Reacher shrugged again. ‘I don’t know.’
‘A picture of you, my friend,’ the doctor said. ‘That’s what. The damn bullet didn’t even make it into your chest. Your pectoral muscle is so thick and so dense it stopped it dead. Like a three-inch kevlar vest. It popped out the other side of the muscle wall and smashed a rib, but it went no farther.’
‘So why was I out three weeks?’ Reacher asked immediately. ‘Not for a muscle wound or a broken rib, that’s for damn sure. Is my head OK?’
The doctor did a weird thing. He clapped his hands and punched the air. Then he stepped closer, beaming all over his face.
‘I was worried about it,’ he said. ‘Real worried about it. Bad wound. I would have figured it for a nail gun, until they told me it was shotgun debris from manufactured furniture. It penetrated your skull and was about an eighth of an inch into your brain. Frontal lobe, my friend, bad place to have a nail. If I had to have a nail in my skull, the frontal lobe would definitely not be my first choice. But if I had to see a nail in anybody else’s frontal lobe I’d pick yours, I guess, because you’ve got a skull thicker than Neanderthal man’s. Anybody normal, that nail would have been all the way in, and that would have been thank you and good night.’
‘So am I OK?’ Reacher asked again.
‘You just saved us ten thousand dollars in tests,’ the doctor said happily. ‘I told you the news about the chest, and what did you do? Analytically? You
compared it with your own internal database, realized it wasn’t a very serious wound, realized it couldn’t have needed three weeks of coma, remembered your other injury, put two and two together and asked the question you asked. Immediately. No hesitation. Fast, logical thinking, assembly of pertinent information, rapid conclusion, lucid questioning of the source of a possible answer. Nothing wrong with your head, my friend. Take that as a professional opinion.’
Reacher nodded slowly. ‘So when can I get out of here?’
The doctor took the medical chart off the foot of the bed. There was a mass of paper clipped to a metal board. He riffled through it. ‘Well, your health is excellent in general, but we better watch you a while. Couple more days, maybe.’
‘Nuts to that,’ Reacher said. ‘I’m leaving tonight.’
The doctor nodded. ‘Well, see how you feel in an hour.’
He stepped close and stretched up to a valve on the bottom of one of the IV bags. Clicked it a notch and tapped a tube with his finger. Watched carefully and nodded and walked back out of the room. He passed Jodie in the doorway. She was walking in with a guy in a seersucker jacket. He was about fifty, pale, short grey hair. Reacher watched him and thought a buck gets ten this is the Pentagon guy.
‘Reacher, this is General Mead,’ Jodie said.
‘Department of the Army,’ Reacher said.
The guy in the jacket looked at him, surprised. ‘Have we met?’
Reacher shook his head. ‘No, but I knew one of you would be sniffing around, soon as I was up and running.’
Mead smiled. ‘We’ve been practically camped out here. To put it bluntly, we’d like you to keep quiet about the Carl Allen situation.’
‘Not a chance,’ Reacher said.
Mead smiled again and waited. He was enough of an Army bureaucrat to know the steps. Leon used to say something for nothing, that’s a foreign language.
‘The Hobies,’ Reacher said. ‘Fly them down to DC first class, put them up in a five-star hotel, show them their boy’s name on the Wall and make sure there’s a shitload of brass in full dress uniform saluting like crazy the whole time they’re doing it. Then I’ll keep quiet.’
Mead nodded.
‘It’ll be done,’ he said. He got up unbidden and went back outside. Jodie sat down on the foot of the bed.
‘Tell me about the police,’ Reacher said. ‘Have I got questions to answer?’
She shook her head.
‘Allen was a cop killer,’ she said. ‘You stick around NYPD territory and you’ll never get another ticket in your life. It was self-defence, everybody’s cool.’