Page 51 of Exit Strategy
Patten shrugged. ‘Maybe. Maybe not. I’d just like to know.’
So would I, Reacher thought. He could feel the scratching at the back of his brain again. It was starting back up. Nagging at him.
Patten said, ‘Anyway, do you guys have anywhere you need to be tonight?’
Gilmour said, ‘I was thinking of leaving town, but I guess that can wait till tomorrow.’
Reacher said, ‘I am leaving town.’ He took hold of the door handle and started to pull.
Patten said, ‘No, wait.’ She started the engine. ‘Come back to my place. For a while, anyway. I’ll make dinner. Or order takeout. It’s a big deal, what we’ve been through together. Even if we thought we were going through it alone. But we survived. We should at least try to celebrate.’
Reacher didn’t object. Nor did Gilmour. Patten pulled away from the curb and found her way home from memory. She drove slowly. She seemed distracted. Two other cars had to brake to avoid hitting her. No one spoke the whole way to Patten’s street. It was busier than before. More cars were driving on it. More were parked. Ahead of them, a guy in a Mercedes signaled left. It looked like he was going to swing around and pull into a parking spot. It was the last one in sight. But before he could complete his turn, a Maserati coming the other way sped up and nipped into the space ahead of him. The Mercedesguy honked. He rolled down his window and yelled that he had seen the space first. The other driver just laughed and flipped him off.
Patten shook her head. ‘This street’s going to shit,’ she said. ‘It started a month ago. A new guy moved in. He’s single, but he bought the biggest house in the neighborhood. He throws parties all the time. Invites dozens of friends. They show up in their fancy sports cars and take all the parking spots until there are none left for the homeowners.’
Gilmour said, ‘Can’t the homeowners park in their driveways? Or in their garages?’
Reacher had no interest in where the homeowners parked or how other people’s party guests behaved. Just thinking about things like that made him want to leave town and get back on the move. It didn’t matter where to. He had been about to say he’d walk to the Greyhound station instead of staying for dinner, but all of a sudden he felt the scratching at the back of his brain grow a little stronger. He still had no idea what was causing it but knew it would most likely be something connected to Baltimore. The place itself, or something that had happened there, or something that would happen there soon. He felt like the location was key, so he figured he’d better hang around until whatever it was came into focus. He just hoped that would happen soon.
TWENTY-NINE
Patten squeezed her Lexus around the nose of a Ferrari that was overhanging the entrance to her driveway, parked, and led the way inside. Gilmour made a couple of half-hearted attempts at small talk. Reacher didn’t say much at all. Patten did everything she could think of to lighten the mood. She played music. She ordered Thai food. She opened a bottle of wine. Then a second. And a third. They sat in a line at the breakfast bar in her kitchen, Patten in the middle, and she started to tell her life story. Parts of it, anyway. How she had grown up in Cleveland, Ohio, wanting to be a dancer. About her string of failed auditions in New York and San Francisco and finally in Baltimore. About a summer spent in Paris. Another in Milan. A short-lived flirtation with stand-up comedy. And an eventual, grudging acceptance that a corporate job was needed, at leasttemporarily, to repair the hole in her bank account and cover life’s other essentials, like health insurance and a 401(k). She’d lost Reacher by the end, but he was aware of one thing: Throughout the whole tale she had been careful to steer clear of whatever it was that had landed her on Dr Martin’s couch.
Reacher’s interest picked back up when Gilmour started talking about his time in the army. They had four years at West Point in common, but aside from that, their experience was very different. Gilmour had been born in the United States. Reacher in Germany. Gilmour had grown up in one place, Pittsburgh, because of his mother’s job. As a kid, Reacher had never spent more than a few months in one place because of his father’s. Stan Reacher had been a captain in the Marines, and he was constantly shifted from one overseas posting to another. Gilmour had spent his whole career, aside from training detachments, at one base. Reacher had served all over the world.
