There was a man at the desk. He was sitting in the gloom, in a leather chair. He was maybe fifty-five years old. Jodie stared at him. His face was divided roughly in two, like an arbitrary decision, like a map of the western states. On the right was lined skin and thinning gray hair. On the left was scar tissue, pink and thick and shiny like an unfinished plastic model of a monster's head. The scars touched his eye, and the lid was a ball of pink tissue, like a mangled thumb.
He was wearing a neat suit, which fell over broad shoulders and a wide chest. His left arm was laid comfortably on the desk. There was the cuff of a white shirt, snowy in the gloom, and a manicured hand, palm down, the fingers tapping an imperceptible rhythm on the desktop. His right arm was laid exactly symmetrical with his left. There was the same fine summer-weight wool of the suit coat, and the same snowy white shirt cuff, but they were collapsed and empty. There was no hand. Just a simple steel hook protruding at a shallow angle, resting on the wood. It was curved and polished like a miniature version of a sculpture from a public garden.
"Hobie," she said.
He nodded slowly, just once, and raised the hook like a greeting.
"Pleased to meet you, Mrs. Jacob. I'm just sorry it took so long."
Then he smiled.
"And I'm sorry our acquaintance will be so brief."
He nodded again, this time to the man called Tony, who maneuvered her alongside the guy claiming to be Forster. They stood side by side, waiting.
"Where's your friend Jack Reacher?" Hobie asked her.
She shook her head. "I don't know."
Hobie looked at her for a long moment.
"OK," he said. "We'll get to Jack Reacher later. Now sit down."
He was pointing with the hook to the sofa opposite the staring couple. She stepped over and sat down, dazed.
"This is Mr. and Mrs. Stone," Hobie said to her. "Chester and Marilyn, to be informal. Chester ran a corporation called Stone Optical. He owes me more than seventeen million dollars. He's going to pay me in stock."
Jodie glanced at the couple opposite. They both had panic in their eyes. Like something had just gone terribly wrong.
"Put your hands on the table," Hobie called. "All three of you. Lean forward and spread your fingers. Let me see six little starfish."
Jodie leaned forward and laid her palms on the low table. The couple opposite did the same thing, automatically.
"Lean forward more," Hobie called.
They all slid their palms toward the center of the table until they were leaning at an angle. It put their weight on their hands and made them immobile. Hobie came out from behind the desk and stopped opposite the guy in the bad suit.
"Apparently you're not David Forster," he said.
The guy made no reply.
"I would have guessed, you know," Hobie said. "In an instant. A suit like that? You've really got to be kidding. So who are you?"
Again the guy said nothing. Jodie watched him, with her head turned sideways. Tony raised his gun and pointed it at the guy's head. He used both hands and did something with the slide that made a menacing metallic sound in the silence. He tightened his finger on the trigger. Jodie saw his knuckle turn white.
"Curry," the guy said quickly. "William Curry. I'm a private detective, working for Forster."
Hobie nodded, slowly. "OK, Mr. Curry."
He walked back behind the Stones. Stopped directly behind the woman.
"I've been misled, Marilyn," he said.
He balanced himself with his left hand on the back of the sofa and leaned all the way forward and snagged the tip of the hook into the neck of her dress. He pulled back against the strength of the fabric and hauled her slowly upright. Her palms slid off the glass and left damp shapes where they had rested. Her back touched the sofa and he slipped the hook around in front of her and nudged her lightly under the chin like a hairdresser adjusting the position of her head before starting work. He raised the hook and brought it back down gently and used the tip to comb through her hair, lightly, front to back. Her hair was thick and the hook plowed through it, slowly, front to back, front to back. Her eyes were screwed shut in terror.
"You deceived me," he said. "I don't like being deceived. Especially not by you. I protected you, Marilyn. I could have sold you with the cars. Now maybe I will. I had other plans for you, but I think Mrs. Jacob just usurped your position in my affections. Nobody told me how beautiful she was."
The hook stopped moving and a thin thread of blood ran down out of Marilyn's hair onto her forehead. Hobie's gaze shifted across to Jodie. His good eye was steady and unblinking.
"Yes," he said to her. "I think maybe you're New York's parting gift to me."
