One Shot (12 page)

Many times. But he had never seen it. Not once. He
had never seen the pink mist. And he really wanted to.'

Silence in the room.

'So he went out one day, alone,' Reacher said. 'In
Kuwait City. He set up and waited. Then he shot and
killed four people coming out of an apartment building.'

Helen Rodin was staring at him.

'He fired from a parking garage,' Reacher said.

'Second level. It was directly opposite the apartment
building's door. The victims were American noncoms,
as it happened. They had weekend passes, and they
were in street clothes.'

Rosemary Barr was shaking her head.

'This can't be true,' she said. 'It just can't be. He
wouldn't do it. And if he did, he'd have gone to prison.

But he got an honourable discharge instead.

Right after the Gulf. And a campaign medal. So it can't
have happened. It can't possibly be true.'

'That's exactly why I'm here,' Reacher said. 'There was
a serious problem.

Remember the sequence of events. We had four dead
guys, and we worked from there. In the end I followed
the trail all the way to your brother. But it was a very
tough trail. We took all kinds of wrong turns. And along
one of them we found stuff out about the four dead
guys. Stuff we really didn't want to know.

Because they had been doing things they shouldn't
have been doing.' "What things?' Helen Rodin asked.

'Kuwait City was a hell of a place. Full of rich Arabs.

Even the poor ones had Rolexes and Rolls-Royces and
marble bathrooms with solid gold faucets. A lot of them
had fled temporarily, for the duration. But they had left
all their stuff behind. And some of them had left their
families behind. Their wives and daughters.'

'And?'

'Our four dead noncoms had been doing the
conquering army thing, just like the Iraqis before them.

That's how they saw it, I guess. We saw it as rape and
armed robbery. As it happened they had left quite a trail
that day, inside that building. And other buildings, on
other days. We found enough loot in their footlockers to
start another branch of Tiffany's. Watches, diamonds, all
kinds of portable stuff. And underwear. We figured they
used the underwear to keep count of the wives and
daughters.'

'So what happened?'

'It got political, inevitably. It went up the chain of
command. The Gulf was supposed to be a big shiny
success for us. It was supposed to be a hundred per
cent wonderful and a hundred per cent squeaky clean.

And the Kuwaitis were our allies, and so on and so
forth. So ultimately we were told to cover for the four
guys. We were told to bury the story. Which we did.

Which

also

meant

letting

James

Barr

walk,

unfortunately. Because whispers had gotten out and we
knew his lawyer would have used them. We were afraid
of blackmail, basically.

If we took Barr to trial, his lawyer would have
countered with a justifiable homicide claim. He would
have said Barr had been standing up for the honour of
the army, in a rough and ready sort of a way. All the
beans would have spilled in the process. We were told
not to risk that. So our hands were tied. It was a
stalemate.'

'Maybe it was justifiable homicide,' Rosemary Barr
said. 'Maybe James really did know all along.'

'Ma'am, he didn't know. I'm very sorry, but he didn't. He
was never near any of those guys before. Didn't know
them from Adam. Didn't say anything to me about them
when I caught up to him. He hadn't been in KC long. Not
long enough to know anything. He was just killing
people. For fun. He confessed to that, to me personally,
before any of the other stuff ever came to light.'

Silence in the room.

'So we hushed it up and mustered him out,' Reacher
said. We said his four guys had been killed by
Palestinians, which was plausible in Kuwait City in 1991,
just. I was mildly pissed about the whole thing. It wasn't
the worst situation I had ever seen, but it wasn't the
nicest, either. James Barr got away with murder, by
sheer luck. So I went to see him before he left and I told
him to justify his great good fortune by never stepping
out of line again, not ever, the whole rest of his life. I told
him if he ever did, I would come find him and make him
sorry.'

Silence in the room. It lasted minutes.

'So here I am,' Reacher said.

"This must be classified information,' Helen Rodin
said. 'I mean, surely it can't ever be used. There would
be a huge scandal.'

Reacher nodded. 'It's highly classified. It's sealed
inside the Pentagon.

That's why I asked if this conversation was privileged.'

You'd get in big trouble if you talked about it'

'I've been in big trouble before. I came here to find out
if I needed to get in big trouble again. As it happens, I
don't think I do. I think your father can put James Barr
away without my help. But my help is always available if
he needs it.'

Then Helen understood.

'You're here to pressure me,' she said. 'Aren't you?

You're telling me if I try too hard, you'll cut me off at the
knees.'

'I'm here to keep my promise,' Reacher said. 'To James
Barr.'

He closed the door and left them there, three silent and
disappointed people in a room. Then he rode down in
the elevator. Ann Yanni got in again on two.

He wondered for a moment if she spent all day riding
the elevators, hoping to be recognized. Hoping to be
asked for an autograph. He ignored her. Got out with her
in the lobby and just headed for the door.

