Child, Lee. Running blind

thousand feet above and three miles east of La Guardia in New York. He looked at his watch and saw he’d slept fifty minutes. His mouth tasted tired.

“You want to get some dinner?” Harper asked him.

He blinked and checked his watch again. He had at least an hour to kill before Jodie’s earliest possible ETA. Probably two hours. Maybe three.

“You got somewhere in mind?” he asked back.

“I don’t know New York too well,” she said. “I’m an Aspen girl.”

“I know a good Italian,” he said.

“They put me in a hotel on Park and Thirty-sixth,” she said. “I assume you’re staying at Jodie’s.”

He nodded. “I assume I am, too.”

“So is the restaurant near Park and Thirty-sixth?”

He shook his head. “Cab ride. This is a big town.”

She shook her head in turn. “No cabs. They’ll send a car. Ours for the duration.”

The driver was waiting at the gate. Same guy who had driven them before. His car was parked in the tow lane outside Arrivals, with a large card with the Bureau shield printed on it propped behind the windshield. Congestion was bad, all the way into Manhattan. It was the second half of rush hour. But the

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guy drove like he had nothing to fear from the traffic cops and they were outside Mostro’s within forty minutes of the plane touching down.

The street was dark, and the restaurant glowed like a promise. Four tables were occupied and Puccini was playing. The owner saw Reacher on the sidewalk and hurried to the door, beaming. Showed them to a table and brought the menus himself.

“This is the place Petrosian was leaning on?” Harper asked.

Reacher nodded toward the owner. “Look at the little guy. Did he deserve that?”

“You should have left it to the cops.”

“That’s what Jodie said.”

“She’s clearly a smart woman.”

It was warm inside the huge room, and Harper slipped her jacket off and twisted to hang it over the back of her chair. Her shirt twisted with her, tightening and loosening. First time since he’d met her, she was wearing a bra. She followed his gaze and blushed.

“I wasn’t sure who we’d be meeting,” she said.

He nodded.

“We’ll be meeting somebody,” he said. “That’s for damn sure. Sooner or later.”

The way he said it made her glance up at him.

“Now you really want this guy, right?” she said.

“Yes, now I do.”

“For Amy Callan? You liked her, didn’t you?”

“She was OK. I liked Alison Lamarr better, what I saw of her. But I want this guy for Rita Scimeca.”

“She likes you too,” she said. “I could tell.”

He nodded again.

“Did you have a relationship with her?”

He shrugged. “That’s a very vague word.”

“An affair?”

He shook his head. “I only met her after she was raped. Because she was raped. She wasn’t in any kind of a state to be having affairs. Still isn’t, by the look of it. I was a little older than she was, maybe five or six years. We got very friendly, but it was like a paternalistic thing, you know, which I guess she needed, but she hated it at the same time. I had to work hard to make it feel at least brotherly, as I recall. We went out a few times, but like big brother and

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little sister, always completely platonic. She was like a wounded soldier, recuperating.”

“That’s how she saw it?”

“Exactly like that,” he said. “Like a guy who has his leg shot off. It can’t be denied, but it can be dealt with. And she was dealing with it.”

“And now this guy is setting her back.”

Reacher nodded. “That’s the problem. Hiding behind this harassment thing, he’s pounding on an open wound. If he was up-front about it, it would be OK. Rita could accept that as a separate problem, I think. Like a one-legged guy could deal with getting the flu. But it’s coming across like a taunt, about her past.”

,- “And that makes you mad.”

‘ ™ “I feel responsible for Rita, he’s messing with her, so he’s messing with me.”

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