‘OK, I guess,’ Curry said. He wrote down the names of the parties involved and the address where the performance was due to take place. He quoted double his normal fee. He didn’t want to look cheap, not in front of these Wall Street guys. They were always impressed by expensive services. He knew that. And, given the nature of the job, he figured he would be earning it. Forster agreed the price without hesitation and promised a cheque in the mail. Curry hung up the phone and started through his closets in his head, wondering what the hell he could wear to make himself look like the head of a big Wall Street firm.
THIRTEEN
St Louis to Dallas-Fort Worth is 568 miles by air, and it took a comfortable ninety minutes, thirty of them climbing hard, thirty of them cruising fast, and thirty of them descending on approach. Reacher and Jodie were together in business class, this time on the port side of the plane, among a very different clientele than had flown with them out of New York. Most of the cabin was occupied by Texan businessmen in sharkskin suits in various shades of blue and grey, with alligator boots and big hats. They were larger and ruddier and louder than their East Coast counterparts, and they were working the stewardesses harder. Jodie was in a simple rust-coloured dress like something Audrey Hepburn might have worn, and the businessmen were stealing glances at her and avoiding Reacher’s eye. He was on the aisle, in his crumpled khakis and his ten-year-old English shoes, and they were trying to place him. He saw them going around in circles, looking at his tan and his hands and his companion, figuring him for a roughneck who got lucky with a claim, then figuring that doesn’t really happen any more, then starting over with new speculations. He ignored them and drank the airline’s best
coffee from a china cup and started thinking about how to get inside Wolters and get some sense out of DeWitt.
A military policeman trying to get some sense out of a two-star general is like a guy tossing a coin. Heads brings you a guy who knows the value of co-operation. Maybe he’s had difficulties in the past inside some unit or another, and maybe he’s had them solved for him by the MPs in an effective and perceptive manner. Then he’s a believer, and his instinct goes with you. You’re his friend. But tails brings you a guy who has maybe caused his own difficulties. Maybe he’s botched and blundered his way through some command and maybe the MPs haven’t been shy about telling him so. Then you get nothing from him except aggravation. Heads or tails, but it’s a bent coin, because on top of everything any institution despises its own policemen, so it comes down tails a lot more than it comes up heads. That had been Reacher’s experience. And, worse, he was a military policeman who was now a civilian. He had two strikes against him before he even stepped up to the plate.
The plane taxied to the gate and the businessmen waited and ushered Jodie down the aisle ahead of them. Either plain Texan courtesy or they wanted to watch her legs and her ass as she walked, but Reacher couldn’t mount any serious criticism on that issue because he wanted to do exactly the same thing. He carried her bag and followed her down the jet way and into the terminal. He stepped alongside her and put his arm around her shoulders and felt a dozen pairs of eyes drilling into his back.
‘Claiming what’s yours?’ she asked.
‘You noticed them?’ he asked back.
She threaded her arm around his waist and pulled him closer as they walked.
‘They were kind of hard to miss. I guess it would have been easy enough to get a date for tonight.’
‘You’d have been beating them off with a stick.’
‘It’s the dress. Probably I should have worn trousers, but I figured it’s kind of traditional down here.’
‘You could wear a Soviet tank driver’s suit, all grey-green and padded with cotton, and they’d still have their tongues hanging out.’