Tripwire by Lee Child Page B

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