by Lee Child
He glanced all around.
Clear.
He looked behind.
Clear.
He pushed the safety down and gripped the Daewoo’s barrel in his left hand and racked the slide with his right. Felt the first fat shell push upward, neatly into the chamber.
The night was not quiet. There was a lot of urban ambient noise. Traffic on the Strip, distant rooftop condensers roaring, extractors humming, the muted rumble of a hundred thousand people playing hard. But Reacher heard the rack of the slide twenty feet behind him. He heard it very clearly. It was exactly the kind of sound he had trained himself never to miss. To his ears it was a complete complex split-second symphony, and every component registered precisely. The scrape of alloy on alloy, its metallic resonance partially damped by a fleshy palm and the ball of a thumb and the side of an index finger, the grateful expansion of a magazine spring, the smack of a brass-cased shell socketing home, the return of the slide. Those sounds took about a thirtieth of a second to reach his ears and he spent maybe another thirtieth of a second processing them.
His life and his history lacked many things. He had never known stability or normality or comfort or convention. He had never counted on anything except surprise and unpredictability and danger. He took things exactly as they came, for exactly what they were. Therefore he heard the slide rack back and felt no disabling shock. No panic. No stab of disbelief. It seemed entirely natural and reasonable to him that he should be walking down a street at night and listening to a man preparing to shoot him in the back. There was no hesitation, no second-guessing, no self-doubt, no inhibition. There was just evidence of a purely mechanical problem laid out behind him like an invisible four-dimensional diagram showing time and space and targets and fast bullets and slow bodies.
And then there was reaction, another thirtieth of a second later.
He knew where the first bullet would be aimed. He knew that any reasonable attacker would want to put the biggest target down first. That was nothing more than common sense. So the first shot would be aimed at him.
Or possibly at O’Donnell.
Better safe than sorry.
He used his right arm and shoved O’Donnell hard in the left shoulder and sent him sprawling into Dixon and then fell away in the opposite direction and crashed into Neagley. They both stumbled and as he was going down to his knees he heard the gun fire behind him and felt the bullet pass through the V-shaped void of empty air where the center of his back had been just a split second before.
He had his hand on his Hardballer before he hit the sidewalk. He was calculating angles and trajectories before he had it out of the waistband of his pants. The Hardballer had two safeties. A conventional lever at the left rear of the frame, and a grip safety released when the butt was correctly held.
Before he had either one set to fire he had decided not to shoot.
Not immediately, anyway.
He had fallen on top of Neagley toward the inside edge of the sidewalk. Their attacker was in the center of the sidewalk. Any angle vectoring from the inside of the sidewalk through the center would launch a bullet out toward the roadway. If he missed the guy, he could hit a passing car. Even if he hit the guy, he could still hit a passing car. A jacketed .45 could go right through flesh and bone. Easily. Lots of power. Lots of penetration.
He made a split-second decision to wait for O’Donnell.
O’Donnell’s angle was better. Much better. He had fallen on top of Dixon, toward the curb. Toward the gutter. His line of sight was inward. Toward the construction. A miss or a through-and-through would do no harm at all. The bullet would spend itself in a pile of sand.
Better to let O’Donnell fire.
Reacher twisted as he hit the ground. He was in that zone where his mind was fast but the physical world was slow. He felt like his body was mired in a vat of molasses. He was screaming at it to move move move but it was responding with extreme reluctance. Beyond him Neagley was thumping dustily to earth with slow-motion precision. In the corner of his eye he saw her shoulder hitting the ground and then her momentum moving her head like a rag doll’s. He moved his own head with enormous effort, like it was strapped with heavy weights, and he saw Dixon sprawling underneath O’Donnell.
He saw O’Donnell’s left arm moving with painful slowness. Saw his hand. Saw his thumb dropping the Hardballer’s safety lever.
Their attacker fired again.
And missed again. With a preplanned shot into empty air where O’Donnell’s back had been. The guy was following a sequence. He had rehearsed. Fire-move-fire, Reacher and O’Donnell first. A sound plan, but the guy was unable to react to unexpected contingencies. He was a slow, conventional thinker. His brain had vapor-locked. Good, but not good enough.
Reacher saw O’Donnell’s hand tighten around the grip of his gun. Saw his finger squeeze the slack out of the trigger. Saw the gun move up, up, up.
Reacher saw O’Donnell fire.
A snapshot, taken from an untidy uncompleted sprawl on the sidewalk. Taken before his body mass had even settled.
Too low, Reacher thought. That’s a leg wound at best.
He forced his head around. He was right. It was a leg wound. But a leg wound from a high-velocity jacketed .45 was not a pretty thing. It was like taking a high-torque power drill and fitting it with a foot-long half-inch masonry bit and drilling right through a limb. All in a lot less than a thousandth of a second. The damage was spectacular. The guy took the slug in the lower thigh and his femur exploded from the inside like it had been strapped with a bomb. Immense trauma. Paralyzing shock. Instant catastrophic blood loss from shattered arteries.