He stood for a moment in the plaza. Deciding. James
Barr's medical condition was the complicating factor. He
didn't want to stick around until the guy woke up. If that
happened at all, it might take weeks. And Reacher was
not a guy who liked to stick around. He liked to be on
the move. Two days in one place was about his limit.

But he was stuck for alternatives. He couldn't hint at
anything to Alex Rodin. Couldn't give him a call-me-if-you-need-me number. For one thing, he didn't have a
phone. For another, a guy as squared away and
cautious as Alex Rodin was would worry away at the
hint until something began to unravel. He would make
the link to the Pentagon easily enough. Reacher had
even asked did she get my name from the Pentagon?

That had been a careless mistake. So Alex Rodin would
put two and two together, eventually. He would figure
there's something extra here, and I can find out what it
is from the Pentagon. The Pentagon would stonewall
him, of course. But Rodin wouldn't like being
stonewalled. He would go to the media. Ann Yanni,
probably. She would be ready for another network story.

And at bottom Rodin would be insecure enough about
losing the case to simply have to know. He wouldn't
give up on it.

And Reacher didn't want the story out there. Not
unless it was absolutely necessary. Gulf War vets had it
hard enough, with the chemical stuff and the uranium
poisoning. All they had going for them was the conflict's
spotless just-war reputation. They didn't need defaming
by association with people like Barr and his victims.

People would say hey, they were all doing it. And they
weren't all doing it, in Reacher's experience. That had
been a good army. So he didn't want the story out there,
unless it was absolutely necessary, and he wanted to
judge that for himself.

So, no hints to Alex Rodin. No call-me contingencies.

So… what, exactly?

He decided to stick around for twenty-four hours.

Maybe there would be a clearer prognosis on Barr's
condition after that. Maybe somehow he could check
with Emerson and get a better feel for the evidence.

Then maybe he could feel OK about leaving things with
Alex Rodin's office, on a kind of forensic autopilot. If
there were problems down the road maybe he would
read about them in a newspaper somewhere, far in the
future, on a beach or in a bar, and then he could come
all the way back again.

So, twenty-four hours in a small heartland city.

He decided to go see if there was a river.

There was a river. It was a broad, slow body of water
that moved west to east through an area south of
downtown. Some tributary that fed the mighty Ohio, he
guessed. Its north bank was straightened and
strengthened with massive stone blocks along a three-hundred-yard stretch. The blocks might have weighed
fifty tons each. They were immaculately chiselled and
expertly fitted. They made a quayside. A wharf. They had
tall fat iron mushrooms set into them, to tie off ropes.

Stone paving slabs made the wharf thirty feet deep. All
along its length were tall wooden sheds, open on the
river side, open on the street side. The street was made
of cobbles. A hundred years ago there would have been
huge river barges tied up and unloading. There would
have been swarms of men at work. There would have
been horses and carts clattering on the cobbles. But
now there was nothing. Just absolute stillness, and the
slow drift of the water. Scabs of rust on the iron
mushrooms, clumps of weeds between the stones.

Some of the sheds still had faded names on them.

McGinty Dry Goods. Allentown Seed Company. Parker
Supply. Reacher strolled the three hundred yards and
looked at all of them. They were still standing, strong
and square. Ripe for renovation, he guessed. A city that
put an ornamental pool with a fountain in a public plaza
would spruce up the waterfront. It was inevitable. There
was construction all over town. It would move south.

They would give someone tax breaks to open a
riverside cafe. Maybe a bar. Maybe with live music,
Thursday through Saturday. Maybe with a little museum
laying out the history of the river trade.

He turned to walk back and came face to face with
Helen Rodin.

'You're not such a hard man to find,' she said.

'Evidently,' he said.

'Tourists always come to the docks.'

She was carrying a lawyer-size briefcase.

'Can I buy you lunch?' she said.

She walked him back north to the edge of the new
gentrification. In the space of a single dug-up block the
city changed from old and worn to new and repainted.

Stores changed from dusty mom-and-pop places with
displays of vacuum cleaner bags and washing machine
hoses to new establishments showing off spotliÌ

hundred-dollar dresses. And shoes, and four-dollar
lattes, and things made of titanium. They walked past a
few such places and then Helen Rodin led him into an
eatery. It was the kind of place he had seen before. It
was the kind of place he usually avoided. White walls,
some exposed brick, engine-turned aluminium tables
and chairs, weird salad combinations. Random
ingredients thrown together, and called inventive.

She led him to a table in the far back corner. An
energetic kid came by with menus. Helen Rodin ordered
something with oranges and walnuts and Gorgonzola
cheese. With a cup of herbal tea. Reacher gave up on
reading his menu and ordered the same thing as her,
but with coffee, regular, black. 'This is my favourite
place in town,'