Tripwire (6 page)

He had given up on hotels. He didn’t necessarily need to invest a lot of time. Could be he’d be in and out within an hour. And he could use more information than hotels had to offer. He needed phone books for all five boroughs and the suburbs. Hotels wouldn’t have all of those. And he didn’t need to pay the kind of rates hotels like to charge for phone calls. Digging swimming pools had not made him rich.

So he was heading for the public library. Forty-second Street and Fifth. The biggest in the world? He couldn’t remember. Maybe, maybe not. But certainly big enough to have all the phone books he needed, and big, wide tables and comfortable chairs. Four miles from Roosevelt Square, an hour’s brisk walk, interrupted only by traffic on the cross streets and a quick diversion into an office-supply store to buy a notebook and a pencil.

THE NEXT GUY into Hobie’s inner office was the receptionist. He stepped inside and locked the door behind him. Walked over and sat down on the end of the sofa nearest the desk. Looked at Hobie, long and hard, and silently.

“What?” Hobie asked him, although he knew what.

“You should get out,” the receptionist said. “It’s risky now.”

Hobie made no reply. Just held his hook in his left hand and traced its wicked metal curve with his remaining fingers.

“You planned,” the receptionist said. “You promised. No point planning and promising if you don’t do what you’re supposed to do.”

Hobie shrugged. Said nothing.

“We heard from Hawaii, right?” the receptionist said. “You planned to run as soon as we heard from Hawaii.”

“Costello never went to Hawaii,” Hobie said. “We checked.”

“So that just makes it worse. Somebody else went to Hawaii. Somebody we don’t know.”

“Routine,” Hobie said. “Had to be. Think about it. No reason for anybody to go to Hawaii until we’ve heard from the other end. It’s a sequence, you know that. We hear from the other end, we hear from Hawaii, step one, step two, and then it’s time to go. Not before.”

“You promised,” the guy said again.

“Too early,” Hobie said. “It’s not logical. Think about it. You see somebody buy a gun and a box of bullets, they point the gun at you, are you scared?”

“Sure I am.”

“I’m not,” Hobie said. “Because they didn’t load it. Step one is buy the gun and the bullets, step two is load it. Until we hear from the other end, Hawaii is an empty gun.”

The receptionist laid his head back and stared up at the ceiling.

“Why are you doing this?”

Hobie rolled open his drawer and pulled out the Stone dossier. Took out the signed agreement. Tilted the paper until the dim light from the window caught the bright blue ink of his twin signatures.

“Six weeks,” he said. “Maybe less. That’s all I need.”

The receptionist craned his head up again and squinted over.

“Need for what?”

“The biggest score of my life,” Hobie said.

He squared the paper on the desk and trapped it under his hook.

“Stone just handed me his whole company. Three generations of sweat and toil, and the stupid asshole just handed me the whole thing on a plate.”

“No, he handed you shit on a plate. You’re out one-point-one million dollars in exchange for some worthless paper.”

Hobie smiled.

“Relax, let me do the thinking, OK? I’m the one who’s good at it, right?”

“OK, so how?” the guy asked.

“You know what he owns? Big factory out on Long Island and a big mansion up in Pound Ridge. Five hundred houses all clustered around the factory. Must be three thousand acres all told, prime Long Island real estate, near the shore, crying out for development.”

“The houses aren’t his,” the guy objected.

Hobie nodded. “No, they’re mostly mortgaged to some little bank in Brooklyn.”

“OK, so how?” the guy asked again.

“Just think about it,” Hobie said. “Suppose I put this stock in the market?”

“You’ll get shit for it,” the guy said back. “It’s totally worthless.”

“Exactly, it’s totally worthless. But his bankers don’t really know that yet. He’s lied to them. He’s kept his problems away from them. Why else would he come to me? So his bankers will have it rammed under their noses exactly how worthless their security is. A valuation, straight from the Exchange. They’ll be told: This stock is worth exactly less than shit. Then what?”

“They panic,” the guy said.

“Correct,” Hobie said. “They panic. They’re exposed, with worthless security. They shit themselves until Hook Hobie comes along and offers them twenty cents on the dollar for Stone’s debt.”

“They’d take that? Twenty cents on the dollar?”

Hobie smiled. His scar tissue wrinkled.

“They’ll take it,” he said. “They’ll bite my other hand off to get it. And they’ll include all the stock they hold, part of the deal.”

