One Shot (42 page)

'I'll know more tomorrow if you lend me your car.' 'How
would I get home tonight?'

'I'll drive you.'

'Then you'll know where I live.'

'I already know where you live. I checked your
registration. To make sure it was your car.' Yanni said
nothing.

'Don't worry,' Reacher said. 'If I wanted to hurt you,
you'd already be hurt, don't you think?'

She said nothing.

'I'm a careful driver,' he said again. 'I'll get you home
safe.'

'I'll call a cab,' she said. 'Better for you that way. The
roads are quiet now and this is a distinctive car. The
cops know it's mine. They stop me all the time. They
claim I'm speeding but really they want an autograph or
they want to look down my shirt.'

She used her phone again and told a driver to meet her
inside the garage. Then she climbed out of the car and
left the motor running.

'Go park in a dark corner,' she said. 'Safer for you if
you don't leave before the morning rush.'

'Thanks,' Reacher said.

'And do it now,' she said. 'Your face has been all over
the news and the cab driver will have been watching. At
least I hope he was watching. I need the ratings.'

'Thanks,' Reacher said again.

Ann Yanni walked away and stood at the bottom of the
ramp like she was waiting for a bus. Reacher slid into
her seat and racked it back and reversed the car deep
into the garage. Then he swung it round and parked
nose-in in a distant corner. He shut it down and watched
in the mirror. Five minutes later a green-and-white
Crown Vic rolled down the ramp and Ann Yanni climbed
into the back. The cab turned and drove out to the street
and the garage went quiet.

Reacher stayed in Ann Yanni's Mustang but he didn't
stay in the garage under the black glass tower. Too
risky. If Yanni had a change of heart he would be a
sitting duck. He could picture her getting hit by cold feet
or a crisis of conscience and picking up the phone and
calling Emerson. He's fast asleep in my car in the corner
of the garage at work. Right now. So three minutes after
her cab left he started up again and drove out and
round to the garage on First Street. It was empty. He
went up to the second level and parked in the space
that James Barr had used. He didn't put money in the
meter. Just pulled out Yanni's stack of road maps and
planned his route and then pushed back on the wheel
and reclined the seat and went back to sleep.

He woke himself up five hours later, before dawn, and
set out on the drive south to Kentucky. He saw three
cop cars before he passed the city limits. But they didn't
pay him any attention. They were too busy hunting Jack
Reacher to waste time harassing a cute news anchor.

TWELVE

DAWN HAPPENED SOMEWHERE WAY OVER IN THE

EAST ABOUT AN hour into the drive. The sky changed
from black to grey to purple and then low orange
sunlight came up over the horizon. Reacher switched
his headlights off. He didn't like to run with lights after
daybreak. Just a subliminal thing, for the State Troopers
camped out on the shoulders. Lights after dawn
suggested all kinds of things, like fast through-the-night
escapes from trouble hundreds of miles behind. The
Mustang was already provocative enough. It was loud
and aggressive and it was the kind of car that gets
stolen a lot.

But the troopers that Reacher saw stayed put on the
shoulder. He kept the car at a nothing-to-hide seventy
miles an hour and touched the CD button on the dash.

Got a blast of mid period Sheryl Crow in return, which
he didn't mind at all. He stayed with it. Every day is a
winding road, Sheryl told him. 'I know, he thought. Tell
me about it.

He crossed the Ohio river on a long iron trestle with
the sun low on his left.

For a moment it turned the slow water into molten
gold. Light reflected up at him from below the horizontal
and made the inside of the car unnaturally bright.

The trestle spars flashed past like a stroboscope. The
effect was disconcerting. He closed his left eye and
entered Kentucky squinting.

He kept south on a county road and waited for the
Blackford river. According to Ann Yanni's maps it was a
tributary that flowed on a southeast to northwest
diagonal into the Ohio. Near its source it formed a
perfect equilateral triangle about three miles on a side
with two rural routes. And according to Helen Rodin's
information James Barr's favoured firing range was
somewhere inside that triangle.

But it turned out that the firing range was the triangle.

Three miles out Reacher saw a wire fence on the left
shoulder of the road that started directly after he
crossed the Blackford on a bridge. The fence ran all the
way to the next intersection and had Keep Out Live
Gunfire signs on every fourth post. Then it turned a
sixty-degree angle and ran three more miles north and
east. Reacher followed it and where it met the Blackford
again he found a gate and a gravel clearing and a
complex of low huts. The gate was chained. It was hung
with a hand-painted sign that read: Open 8 a.m. until
dark.

He checked his watch. He was a half-hour too early. On
the other side of the road was an aluminium coach diner
fronted by a gravel lot. He pulled in and stopped the
Mustang right by the diner's door. He was hungry. The
Marriott's room-service steak seemed like a long time
ago.