The guy stayed vertical but his gun hand dropped and O’Donnell was instantly on his feet. He scrambled up and his hand went in and out of his pocket and he covered the twenty feet full tilt and slammed the guy in the face with his knuckles. A straight right, with two hundred pounds of charging body mass behind it. Like hitting a watermelon with a sledgehammer.
The guy went down on his back. O’Donnell kicked his gun away and crouched at his side and jammed the Hardballer into his throat.
Game over, right there.
46
Reacher helped Dixon up. Neagley got up on her own. O’Donnell was scooting around in a tight circle, trying to keep his feet out of the big welling puddle of blood coming from the guy’s leg. Clearly his femoral artery was wide open. A healthy human heart was a pretty powerful pump and this guy’s was busy dumping the whole of his blood supply onto the street. A guy his size, there had been probably fifteen pints in there at the beginning. Most of them were already gone.
“Step away, Dave,” Reacher called. “Let him bleed out. No point ruining a pair of shoes.”
“Who is he?” Dixon asked.
“We may never know,” Neagley said. “His face is a real mess.”
She was right. O’Donnell’s ceramic knuckleduster had done its work well. The guy looked like he had been attacked with hammers and knives. Reacher walked a wide circle around his head and grabbed his collar and pulled him backward. The lake of blood changed to a teardrop shape. Reacher took advantage of dry pavement and squatted down and checked through his pockets.
Nothing in any of them.
No wallet, no ID, no nothing.
Just car keys and a remote clicker, on a plain steel ring.
The guy was pale and turning blue. Reacher put a finger on the pulse in his neck and felt an irregular thready beat. The blood coming out of his thigh was turning foamy. There was major air in his vascular system. Blood out, air in. Simple physics. Nature abhors a vacuum.
“He’s on the way out,” Reacher said.
“Good shooting, Dave,” Dixon said.
“Left-handed, too,” O’Donnell said. “I hope you noticed that.”
“You’re right-handed.”
“I was falling on my right arm.”
“Outstanding,” Reacher said.
“What did you hear?”
“Th
e slide. It’s an evolution thing. Like a predator stepping on a twig.”
“So there’s an advantage in being closer to the cavemen than the rest of us.”
“You bet there is.”
“But who does that? Attacks without a round in the chamber?”
Reacher stepped away and looked down for a full-length view.
“I think I recognize him,” he said.
“How could you?” Dixon asked. “His own mother wouldn’t know him.”
“The suit,” Reacher said. “I think I saw it before.”
“Here?”
“I don’t know. Somewhere. I can’t remember.”
“Think hard.”
O’Donnell said, “I never saw that suit before.”
“Me either,” Neagley said.
“Nor me,” Dixon said. “But whatever, it’s a good sign, isn’t it? Nobody tried to shoot us in LA. We must be getting close.”
Reacher tossed the guy’s gun and car keys to Neagley and broke down a section of the construction site’s fence. He hauled the guy through the gap as fast as he could, to minimize the blood smear. The guy was still leaking a little. Reacher dragged him across rough ground past tall piles of gravel until he found a wide trench built up with plywood formwork. The trench was about eight feet deep. The bottom was lined with gravel. The formwork was there to mold concrete for a foundation. Reacher rolled the guy into the trench. He fell eight feet and crunched on the stones and settled heavily, half on his side.
“Find shovels,” Reacher said. “We need to cover him with more gravel.”
Dixon said, “Is he dead yet?”
“Who cares?”
O’Donnell said, “We should put him on his back. That way we need less gravel.”
“You volunteering?” Reacher said.
“I’ve got a good suit on. And I did all the hard work so far.”
So Reacher shrugged and vaulted down into the pit. Kicked the guy onto his back and stamped him flat and got him partway embedded in the gravel that was already there. Then he hauled himself back out and O’Donnell handed him a shovel. Between them they had to make ten trips to the gravel pile before the guy was adequately hidden. Neagley found a standpipe and unrolled a hose and turned on the water. She rinsed the sidewalk and chased watery blood into the gutter. Then she waited and followed the others out backward and hosed away their footprints from the construction site’s sand. Reacher pulled the fence back into shape. Turned a full circle and checked the view. Not perfect, but reasonable. He knew there would be plenty a competent CSI team could get its teeth into, but there was nothing that would attract anyone’s attention in the short term. They had a margin of safety. A few hours, at least. Maybe longer. Maybe concrete would get poured right at the start of the work day and the guy would become just one more missing person. Not the only person missing in a building’s foundation, he guessed, in Las Vegas.
He breathed out.
“OK,” he said. “Now we take the rest of the night off.”
They dusted themselves down and formed up and resumed their walk down the Strip, slowly, four abreast, ready to relax. But Wright was waiting for them in the hotel lobby. The house security manager. For a Vegas guy, he didn’t have a great poker face. It was clear that he was uptight about something.
47
Wright hurried over to them when they came in and led them away to the same quiet corner of the lobby that they had used before.
“Azhari Mahmoud isn’t in any Las Vegas hotel,” he said. “That’s definitive. Also negative on Andrew MacBride and Anthony Matthews.”
Reacher nodded.
“Thanks for checking,” he said.
