severed at the wrist. It was lying on the carpet six inches away from his shirt cuff, arranged in a precise straight line with the arm it had come from. She heard Hobie making a small sound in his throat and turned to see him dropping the shotgun and clutching at the door with his good hand. The burn scars were still vivid pink, but the rest of his face was turning a ghastly white.
SEVENTEEN
Reacher had been named Jack by his father, who was a plain New Hampshire Yankee with an implacable horror of anything fancy. He had walked into the maternity ward one late October Tuesday, the morning after the birth, and he had handed his wife a small bunch of flowers and told her we’ll call him Jack. There was no middle name. Jack Reacher was the whole of it, and it was already on the birth certificate, because he had visited the company clerk on his way to the infirmary and the guy had written it down and reported it by telex to the Berlin Embassy. Another United States citizen, born overseas to a serving soldier, name of Jack-none-Reacher.
His mother made no objection. She loved her husband for his ascetic instincts, because she was French and they gave him a kind of European sensibility that made her feel more at home with him. She had found an enormous gulf between America and Europe in those postwar decades. The wealth and excess of America contrasted uneasily with the exhaustion and poverty of Europe. But her very own New Hampshire Yankee had no use for wealth and excess. No use at all. Plain simple things were what he
liked, and that was absolutely fine with her, even if it did extend all the way to her babies’ names.
He had called her firstborn Joe. Not Joseph, just Joe. No middle name. She loved the boy, of course, but the name was hard for her. It was very short and abrupt, and she struggled with the initial J because of her accent. It came out like zh. Like the boy was called Zhoe. Jack was much better. Her accent made it sound like Jacques, which was a very traditional old French name. Translated, it meant James. Privately, she always thought of her second boy as James.
But paradoxically nobody ever called him by his first name. Nobody knew how it came about, but Joe was always called Joe and Jack was always called Reacher. She did it herself, all the time. She had no idea why. She would stick her head out of some service bungalow window and yell Zhoe! Come get your lunch! And bring Reacher with you! And her two sweet little boys would come running inside for something to eat. The exact same thing happened in school. It was Reacher’s own earliest memory. He was an earnest, serious boy, and he was puzzled why his names were backward. His brother was called by his first name first and his last name last. Not him. There was a schoolyard softball game and the kid who owned the bat was choosing up sides. He turned to the brothers and called out I’ll have Joe and Reacher. All the kids did the same thing. The teachers, too. They called him Reacher, even in kindergarten. And somehow it travelled with him. Like any Army kid, he changed elementary schools dozens of times. First day in some new place somewhere, maybe even on a new continent, some new teacher would be yelling come here,
But he got used to it fast and had no problem living his whole life behind a one-word name. He was Reacher, always had been, always would be, to everybody. The first girl he ever dated was a tall brunette who sidled shyly up to him and asked what’s your name? Reacher, he replied. The loves of his life had all called him that. Mmm, Reacher, I love you, they had whispered in his ear. All of them. Jodie herself had done the exact same thing. He had appeared at the top of the concrete steps in Leon’s yard and she had looked up at him and said hello, Reacher. After fifteen long years, she still knew exactly what he was called. But she hadn’t called him Reacher on the mobile. He had clicked the button and said hello and she had said hi, Jack. It went off in his ear like a siren. Then she had asked where are you? and she had sounded so tense about it he panicked and his mind started racing and for a second he missed exactly what she meant. His given name, just a lucky chance. Hi, Jack meant hijack. It took him a second to catch on. She was in trouble. Big trouble, but she was still Leon’s daughter, smart enough to think hard and warn him with two little syllables at the start of a desperate phone call.