Sark moved his gaze upward. Looked Hobie full in the face.
‘Because we didn’t believe her. It was clear somebody beat on her. We followed up on the Tahoe plate, and it looks like it led us to the right place.’
The office went silent. Nothing except the hiss and the squelch from the police radios on the end of the desk. Hobie nodded.
‘Exactly the right place,’ he said. ‘There was no door involved.’
Sark nodded back. He was a reasonably courageous man. The Domestic Violence Unit was no kind of safe refuge for cowards. By definition it involved dealing with men who had the capacity for brutal violence. And Sark was as good at dealing with them as anybody.
‘This is a big mistake,’ he said quietly.
‘In what way?’ Hobie asked interested.
‘This is about what you did to Sheryl, is all. It doesn’t have to be about anything else. You really shouldn’t mix anything else in with it. It’s a big step
up to violence against police officers. It might be possible to work something out about the Sheryl issue. Maybe there was provocation there, you know, some mitigating circumstance. But you keep on’ messing with us, then we can’t work anything out. Because you’re just digging yourself into bigger trouble.’
He paused and watched carefully for the response. The approach often worked. Self-interest on the part of the perpetrator often made it work. But there was no response from Hobie. He said nothing. The office was silent. Sark was shaping the next gambit on his lips when the radios crackled and some distant despatcher came over the air and sentenced him to death.
‘Five one and five two, please confirm your current location.’
Sark was so conditioned to respond that his hand jerked towards where his belt had been. It was stopped short by the handcuff. The radio call died into silence. Hobie was staring into space.
‘Five one, five two, I need your current location, please.’
Sark was staring at the radios in horror. Hobie followed his gaze and smiled.
‘They don’t know where you are,’ he said.
Sark shook his head. Thinking fast. A courageous man.
‘They know where we are. They know we’re here. They want confirmation, is all. They check we’re where we’re supposed to be, all the time.’
The radios crackled again. ‘Five one, five two, respond, please.’
Hobie stared at Sark. O’Hallinan was struggling to her knees and staring towards the radios. Tony moved his pistol to cover her.
‘Five one, five two, do you copy?’
The voice slid under the sea of static and then came back stronger.
‘Five one, five two, we have a violent domestic emergency at Houston and Avenue D. Are you anywhere near that vicinity?’
Hobie smiled.
‘That’s two miles from here,’ he said. ‘They have absolutely no idea where you are, do they?’
Then he grinned. The left side of his face folded into unaccustomed lines, but on the right the scar tissue stayed tight, like a rigid mask.
FOURTEEN
For the first time in his life, Reacher was truly comfortable in a plane. He had been flying since birth, first as a soldier’s kid and then as a soldier himself, millions of miles in total, but all of them hunched in roaring spartan military transports or folded into hard civilian seats narrower than his shoulders. Travelling first class on a scheduled airline was a completely new luxury.
The cabin was dramatic. It was a calculated insult to the passengers who filed down the jet way and glanced into it before shuffling along the aisle to their own mean accommodations. It was cool and pastel in first class, with four seats to a row where there were ten in coach. Arithmetically, Reacher figured that made each seat two and a half times as wide, but they felt better than that. They felt enormous. They felt like sofas, wide enough for him to squirm left and right without bruising bis hips against the arms. And the leg room was amazing. He could slide right down and stretch right out without touching the seat in front. He could hit the button and recline almost horizontal without bothering the guy behind. He operated the mechanism a couple of times like a kid with a toy, and