He ate a long slow breakfast at a window table and
watched the scene across the street. By eight o'clock
there were three pickup trucks waiting to get into the
range. At five after eight a guy showed up in a black
diesel Humvee and mimed an apology for being late and
unchained the gate. He stood aside and let his
customers in ahead of him. Then he climbed back in his
Humvee and followed them. He went through the same
apologetic routine with the main hut door and then all
four guys went inside and disappeared from view.

Reacher called for another cup of coffee. He figured he
would let the guy deal with the early rush and then stroll
over when he had a moment to talk. And the coffee was
good. Too good to pass up. It was fresh, hot, and very
strong.

By eight twenty he started to hear rifles firing. Dull
percussive sounds, robbed of their power and impact
by distance and wind and berms of earth. He figured the
guns were about two hundred yards away, firing west.

The shots came slow and steady, the sound of serious
shooters aiming for the inner rings. Then he heard a
string of lighter pops, from a handgun. He listened to
the familiar sounds for a spell and then left two bucks
on the table and paid a twelve-dollar check at the
register. Went outside and got back in the Mustang and
drove through the lot and bumped up over the camber
of the road and straight in through the range's open
gate.

He found the Humvee guy behind a waist-high counter
in the main hut. Up close he was older than he had
looked from a distance. More than fifty, less than sixty,
sparse grey hair, lined skin, but ramrod straight. He had
a weathered neck wider than his head and the sort of
eyes that pegged him as an ex-Marine noncom even
without the tattoos on his forearms and the souvenirs
on the wall behind him. The tattoos were old and faded
and the souvenirs were mostly pennants and unit
patches. But the centrepiece of the display was a
yellowing paper target framed under glass. It had a tight
group of five.300 holes inside the inner ring and a sixth
just clipping it.

'Help you?' the guy said. He was looking past
Reacher's shoulder, out the window, at the Mustang.

'I'm here to solve all your problems,' Reacher said.

'Really?'

'No, not really. I just want to ask you some questions.'

The guy paused. 'About James Barr?'

'Good guess.'

'No.'

'No?'

'I don't speak to reporters.'

'I'm not a reporter.'

'That's a five-litre Mustang out there, with a couple of
options on it. So it ain't a cop car or a rental. And it's got
Indiana plates. And it's got an NBC sticker in the
windshield. Therefore my guess is you're a reporter
fixing to gin up a television story about how James Barr
used my place to train and prepare.'

'Did he?'

'I told you, I'm not talking.'

'But Barr came here, right?'

'I'm not talking,' the guy said again. No malice in his
voice. Just determination. No hostility. Just self-assurance. He wasn't talking. End of story. The hut went
quiet. Nothing to hear except the distant gunfire and a
low rattling hum from another room. A refrigerator,
maybe. 'I'm not a reporter,' Reacher said again. 'I
borrowed a reporter's car, that's all. To get down here.'

'So what are you?'

'Just a guy who knew James Barr way back. I want to
know about his friend Charlie. I think his friend Charlie
led him astray.' The guy didn't say: What friend? He
didn't ask: Who's Charlie? He just shook his head and
said, 'Can't help you.' Reacher switched his gaze to the
framed target.

'Is that yours?' he asked.

'Everything you see here is mine.'

'What range was it?' he asked.

Why?'

'Because I'm thinking that if it was six hundred yards,
you're pretty good. If it was eight hundred, you're very
good. If it was a thousand, you're unbelievable.' "You
shoot?' the guy asked.

'I used to,' Reacher said.

'Military?'

'Once upon a time.'

The guy turned round and lifted the frame off its hook.

Laid it gently on the counter and turned it round for
inspection. There was a handwritten inscription in faded
ink across the bottom of the paper: 1978 U.S. Marine
Corps 1000 Yard Invitational. Gunny Samuel Cash, third
place. Then there were three signatures from three
adjudicators. You're Sergeant Cash?' Reacher said.

'Retired and scuffling,' the guy said.

'Me too.'

'But not from the Corps.'

"You can tell that just by looking?'

'Easily.'

'Army,' Reacher said. 'But my dad was a Marine.'

Cash nodded. 'Makes you half-human.'

Reacher traced his fingertip over the glass, above the
bullet holes. A fine group of five, and a sixth that had
drifted just a hair.

'Good shooting,' he said.

'I'd be lucky to do that at half the range today.'

'Me too,' Reacher said. 'Time marches on.' "You saying
you could have done it back in the day?'

Reacher didn't answer. Truth was he had actually won
the Marine Corps 1000 Yard Invitational, exactly ten
years after Cash had scraped third place. He had placed
all his rounds through the precise centre of the target, in
a ragged hole a man could put his thumb through. He
had displayed the shiny cup on one office shelf after
another through twelve busy months. It had been an
exceptional year. He had been at some kind of peak,
physically, mentally, every way there was. That year, he
couldn't miss, literally or metaphorically.

But he hadn't defended his title the following year,
even though the MP hierarchy had wanted him to. Later,
looking back, he understood how that decision marked
two things: the beginning of his long slow divorce from
the army, and the beginning of restlessness. The
beginning of always moving on and never looking back.