He pushed the hook hard against the back of Marilyn's head until she leaned forward again and put her hands back on the table. Then he turned around.
"You armed, Mr. Curry?"
Curry shrugged. "I was. You know that. You took it."
The guy with the shotgun held up the shiny revolver. Hobie nodded.
"Tony?"
Tony started patting him down, across the tops of his shoulders, under his arms. Curry glanced left and right and the guy with the shotgun stepped close and jammed the barrel into his side.
"Stand still," he said.
Tony leaned forward and smoothed his hands over the guy's belt area and between his legs. Then he slid them briskly downward and Curry twisted violently sideways and tried to knock the shotgun away with his arm, but the guy holding it was firmly grounded with his feet well apart and he stopped Curry short. He used the muzzle like a fist and hit him in the stomach. Curry's breath coughed out and he folded up and the guy hit him again, on the side of the head, hard with the stock of the shotgun. Curry went down on his knees and Tony rolled him over with his foot.
"Asshole," he sneered.
The guy with the shotgun leaned down one-handed and rammed the muzzle into Curry's gut with enough weight on it to hurt. Tony squatted and fiddled under the legs of the pants and came back up with two identical revolvers. His left forefinger was threaded through the trigger guards and he was swinging them around. The metal clicked and scratched and rattled. The revolvers were small. They were made from stainless steel. Like shiny toys. They had short barrels. Almost no barrels at all.
"Stand up, Mr. Curry," Hobie said.
Curry rolled onto his hands and knees. He was clearly dazed from the blow to the head. Jodie could see him blinking, trying to focus. Shaking his head. He reached out for the back of the sofa and hauled himself upright. Hobie stepped a yard closer and turned his back on him. He looked at Jodie and Chester and Marilyn like they were an audience. He held his left palm flat and started butting the curve of the hook into it. He was butting with the right and slapping with the left, and the impacts were building.
"A simple question of mechanics," he said. "The impact on the end of the hook transfers up to the stump. The shock waves travel. They dissipate against what's left of the arm. Naturally the leatherwork was built by an expert, so the discomfort is minimized. But we can't beat the laws of physics, can we? So in the end the question is: Who does the pain get to first? Him or me?"
He spun on the ball of his foot and punched Curry full in the face with the blunt outside curve of the hook. It was a hard punch thrown all the way from the shoulder, and Curry staggered back and gasped.
"I asked you if you were armed," Hobie said quietly. "You should have told the truth. You should have said, 'Yes, Mr. Hobie, I've got a revolver on each ankle.' But you didn't. You tried to deceive me. And like I told Marilyn, I don't like to be deceived."
The next punch was a jab to the body. Sudden and hard.
"Stop it," Jodie screamed. She pushed back and sat upright. "Why are you doing this? What the hell happened to you?"
Curry was bent over and gasping. Hobie turned away from him to face her.
"What happened to me?" he repeated.
"You were a decent guy. We know all about you."
He shook his head slowly.
"No, you don't," he said.
Then the buzzer sounded at the door out to the elevator lobby. Tony glanced at Hobie, and slipped his automatic into his pocket. He took Curry's two small revolvers off his finger and stepped over and pressed one of them into Hobie's left hand. Then he leaned in close and slipped the other into the pocket of Hobie's jacket. It was a curiously intimate gesture. Then he walked out of the office. The guy with the shotgun stepped back and found an angle to cover all four prisoners. Hobie moved in the opposite direction and triangulated his aim.
"Be very quiet, everybody," he whispered.
They heard the lobby door open. There was the low sound of conversation and then it closed again. A second later Tony walked back into the gloom with a package under his arm and a smile on his face.
"Messenger from Stone's old bank. Three hundred stock certificates."
He held up the package.
"Open it," Hobie said.
Tony found the plastic thread and tore open the envelope. Jodie saw the rich engraving of equity holdings. Tony flicked through them. He nodded. Hobie stepped back to his chair and laid the small revolver on the desktop.
"Sit down, Mr. Curry," he said. "Next to your legal colleague."
Curry dropped heavily into the space next to Jodie. He slid his hands across the glass and leaned forward, like the others. Hobie used the hook in a circular gesture.