Lee Child - [Jack Reacher 01-16]

by Jack Reacher Series (epub)

  “And then what?”

  “Then we put it all together.”

  “How big is this?”

  “Pulitzer-sized. Emmy-sized. New-job-sized.”

  “How would you know? You’re not in the business.”

  “I was in the army. I would guess this is worth a Bronze Star. That’s probably a rough equivalent. Better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I should turn you in.”

  “You can’t,” he said. “You pull out a phone and I’ll take off up the ramp. They won’t find me. They’ve been trying all day.”

  “I don’t really care about prizes,” she said.

  “So do it for fun,” he said. “Do it for professional satisfaction.”

  He rocked sideways and took out the napkin with Helen Rodin’s number on it. Held it edge-on at the crack of the window. Yanni took it from him, delicately, trying to avoid touching his fingers with hers.

  “Call Helen,” Reacher said. “Right now. She’ll vouch for me.”

  Yanni took a cell phone out of her purse and turned it on. Watched the screen and waited until it was ready and then dialed the number. She passed the napkin back. Listened to the phone.

  “Helen Rodin?” she said. Then she buzzed the window all the way up and Reacher didn’t hear any of the conversation. He gambled that it was really Helen she was speaking to. It was possible that she had looked at the napkin and dialed another number entirely. Not 911, because she had dialed ten digits. But she might have called the cops’ main desk. A reporter might know that number by heart.

  But it was Helen on the line. Yanni buzzed the window down again and passed him her phone through the gap.

  “Is this for real?” Helen asked him.

  “I don’t think she’s decided yet,” Reacher said. “But it might work out.”

  “Is it a good idea?”

  “She’s got resources. And having the media watching our backs might help us.”

  “Put her back on.”

  Reacher passed the phone through the window. This time Yanni kept the glass down so that Reacher heard her end of the rest of the conversation. Initially she sounded skeptical, and then neutral, and then somewhat convinced. She arranged to meet on the fourth floor first thing in the morning. Then she clicked the phone off.

  “There’s a cop outside her door,” Reacher said.

  “She told me that,” Yanni said. “But they’re looking for you, not me.”

  “What exactly are you going to do?”

  “I haven’t decided yet.”

  Reacher said nothing.

  “I guess I need to understand where you’re coming from first,” Yanni said. “Obviously you don’t care anything about James Barr himself. So is this all for the sister? Rosemary?”

  Reacher watched her watching him. A woman, a journalist.

  “Partly for Rosemary,” he said.

  “But?”

  “Mostly for the puppet master. He’s sitting there thinking he’s as smart as a whip. I don’t like that. Never have. Makes me want to show him what smart really is.”

  “Like a challenge?”

  “He had a girl killed, Yanni. She was just a dumb sweet kid looking for a little fun. He pushed open the wrong door there. So he deserves to have something come out at him. That’s the challenge.”

  “You hardly knew her.”

  “That doesn’t make her any less innocent.”

  “OK.”

  “OK what?”

  “NBC will spring for Franklin. Then we’ll see where that takes us.”

  “Thanks,” Reacher said. “I appreciate it.”

  “You should.”

  “I apologize again. For scaring you.”

  “I nearly died of fright.”

  “I’m very sorry.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Yes,” Reacher said. “I need to borrow your car.”

  “My car?”

  “Your car.”

  “What for?”

  “To sleep in and then to go to Kentucky in.”

  “What’s in Kentucky?”

  “Part of the puzzle.”

  Yanni shook her head. “This is nuts.”

  “I’m a careful driver.”

  “I’d be aiding and abetting a fugitive criminal.”

  “I’m not a criminal,” Reacher said. “A criminal is someone who has been convicted of a crime after a trial. Therefore I’m not a fugitive, either. I haven’t been arrested or charged. I’m a suspect, that’s all.”

  “I can’t lend you my car after running your picture all night.”

  “You could say you didn’t recognize me. It’s a sketch, not a photograph. Maybe it isn’t totally accurate.”

  “Your hair is different.”

  “There you go. I had it cut this morning.”

  “But I would recognize your name. I wouldn’t lend my car to a stranger without at least knowing his name, would I?”

  “Maybe I gave you a false name. You met a guy with a different name who didn’t look much like the sketch, that’s all.”

  “What name?”

  “Joe Gordon,” Reacher said.

  “Who’s he?”

  “Yankees’ second baseman in 1940. They finished third. Not Joe’s fault. He had a decent career. He played exactly one thousand games and got exactly one thousand hits.”

  “You know a lot.”

  “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 around 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 around to the garage on First Street. It was empty. He went up to the second level and parked in the slot that James Barr had supposedly 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 dr
ive 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.

  CHAPTER 12

  Dawn happened somewhere way over in the east about an hour into the drive. The sky changed from black to gray 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 favored 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 aluminum 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 at 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 gray 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 centerpiece 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-liter 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 around and lifted the frame off its hook. Laid it gently on the counter and turned it around 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 preci
se center 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 a 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. The beginning of never wanting to do the same thing twice.

  “Thousand yards is a long way,” Gunny Cash said. “Truth is, since I left the Corps I haven’t met a man who could even put a mark on the paper.”

  “I might have been able to clip the edge,” Reacher said.

  Cash took the frame off the counter and turned and hung it back on its hook. He used the ball of his right thumb to level it.

  “I don’t have a thousand-yard range here,” he said. “It would be a waste of ammunition and it would make the customers feel bad about themselves. But I’ve got a nice three-hundred that’s not being used this morning. You could try it. A guy who could clip the paper at a thousand should be able to do pretty well at three hundred.”

  Reacher said nothing.

  “Don’t you think?” Cash said.

  “I guess,” Reacher said.

  Cash opened a drawer and took out a new paper target. “What’s your name?”

  “Bobby Richardson,” Reacher said. Robert Clinton Richardson, hit .301 in 1959, 141 hits in 134 games, but the Yanks still only finished third.

  Cash took a roller ball pen from his shirt pocket and wrote R. Richardson, 300 yards, and the date and time on the paper.

  “Record keeper,” Reacher said.

  “Habit,” Cash said. Then he drew an X inside the inner ring. It was about half an inch tall and because of the slant of his handwriting a little less than half an inch wide. He left the paper on the counter and walked away into the room with the refrigerator noise. Came back out a minute later carrying a rifle. It was a Remington M24, with a Leupold Ultra scope and a front bipod. A standard-issue Marine sniper’s weapon. It looked to be well used but in excellent condition. Cash placed it sideways on the counter. Detached the magazine and showed Reacher that it was empty. Operated the bolt and showed Reacher that the chamber was empty, too. Reflex, routine, caution, professional courtesy.