Bad Luck and Trouble

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?”
    “The 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