desk since last fall.
“Financial section?” he guessed.
She shook her head.
“I can’t discuss it,” she said again.
“But you already made enemies,” he said.
She gave him a half-smile which died fast. Then she went quiet. She
looked calm, but Reacher could feel in her wrist that she was worried
for the first time. But she was hanging in there. And she was
wrong.
They’re not out to kill you,” he said. They could have killed you in
that waste ground. Why haul you away in this damn truck? And there’s
your crutch, too.”
“What about my crutch?” she said.
“Doesn’t make any sense,” he said. “Why would they toss your crutch in
here if they’re going to kill you? You’re a hostage, Holly, that’s
what you are. You sure you don’t know these guys? Never saw them
before?”
“Never,” she said. “I don’t know who the hell they are, or what the
hell they want from me.”
He stared at her. She sounded way too definite. She knew more than
she was telling him. They went quiet in the noise. Rocked and bounced
with the movement of the truck. Reacher stared into the gloom. He
could feel Holly making decisions, next to him. She turned sideways
again.
“I need to get you out of here,” she said again.
He glanced at her. Glanced away and grinned.
“Suits me, Holly,” he said. “Sooner the better.”
“When will somebody miss you?” she asked.
That was a question he would have preferred not to answer. But she was
looking hard at him, waiting. So he thought about it, and he told her
the truth.
“Never,” he said.
“Why not?” she asked. “Who are you, Readier?”
He looked across at her and shrugged.
“Nobody,” he said.
She carried on looking at him, quizzically. Maybe irritated.
“OK, what kind of nobody?” she asked.
He heard Memphis Slim in his head: got me working in a steel mill.
“I’m a doorman,” he said. “At a club in Chicago.”
“Which club?” she asked.
“A blues place on the South Side,” he said. “You probably don’t know
it.”
She looked at him and shook her head.
“A doorman?” she said. “You’re playing this pretty cool for a
doorman.”
“Doormen deal with a lot of weird situations,” he said.
She looked like she wasn’t convinced and he put his face down near his
wristwatch to check the time. Two-thirty in the afternoon.
“And how long before somebody misses you?” he asked.
She looked at her own watch and made a face.
“Quite a while,” she said. “I’ve got a case conference starting at
five o’clock this afternoon. Nothing before then. Two and a half
hours before anybody even knows I’m gone.”
FOUR
RIGHT INSIDE THE SHELL OF THE SECOND-FLOOR ROOM, A SECOND shell was
taking shape. It was being built from brand-new softwood two-by-fours,
nailed together in the conventional way, looking like a new room
growing right there inside the old room. But the new room was going to
be about a foot smaller in every dimension than the old room had been.
A foot shorter in length, a foot narrower in width, and a foot shorter
in height.
The new floor joists were going to be raised a foot off the old joists
with twelve-inch lengths of the new softwood. The new lengths looked
like a forest of short stilts, ready to hold the new floor up. More
short lengths were ready to hold the new framing a foot away from the
old framing all the way around the sides and the ends. The new framing
had the bright yellow ness of new wood. It gleamed against the smoky
honey color of the old framing. The old framing looked like an ancient
skeleton which was suddenly growing a new skeleton right inside
itself.
Three men were building the new shell. They were stepping from joist
to joist with practiced skill. They looked like men who had built
things before. And they were working fast. Their contract demanded
they finish on time. The employer had been explicit about it. Some
kind of a rush job. The three carpenters were not complaining about
that. The employer had accepted their first bid. It had been an