Reacher said nothing.
“And I told you not to do that,” she said.
Reacher said nothing.
“Deerfield knows you did it,” she said.
“He can’t prove it.”
“That doesn’t matter,” she said. “Don’t you see that? He can try to prove it. And he’s not kidding about the two years in jail. A suspicion of gang warfare? A thing like that, the courts will back him up all the way. Denial of bail, continuances, the prosecutors will really go to bat for him. It’s not an empty threat. He owns you now. Like I told you he would.”
Reacher said nothing.
“Why did you do it?”
He shrugged. “Lots of reasons. It needed doing.”
There was a long silence.
“Would my father have agreed with you?” Jodie asked.
“Leon?” Reacher said. He recalled the photographs in Cozo’s packet. The photographs of Petrosian’s handiwork. The dead women, displayed like centerfolds. Pieces missing, things inserted. “Are you kidding? Leon would have agreed with me in a heartbeat.”
“And would he have gone ahead and done what you did?”
“Probably.”
She nodded. “Yes, he probably would. But look around you, OK?”
“At what?”
“At everything. What do you see?”
He looked around. “An apartment.”
She nodded. “My apartment.”
“So?”
fu/lSUfl4 <£)iifi*( 163 "Did I grow up here?" "Of course not." "So where did I grow up?" He shrugged. "All over the place, on Army bases, like I did." She nodded. "Where did you first meet me?" "You know where. Manila. On the base." "Remember that bungalow?" "Sure I do." She nodded. "So do I. It was tiny, it stank, and it had cockroaches bigger than my hand. And you know what? That was the best place I ever lived as a kid." "So?" She was pointing at her briefcase. It was a leather pilot's case, stuffed with legal paper, parked against the wall just inside the kitchen door. "What's that?" "Your briefcase." "Exactly. Not a rifle, not a carbine, not a flamethrower." "So?" "So I live in a Manhattan apartment instead of base quarters, and I carry a briefcase instead of infantry weapons." He nodded. "I know you do." "But do you know why?" "Because you want to, I guess." "Exactly. Because I want to. It was a conscious choice. My choice. I grew up in the Army, just like you did, and I could have joined up if I'd wanted to, just like you did. But I didn't want to. I wanted to go to college and law school instead. I wanted to join a big firm and make partner. And why was that?" "Why?" "Because I wanted to live in a world with rules." "Plenty of rules in the Army," he said. "The wrong rules, Reacher. I wanted civilian rules. Civilized rules." "So what are you saying?" "I'm saying I left the military all those years ago and I don't want to be back in it now." "You're not back in it." "But you make me feel that I am. Worse than the military. This thing with Petrosian? I don't want to be in a world with rules like that. You know I don't." "So what should I have done?" 164 1"&M "You shouldn't have gotten into it in the first place. That night in the restaurant? You should have walked away and called the cops. That's what we do here." "Here?" "In the civilized world." He sat on her kitchen stool and leaned his forearms on her countertop. Spread his fingers wide and placed his palms down flat. The countertop was cold. It was some kind of granite, gray and shiny, milled to reveal tiny quartz speckles throughout its surface. The corners and angles were radiused into perfect quarter-circles. It was an inch thick, and probably very expensive. It was a civilized product. It belonged right there in a world where people agree to labor forty hours, or a hundred, or two hundred, and then exchange the remuneration they get for installations they hope will make their kitchens look nice, inside their expensive remodeled buildings high above Broadway. "Why did you stop calling me?" she asked. He looked down at his hands. They lay on the polished granite like the rough exposed roots of small trees.