“Mine,” he said. “Zeroed for three hundred yards exactly. By me myself, personally.”
“Good enough,” Reacher said. Which it was. An ex-Marine who in 1978 had been the third-best shooter in the world could be trusted on such matters.
“One shot,” Cash said. He took a single cartridge from his pocket. Held it up. It was a .300 Winchester round. Match grade. He stood it upright on the X on the paper target. It hid it entirely. Then he smiled. Reacher smiled back. He understood the challenge. He understood it perfectly. Hit the X and I’ll talk to you about James Barr.
At least it’s not hand-to-hand combat, Reacher thought.
“Let’s go,” he said.
Outside the air was still, and it was neither hot nor cold. Perfect shooting weather. No shivering, no risk of thermals or currents or shimmer. No wind. Cash carried the rifle and the target, and Reacher carried the cartridge in the palm of his hand. They climbed into Cash’s Humvee together and Cash fired it up with a loud diesel clatter.
“You like this thing?” Reacher asked, over the noise.
“Not really,” Cash said. “I’d be happier with a sedan. But it’s a question of image. Customers like it.”
The landscape was all low hills, covered in grass and stunted trees. Someone had used a bulldozer to carve wide straight paths through it. The paths were hundreds of yards apart and hundreds of yards long, and all of them were parallel. Each path was a separate rifle range. Each range was isolated from the others by natural hills and backed by high berms made from the earth scraped up by the bulldozer. The whole place looked like a half-built golf course. It was part green, part raw, all covered with red earth gashes. White-painted rocks and boulders delineated tracks through it, some for vehicles, some for foot traffic.
“My family has owned this land forever,” Cash said. “The range was my idea. I thought I could be like a golf pro, or tennis. You know those guys, they’ve been on the tour, they retire, they set up teaching afterward.”
“Did it work?” Reacher asked.
“Not really,” Cash said. “People come here to shoot, but to get a guy to admit he doesn’t really know how is like pulling teeth.”
Reacher saw three pickup trucks parked at separate shooting stations. The guys who had been waiting at eight o’clock were well into their morning sessions. They were all prone on coconut mats, firing, pausing, sighting, firing again.
“It’s a living,” Cash said, in answer to a question Reacher hadn’t asked. Then he pulled the Humvee off the main track and drove three hundred yards down the length of an empty range. He got out and clipped the paper target to a frame and got back in and K-turned the truck and headed back. He parked it neatly and shut it down.
“Good luck,” he said.
Reacher sat still for a moment. He was more nervous than he should have been. He breathed in and held it and felt the thrill of caffeine in his veins. Just a tiny microscopic tremble. Four fast cups of strong coffee were not an ideal preparation for accurate long-distance shooting.
But it was only three hundred yards. Three hundred yards, with a good rifle, no heat, no cold, still air. More or less the same thing as pressing the muzzle into the center of the target and pulling the trigger. He could do it with his eyes closed. There was no fundamental problem with the marksmanship. The problem was with the stakes. He wanted the puppet master more than he had wanted the Marines’ cup all those years before. A lot more. He didn’t know why. But that was the problem.
He breathed out. It was only three hundred yards. Not six. Not eight. Not a thousand. No big deal.
He slid out of the Humvee and took the rifle off the back seat. Carried it across rough earth to the coconut mat. Placed it gently with its bipod feet a yard back from the edge. Bent down and loaded it. Stepped back behind it and lined himself up and crouched, knelt, lay full length. He snuggled the stock into his shoulder. Eased his neck left and right and looked around. It felt like he was alone in the middle of nowhere. He ducked his head. Closed his left eye and moved his right eye to the scope. Draped his left hand over the barrel and pressed down and back. Now he had a tripod mount. The bipod, and his shoulder. Solid. He spread his legs and turned his feet out so they were flat on the mat. Drew his left leg up a little and dug the sole of his shoe into the mat’s fibers so the deadweight of the limb anchored his position. He relaxed and let himself sprawl. He knew he must look like a guy who had been shot, instead of a guy preparing to shoot.
