‘How tall is he?’ Jodie whispered.
Reacher leaned over and glanced ahead. ‘Maybe six one.’
‘Same as Victor Hobie,’ she said. ‘Remember the file?’
Reacher nodded. Glanced diagonally across at the pale forearm resting along the seat. The guy was thin, and he could see the prominent knob of bone at the wrist, standing out in the dimness. There was slim muscle and freckled skin and bleached hair. The radius bone was visible, running all the way back to the elbow. Hobie had left six inches of his radius bone behind at the crash site. Reacher counted with his eyes, up from the guy’s wrist joint. Six inches took him halfway to the elbow.
‘About half and half, right?’ Jodie said.
‘A little more than half,’ Reacher said. ‘The stump would have needed trimming. They’d have filed it down where it was splintered, I guess. If he survived.’
The guy two rows ahead turned sleepily and pulled his arm in close to his body and out of sight, like he knew they were talking about it.
‘He survived,’ Jodie said. ‘He’s in New York, trying to stay hidden.’
Reacher leaned the other way and rested his forehead on the cold plastic of the porthole.
‘I would have bet my life he isn’t,’ he said.
He kept his eyes open, but there was nothing to see out of the window. Just black night sky all the way down to the black night ocean, seven miles below.
‘Why does it bother you so much?’ she asked, in the quiet.
He turned forward and stared at the empty seat six feet in front of him.
‘Lots of reasons,’ he said.
‘Like what?’
He shrugged. ‘Like everything, like a great big depressing spiral. It was a professional call. My gut told me something, and it looks like I was wrong.’
She laid her hand gently on his forearm, where the muscle narrowed a little above his wrist. ‘Being wrong isn’t the end of the world.’
He shook his head. ‘Sometimes it isn’t, sometimes it is. Depends on the issue, right? Somebody asks me who’s going to win the series, and I say the Yankees, that doesn’t matter, does it? Because how can I know stuff like that? But suppose I was a sportswriter who was supposed to know stuff like that? Or a professional gambler? Suppose baseball was my life? Then it’s the end of the world if I start to screw up.’
‘So what are you saying?’
‘I’m saying judgements like that are my life. It’s what I’m supposed to be good at. I used to be good at it. I could always depend on being right.’
‘But you had nothing to go on.’
‘Bullshit, Jodie. I had a whole lot to go on. A whole lot more than I sometimes used to have. I met with the guy’s folks, I read his letters, I talked with his old friend, I saw his record, I talked with his old comrade-in-arms, and everything told me this was a guy who definitely could not behave the way he clearly did behave. So I was just plain wrong, and that burns me up, because where does it leave me now?’
‘In what sense?’
‘I’ve got to tell the Hobies,’ he said. ‘It’ll kill them stone dead. You should have met them. They worshipped that boy. They worshipped the military, the patriotism of it all, serving your country, the whole damn thing. Now I’ve got to walk in there and tell
them their boy is a murderer and a deserter. And a cruel son who left them twisting in the wind for thirty long years. I’ll be walking in there and killing them stone dead, Jodie. I should call ahead for an ambulance.’
He lapsed into silence and turned back to the black porthole.
‘And?’ she said.
He turned back to face her. ‘And the future. What am I going to do? I’ve got a house, I need a job. What kind of a job? I can’t put myself about as an investigator any more, not if I’ve started getting things completely ass-backward all of a sudden. The timing is wonderful, right? My professional capabilities have turned to mush right at the exact time I need to find work. I should go back to the Keys and dig pools the rest of my life.’