‘What was the car?’ Sark asked.
‘Big black thing,’ the nurse said.
‘You recall the plate?’
‘What am I, Mr Memory?’
O’Hallinan shrugged and started to move away.
‘But it’ll be on the video,’ the nurse said suddenly.
‘What video?’ Sark asked.
‘Security camera, above the doors. We stand right underneath it, so the management can’t clock how long we take out there. So what we see, it sees too.’
The exact time of Sheryl’s arrival was recorded in the paperwork at the desk. It took just a minute to wind the tape back to that point. Then another minute to run her slow walk in reverse, backward across the ambulance circle, across the plaza, across the sidewalk, through the traffic, into the front of a big black car. O’Hallinan bent her head close to the screen.
‘Got it,’ she said.
Jodie chose the hotel for the night. She did it by finding the travel section in the nearest bookstore to the NPRC building. She stood there and leafed through the local guides until she found a place recommended in three of them.
‘It’s funny, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘We’re in St Louis here, and the travel section has more guides to St Louis than anyplace else. So how is that a travel section? Should be called the stay-at-home section.’
Reacher was a little nervous. This method was new to him. The sort of places he normally patronized never advertised in books. They relied on neon signs on tall poles, boasting attractions that had stopped being attractions and had become basic human rights about twenty years ago, like air and cable and a pool.
‘Hold this,’ she said.
He took the book from her and kept his thumb on the page while she squatted down and opened her carry-on. She rooted around and found her mobile phone. Took the book back from him and stood right there in the aisle and called the hotel. He watched her. He had never called a hotel. The places he stayed always had a room, no matter when. They were delirious if their occupancy rates ever made it above 50 per cent. He listened to Jodie’s end of the conversation and heard her mentioning sums of money that would have bought him a bed for a month, given a little haggling.
‘OK,’ she said. ‘We’re in. It’s their honeymoon suite. Four-poster bed. Is that neat, or what?’
He smiled. The honeymoon suite.
‘We need to eat,’ he said. ‘They serve dinner there?’
She shook her head and thumbed through the book to the restaurant section.
‘More fun to go someplace else for dinner,’ she said. ‘You like French?’
He nodded. ‘My mother was French.’
She checked the book and used the mobile again and reserved a table for two at a fancy place in the
historic section, near the hotel.
‘Eight o’clock,’ she said. ‘Gives us time to look around a little. Then we can check in at the hotel and get freshened up.’
‘Call the airport,’ he said. ‘We need early flights out. Dallas-Fort Worth should do it.’
‘I’ll do that outside,’ she said. ‘Can’t call the airport from a bookstore.’
He carried her bag and she bought a gaudy tourist map of St Louis and they stepped out into the heat of the late-afternoon sun. He looked at the map and she called the airline from the sidewalk and reserved two business-class seats to Texas, eight thirty in the morning. Then they set out to walk the banks of the Mississippi where it ran through the city.
They strolled arm in arm for ninety minutes, which took them about four miles, all the way around to the historic part of town. The hotel was a medium-sized old mansion set on a wide quiet street lined with chestnut trees. It had a big door painted shiny black and oak floors the colour of honey. Reception was an antique mahogany desk standing alone in the corner of the hallway. Reacher stared at it. The places he normally stayed, reception was behind a wire grille or boxed in with bulletproof plexiglas. An elegant lady with white hair ran Jodie’s card through the swipe machine and the charge slip came chattering out. Jodie bent to sign it and the lady handed Reacher a brass key.