Eventually the focus shifted away from Gilmour. Patten took up the slack again, but this time she was mainly asking questions. Of Reacher. She didn’t care about his service life too much. It was the choices he’d made afterward that fascinated her. She kept circling back to the things that she felt he lacked. A house. A car. Possessions. Clothes. He tried to explain that he hadn’t lost anything. He had gained everything. But he didn’t try too hard. People either got his lifestyle or they didn’t. He knew that from experience. People wanted roots or they wanted freedom. They wanted to have a boss or to be their own boss. To have structure or to have flexibility.There was no point in trying to change anyone’s mind. And even if it had been possible, Reacher wouldn’t have wanted to. Deciding on a path for yourself was pretty much the whole point.
Patten was the first to run out of steam. She tossed the leftovers in the trash, put her empty wineglass in the sink, and stumbled up the stairs, muttering something about spare bedrooms and clean bath towels. Gilmour was the next to go. Reacher waited until he could no longer hear either of them moving around, then checked the time. The clock on Patten’s microwave said it was 2:11 a.m. The clock in Reacher’s head said 2:08. Either way, there would still be buses running. Reacher wasn’t sure exactly how far away the Greyhound station was, but he didn’t really care. A walk would be welcome, and he had no interest in sticking around the house for a bunch of hungover goodbyes later that morning. He left the phone Gilmour had loaned him on the kitchen table, picked up his coat, and made for the front door. He took hold of the handle. Then he turned back. The scratching in his head was still there. Maybe worse than before. Certainly more insistent. Leaving town wouldn’t help to quiet it. Reacher was sure about that, so he found Patten’s living room. He folded his coat to make a pillow and set it down on the longer of her two couches. He unlaced his shoes and took them off. Positioned them so they’d be easy to slip back on quickly if the need arose. Then he lay down, closed his eyes, and prepared to get some sleep.
But sleep didn’t come easily to Reacher that night. At least not in the satisfying way it usually did. Something kept him awake, and when he did occasionallydrift off, he was bothered by dreams. One in particular. Although when he looked back, he realized it was more of a memory than a dream. A recent memory, of the Mercedes and the Maserati on the street outside the house. The two drivers competing for one parking space.
After an hour of the same loop grinding relentlessly around in his head, Reacher sat upright. He was annoyed with himself. He had no interest in cars. No interest in parking spaces, or neighborhood disputes over party guests. Those thoughts had no place in his head. They needed to leave. He needed to purge his mind so he went to the kitchen, took a drink of water, then returned to the lounge. He lay back down and closed his eyes. He started to slip away. He fell half asleep. Then he was gone all the way, and he stayed under until a minute before six a.m. Then he surfaced and found that the two cars were back in his mind’s eye. Two cars, one space. Only this time he knew why they were there.
Reacher sat up. He heard light footsteps padding down the stairs, and a moment later Patten appeared in the doorway. She was wearing a bottle-green nightgown. It was lightweight, made of silk or some other shiny material, and she pulled it tight around herself. Her hair was piled loosely on top of her head. Her face was pale except for the dark circles under her eyes. She looked at Reacher for a moment, like she was surprised to find him there, then said, ‘Are you hungry? I could make breakfast.’
Gilmour staggered into sight before Reacher could answer. He was fully dressed, but his hair was damp and drops of water had soaked into his shirt collar. Hegrunted a kind of primal greeting, brushed past Patten, staggered across to the shorter couch, and flung himself down, glowering at the others through bloodshot eyes.
Reacher said, ‘Just coffee. But first I need to know something. Does Kathryn Kasselwood work at the port? Is there some way you can find that out?’
Gilmour grunted incoherently and rolled over.
Patten said, ‘Coffee’s no problem. But why do you need to know about Kasselwood?’
Reacher shifted to the edge of the couch and said, ‘There’s something about this whole thing with her and the shipment robbery that doesn’t make sense.’
‘Life has to make sense?’ Patten threw up her hands. ‘Shoot me now.’
Gilmour rolled back and opened his eyes just a crack. ‘What doesn’t make sense?’
Reacher said, ‘We figured she’s connected with the shipment robbery, like you both are.’
Gilmour hauled himself up a little straighter. ‘She has to be connected. There’s no other explanation for the things she did.’
‘Connected, yes. But in the same way as you? That’s where the lines get blurred.’
‘How?’
‘Think about the file she took from Weaver’s desk. Why did she do that?’
