Tripwire by Lee Child

‘I’m on four,’ she said.

He pressed five.

‘We’ll come down the stairs from above,’ he said. ‘Just in case.’

They used the fire stairs and came back down to four. He had her wait on the landing and peered out. A deserted hallway. Tall and narrow. Apartment ten to the left, eleven to the right, and twelve straight ahead.

‘Let’s go,’ he said.

Her door was black and thick. Spy hole at eye level, two locks. She used the keys and they went inside. She locked up again and dropped an old hinged bar into place, right across the whole doorway. Reacher pressed it down in its brackets. It was iron, and as long as it was there, nobody else was going to get in. He put her garment bag against a wall. She flicked switches and the lights came on. She waited by the door while Reacher walked ahead. Hallway, living room, kitchen, bedroom, bathroom, bedroom, bathroom, closets. Big rooms, very high. Nobody in them. He came back to the living room and shrugged off his new jacket and threw it on a chair and turned back to her and relaxed. But she wasn’t relaxed. He could see that. She was looking directly away from him, more tense than she’d been all day. She was just standing there with her sweatshirt cuffs way down over her hands, in the

doorway to her living room, fidgeting. He had no idea what was wrong with her.

‘You OK?’ he asked.

She ducked her head forward and back in a figure eight to drop her hair behind her shoulders.

‘I guess I’ll take a shower,’ she said. ‘You know, hit the sack.’

‘Hell of day, right?’

‘Unbelievable.’

She crabbed right around him on her way through the room, keeping her distance. She gave him a sort of shy wave, just her fingers peeping out from the sweatshirt sleeve.

‘What time tomorrow?’ he asked.

‘Seven-thirty will do it,’ she said.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘Good night, Jodie.’

She nodded and disappeared down the inner hallway. He heard her bedroom door open and close. He stared after her for a long moment, surprised. Then he sat on the sofa and took off his shoes. Too restless to sleep right away. He padded around in his new socks, looking at the apartment.

It wasn’t really a loft, as such. It was an old building with very high ceilings, was all. The shell was original. It had probably been industrial. The outside walls were sandblasted brick, and the inner walls were smooth clean plaster. The windows were huge. Probably put there to illuminate the sewing-machine operation or whatever was there a hundred years ago.

The parts of the walls that were brick were a warm natural brick colour, but everything else was white, except for the floor, which was pale maple strips. The decor was cool and neutral, like a gallery. There was no sign that more than one person had ever lived there.

No sign of two tastes competing. The whole place was very unified. White sofas, white chairs, bookshelves built in simple cubic sections, painted with the same white paint that had been used on the walls. Big steam pipes and ugly radiators, all painted white. The only definite colour in the living room was a life-size Mondrian copy on the wall above the largest sofa. It was a proper copy, done by hand in oil on canvas, with the proper colours. Not garish reds and blues and yellows, but the correct dulled tones, with authentic little cracks and crazings in the white, which was nearer a grey. He stood and looked at it for a long time, totally astonished. Piet Mondrian was his favourite painter of all time, and this exact picture was his favourite work of all time. The title was Composition with Red, Yellow and Blue. Mondrian had painted the original in 1930 and Reacher had seen it in Zurich, Switzerland.

There was a tall cabinet opposite the smallest sofa, painted the same white as everything else. There was a small TV in it, a video, a cable box, a CD player with a pair of large headphones plugged into the jack. A small stack of CDs, mostly fifties jazz, stuff he liked without really being crazy about.

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