Tripwire by Lee Child

She led him towards an escalator. He smiled. He knew how she was feeling. He had felt the same, fifteen years before. She had come with him, nervous and tentative, on a routine visit to the glass house in

Manila. Familiar territory to him, just routine, really nothing at all. But new and strange to her. He had felt busy and happy, and somehow educational. It had been fun being with her, showing her around. Now she was feeling the same thing. All this mall stuff was nothing to her. She had come home to America a long time ago and learned its details. Now he was the stranger in her territory.

‘What about this place?’ she called to him.

It wasn’t the Gap. It was some one-off store, heavily designed with weathered shingles and timbers rescued from some old barn. The clothes were made from heavy cottons and dyed in subdued colours, and they were artfully displayed in the beds of old farm carts with iron-banded wheels.

He shrugged. ‘Looks OK to me.’

She took his hand. Her palm felt cool and slim against his. She led him inside and put her hair behind her ears and bent and started looking through the displays. She did it the way he’d seen other women do it. She used little flicks of her wrist to put together assemblages of different items. A pair of pants, still folded, laid over the bottom half of a shirt. A jacket laid sideways over both of them, with the shirt peeping out at the top, and the pants showing at the bottom. Half-closed eyes, pursed lips. A shake of the head. A different shirt. A nod. Real shopping.

‘What do you think?’ she asked.

She had put together a pair of pants, khaki, but a little darker than most chinos. A shirt in a quiet check, greens and browns. A thin jacket in dark brown which seemed to match the rest pretty well. He nodded.

‘Looks OK to me,’ he said again.

The prices were handwritten on small tickets

attached to the garments with string. He flicked one over with his fingernail. ‘Christ,’ he said. ‘Forget about it.’ ‘It’s worth it,’ she said. ‘Quality’s good.’ ‘I can’t afford it, Jodie.’

The shirt on its own was twice what he had ever paid for a whole outfit. To dress in that stuff was going to cost him what he had earned in a day, digging pools. Ten hours, four tons of sand and rock and earth. ‘I’ll buy them for you.’

He stood there with the shirt in his hands, uncertain.

‘Remember the necklace?’ she asked.

He nodded. He remembered. She had developed

a passion for a particular necklace in a Manila

jeweller’s. It was a plain gold thing, like a rope,

vaguely Egyptian. Not really expensive, but out of her

league. Leon was into some self-discipline thing with

her and wouldn’t spring for it. So Reacher had bought

it for her. Not for her birthday or anything, just

because he liked her and she liked it.

‘I was so happy,’ she said. ‘I thought I was going to burst. I’ve still got it, I still wear it. So let me pay you back, OK?’

He thought about it. Nodded. ‘OK,’ he said.

She could afford it. She was a lawyer. Probably made a fortune. And it was a fair trade, looking at it in proportion, cost-versus-income, fifteen years of inflation.

‘OK,’ he said again. ‘Thanks, Jodie.’ ‘You need socks and things, right?’ They picked out a pair of khaki socks and a pair of white boxers. She went to a till and used a gold card. He took the stuff into a changing cubicle and tore off

the price tickets and put everything on. He transferred his cash from his pants pocket and left the old clothes in the trash can. The new stuff felt stiff, but it looked pretty good in the mirror, against his tan. He came back out.

‘Nice,’ Jodie said. ‘Pharmacy next.’

‘Then coffee,’ he said.

He bought a razor and a can of foam and a toothbrush and toothpaste. And a small tube of burn ointment. Paid for it all himself and carried it in a brown paper bag. The walk to the pharmacy had taken them near a food court. He could see a rib place that smelled good.

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