One Shot (19 page)

Helen Rodin's ride was a small dark green sedan so
anonymous Reacher didn't know what it was. A Saturn,
maybe. It was unwashed and not new. It was a graduate
student's car, the sort of thing a person uses until a first
salary kicks in and lease payments become affordable.

Reacher knew all about lease payments. Baseball on
the TV carried a lot of commercials. Every half inning,
and every call to the bullpen. 'Where are we going?'

Helen asked.

'South,' Reacher said.

He racked his seat back and crunched a whole lot of
stuff in the footwell behind him. She had her seat close
to the wheel, even though she wasn't a short woman.

He ended up looking at her more or less from behind.

'What do you know?' she asked.

'It's not what I know,' he said. 'It's what James Barr
knows.'

'About what?'

'About me.'

She came up out of the garage and started south
down a street parallel with First. Eight o'clock in the
morning, the rush hour traffic was still heavy.

Going the opposite way from the afternoon rush, he
guessed. 'What does James Barr know about you?' she
asked.

'Something that made him want me here,' he said.

'He ought to hate you.'

'I'm sure he does. But he still wanted me here.'

She crawled south, towards the river.

'He never met me before,' Reacher said. 'Never saw me
again afterwards. We knew each other for three weeks,
more than fourteen years ago.' 'He knew you as an
investigator. Someone who broke a tough case.'

'A case he thought couldn't be broken. He watched me
do it every step of the way. He had a front row seat. He
thought I was an investigative genius.'

'That's why he wanted you here?'

Reacher nodded. 'I spent last night trying to live up to
his opinion.'

They crossed the river, on a long iron trestle. The sun
was on their left. The wharf was on their right. The slow
grey water moved listlessly past it.

'Go west now,' Reacher said.

She made a right and took a two-lane county road.

There were bait stores on the riverbank, and shacks
selling barbecue and beer and crushed ice. 'But this
case was already broken,' she said. 'He knew that'

'This case was only halfway broken,' Reacher said.

'That's what he knew.'

'Halfway?'

Reacher nodded, even though he was behind her.

'There's more to this case than Emerson saw,' he said.

'Barr wanted someone else to understand that. But his
first lawyer was lazy. He wasn't very interested. That's
why Barr got so frustrated.' What more is there?'

'I'll show you.'

'A lot?'

'I think so.'

'So why didn't he just lay out the facts, whatever they
are?'

'Because he couldn't. And because nobody would
have believed him anyway.'

Why? What the hell happened here?'

There was a highway cloverleaf ahead, just like he had
hoped.

'I'll show you,' he said again. 'Take the highway north.'

She powered the little car through the ramp and
merged with the traffic. There was a mixed stream
flowing north. Eighteen wheelers, panel trucks, pickups,
cars. The road recrossed the river on a concrete bridge.

The wharf was visible to the east, in the distance. The
city centre was ahead, on the right. The highway rose
gently on its stilts. Helen drove onward, with the roofs
of low edge-of-town buildings flashing past on the left
and the right. 'Be ready to take the spur that runs
behind the library,' Reacher said.

It was going to be a right exit. It was announced well in
advance with a sign.

The broken line separating the right lane from the
centre lane became a solid line. Then the solid line
became a narrow wedge. The through traffic was forced
away to the left. The exit lane angled slightly right. They
stayed in it.

The wedge grew wider and was filled in with bold
crosshatched lines. Up ahead were yellow drums. They
passed them by, onto the spur that would lead behind
the library. Reacher twisted in his seat and checked the
rear window. Nobody behind them. 'Go slow,' he said.

Two hundred yards ahead the spur started to curve,
behind the library, behind the black glass tower. The
roadbed was wide enough for two lanes. But the radius
was too tight to make it safe for two lanes to run side by
side at high speed into the corner. Traffic engineers had
thought better of it. They had advised a gentler
trajectory. They had marked out a single lane through
the curve. It was a little wider than a normal lane, to
allow for misjudgements.

It started way on the left and then swung sharply to the
right and cut across the apex of the curve at a shallower
angle. 'Go real slow now,' Reacher said.

The car slowed. Way up ahead of them on the left was
a crescent-moon shape of white crosshatching.

Beginning right next to them on the right was a long thin
triangle of white crosshatching. Just lines of paint on
the blacktop, but they shepherded people along and
kept them safe. 'Pull over,' Reacher said. 'Here, on the
right.'

'Can't stop here,' Helen said.

'Like you had a flat. Just pull over. Right here.'

She braked hard and turned the wheel and steered
onto the crosshatched no-man's-land on their right.

They felt the thick painted lines thumping under the
tyres. A juddery little rhythm. It slowed as she slowed.

