The windows gave out over Lower Broadway. There was a constant wash of traffic hum, neon blaze from up and down the street, an occasional siren wailing and booping and blasting loud as it came out through the gaps between blocks. He tilted the blind with a clear plastic wand and looked down at the sidewalk. There were still the same knots of people hanging around. Nothing to make him nervous. He tilted the blind back and closed it up tight.
The kitchen was huge and tall. All the cupboards
were wood, painted white, and the appliances were industrial sizes in stainless steel, like pizza ovens. He had lived in places smaller than the refrigerator. He pulled it open and saw a dozen bottles of his favourite water, the same stuff he had grown to love in the Keys. He took the seal off one of them and carried it into the guest bedroom.
The bedroom was white, like everything else. The furniture was wood, which had started out with a different finish, but which was now white like the walls. He put the water on the night table and used the bathroom. White tiles, white sink, white tub, all old enamel and tiling. He closed the blinds and stripped and folded his new clothes on to the closet shelf. Threw back the cover and slid into bed and fell to thinking.
Illusion and reality. What was nine years, anyway? A lot, he guessed, when she was fifteen and he was twenty-four, but what was it now? He was thirty-eight, and she was either twenty-nine or thirty, he wasn’t exactly sure which. Where was the problem with that? Why wasn’t he doing something? Maybe it wasn’t the age thing. Maybe it was Leon. She was his daughter, and always would be. It gave him the guilty illusion she was somewhere between his kid sister and his niece. That obviously gave him a very inhibiting feeling, but it was just an illusion, right? She was the relative of an old friend, was all. An old friend who was now dead. So why the hell did he feel so bad about looking at her and seeing himself peeling off her sweatshirt and undoing the belt from around her waist? Why wasn’t he just doing it? Why the hell was he in the guest room instead of on the other side of the wall in bed with her? Like he’d ached to be through countless
forgotten nights in the past, some of them shameful, some of them wistful?
Because presumably her realities were rooted in the same kind of illusions. For kid sister and niece, call it big brother and uncle. Favourite uncle, for sure, because he knew she liked him. There was a lot of affection there. But that just made it worse. Affection for favourite uncles was a specific type of affection. Favourite uncles were there for specific types of things. Family things, like shopping and spoiling, one way or the other. Favourite uncles were not there to put the moves on you. That would come out of the blue like some kind of a shattering betrayal. Horrifying, unwelcome, incestuous, psychologically damaging.
She was on the other side of the wall. But there was nothing he could do about it. Nothing. It was never going to happen. He knew it was going to drive him crazy, so he forced his mind away from her and started thinking about other things. Things that were realities for sure, not just illusions. The two guys, whoever they were. They would have her address by now. There were a dozen ways of discovering where a person lives. They could be outside the building right at that moment. He scanned through the apartment building in his head. The lobby door, locked. The door from the parking garage, locked. The door to the apartment, locked and barred. The windows, all closed up, the blinds all drawn. So tonight, they were safe. But tomorrow morning was going to be dangerous. Maybe very dangerous. He concentrated on fixing the two guys in his mind as he fell asleep. Their vehicle, their suits, their build, their faces.
But at that exact moment, only one of the two guys had a face. They had sailed together ten miles south of where Reacher lay, out into the black waters of lower New York Harbor. They had worked together to unzip the rubber bodybag and lower the secretary’s cold corpse down into the oily Atlantic swell. One guy had turned to the other with some cheap joke on his lips and was shot full in the face with a silenced Beretta. Then again, and again. The slow fall of his body put the three bullets all in different places. His face was all one big fatal wound, black in the darkness. His arm was levered up across the mahogany rail and his right hand was severed at the wrist with a stolen restaurant cleaver. Five blows were required. It was messy and brutal work. The hand went into a plastic bag and the body slipped into the water without a sound, less than twenty yards from the spot where the secretary was already sinking.