‘Will that work?’
‘I think so,’ she said. ‘He’s in some kind of a hurry. Can’t you see that? He’s got some kind of a deadline. He’s panicking. Our best bet is to delay as long as we can, and then just slip away, with a witness watching the whole thing and guarding us. Hobie will be too uptight about time to react.’
‘I don’t understand,’ he said again. ‘You mean this private dick will testify we were acting under duress? You mean so we can sue Hobie to get the stock back?’
She was quiet for a beat. Amazed. ‘No, Chester, we’re not going to sue anybody. Hobie gets the stock, and we forget all about it.’
He stared at her through the steam. ‘But that’s no good. That won’t save the company. Not if it means Hobie gets the stock and we’ve got no comeback.’
She stared back at him. ‘God’s sake, Chester, don’t you understand anything? The company is gone. The company is history, and you better face it. This is not about saving the damn company. This is about saving our lives.’
The soup was wonderful and the pork was even better. His mother would have been proud of it. They shared a half-bottle of Californian wine and ate in contented silence. The restaurant was the sort of place that gave
you a long pause between the main course and the dessert. No rush to get you out and reclaim the table. Reacher was enjoying the luxury. Not something he was used to. He sprawled back in his chair and stretched his legs out. His ankles were rubbing against Jodie’s, under the table.
‘Think about his parents,’ he said. ‘Think about him, as a kid. Open up the encyclopedia to N for ‘normal American family’ and you’re going to see a picture of the Hobies, all three of them, staring right out at you. I accept that ‘Nam changed people. I can see it kind of expanding his horizons a little. They knew that, too. They knew he wasn’t going to come back and work for some dumb little print shop in Brighton. They saw him going down to the rigs, flying around the Gulf for the oil companies. But he would have kept in touch, right? To some extent? He wouldn’t have just abandoned them. That’s real cruelty, cold and consistent for thirty straight years. You see anything in his record that makes him that kind of a guy?’
‘Maybe he did something,’ she said. ‘Something shameful. Maybe something like My Lai, you know, a massacre or something? Maybe he was ashamed to go home. Maybe he’s hiding a guilty secret.’
He shook his head impatiently. ‘It would be in his record. And he didn’t have the opportunity, anyway. He was a helicopter pilot, not an infantryman. He never saw the enemy close up.’
The waiter came back with his pad and pencil.
‘Dessert?’ he asked. ‘Coffee?’
They ordered raspberry sorbet and black coffee. Jodie drained the last of her wine. It shone dull red in the glass in the candlelight.
‘So what do we do?’
‘He died,’ Reacher said. ‘We’ll get the definitive evidence, sooner or later. Then we’ll go back and tell the old folks they’ve wasted thirty years fretting about it.’
‘And what do we tell ourselves? We were attacked by a ghost?’
He shrugged and made no reply to that. The sorbet arrived and they ate it in silence. Then the coffee came, and the check in a padded leather folder bearing the restaurant logo printed in gold. Jodie laid her credit card on it without looking at the total. Then she smiled.
‘Great dinner,’ she said.
He smiled back. ‘Great company.’
‘Let’s forget all about Victor Hobie for a while,’ she said.
‘Who?’ he asked, and she laughed.
‘So what shall we think about instead?’ she said.
He smiled. ‘I was thinking about your dress.’
‘You like it?’
‘I think it’s great,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘But it could look better. You know, maybe thrown in a heap on the floor.’
‘You think so?’
‘I’m pretty sure,’ he said. ‘But that’s just a guess, right now. I’d need some experimental data. You know, a before-and-after comparison.’