hard about what type to buy.

“Are you going to get a job?” Jodie asked.

He stared out through the oval window at southern California, dry and brown seven miles below him. What sort of a job? The house was going to cost him maybe ten thousand dollars a year in taxes and premiums and maintenance. And it was an isolated house, so he would have to keep Rutter’s car, too. It was a free car, like the house, but it would cost him money just to own. Insurance, oil changes, inspections, title, gasoline. Maybe another three grand a year. Food and clothes and utilities were on top of all of that. And if he had a house, he would want other things. He would want a stereo. He would want Wynonna Judd’s record, and a whole lot of others, too. He thought back to old Mrs. Hobie’s handwritten calculations. She had settled on a certain sum of money she needed every year, and he couldn’t see getting it any lower than she had gotten it. The whole deal added up to maybe thirty thousand dollars a year, which meant earning maybe fifty, to take account of income taxes and the cost of five days a week traveling back and forth to wherever the hell he was going to earn it.

“I don’t know,” he said again.

“Plenty of things you could do.”

“Like what?”

“You’ve got talents. You’re a hell of an investigator, for instance. Dad always used to say you’re the best he ever saw.”

“That was in the Army.” he said. “That’s all over now.”

“Skills are portable, Reacher. There’s always demand for the best.”

Then she looked up, a big idea in her face. “You could take over Costello’s business. He’s going to leave a void. We used him all the time.”

“That’s great. First I get the guy killed, then I steal his business.”

“It wasn’t your fault,” she said. “You should think about it.”

So he looked back down at California and thought about it. Thought about Costello’s well-worn leather chair and his aging, comfortable body. Thought about sitting in his pastel room with its pebble glass windows, spending his whole life on the telephone. Thought about the cost of running the Greenwich Avenue office and hiring a secretary and providing her with new computers and telephone consoles and health insurance and paid vacations. All on top of running the Garrison place. He would be working ten months of the year before he got ahead by a single dollar.

“I don’t know,” he said again. “I’m not sure I want to think about it.”

“You’re going to have to.”

“Maybe,” he said. “But not necessarily right now.”

She smiled like she understood and they lapsed back into silence. The plane hissed onward and the stewardess came back with the drinks cart. Jodie got a refill of champagne and Reacher took a can of beer. He flipped through the airline magazine. It was full of bland articles about nothing much in particular. There were advertisements for financial services and small, complicated gadgets, all of which were black and ran on batteries. He arrived at the section where the airline’s operational fleet was pictured in little colored drawings. He found the plane they were on and read about its passenger capacity and its range and the power of its engines. Then he arrived at the crossword in back. It filled a page and looked pretty hard. Jodie was already there in her own copy, ahead of him.