61 Hours

tramping feet on the stairs, and people started talking all at once, loud and scared and horrified.
    Reacher stepped out of his room and hustled down to the hallway. The four women cops were standing all together on the rug, two in uniform, two in night clothes, all talking on phones, all white and shocked and looking around wide-eyed inhelpless restless panic, all full of adrenalin, all with nowhere to go.
    Reacher said, ‘What?’
    One of the cops said, ‘It’s Andrew Peterson.’
    ‘What about him?’
    ‘He’s been shot and killed.’

THIRTY-FIVE
    T HE GUY FROM THE CAR ON THE STREET CAME IN AND JOINED the confusion. Reacher had no doubt the guys in the other two cars were equally distracted. For the moment Janet Salter’s security was worth exactly less than jack shit. So he kept half his attention on the parlour window and used the other half to piece the story together from the babble of voices. It wasn’t difficult. The hard facts seemed to be: following Chief Holland’s most recent orders, the department was still on high alert. Therefore mobile patrols were constant, and vigilance was high. No street was visited less than every twenty minutes. Every pedestrian was eyeballed, as was every car and every truck. Every lot was checked regularly, every alley, every approach.
    A unit driven solo by the new guy Montgomery had nosed into a snowbound parking lot north and east of downtown and Montgomery had seen Peterson’s car apparently empty and idling with its driver’s window all the way down and its nudge bars pushed up hard against a blank brick wall. On closer inspectionMontgomery had found the car not to be empty. Peterson was sprawled across the front seats, dead from a gunshot wound to the head.
    Reacher stayed at the parlour window, watching the silent street, thinking about Peterson, leaving the cops to their private grief in the hallway. He could hear their voices. They were passing through a short phase of denial. Maybe the story was wrong. Which Reacher considered theoretically plausible, but very unlikely. Operational reports called in from the field were occasionally unreliable. And head wounds sometimes produced misleading impressions. Deep comas could be mistaken for death. But ninety-nine times out of a hundred hoping for the best was a waste of time. Reacher knew that. He was an optimist, but not a fool.
    The bad news was confirmed five minutes later by Chief Holland himself. He drove up and parked and came in through the cold. Three items on his agenda. First, he wanted to break the news to his crew personally. Second, he wanted to make sure they got their minds back on their job. He sent the lone male officer back to his car on the street, he sent the day watch women back to bed, he sent one of the night watch women back to the library, and he told the other to focus hard on the front door. His voice was quiet and firm and his manner was controlled. He was a decent CO. Out of his league, perhaps, in over his head, no question, but he was still walking and talking. Which was more than Reacher had seen from some COs he had known, when the shit had hit the fan.
    The third item on Holland’s agenda was something halfway between an invitation and a command. He stepped into the parlour and looked straight at Reacher and asked him to come out and take a look at the crime scene.
    Janet Salter had gotten up because of the noise and was hiding out in the kitchen. Reacher found her there. She was still fully dressed. She had her gun in her pocket. She knew exactly whathe was about to tell her. She waved it away impatiently and said, ‘I know what to do.’
    He said, ‘Do you?’
    She nodded. ‘The basement, the gun, the password.’
    ‘When?’
    ‘Immediately anything happens.’ Then she said, ‘Or before. Perhaps now.’
    ‘Not a bad idea,’ Reacher said. ‘The guy is out there, and close by.’
    ‘I know what to do,’ she said again.
    Reacher climbed into the front passenger seat of Holland’s unmarked sedan. Holland backed up and turned and drove towards town. He made a left at the park and a right that led past the coffee shop and onward past the clothing store that Reacher had used. Then he threaded right and left and right again through back streets to a long block of two-storey brick buildings. They were plain and square. Maybe once they had been stores or offices or warehouses. Maybe once they had been the hub of Bolton’s commercial district. Now they were decrepit. Most