One Shot (45 page)

After a minute he was deep in the silent countryside.

The irrigation booms were turning slowly and the sun
was making rainbows in the droplets.

The heartland. Where the secrets are.

He coasted to a stop next to the Olivers' mailbox. No
way was the Mustang going to make it down the
driveway. The centre hump would have ripped all the
parts off the bottom. The suspension, the exhaust
system, the axle, the diff, whatever else was down there.

Ann Yanni wouldn't have been pleased at all. So he slid
out and left the car where it was, low and crouched and
winking blue in the sun. He picked his way down the
track, feeling every rock and stone through his thin
soles. Jeb Oliver's red Dodge hadn't been moved. It was
sitting right there, lightly dusted with brown dirt and
streaked with dried dew. The old farmhouse was quiet.

The barn was closed and locked.

Reacher ignored the front door. He walked round the
side of the house to the back porch. Jeb's mother was
right there on her glider. She was dressed the same but
this time she had no bottle. Just a manic stare out of
eyes as big as saucers. She had one foot hooked up
under her and was using the other to scoot the chair
about twice as fast as she had before.

'Hello,' she said.

'Jeb not back yet?' Reacher said.

She just shook her head. Reacher heard all the sounds
he had heard before. The irrigation hiss, the squeak of
the glider, the creak of the porch board.

'Got a gun?' he asked.

'I don't hold with them,' she said.

'Got a phone?' he asked.

'Disconnected,' she said. 'I owe them money. But I
don't need them. Jeb lets me use his cell if I need it.'

'Good,' Reacher said.

'How the hell is that good? Jeb's not here.'

'That's exactly what's good about it. I'm going to break
into your barn and I don't want you calling the cops
while I'm doing it. Or shooting me.'

'That's Jeb's barn. You can't go in there.'

'I don't see how you can stop me.'

He turned his back on her and continued down the
track. It curved a little and led directly to the barn's
double doors. The doors like the barn itself were built of
old planks alternately baked and rotted by a hundred
summers and a hundred winters. Reacher touched
them with his knuckles and felt a dry hollowness. The
lock was brand new. It was a U-shaped bicycle lock like
the ones city messengers used. One leg of the U ran
through two black steel hasps that were bolted through
the planks of the doors. Reacher touched the lock.

Shook it. Heavy steel, warm from the sun. It was a
pretty solid arrangement.

No way of cutting it, no way of breaking it.

But a lock was only as strong as what it was fixed to.

Reacher grabbed the straight end of the lock at the
bottom of the U. Pulled on it, gently, and then harder.

The doors sagged towards him and stopped. He put the
flat of his palm against the wood and pushed them
back. Held them closed with a straight left arm and
yanked on the lock with his right. The bolts gave a little,
but not much. Reacher figured that Jeb must have used
washers on the back, under the nuts. Maybe big wide
ones. They were spreading the load.

He thought: OK, more load.

He held the straight part of the lock with both hands
and leaned back like a water-skier Pulled hard and
smashed his heel into the wood under the hasps.

His legs were longer than his arms, so he was
cramped and the kick didn't carry much power. But it
carried enough. The old wood splintered a little and
something gave half an inch. He regrouped and tried it
again. Something gave a little more. Then a plank in the
left-hand door split completely and two bolts pulled out.

Reacher put his left hand flat on the door and got his
right hand fingers hooked in the gap with a backhand
grip. He took a breath and counted to three and jerked
hard. The last bolt fell out and the whole lock assembly
hit the ground and the doors sagged all the way open.

Reacher stepped away and folded the doors back flush
with the walls and let the sunlight in.

He guessed he was expecting to see a meth lab,
maybe with workbenches and beakers and scales and
propane burners and piles of new baggies ready to
receive the product. Or else a big stash, ready for
onward distribution.

He saw none of that.

Bright light leaked in through long vertical gaps
between warped planks. The barn was maybe forty feet
by twenty inside. It had a bare earth floor, swept and
compacted. It was completely empty except for a well-used pickup truck parked in the exact centre of the
space.

The truck was a Chevy Silverado, several years old. It
was light brown, like fired clay. It was a working vehicle.

It had been built down to a plain specification. A base
model. Vinyl seats, steel wheels, undramatic tyres. The
load bed was clean but scratched and dented. It had no
licence plates. The doors were locked and there was no
sign of a key anywhere.

'What's that?'

Reacher turned and saw Jeb Oliver's mother behind
him. She had her hand tight on the door jamb, like she
was unwilling to cross the threshold.

'It's a truck,' Reacher said.

'I can see that.'

'Is it Jeb's?'

'I never saw it before.' "What did he drive before that
big red thing?'

'Not this.'

Reacher stepped closer to the truck and peered in
through the driver's side window. Manual shift. Dirt and
grime. High mileage. But no trash. The truck had been
someone's faithful servant, used but not abused. 'I
never saw it before,' the woman said again.