“OK, then what? What about the houses?”

“Same thing,” Hobie said. “I own the stock, I own the factory out there, I close it down. No jobs, five hundred defaulted mortgages. The Brooklyn bank will get real shaky over that. I’ll buy those mortgages for ten cents on the dollar, foreclose everybody and sling them out. Hire a couple of bulldozers, and I’ve got three thousand acres of prime Long Island real estate, right near the shore. Plus a big mansion up in Pound Ridge. Total cost to me, somewhere around eight-point-one million dollars. The mansion alone is worth two. That leaves me down six-point-one for a package I can market for a hundred million, if I pitch it right.”

The receptionist was staring at him.

“That’s why I need six weeks,” Hobie said.

Then the receptionist was shaking his head.

“It won’t work,” he said. “It’s an old family business. Stone still holds most of the stock himself. It’s not all traded. His bank’s only got some of it. You’d only be a minority partner. He wouldn’t let you do all that stuff.”

Hobie shook his head in turn.

“He’ll sell out to me. All of it. The whole nine yards.”

“He won’t.”

“He will.”

THERE WAS GOOD news and bad news at the public library. Plenty of people called Jacob listed in the phone books for Manhattan, the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, Long Island, Westchester, the Jersey shore, Connecticut. Reacher gave it an hour’s radius from the city. People an hour away turn instinctively to the city when they need something. Farther out than that, maybe they don’t. He made marks with his pencil in his notebook and counted 129 potential candidates for the anxious Mrs. Jacob.

But the Yellow Pages showed no private investigators called Costello. Plenty of private Costellos in the white pages, but no professional listings under that name. Reacher sighed. He was disappointed, but not surprised. It would have been too good to be true to open up the book and see Costello Investigations-We Specialize in Finding Ex-MPs Down in the Keys.

Plenty of the agencies had generic names, a lot of them competing for the head of the alphabetical listings with a capital A as their first letter. Ace, Acme, A-One, AA Investigators. Others had plain geographical connotations, like Manhattan or the Bronx. Some were heading upmarket by using the words Paralegal Services. One was claiming the heritage trade by calling itself Gumshoe. Two were staffed only by women, working only for women.

He pulled the White Pages back and turned the page in his notebook and copied fifteen numbers for the NYPD. Sat for a while, weighing his options. Then he walked outside, past the giant crouching lions and over to a pay phone on the sidewalk. He propped his notebook on top of the phone with all the quarters he had in his pocket and started down his list of precinct houses. Each one, he asked for administration. He figured he would get some grizzled old desk sergeant who would know everything worth knowing.

He got the hit on his fourth call. The first three precincts were unable to help, without sounding any too regretful about it. The fourth call started the same way, a ring tone, a quick transfer, a long pause, then a wheezing acknowledgment as the phone was answered deep in the bowels of some grimy file room.

“I’m looking for a guy called Costello,” he said. “Retired from the job and set up private, maybe on his own, maybe for somebody else. Probably about sixty.”

“Yeah, who are you?” a voice replied. Identical accent. Could have been Costello himself on the line.

“Name’s Carter,” Reacher said. “Like the president.”

“So what you want with Costello, Mr. Carter?”

“I got something for him, but I lost his card,” Reacher said. “Can’t find his number in the book.”

“That’s because Costello ain’t in the book. He only works for lawyers. He don’t work for the general public.”

“So you know him?”

“Know him? Of course I know him. He worked detective out of this building fifteen years. Not surprising I would know him.”

“You know where his office is?”

“Down in the Village someplace,” the voice said, and stopped.

Reacher sighed away from the phone. Like pulling teeth.

“You know where in the Village?”

“ Greenwich Avenue, if I recall.”

“You got a street number?”

“No.”

“Phone number?”

“No.”

“You know a woman called Jacob?”

“No, should I?”

“Just a long shot,” Reacher said. “She was his client.”

“Never heard of her.”

“OK, thanks for your help,” Reacher said.

“Yeah,” the voice said.

Reacher hung up and walked back up the steps and inside. Checked the Manhattan white pages again for a Costello on Greenwich Avenue. No listing. He put the books back on the shelf and went back out into the sun and started walking.