He gazed through the scope. Saw the hypervivid image of great optics. He acquired the target. It looked close enough to touch. He laid the reticle where the two strokes of the X met. Squeezed the slack out of the trigger. Relaxed. Breathed out. He could feel his heart. It felt like it was loose in his chest. The caffeine was buzzing in his veins. The reticle was dancing over the X. It was hopping and jerking, left and right, up and down, in a tiny random circle.
He closed his right eye. Willed his heart to stop. Breathed out and kept his lungs empty, one second, two. Then again, in, out, hold. He pulled all his energy downward, into his gut. Let his shoulders slacken. Let his muscles relax. Let himself settle. He opened his eye again and saw that the reticle was still. He stared at the target. Feeling it. Wanting it. He pulled the trigger. The gun kicked and roared and the muzzle blast blew a cloud of dust out of the coconut mat and obscured his view. He lifted his head and coughed once and ducked back to the scope.
Bull’s-eye.
The X was gone. There was a neat hole drilled through the center of it, leaving only four tiny ballpoint ticks visible, one at the top and one at the bottom of each stroke. He coughed again and pushed back and stood up. Cash dropped down in his place and used the scope to check the result.
“Good shooting,” he said.
“Good rifle,” Reacher said.
Cash operated the bolt and the spent case fell out on the mat. He got to his knees and picked it up and put it in his pocket. Then he stood up and carried the rifle back toward the Humvee.
“So do I qualify?” Reacher called after him.
“For what?”
“For talking to.”
Cash turned around. “You think this was a test?”
“I sincerely hope it was.”
“You might not want to hear what I’ve got to say.”
“Try me,” Reacher said.
Cash nodded. “We’ll talk in the office.”
They detoured up the length of the range for Cash to retrieve the target. Then they turned and drove back to the huts. They passed the pickup guys. They were still blasting away. Cash parked and they went inside and Cash filed Reacher’s target in a drawer, under R for Richardson. Then he danced his fingers forward to B for Barr and pulled out a thick sheaf of paper.
“You looking to show your old buddy didn’t do it?” he asked.
“He wasn’t my buddy,” Reacher said. “I knew him once, is all.”
“And?”
“I don’t remember him being that great a shooter.”
“TV news said it was pretty short range.”
“With moving targets and deflection angles.”
“TV said the evidence is pretty clear.”
“It is,” Reacher said. “I’ve seen it.”
“Check these out,” Cash said.
He dealt the filed targets like a deck of cards, all along the length of the counter. Then he butted them edge-to-edge and squared them off to make room for more. Then he started a second row, directly underneath the first. In the end he had thirty-two sheets of paper displayed, two long rows of repetitive concentric circles, all of them marked J. Barr, 300 yards, with times and dates stretching back three years.
“Read them and weep,” Cash said.
Every single target showed an expert score.
Reacher stared at them, one after the other. Each inner ring was tightly packed with clean, crisp holes. Tight clusters, big and obvious. Thirty-two targets, ten rounds each, three hundred twenty rounds, all of them dead-on maximum scores
.
“This is everything he did?” Reacher asked.
Cash nodded. “Like you said, I’m a record keeper.”
“What gun?”
“His own Super Match. Great rifle.”
“Did the cops call you?”
“Guy called Emerson. He was pretty decent about it. Because I’ve got to think about my own ass, because Barr trained here. I don’t want to damage my professional reputation. I’ve put in a lot of work here, and this place could get a bad name.”
Reacher scanned the targets, one more time. Remembered telling Helen Rodin: They don’t forget.
“What about his buddy Charlie?” he asked.
“Charlie was hopeless by comparison.”
Cash butted James Barr’s targets into a pile and put them back in the B slot. Then he opened another drawer and ran his fingers back to S and took out another sheaf of paper.
