One Shot

“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 most 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