Wright said, “And I made a few panic calls to my opposite numbers. Better that than lying awake all night, worrying. And you know what I found? You guys are completely full of shit. No way is this town down sixty-five million dollars in the last four months. It just isn’t happening.”
“Can you be sure?”
Wright nodded. “We all ran emergency cash-flow audits. And there’s nothing going on. The usual bits and pieces, that’s all. Nothing else. I’m going to send you my Prozac bill. I practically overdosed tonight.”
They found a bar off the lobby and bought one another beers and sat in a line in front of four idle slots. Reacher’s was simulating a big jackpot win, over and over again, like a tempting advertisement. Four reels were clicking to a stop on four cherries and lights were flashing and strobing and chasing themselves all over the front. Four reels, eight symbols on each. Astronomical odds, even without the microprocessor’s covert intervention. Reacher tried to calculate the tonnage of quarters a player would need to get through before he could expect his first win. But he didn’t know exactly how much a quarter weighed. Some small fraction of an ounce, obviously, which would add up fast. Tendon damage would be involved, muscle strain, repetitive stress injury. He wondered if casino owners had stock in orthopedic clinics. Probably.
Dixon said, “Wright already figured it would have to be industrial-scale scamming. He came right out and said so. Dealers, pit bosses, security guys, cameras, tapes, cashiers. It’s not much more of a leap to imagine that apparent cash flow could be massaged. They could have installed a phony program that makes everything look kosher for as long as they need it to. It’s exactly what I would do.”
Reacher asked, “When would they find out?”
“When they do their books at the end of their financial year. By that point the money is either there or it’s not.”
“How would Sanchez and Orozco find out ahead of that?”
“Maybe they tapped in lower down the food chain and extrapolated backward.”
“Who would need to be involved?”
“Key people.”
“Like Wright himself?”
“Possibly,” Dixon said.
O’Donnell said, “We talked to him and a half-hour later someone was trying to shoot us in the back.”
“We need to find Sanchez’s friend,” Neagley said. “Before someone else does.”
“We can’t,” Reacher said. “No bar is going to give out a girl’s address to a bunch of complete strangers.”
“We could tell them she’s in danger.”
“Like they haven’t heard that before.”
“Some other way,” Dixon said. “The UPS thing.”
“We don’t have her second name.”
“So what do we do?”
“We suck it up and wait for morning.”
“Should we move hotels? If Wright could be a bad guy?”
“No point. He’ll have buddies all over town. Just lock your door.”
Reacher followed his own advice when he got back to his room. He clicked the security lever and put the chain on. No real defense against a determined opponent, but it would buy a second or two, and a second or two was generally all that Reacher needed.
He put the Hardballer in the bedside drawer. Put his clothes under the mattress to press and took a long hot shower. Then he started thinking about Karla Dixon.
She was alone.
Maybe she didn’t like that.
Maybe she would appreciate a little safety in numbers.
He wrapped a towel around his waist and padded over to the phone. But before he got to it there was a knock at his door. He changed course. Ignored the peephole. He didn’t like to put his eye to the glass undefended. Easiest thing in the world for an assailant in the corridor to wait for the lens to darken and then fire a large-caliber handgun straight through it. Such a move would make a hell of a mess. The bullet, plus shards and fragments of glass and steel, all of them through the eye and into the brain and out the back of the skull. Peepholes were a very bad idea, in Reacher’s opinion.
He took off the chain and undid the extra lock. Opened the door.
Karla Dixon.
She was still fully dressed. She would be, he guessed, for a walk through the corridors and a ride in the elevator. Black suit, no shirt.
&
nbsp; “Can I come in?” she said.
“I was just about to call you,” Reacher said.
“Right.”
“I was on my way to the phone.”
“Why?”
“Lonely.”
“You?”
“Me for sure. You, I hoped.”
“So can I come in?”
He held the door wide. She came in. Within a minute he discovered a shirt wasn’t the only thing she wasn’t wearing under the suit.
Neagley called on the bedside phone at nine-thirty in the morning.
“Dixon’s not in her room,” she said.
“Maybe she’s working out,” Reacher said. “Jogging or something.”
Dixon smiled and moved at his side, warm and lazy.
Neagley said, “Dixon doesn’t work out.”
“Then maybe she’s in the shower.”
“I’ve tried her twice.”
“Relax. I’ll try her. Breakfast in a half-hour, downstairs.”
He hung up with Neagley and gave the phone to Dixon and told her to count to sixty and then call Neagley’s room and say she had just gotten out of the bath. Thirty minutes later they were all eating breakfast together in a lounge restaurant full of the noise of slot machines. An hour after that they were back on the Strip, heading for the bar with the fire pit again.
48
Vegas in the morning looked flat and small and exposed under the hard desert sun. The light was pitiless. It showed up every fault and compromise. What by night had looked like inspired impressionism looked like silly fakery by day. The Strip itself could have been any worn-out four-lane in America. This time they walked it in a quadrant of four, two ahead, two behind, a smaller collective target, alert and always aware of who was ahead and who was behind them.
But there was nobody ahead and nobody behind. Traffic on the street was thin and the sidewalks were empty. Vegas in the morning was as close as it ever got to quiet.
