‘Take it easy,’ Jodie said to him.
‘I want to see Saint Vincent,’ he said. ‘And I want to see him right now. Tell him to get his sorry ass in this room inside five minutes or I’m going to be seriously pissed off.’
She looked at him and nodded.
‘OK,’ she said.
Then she looked away and stood up. She disappeared from his sight and he lay back down. This wasn’t any kind of a boot camp. It was too quiet, and the pillows were soft.
Looking back, it should have been a shock. But it wasn’t. The room just swam into focus and he saw the decor and the shiny equipment and he thought hospital. He changed from being dead to being alive with the same little mental shrug a busy man gives when he realizes he’s wrong about what day it is.
The room was bright with sun. He moved his head and saw he had a window. Jodie was sitting in a chair next to it, reading. He kept his breathing low and watched her. Her hair was washed and shiny. It fell past her shoulders, and she was twirling a strand
between her finger and thumb. She was wearing a yellow sleeveless dress. Her shoulders were brown with summer. He could see the little knobs of bone on top. Her arms were long and lean. Her legs were crossed. She was wearing tan penny loafers that matched the dress. Her ankles glowed brown in the sun.
‘Hey, Jodie,’ he said.
She turned her head and looked at him. Searched his face for something and when she found it she smiled.
‘Hey yourself,’ she said. She dropped the book and stood up. Walked three paces and bent and kissed him gently on the lips.
‘St Vincent’s,’ he said. ‘You told me, but I was confused.’
She nodded.
‘You were full of morphine,’ she said. ‘They were pumping it in like crazy. Your bloodstream would have kept all the addicts in New York happy.’
He nodded. Glanced at the sun in the window. It looked like afternoon.
‘What day is it?’
‘It’s July. You’ve been out three weeks.’
‘Christ, I ought to feel hungry.’
She moved around the foot of the bed and came up on his left. Laid her hand on his forearm. It was turned palm up and there were tubes running into the veins of his elbow.
‘They’ve been feeding you,’ she said. ‘I made sure you got what you like. You know, lots of glucose and saline.’
He nodded.
‘Can’t beat saline,’ he said.
She went quiet.
‘What?’ he asked.
‘Do you remember?’
He nodded again.
‘Everything,’ he said.
She swallowed.
‘I don’t know what to say,’ she whispered. ‘You took a bullet for me.’
‘My fault,’ he said. ‘I was too slow, is all. I was supposed to trick him and get him first. But apparently I survived it. So don’t say anything. I mean it. Don’t ever mention it.’
‘But I have to say thank you,’ she whispered.
‘Maybe I should say thank you,’ he said. ‘Feels good to know somebody worth taking a bullet for.’
She nodded, but not because she was agreeing. It was just random physical motion designed to stop her crying.
‘So how am I?’ he asked.
She paused for a long moment.
‘I’ll get the doctor,’ she said quietly. ‘He can tell you better than me.’
She went out and a guy in a white coat came in. Reacher smiled. It was the guy the Army had sent to finish him off at the end of his parade. He was a small wide hairy man who could have found work wrestling.
‘You know anything about computers?’ he asked.
Reacher shrugged and started worrying this was a coded lead-in to bad news about a brain injury, impairment, loss of memory, loss of function.
‘Computers?’ he said. ‘Not really.’
‘OK, try this,’ the doctor said. ‘Imagine a big Cray supercomputer humming away. We feed it everything we know about human physiology and everything we
know about gunshot wounds and then we ask it to design us a male person best equipped to survive a thirty-eight in the chest. Suppose it hums away for a week. What does it come up with?’