“Charlie Smith,” he said. “He was military too, by the look of him. But Uncle Sam’s money didn’t buy anything long-term there.”
He went through the same routine, laying out Charlie’s targets in two long rows. Thirty-two of them.
“They always showed up together?” Reacher asked.
“Like peanut butter and jelly,” Cash said.
“Separate ranges?”
“Separate planets,” Cash said.
Reacher nodded. In terms of numerical score Charlie’s targets were much worse than James Barr’s. Way worse. They were the product of a very poor shooter. One had just four hits, all of them outside the outer ring, one each in the quadrants in the corners. Across all thirty-two targets he had just eight hits inside the inner ring. One was a dead-on bull’s-eye. Dumb luck, maybe, or wind or drift or a random thermal. Seven were very close to clipping the black. Apart from that, Charlie was all over the place. Most of his rounds must have missed altogether. Percentage-wise most of his hits happened in the white between the two outer rings. Low, low scores. But his hits weren’t precisely random. There was a weird kind of consistency there. He was aiming, but he was missing. Maybe some kind of bad astigmatism in his eyes.
“What type of a guy was he?” Reacher asked.
“Charlie?” Cash said. “Charlie was a blank slate. Couldn’t read him at all. If he had been a better shot, he’d have come close to frightening me.”
“Small guy, right?”
“Tiny. Weird hair.”
“Did they talk to you much?”
“Not really. They were just two guys down from Indiana, getting off on shooting guns. I get a lot of that here.”
“Did you watch them shoot?”
Cash shook his head. “I learned never to watch anybody. People take it as a criticism. I let them come to me, but nobody ever does.”
“Barr bought his ammo here, right?”
“Lake City. Expensive.”
“His gun wasn’t cheap, either.”
“He was worth it.”
“What gun did Charlie use?”
“The same thing. Like a matched pair. In his case it was a comedy. Like a fat guy who buys a carbon fiber racing bike.”
“You got separate handgun ranges here?”
“One indoor. People use it if it rains. Otherwise I let them blast away outside, anywhere they want. I don’t care much for handguns. No art to them.”
Reacher nodded and Cash swept Charlie’s targets into a pile, careful to keep them in correct date order. Then he stacked them together and put them back in the S drawer.
“Smith is a common name,” Reacher said. “Actually I think it’s the most common name in America.”
“It was genuine,” Cash said. “I see a driver’s license before anyone gets membership.”
“Where was he from originally?”
“Accent? Somewhere way north.”
“Can I take one of James Barr’s targets?”
“What the hell for?”
“For a souvenir,” Reacher said.
Cash said nothing.
“It won’t go anywhere,” Reacher said. “I’m not going to sell it on the internet.”
Cash said nothing.
“Barr’s not coming back,” Reacher said. “That’s for damn sure. And if you really want to cover your ass you should dump them all anyway.”
Cash shrugged and turned back to the file drawer.
“The most recent one,” Reacher said. “That would be best.”
Cash thumbed through the stack and pulled a sheet. Handed it across the counter. Reacher took it and folded it carefully and put it in his shirt pocket.
“Good luck with your buddy,” Cash said.
“He’s not my buddy,” Reacher said. “But thanks for your help.”
“You’re welcome,” Cash said. “Because I know who you are. I recognized you when you got behind the gun. I never forget the shape of a prone position. You won the Invitational ten years after I was in it. I was watching, from the crowd. Your real name is Reacher.”
Reacher nodded.
“Polite of you,” Cash said. “Not to mention it after I told you how I only came in third.”
“You had tougher competition,” Reacher said. “Ten years later it was all a bunch of deadbeats.”
He stopped at the last gas station in Kentucky and filled Yanni’s tank. Then he called Helen Rodin from a pay phone.
“Is the cop still there?” he asked.
“Two of them,” she said. “One in the lobby, one at my door.”
“Did Franklin start yet?”
“First thing this morning.”
“Any progress?”
