One Shot (36 page)

'Not a chance. You're not good enough.' 'Maybe we're
tracing this call.'

'I'll save you the trouble. I'm outside a grocery called
Martha's.' 'You should come in from the cold.'

'I'll trade,' Reacher said. 'Find out who placed the cone
in the parking garage and then I'll think about coming
in.' 'Barr placed the cone.'

'You know he didn't. His van isn't on the tapes.' 'So he
used another vehicle.'

'He doesn't have another vehicle.'

'So he borrowed one.'

'From a friend?' Reacher said. 'Maybe. Or maybe the
friend placed the cone for him. Either way, you find that
friend, and I'll think about coming in to talk to you.'

'There are hundreds of cars on those tapes.' You've got
the resources,' Reacher said. 'I don't trade,' Emerson
said.

'I think his name is Charlie,' Reacher said. 'Small guy,
wiry black hair.' 'I don't trade,' Emerson said again.

'I didn't kill the girl,' Reacher said. 'Says you.'

'I liked her.'

You're breaking my heart.'

'And you know I didn't stay at the Metropole last night.'

'Which is why you dumped her there.'

'And I'm not left-handed.'

'I don't follow.'

'Tell Bellantonio to talk to your ME.'

'We'll find you,' Emerson said.

'You won't,' Reacher said. 'Nobody ever has before.'

Then he hung up and walked back to the street.

Crossed the road and hiked half a block north and took
cover behind a stack of unused concrete lane dividers
in a vacant lot. He waited. Six minutes later two cruisers
pulled up in front of Martha's grocery. Lights, but no
sirens. Four cops spilled out. Two went in the store and
two went to find the phone. Reacher watched them
regroup on the sidewalk. Watched them search the alley
and check round its corner. Watched them come back.

Watched them admit defeat. He saw one of the four get
on his radio for a short conversation full of defensive
body language. Raised palms, shrugged shoulders.

Then the conversation ended and Reacher slipped
away east, heading back towards the Marriott.

The Zee had only a thumb and a single finger
remaining on each hand. On the right was a stump of an
index finger, blackened and gnarled by frostbite. He had
once spent a week outdoors in the winter, wearing an
old Red Army tunic, and the way its previous owner's
water canteen had ridden on his belt had worn the
fabric of the right pocket thinner than the left. On such
trivial differences survival had hung. His left hand had
been saved, and his right hand lost. He had felt his
fingers die from the pinkie inward. He had taken his
hand out of his pocket and let it freeze hard enough to
go completely numb. Then he had chewed off the dead
fingers before the gangrene could spread. He
remembered dropping them to the ground, one by one,
like small brown twigs.

His left hand retained the pinkie. The middle three
fingers were missing. Two had been amputated by a
sadist with garden shears. The Zee had removed the
other himself, with a sharpened spoon, so as to be
disqualified for labour in some machine shop or other.

He couldn't recall the specifics, but he remembered a
persuasive rumour that it was better to lose another
finger than work on that particular detail. Something to
do with the overseer.

Ruined hands. Just two of many souvenirs of another
time, another place. He wasn't very aware of them any
more, but they made modern life difficult. Cell phones
had got so damn small. Linsky's number was ten digits
long, and it was a pig to dial. The Zee never retained a
phone long enough to make it worth storing a number.

That would be madness.

Eventually he got the number entered and he
concentrated hard and pressed the call button with his
left-hand pinkie. Then he juggled the phone into his
other palm and cupped it near his ear. He didn't need to
hold it close. His hearing was still excellent, which was a
miracle all by itself.

'Yes?' Linsky said.

'They can't find him,' the Zee said. 'I shouldn't have
told you to break off our own surveillance. My mistake.'

'Where have they looked?'

'Here and there. He stayed last night at the motor
court. They've got it staked out, but I'm sure he won't go
back. They've got a man at the lawyer's office. Other
than that, they're stumbling around in the dark.'

What do you want me to do?'

'I want you to find him. Use Chenko and Vladimir. And
I'll send Raskin to you.

Work together. Find him tonight and then call me.'

Reacher stopped two blocks short of the Marriott. He
knew what Emerson would be doing. He had been
Emerson for thirteen years. Emerson would be running
down a mental list. Likely haunts, known associates.

Likely haunts at this time of day would include eating
places. So Emerson would be sending cars to diners
and restaurants and cafes, including the salad place
that Helen Rodin liked and the sports bar. Then he
would move on to known associates, which pretty
much limited him to Helen Rodin herself. He would have
the lobby cop ride up to the fourth floor and knock on
the office door.

Then he would take a chance on Eileen Hutton.

So Reacher stopped two blocks short of the Marriott
and looked round for a place to wait. He found one
behind a shoe store. There was a three-sided corral
made of head-high brick walls shielding a shoulder-high
plastic garbage receptacle from public view. Reacher
stepped in and found that if he leaned his shoulder on
the trash can he could see a yard-wide sliver of the
Marriott's main door. He wasn't uncomfortable. And it
was the best-smelling garbage dump he had ever been
in. The can smelled of fresh cardboard and new shoes.