She stopped.

'Back up a little,' Reacher said.

She backed up, like she was parallel parking against
the concrete parapet.

'Now forward a yard,' Reacher said.

She drove forward a yard.

'OK,' he said.

He wound his window down. The traffic lane on their
left was clear and smooth, but the crosshatched no-man's-land they were stopped on was covered with grit
and trash and debris blown across it by years of
passing vehicles. There were cans and bottles and
detached mud flaps and tiny cubes of broken headlight
glass and plastic splinters from old fender benders. Far
away to the left the through traffic rumbled north on a
separate bridge. There was a constant stream over
there.

But they sat for a whole minute before anyone else
came the way they had taken. A lone pickup passed
close on their left and rocked them with its slipstream.

Then the spur went quiet again.

'Not busy,' Reacher said.

'It never is,' Helen said. 'This doesn't really go
anywhere people need to get. It was a total waste of
money. But I guess they've always got to be building
something.'

'Look down,' Reacher said.

The highway was raised up on tall stilts. The roadbed
was maybe forty feet above ground level. The parapet
wall was three feet high. Beyond it, ahead and to their
right, was the upper storey of the library building. It had
an intricate cornice, carved from limestone, and a slate
roof. It felt close enough to touch.

"What?' Helen asked.

Reacher pointed with his thumb, and then leaned way
back so she could see across him. Directly to their right
was an unobstructed view down into the plaza, with a
perfectly straight line of sight along the narrow
bottleneck between the end of the ornamental pool and
the plaza wall. And beyond it, dead ahead, perfectly
aligned, was the door of the DMV office.

'James Barr was a sniper,' Reacher said. 'Not the best,
not the worst, but he was one of ours and he trained for
more than five years. And training has a purpose. It
takes people who aren't necessarily very smart and it
makes them seem smart by beating some basic tactical
awareness into them. Until it becomes instinctive.'

'I don't understand.'

'This is where a trained sniper would have fired from.

Up here on the highway.

Because from here he's got his targets walking directly
towards him in a straight line. Single file, into a
bottleneck. He sets up with one aiming point and never
has to vary it. His targets just walk into it, one after the
other. Shooting from the side is much harder. The
targets are passing right to left in front of him, relatively
quickly, he's got to figure in deflection compensation,
he's got to move the rifle after each shot'

'But he didn't fire from here.'

'That's my point. He should have, but he didn't.'

'So?'

'He had a minivan. He should have parked it right
where we are now. On this exact spot. He should have
climbed through into the back seat and opened the
sliding door. He should have fired from inside the
minivan, Helen. It had tinted windows. The few cars that
passed him wouldn't have seen a thing. He should have
fired his six shots, with the much easier aim, and the six
cartridge cases would have ejected inside the van, and
then he should have shut the door and climbed back
into the driver's seat and driven away. It would have
been a much better firing position and he would have
left nothing at all behind. No physical evidence of any
kind, because nothing would have touched anything
except his tyres would have touched the road.'

'It's farther away. It's a longer distance to shoot.'

'It's about seventy yards. Barr was reliable at five times
that distance. Any military sniper is. With an MIA Super
Match, seventy yards is the same thing as point-blank
range.'

'Someone would have gotten his plate number.

There's always some traffic. They would have
remembered him being here, afterwards.'

'His plates were covered with mud. Probably on
purpose. It would have been a great getaway. In five
minutes he would have been five miles away. Much
better than threading through the traffic on the surface
streets.'

Helen Rodin said nothing.

'And he was expecting it to be sunny,' Reacher said.

'You told me it usually is. Five o'clock in the afternoon,
the sun would have been in the west, behind him. He
would have been firing out of the sun. That's an
absolutely basic preference, for a sniper.'

'Sometimes it rains.'

'That would have been OK too. It would have washed
his tyre tracks out of this grit. Either way around, he
should have been up here in his van. Every reason in
the world says he should have been up here in his van.'

'But he wasn't'

'Evidently.'

'Why not?'

'We should get back to your office. That's where you
need to be now. You've got a lot of strategizing to do.'

Helen Rodin sat down at her desk. Reacher walked to
her window and looked out into the plaza. Looked for
the damaged man in the boxy suit. Didn't see him.

'What strategizing?' Helen asked. 'Barr made a choice
about where to shoot from, that's all, and it wasn't a
great choice, according to you, according to some
fourteen-year-old military theory that he probably forgot
all about the day he quit the service.' 'They don't forget,'

Reacher said.

'I'm not convinced.'

'That's why he walked out on Chapman. Chapman
wasn't going to be convinced either. That's why he
asked for me.' 'And you are convinced?'