“Nothing. They were five very ordinary people.”
“Where is Franklin’s office?”
She gave him an address. Reacher checked his watch. “I’ll meet you there at four o’clock.”
“How was Kentucky?”
“Confusing,” he said.
He recrossed the Ohio on the same trestle bridge with Sheryl Crow telling him all over again about how every day was a winding road. He cranked up the volume and turned left and headed west. Ann Yanni’s maps showed a highway cloverleaf forty miles ahead. He could turn north there and a couple hours later he could scoot past the whole city, forty feet in the air. It seemed like a better idea than trying the surface streets. He figured Emerson would be getting seriously frustrated. And then seriously enraged, at some point during the day. Reacher would have been. Reacher had been Emerson for thirteen years, and in this kind of a situation he would have been kicking ass big time, blanketing the streets with uniforms, trying everything.
He found the cloverleaf and joined the highway going north. He killed the CD when it started over again and settled in for the cruise. The Mustang felt pretty good at seventy miles an hour. It rumbled along, lots of power, no finesse at all. Reacher figured if he could put that drivetrain in some battered old sedan body, then that would be his kind of car.
Bellantonio had been at work in his crime lab since seven o’clock in the morning. He had fingerprinted the cell phone found abandoned under the highway and come up with nothing worth a damn. Then he had copied the call log. The last number dialed was Helen Rodin’s cell. Last-but-one was Emerson’s cell. Clearly Reacher had made both of those calls. Then came a long string of calls to several different cell phones registered to Specialized Services of Indiana. Maybe Reacher had made those too, or maybe he hadn’t. No way of knowing. Bellantonio wrote it all up, but he knew Emerson wouldn’t do anything with it. The only viable pressure point was the call to Helen Rodin, and no way could Emerson start hassling a defense lawyer about a conversation with a witness, suspect or not. That would be a waste of breath.
So he moved on to the garage tapes. He had four days’ worth, ninety-six hours, nearly three thousand separate vehicle movements. His staff had logged them all. Only three of them were Cadillacs. Indiana was the same as most heartland states. People bought pickup trucks as a first preference, then SUVs, then coupes, then convertibles. Regular sedans claimed a tiny market share, and mo
st of them were Toyotas or Hondas or mid-sized domestics. Full-sized turnpike cruisers were very rare, and premium brands rarest of all.
The first Cadillac on tape was a bone-white Eldorado. A two-door coupe, several years old. It had parked before ten in the morning on the Wednesday and stayed parked for five hours. The second Cadillac on tape was a new STS, maybe red or gray, possibly light blue. Hard to be sure, with the murky monochrome picture. Whatever, it had parked soon after lunch on the Thursday and stayed there for two hours.
The third Cadillac was a black DeVille. It was caught on tape entering the garage just after six o’clock in the morning on the Friday. Black Friday, as Bellantonio was calling it. At six o’clock in the morning the garage would have been more or less completely empty. The tape showed the DeVille sweeping up the ramp, fast and confident. It showed it leaving again after just four minutes.
Long enough to place the cone.
The driver wasn’t really visible in either sequence. There was just a gray blur behind the windshield. Maybe it was Barr, maybe it wasn’t. Bellantonio wrote it all up for Emerson. He made a mental note to check through again to determine if four minutes was the shortest stay on the tapes. He suspected it was, easily.
Then he scanned the forensic sweep through Alexandra Dupree’s garden apartment. He had assigned a junior guy to do it, because it wasn’t the crime scene. There was nothing of interest there. Nothing at all. Except the fingerprint evidence. The apartment was a mess of prints, like all apartments are. Most of them were the girl’s, but there were four other sets. Three of them were unidentifiable.
The fourth set of prints belonged to James Barr.
James Barr had been in Alexandra Dupree’s apartment. In the living room, in the kitchen, in the bathroom. No doubt about it. Clear prints, perfect matches. Unmistakable.
Bellantonio wrote it up for Emerson.
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