Better than the kind of place you find behind a fish
store.

He figured if Emerson was efficient he would have to
wait less than thirty minutes. Very efficient, less than
twenty. Average, somewhere up around an hour. He
leaned on the trash can and passed the time. It wasn't
late but the streets were already quiet. There were very
few people out and about. He watched, and waited.

Then the smell of new leather from the discarded shoe
boxes distracted him. It started him thinking about
footwear. Maybe he should drop by the store sometime
and pick out a brand new pair. He stuck his foot out and
looked down. The boat shoes he had on were soft and
light and the soles were thin. They had been fine for
Miami. Not so good for his current situation. He could
foresee a time when he would appreciate something
heavier.

Then he looked down again. Rocked back and
brought his feet together and took the same pace
forward. And stopped. He tried it again with his other
foot, and stopped again, like a freeze-frame of a man
walking. He stared down, with something in the back of
his mind. Something from Bellantonio's evidence.

Something among all those hundreds of printed
pages.

Then he looked up again, because he sensed
movement in the corner of his eye at the Marriott's door
two blocks away. He saw a squad car's hood. It moved
into his field of view and dipped once as it braked and
stopped. Then two cops appeared, in uniform, walking
forward. He glanced at his watch. Twenty three minutes.

He smiled. Emerson was good, but not unbelievable.

The cops went in through the door. They would spend
five minutes with the desk clerk. The clerk would give
up Hutton's room number without a fight. Generally
speaking hotel clerks from small heartland cities weren't
ACLU activists. And guests were gone tomorrow, but
the local PD was always there.

So the cops would go to Hutton's room. They would
knock on her door. Hutton would let them in. She had
nothing to hide. The cops would poke around and be on
their way. Ten minutes, tops, beginning to end.

Reacher checked his watch again, and waited.

The cops were back out after eight minutes. They
paused outside the doors, tiny figures far in the
distance. One of them ducked his head to his collar and
used his radio, calling in a negative progress report,
listening for the next destination. The next likely haunt.

The next known associate. Pure routine. Have a fun
evening, boys, Reacher thought. Because I'm going to.

That's for damn sure. He watched them drive off and
waited another minute in case they were driving his
way. Then he stepped out of the brick corral and
headed for Eileen Hutton.

Grigor Linsky waited in his car in a fire lane in a
supermarket parking lot, framed against a window that
was entirely pasted over with a gigantic orange
advertisement for ground beef at a very low price. Old
and spoiled, Linsky thought. Or full of listeria. The kind
of thing the Zee and I would once have killed to eat. And
killed was the truth. Linsky had no illusions. None at all.

The Zee and he were bad people made worse by
experience. Their shared suffering had conferred no
grace or nobility. Quite the reverse. Men in their situation
inclined towards grace and nobility had died within
hours. But the Zee and he had survived, like sewer rats,
by abandoning inhibition, by fighting and clawing, by
betraying those stronger than themselves, by
dominating those weaker.

And they had learned. What works once works always.

Linsky watched in his mirror and saw Raskin's car
coming towards him. It was a Lincoln Town Car, the old
square style, black and dusty, listing like a holed
battleship. It stopped nose to tail with him and Raskin
got out. He looked exactly like what he was, which was
a second-rate Moscow hoodlum. Square build, flat face,
cheap leather jacket, dull eyes. Forty-some years old. A
stupid man, in Linsky's opinion, but he had survived the
Red Army's last hurrah in Afghanistan, which had to
count for something. Plenty of people smarter than
Raskin hadn't come back whole, or come back at all.

Which made Raskin a survivor, which was the quality
that meant more than any other to the Zee.

Raskin opened the rear door and slid into the back
seat behind Linsky. He didn't speak. Just handed over
four copies of Emerson's wanted poster. A delivery from
the Zee. How the Zee had got the posters, Linsky wasn't
sure.

But he could make a guess. The posters themselves
were pretty good. The likeness was pretty accurate. It
would serve its purpose.

'Thank you,' Linsky said politely.

Raskin didn't respond.

Chenko and Vladimir showed up two minutes later, in
Chenko's Cadillac. Chenko was driving. Chenko always
drove. He parked behind Raskin's Lincoln. Three large
black cars, all in a line. Jack Reacher's funeral
procession. Linsky smiled to himself. Chenko and
Vladimir got out of their car and walked forward, one
small and dark, the other big and fair. They got into
Linsky's own Cadillac, Chenko in the front, Vladimir in
the back next to Raskin, so that counting clockwise
there was Linsky in the driver's seat, then Chenko, then
Vladimir, then Raskin. The proper pecking order,
instinctively obeyed.

Linsky smiled again and handed out three copies of
the poster. He kept one for himself, even though he
didn't need it. He had seen Jack Reacher many times
already.