It looked like it had been there for a long time. It was
settled on soft tyres. It didn't smell of oil or gasoline. It
was cold, inert, filmed with dust. Reacher got on his
knees and checked underneath. Nothing to see. Just a
frame, caked with old dirt, clipped by rocks and gravel.

'How long has this thing been in here?' he asked, from
the floor.

'I don't know.'

'When did he put the lock on the door?'

'Maybe two months ago.'

Reacher stood up again.

'What did you expect to find?' the woman asked him.

Reacher turned to face her and looked at her eyes. The
pupils were huge.

'More of what you had for breakfast,' he said.

She smiled. 'You thought Jeb was cooking in here?'

'Wasn't he?'

'His stepfather brings it by.'

'You married?'

'Not any more. But he still brings it by.'

'Jeb was using on Monday night,' Reacher said.

The woman smiled again. 'A mother can share with her
kid. Can't she? What else is a mother for?' Reacher
turned away and looked at the truck one more time.

'Why would he keep an old truck locked in here and a
new truck out in the weather?' 'Beats me,' the woman
said. 'Jeb always does things his own way.'

Reacher backed out of the barn and walked each door
closed. Then he used the balls of his thumbs to press
the bolts back into their splintered holes. The weight of
the lock dragged them all halfway out again. He got it
looking as neat as he could, and then he left it alone and
walked away. 'Is Jeb ever coming back?' the woman
called after him.

Reacher didn't answer.

The Mustang was facing north, so Reacher drove
north. He put the CD player on loud and kept going ten
miles down an arrow-straight road, aiming for a horizon
that never arrived.

Raskin dug his own grave with a Caterpillar backhoe. It
was the same machine that had been used to level the
Zee's land. It had a twenty-inch entrenching shovel with
four steel teeth on it. The shovel took long slow bites of
the soft earth and laid them aside. The engine roared
and slowed, roared and slowed, and pulsed clouds of
diesel exhaust filled the Indiana sky.

Raskin had been born during the Soviet, and he had
seen a lot. Afghanistan, Chechnya, unthinkable
upheaval in Moscow. A guy in his position could have
been dead many times over, and that fact combined with
his natural Russian fatalism made him utterly indifferent
to his fate.

'Ukase,' the Zee had said. An order from an absolute
authority.

'Nichevo,' Raskin had said in reply. Think nothing of it.

So he worked the backhoe. He chose a spot
concealed from the stone-crushers' view by the bulk of
the house. He dug a neat trench, twenty inches wide, six
feet long, six feet deep. He piled the excavated earth to
his right, to the east, like a high barrier between himself
and home. When he was finished he backed the
machine away from the hole and shut it down. Climbed
down from the cab and waited. There was no escape.

No point in running. If he ran, they would find him
anyway, and then he wouldn't need a grave. They would
use garbage bags, five or six of them. They would use
wire ties to seal the several parts of him into cold black
plastic. They would put bricks in with his flesh and
throw the bags in the river.

He had seen it happen before.

In the distance the Zee came out of his house. A short
wide man, ancient, stooped, walking at a moderate
speed, exuding power and energy. He picked his way
across the uneven ground, glancing down, glancing
forward. Fifty yards, a hundred. He came close to
Raskin and stopped. He put his ruined hand in his
pocket and came out with a small revolver, his thumb
and the stump of his index finger pincered through the
trigger guard. He held it out, and Raskin took it from
him.

'Ukase,' the Zee said.

'Nichevo,' Raskin replied. A short, amiable, self-deprecating sound, like de rien in French, like de nada
in Spanish, like prego in Italian. Please. I'm yours to
command.

'Thank you,' the Zee said.

Raskin stepped away to the narrow end of the trench.

Opened the revolver's cylinder and saw a single
cartridge. Closed the cylinder again and turned it until it
was lined up right. Then he pulled the hammer back and
put the barrel in his mouth. He turned round, so that he
was facing the Zee and his back was to the trench. He
shuffled backwards until his heels were on the edge of
the hole. He stood still and straight and balanced and
composed, like an Olympic diver preparing for a difficult
backward pike off the high board.

He closed his eyes.

He pulled the trigger.

For a mile around black crows rose noisily into the air.

Blood and brain and bone arced through the sunlight in
a perfect parabola. Raskin's body fell backwards and
landed stretched out and flat in the bottom of the trench.

The crows settled back to earth and the faint noise of
the distant stone-crushing machines rolled back in and
sounded like silence. Then the Zee clambered up into
the Caterpillar's cab and started the engine. The levers
all had knobs as big as pool balls, which made them
easy to manipulate with his palms.

Reacher stopped fifteen miles north of the city and
parked the Mustang on a big V-shaped gravel turnout
made where the corners of two huge circular fields met.