One Shot (40 page)

'The description. Small guy, dark, with black hair that
sticks up like a brush.' 'James Barr has got a Russian
friend? Not according to our inquiries.' 'Like I said, do
your job.'

'We're doing it. Nobody mentioned a Russian friend.'

'He sounds American. I think he was involved with
what happened on Friday, which means maybe this
whole crew was involved.' 'Involved how?'

'I don't know. But I plan to find out. I'll call you
tomorrow.' "You'll be in jail tomorrow.'

'Like I'm in jail now? Dream on, Emerson.'

'Where are you?'

'Close by,' Reacher said. 'Sleep well, detective.'

He clicked the phone off and put Emerson's number
back in his pocket and took out Helen Rodin's. Dialled it
and moved round the concrete pillar into deep shadow.

'Yes?' Helen Rodin said.

'This is Reacher.'

'Are you OK? The cop is right outside my door now.'

'Suits me,' Reacher said. 'Suits him too, I expect. He's
probably getting forty bucks an hour for the overtime.'

'They put your face on the six o'clock news. It's a big
story.' 'Don't worry about me.'

'Where are you?'

'Free and clear. Making progress. I saw Charlie. I gave
Emerson his plate number. Are you making progress?'

'Not really. All I've got is five random names. No reason I
can see why anybody told James Barr to shoot any one
of them.' "You need Franklin. You need research.'

'I can't afford Franklin.'

'I want you to find that address in Kentucky for me.'

'Kentucky?'

'Where James Barr went to shoot.'

Reacher heard her juggle the phone and flip through
paper. Then she came back and read out an address. It
meant nothing to Reacher. A road, a town, a state, a zip.

'What's Kentucky got to do with anything?' Helen
asked.

Reacher heard a car on the street. Close by, to his left,
fat tyres rolling slow. He slid round the pillar and looked.

A PD prowl car, crawling, lights off. Two cops in the
front, craning their necks, looking right, looking left.

'Got to go,' he said. He clicked the phone off and put it
on the ground at the base of the pillar. Emerson's caller
ID would have trapped the number and any cell phone's
physical location could be tracked by the recognition
pulse that it sends to the network, once every fifteen
seconds, regular as clockwork. So Reacher left the
phone in the dirt and headed west, forty feet below the
raised roadbed.

Ten minutes later he was opposite the back of the
black glass tower, in the shadows under the highway,
facing the vehicle ramp. There was an empty cop car
parked on the kerb. It looked still and cold. Settled. Like
it had been there for a spell. The guy outside Helen's
door, Reacher thought. He crossed the street and
walked down the ramp. Into the underground garage.

The concrete was all painted dirty white and there were
fluorescent tubes blazing every fifteen feet. There were
pools of light and pools of darkness. Reacher felt like
he was walking out of the wings across a succession of
brightly lit stages. The ceiling was low. There were fat
square pillars holding up the building. The service core
was in the centre. The whole space was cold and silent
and about forty yards deep and maybe three times as
wide.

Forty yards deep.

Just like the new extension on First Street. Reacher
stepped over and put his back against the front wall.

Walked all the way across to the back wall.

Thirty-five paces. He turned like a swimmer at the end
of a lap and walked back. Thirty-five paces. He crossed
diagonally to the far corner. The garage was dark back
there. He threaded between two NBC vans and found
the blue Ford Mustang he guessed belonged to Ann
Yanni. It was clean and shiny. Recently waxed. It had
small windows, because of the convertible top. A raked
windshield. Tinted glass.

He tried the passenger door. Locked. He moved round
the hood and tried the driver's door. The handle moved.

Unlocked. He glanced around and opened the door.

No alarm.

He reached inside and touched the unlock button.

There was a triple thunk as both door locks and the
trunk lock unlatched. He closed the driver's door and
stepped back to the trunk. The spare tyre was under the
floor. Nested inside the wheel were the jack and a length
of metal pipe that both worked the jack and undid the
wheel nuts. He took the pipe out and closed the trunk.

Stepped round to the passenger side and opened the
door and got inside the car.

The interior smelled of perfume and coffee. He opened
the glove box and found a stack of road maps and a
small leather folder the size of a purse diary.

Inside the folder were an insurance slip and an auto
registration both made out to Ms Janine Lorna Ann
Yanni at a local Indiana address. He put the folder away
again and closed the glove box. Found the right levers
and lowered his seat as far as it would go. He reclined
the back all the way, which wasn't far. Then he moved
the whole seat backwards to give himself as much
legroom as he could get. He untucked his shirt and
rested the pipe in his lap and lay back in the seat.

Stretched. He had about three hours to wait. He tried to
sleep. Sleep when you can was the old army rule.

First thing Emerson did was contact the phone
company. He confirmed that the number his caller ID

had caught was a cell phone. The service contract was
written out to a business operating under the name
Specialized Services of Indiana. Emerson tasked a first-year detective to track the business and told the phone
company to track the phone. Initial progress was mixed.