GREENWICH AVENUE WAS a long, straight street running diagonally southeast from Fourteenth Street and Eighth to Eighth Street and Sixth. It was lined on both sides with pleasant low-rise Village buildings, some of them with scooped-out semibasement floors in use as small stores and galleries. Reacher walked the northern side first, and found nothing. Dodged the traffic at the bottom and came back on the other side and found a small brass plaque exactly halfway up the street, fixed to the stone frame of a doorway. The plaque was a well-polished rectangle, one of a cluster, and it said Costello. The door was black, and it was open. Inside was a small lobby with a notice board, ridged felt press-in white plastic letters, indicating the building was subdivided into ten small office suites. Suite five was marked Costello. Beyond the lobby was a glass door, locked. Reacher pressed the buzzer for five. No reply. He used his knuckle and leaned on it, but it got him nowhere. So he pressed six. A voice came back, distorted.

“Yes?”

“UPS,” he said, and the glass door buzzed and clicked open.

It was a three-floor building, four if you counted the separate basement. Suites one, two and three were on the first floor. He went up the stairs and found suite four on his left, six on his right, and five right at the back of the building with its door tucked under the angle of the staircase as it wound up to the third story.

The door was a polished mahogany affair, and it was standing open. Not wide open, but open enough to be obvious. Reacher pushed it with his toe, and it swung on its hinges to reveal a small quiet reception area the size of a motel room. It was decorated in a pastel color somewhere between light gray and light blue. Thick carpet on the floor. A secretary’s desk in the shape of the letter L, with a complicated telephone and a sleek computer. A filing cabinet and a sofa. There was a window with pebbled glass and another door leading straight ahead to an inner office.

The reception area was empty, and it was quiet. Reacher stepped inside and closed the door behind him with his heel. The lock was latched back, like the office had been opened up for business. He padded across the carpet to the inner door. Wrapped his hand in his shirttail and turned the knob. Stepped through into a second room of equal size. Costello’s room. There were framed black-and-white photographs of younger versions of the man he had met in the Keys standing with police commissioners and captains and local politicians Reacher did not recognize. Costello had been a thin man, many years ago. The pictures showed him getting fatter as he got older, like a diet advertisement in reverse. The photographs were grouped on a wall to the right of a desk. The desk held a blotter and an old-fashioned inkwell and a telephone and behind it was a leather chair, crushed into the shape of a heavy man. The left-hand wall held a window with more obscure glass and a line of locked cabinets. In front of the desk was a pair of client chairs, neatly arranged at a comfortable and symmetrical angle.

Reacher stepped back to the outer office. There was a smell of perfume in the air. He threaded around the secretary’s desk and found a woman’s bag, open, neatly stowed against the vanity panel to the left of the chair. The flap was folded back, revealing a soft leather wallet and a plastic pack of tissues. He took out his pencil and used the eraser end to poke the tissues aside. Underneath them was a clutter of cosmetics and a bunch of keys and the soft aroma of expensive cologne.

The computer monitor was swirling with a watery screensaver. He used the pencil to nudge the mouse. The screen crackled and cleared and revealed a half-finished letter. The cursor was blinking patiently in the middle of an uncompleted word. That morning’s date sat underneath a letterhead. Reacher thought about Costello’s body, sprawled out on the sidewalk next to the Key West graveyard, and he glanced between the tidy placement of the absent woman’s bag, the open door, the uncompleted word, and he shivered.

Then he used the pencil to exit the word processor. A window opened and asked him if he wanted to save the changes to the letter. He paused and hit
no.
Opened the file manager screen and checked the directories. He was looking for an invoice. It was clear from looking around that Costello ran a neat operation. Neat enough to invoice for a retainer before he went looking for Jack Reacher. But when did that search start? It must have followed a clear sequence. Mrs. Jacob’s instructions coming at the outset, nothing except a name, a vague description about his size, his Army service. Costello must then have called the military’s central storage facility, a carefully guarded complex in St. Louis that holds every piece of paper relating to every man and woman who has ever served in uniform. Carefully guarded in two ways, physically with gates and wire, and bureaucratically with a thick layer of obstruction designed to discourage frivolous access. After patient inquiries he would have discovered the honorable discharge. Then a puzzled pause, staring at a dead end. Then the long shot with the bank account. A call to an old buddy, favors called in, strings pulled. Maybe a blurry faxed printout from Virginia, maybe a blow-by-blow narrative of credits and debits over the telephone. Then the hurried flight south, the questions up and down Duval, the two guys, the fists, the linoleum knife.