then he settled on a sensible halfway position and opened the in-flight magazine, which was crisp and new and not creased and sticky like the ones they were reading forty rows back.
Jodie was lost in her own seat, with her shoes off and her feet tucked up under her, the same magazine open on her lap and a glass of chilled champagne at her elbow. The cabin was quiet. They were a long way forward of the engines, and their noise was muted to a hiss no louder than the hiss of the air coming through the vents in the overhead. There was no vibration. Reacher was watching the sparkling gold wine in Jodie’s glass, and he saw no tremor on its surface.
‘I could get accustomed to this,’ he said.
She looked up and smiled.
‘Not on your wages,’ she said.
He nodded and went back to his arithmetic. He figured a day’s earnings from digging swimming pools would buy him fifty miles of first-class air travel. Cruising speed, that was about five minutes’ worth of progress. Ten hours of work, all gone in five minutes. He was spending money 120 times faster than he had been earning it.
‘What are you going to do?’ she asked. ‘When this is all over?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said.
The question had been in the back of his mind ever since she told him about the house. The house itself sat there in his imagination, sometimes benign, sometimes threatening, like a trick picture that changed depending on how you tilted it against the light. Sometimes it sat there in the glow of the sun, comfortable, low and spreading, surrounded by its amiable jungle of a yard, and it looked like home. Other times,
it looked like a gigantic millstone, requiring him to run and run and run just to stay level with the starting line. He knew people with houses. He had talked to them, with the same kind of detached interest he would talk to a person who kept snakes as pets or entered ballroom dancing competitions. Houses forced you into a certain lifestyle. Even if somebody gave you one for nothing, like Leon had, it committed you to a whole lot of different things. There were property taxes. He knew that. There was insurance, in case the place burned down or was blown away in a high wind. There was maintenance. People he knew with houses were always doing something to them. They would be replacing the heating system at the start of the winter, because it had failed. Or the basement would be leaking water, and complicated things with excavations would be required. Roofs were a problem. He knew that. People had told him. Roofs had a finite life span, which surprised him. The shingles needed stripping off and replacing with new. Siding, also. Windows, too. He had known people who had put new windows in their houses. They had deliberated long and hard about what type to buy.
‘Are you going to get a job?’ Jodie asked.
He stared out through the oval window at southern California, dry and brown seven miles below him. What sort of a job? The house was going to cost him maybe ten thousand dollars a year in taxes and premiums and maintenance. And it was an isolated house, so he would have to keep Rutter’s car, too. It was a free car, like the house, but it would cost him money just to own. Insurance, oil changes, inspections, title, gasoline. Maybe another three grand a year. Food and clothes and utilities were on top of all
that. And if he had a house, he would want other things. He would want a stereo. He would want Wynonna Judd’s record, and a whole lot of others, too. He thought back to old Mrs Hobie’s handwritten calculations. She had settled on a certain sum of money she needed every year, and he couldn’t see getting it any lower than she had got it. The whole deal added up to maybe thirty thousand dollars a year, which meant earning maybe fifty, to take account of income taxes and the cost of five days a week travelling back and forth to wherever the hell he was going to earn it.