Specialized Services of Indiana dead-ended because it
was owned by an offshore trust in Bermuda and had no
local address. But the phone company reported that the
cell phone was stationary and was showing up on three
cells at once, which meant it had to be in the downtown
area and would be easy to triangulate.

Rosemary Barr sweet-talked her way past the Board of
Corrections desk on the sixth floor of the hospital and
was granted an out-of-hours visit with her brother. But
when she got to his room she found he was deeply
asleep. Her sweet talk was wasted. She sat for thirty
minutes but he didn't wake up. She watched the
monitors. His heartbeat was strong and regular. His
breathing was fine. He was still handcuffed and his
head was still clamped but his body was perfectly still.

She checked his chart, to make sure he was being
properly cared for. She saw the doctor's scribbled note:
possible early-onset PA? She had no idea what that
meant, and in the middle of the evening she couldn't
find anyone willing to explain it to her.

The phone company marked the cell phone's location
on a large scale city map and faxed it to Emerson.

Emerson tore it out of the machine and spent five
minutes trying to make sense of it. He was expecting to
find the three arrows meeting at a hotel, or a bar, or a
restaurant. Instead they met on a vacant lot under the
raised highway. He had a brief image in his mind of
Reacher sleeping rough in a cardboard box. Then he
concluded that the phone was abandoned, which was
confirmed ten minutes later by the patrol car he sent out
to check.

And then just for formality's sake he fired up his
computer and entered the plate numbers Reacher had
given him. They came back as late-model Cadillac
Devilles, both black, both registered to Specialized
Services of Indiana. He wrote dead end on the sheet of
paper and put it in a file.

Reacher woke up every time he heard the elevator
motors start. The sound whined down the shaft through
the cables and the moving cars rumbled. The first three
times were false alarms. Just anonymous office people
heading home after a long day at work. Every forty
minutes or so they came down alone and walked
wearily to their cars and drove away. Three times the
tang of cold exhaust fumes drifted and three times the
garage went quiet again and three times Reacher went
back to sleep.

The fourth time, he stayed awake. He heard the
elevator start and checked his watch. Eleven forty-five.

Showtime. He waited and heard the elevator doors
open. This time, it wasn't just another lone guy in a suit.

It was a big crowd. Eight or ten people. Noisy. It was the
whole cast and crew from the NBC affiliate's eleven
o'clock news.

Reacher pressed himself down in the Mustang's
passenger seat and hid the tyre iron underneath the
tails of his shirt. It was cold against the skin of his
stomach. He stared up at the fabric roof and waited.

A heavy guy in baggy jeans passed through the
darkness within five feet of the Mustang's front fender.

He had a ragged grey beard and was wearing a Grateful
Dead T-shirt under a torn cotton cardigan. Not on-screen talent. Maybe a cameraman. He walked on
towards a silver pickup and climbed inside. Then came
a man in a sharkskin suit and orange make-up. He had
big hair and white teeth. Definitely on-screen talent,
maybe weather, maybe sports. He passed by on the
Mustang's other side and got into a white Ford Taurus.

Then came three women together, young, casual dress,
maybe the studio director and the floor manager and the
vision mixer. They squeezed between the Mustang's
trunk and a broadcast van. The car rocked three times
as they nudged it. Then they split up and headed for
their own separate rides.

Then came three more people.

Then came Ann Yanni.

Reacher didn't notice her individually until she put her
hand on her car's door handle. She paused and called
something out to one of the others. She got an answer,
said something else, and then opened the door. She
came in butt first, swivelling and ducking her head. She
was wearing old jeans and a new silk blouse. It looked
expensive. Reacher guessed she had been on camera,
but at an anchor's desk, visible from the waist up only.

Her hair was stiff with spray. She dumped herself in the
seat and shut her door. Then she glanced to her right.

'Keep very quiet,' Reacher said to her. 'Or I'll shoot
you.'

He jabbed the tyre iron at her, under his shirt. Half-inch
wide, long and straight, it looked plausible. She stared
at it in shock. Face to face two feet away she looked
thinner and older than she looked on the television
screen. There were fine lines all around her eyes, full of
makeup. But she was very beautiful. She had
impossibly perfect features, bold and vivid and larger
than life, like most TV people. Her blouse had a formal
collar but was open three buttons. Prim and sexy, all at
the same time.

'Hands where I can see them,' Reacher said. 'In your
lap.' He didn't want her to go for the horn. 'Keys on the
console.' He didn't want her to hit the panic button. The
new Fords he had driven had a little red button on the
remote fob.

He assumed it set off an alarm.

'Just sit tight,' he said. 'Nice and quiet. We'll be OK.'

He clicked the button on his side and locked the car.

'I know who you are,' she said.

'So do 1/ he said.

He kept the tyre iron in place and waited. Yanni sat still,
hands in her lap, breathing hard, looking more and more
scared as all around them her colleagues' cars started
up. Blue haze drifted. People drove away, one by one.