Hobie shrugged and shook his head. ‘A combina-tion. We get out, for sure, but only after I nail Stone.’ Tony sighed and laid his hands palm-up on the upholstery. ‘Six weeks is way, way too long. Garber already went to Hawaii, for Christ’s sake. He was some kind of a hot-shot general. And obviously he knew stuff, or why would he go out there?’
Hobie was nodding. His head was moving in and out of a thin shaft of light that picked up the crude grey tufts of his hair. ‘He knew stuff, I accept that. But he took sick and died. The stuff he knew died with him. Otherwise why would his daughter resort to some half-assed private dick and some unemployed drifter?’ ‘So what are you saying?’
Hobie slipped his hook below the level of the desktop and cupped his chin with his good hand. He let the fingers spread upward, over the scars. It was a pose he used subconsciously, when he was aiming to look accommodating and unthreatening.
‘I can’t give up on the Stone score,’ he said. ‘You can see that, right? It’s just sitting there, begging to be eaten up. I give up on that, I couldn’t live with myself the whole rest of my life. It would be cowardice. Running is smart, I agree with you, but running too early, earlier than you really need to, that’s cowardice. And I’m not a coward, Tony, you know that, right?’
‘So what are you saying?’ Tony asked again. ‘We do both things together, but accelerated. Because I agree with you, six weeks is way too long. We need to get out before six weeks. But we aren’t
going without the Stone score, so we speed things up.’
‘OK, how?’
‘I put the stock in the market today,’ Hobie said. ‘It’ll hit the floor ninety minutes before the closing bell. That should be long enough to get the message through to the banks. Tomorrow morning, Stone will be coming here all steamed up. I won’t be here tomorrow, so you’ll tell him what we want, and what we’ll do if we don’t get it. We’ll have the whole nine yards within a couple of days, tops. I’ll pre-sell the Long Island assets so we don’t hit any delay out there. Meanwhile, you’ll close things down here.’
‘OK, how?’ Tony asked again.
Hobie looked around the dim office, all four corners.
‘We’ll just walk away from this place. Wastes six months of lease, but what the hell. Those two assholes playing at being my enforcers will be no problem. One of them is wasting the other tonight, and you’ll work with him until he gets hold of this Mrs Jacob for me, whereupon you’ll waste her and him together. Sell the boat, sell the vehicles, and we’re out of here, no loose ends. Call it a week. Just a week. I think we can give ourselves a week, right?’
Tony nodded. Leaned forward, relieved at the prospect of action.
‘What about this Reacher guy? He’s still a loose end.’
Hobie shrugged in his chair. ‘I’ve got a separate plan for him.’
‘We won’t find him,’ Tony said. ‘Not just the two of us. Not within a week. We don’t have the time to go out searching around for him.’
‘We don’t need to.’
Tony stared at him. ‘We do, boss. He’s a loose end, right?’
Hobie shook his head. Then he dropped his hand away from his face and came out from under the desktop with his hook. ‘I’ll do this the efficient way. No reason to waste my energy finding him. I’ll let him find me. And he will. I know what military cops are like.’
‘And then what?’
Hobie smiled.
‘Then he leads a long and happy life,’ he said. ‘Thirty more years at least.’
‘So what now?’ Reacher asked.
They were still in the lot outside McBannerman’s long low office, engine idling, air roaring to combat the sun beating down on the Bravada’s dark green paint. The vents were angled all over the place, and he was catching Jodie’s subtle perfume mixed in with the Freon blast. Right at that moment, he was a happy guy, living an old fantasy. Many times in the past he’d speculated about how it would feel to be within touching distance of her when she was all grown up. It was something he had never expected to experience. He had assumed he would lose track of her and never see her again. He had assumed his feelings would just die away, over time. But there he was, sitting right next to her, breathing in her fragrance, taking sideways glances at her long legs sprawling down into the foot well. He had always assumed she would grow up pretty spectacular. Now he was feeling a little guilty for underestimating how beautiful she would become. His fantasies had not done her justice. ‘It’s a problem,’ she said. ‘I can’t go up there