He opened the case and lifted the concertina files out on to the floor. The bullet fell out with them and bounced on the rug. It was a standard nine-millimetre Parabellum, full copper jacket. Slightly flattened on the nose from the impact with the old plywood, but otherwise unmarked. The paper had slowed it to a complete stop in the space of about eighteen inches. He could see the hole punched all the way through half the files. He weighed the bullet in his palm, and
then he saw Jodie at the door, watching him. He tossed the bullet to her. She caught it, one-handed.
‘Souvenir,’ he said.
She juggled it like it was hot and dropped it in the fireplace. Joined him on the rug, kneeling hip to hip beside him in front of the mass of paper. He caught her perfume, something he did not recognize, but something subtle and intensely feminine. The sweatshirt was too big on her, large and shapeless, but somehow it emphasized her figure. The sleeves finished halfway down the backs of her hands, almost at her fingers. Her Levi’s were cinched in tight around her tiny waist with a belt, and her legs left them slightly empty. She looked fragile, but he could remember the strength in her arms. Thin, but wiry. She bent to look at the files, and her hair fell forward, and he caught the same soft smell he recalled from fifteen years previously.
‘What are we looking for?’ she asked.
He shrugged. ‘We’ll know when we find it, I guess.’
They looked hard, but they found nothing. There was nothing there. Nothing current, nothing significant. Just a mass of household paper, looking suddenly old and pathetic as it charted its way through a domestic life that was now over. The most recent item was the will, on its own in a separate slot, sealed into an envelope with neat writing on it. Neat, but slightly slow and shaky, the writing of a man just back from the hospital after his first heart attack. Jodie took it out to the hallway and slipped it into the pocket of her garment bag.
‘Any unpaid bills?’ she called.
There was a slot marked pending. It was empty.
‘Can’t see any,’ he called back. ‘There’ll be a few coming in, I guess, right? Do they come in monthly?’
She gave him a look from the doorway and smiled.
‘Yes, they do,’ she said. ‘Monthly, every month.’
There was a slot marked medical. It was overstuffed with receipted bills from the hospital and the clinic and sheaves of efficient correspondence from the insurance provider. Reacher leafed through it all.
‘Christ, is that what this stuff costs?’
Jodie came back and bent to look.
‘Sure it is,’ she said. ‘Have you got insurance?’
He looked at her, blankly.
‘I think maybe the VA gives it to me, at least for a period.’
‘You should check it out,’ she said. ‘Make sure.’
He shrugged. ‘I feel OK.’
‘So did Dad,’ she said. ‘For sixty-three and a half straight years.’
She knelt beside him again, and he saw her eyes cloud over. He laid his hand on her arm, gently.
‘Hell of a day, right?’ he said.
She nodded and blinked. Then she came up with a small, wry smile.
‘Unbelievable,’ she said. ‘I bury” the old man, I get shot at by a couple of murderers, I break the law by failing to report so many felonies I can’t even count them, and then I get talked into hooking up with some wild man aiming to run some kind of a vigilante deal. You know what Dad would have said to me?’
‘What?’
She pursed her lips and lowered her voice into a close imitation of Garber’s good-natured growl. ‘All in a day’s work, girl, all in a day’s work. That’s what he would have said to me.’
Reacher grinned back at her and squeezed her arm again. Then he leafed through the medical junk and picked out a letterhead.
‘Let’s go find this clinic,’ he said.
There was a lot of debate going on inside the Tahoe about whether they should go back at all. Failure was not a popular word in Hobie’s vocabulary. It might be better just to take off and disappear. Just get the hell out. It was an attractive prospect. But they were pretty sure Hobie would find them. Maybe not soon, but he would find them. And that was not an attractive prospect.