One Shot

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 drive 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.