THEY BOTH MADE it down the hallway to see him leave. The old man worked on the oxygen long enough to get himself up out of his chair, and then he wheeled the cylinder slowly ahead of him, partly leaning on it like a cane, partly pushing it like a golf trolley. His wife rustled along in front of him, her skirt brushing both doorjambs and both sides of the narrow passageway. Reacher followed behind them, with the leather folder tucked up under his arm. The old lady worked the lock on the door and the old man stood panting and gripping the handle of the cart. The door opened and sweet fresh air blew in.
“Any of Victor’s old friends still around here?” Reacher asked.
“Is that important, Major?”
Reacher shrugged. He had learned a long time ago the best way to prepare people for bad news was by looking very thorough, right from the start. People listened better if they thought you’d exhausted every possibility.
“I just need to build up some background,” he said.
They looked mystified, but like they were ready to think about it, because he was their last hope. He held their son’s life in his hands, literally.
“Ed Steven, I guess, at the hardware store,” Mr. Hobie said eventually. “Thick as thieves with Victor, from kindergarten right through twelfth grade. But that was thirty-five years ago, Major. Don’t see how it can matter now.”
Reacher nodded, because it didn’t matter now.
“I’ve got your number,” he said. “I’ll call you, soon as I know anything.”
“We’re relying on you,” the old lady said.
Reacher nodded again.
“It was a pleasure to meet you both,” he said. “Thank you for the coffee and the cake. And I’m very sorry about your situation.”
They made no reply. It was a hopeless thing to say. Thirty years of agony, and he was sorry about their situation? He just turned and shook their frail hands and stepped back outside onto their overgrown path. Picked his way back to the Taurus, carrying the folder, looking firmly ahead.
He reversed down the driveway, catching the vegetation on both sides, and eased out of the track. Made the right and headed south on the quiet road he’d left to find the house. The town of Brighton firmed up ahead of him. The road widened and smoothed out. There was a gas station and a fire-house. A small municipal park with a Little League diamond. A supermarket with a large parking lot, a bank, a row of small stores sharing a common frontage, set back from the street.
The supermarket’s parking lot seemed to be the geographic center of the town. He cruised slowly past it and saw a nursery, with lines of shrubs in pots under a sprinkler which was making rainbows in the sun. Then a large shed, dull red paint, standing in its own lot: Steven’s Hardware. He swung the Taurus in and parked next to a timber store in back.
The entrance was an insignificant door set in the end wall of the shed. It gave onto a maze of aisles, packed tight with every kind of thing he’d never had to buy. Screws, nails, bolts, hand tools, power tools, garbage cans, mailboxes, panes of glass, window units, doors, cans of paint. The maze led to a central core, where four shop counters were set in a square under bright fluorescent lighting. Inside the corral were a man and two boys, dressed in jeans and shirts and red canvas aprons. The man was lean and small, maybe fifty, and the boys were clearly his sons, younger versions of the same face and physique, maybe eighteen and twenty.
“Ed Steven?” Reacher asked.
The man nodded and set his head at an angle and raised his eyebrows, like a guy who has spent thirty years dealing with inquiries from salesmen and customers.
“Can I talk to you about Victor Hobie?”
The guy looked blank for a second, and then he glanced sideways at his boys, like he was spooling backward all the way through their lives and far beyond, back to when he last knew Victor Hobie.
“He died in ‘Nam, right?” he said.
“I need some background.”
“Checking for his folks again?” He said it without surprise, and there was an edge of weariness in there, too. Like the Hobies’ problems were well known in the town, and gladly tolerated, but no longer exciting any kind of urgent sympathy.
Reacher nodded. “I need to get a feel for what sort of a guy he was. Story is you knew him pretty well.”
Steven looked blank again. “Well, I did, I guess. But we were just kids. I only saw him once, after high school.”
“Want to tell me about him?”
“I’m pretty busy. I’ve got unloading to see to.”
“I could give you a hand. We could talk while we’re doing it.”
Steven started to say a routine no, but then he glanced at Reacher, saw the size of him, and smiled like a laborer who’s been offered the free use of a forklift.
“OK,” he said. “Out back.”
He came out from the corral of counters and led Reacher through a rear door. There was a dusty pickup parked in the sun next to an open shed with a tin roof. The pickup was loaded with bags of cement. The shelves in the open shed were empty. Reacher took his jacket off and laid it on the hood of the truck.
The bags were made of thick paper. He knew from his time with the pool gang that if he used two hands on the middle of the bags, they would fold themselves over and split. The way to do it was to clamp a palm on the comer and lift them one-handed. That would keep the dust off his new shirt, too. The bags weighed a hundred pounds, so he did them two at a time, one in each hand, holding them out, counterbalanced away from his body. Steven watched him, like he was a side-show at the circus.
“So tell me about Victor Hobie,” Reacher grunted.
Steven shrugged. He was leaning on a post, under the tin roof, out of the sun.
“Long time ago,” he said. “What can I tell you? We were just kids, you know? Our dads were in the chamber of commerce together. His was a printer. Mine ran this place, although it was just a lumberyard back then. We were together all the way through school. We started kindergarten on the same day, graduated high school on the same day. I only saw him once after that, when he was home from the Army. He’d been in Vietnam a year, and he was going back again.”
“So what sort of a guy was he?”
Steven shrugged again. “I’m kind of wary about giving you an opinion.”
“Why? Some kind of bad news in there?”
“No, no, nothing like that,” Steven said. “There’s nothing to hide. He was a good kid. But I’d be giving you one kid’s opinion about another kid from thirty-five years ago, right? Might not be a reliable opinion.”
Reacher paused, with a hundred-pound bag in each hand. Glanced back at Steve. He was leaning on his post in his red apron, lean and fit, the exact picture of what Reacher assumed was a typical cautious small-town Yankee businessman. The sort of guy whose judgment might be reasonably solid. He nodded.
“OK, I can see that. I’ll take it into account.”
Steven nodded back, like the ground rules were clear. “How old are you?”
“Thirty-eight,” Reacher said.
“From around here?”
Reacher shook his head. “Not really from around anywhere.”
“OK, couple of things you need to understand,” Steven said. “This is a small small suburban town, and Victor and I were born here in ‘48. We were already fifteen years old when Kennedy got shot, and sixteen before the Beatles arrived, and twenty when there was all that rioting in Chicago and L.A. You know what I’m saying here?”
“Different world,” Reacher said.
“You bet your ass it was,” Steven said back. “We grew up in a different world. Our whole childhood. To us, a real daring guy was one who put baseball cards in the wheels of his Schwinn. You need to bear that in mind, when you hear what I say.”