One Shot

floor.
    “I don’t know.”
    “When did he put the lock on the door?”
    “Maybe two months ago.”
    Reacher stood up again.
    “What did you expect to find?” the woman asked him.
    Reacher turned to face her and looked at her eyes. The pupils were huge.
    “More of what you had for breakfast,” he said.
    She smiled. “You thought Jeb was cooking in here?”
    “Wasn’t he?”
    “His stepfather brings it by.”
    “You married?”
    “Not anymore. But he still brings it by.”
    “Jeb was using on Monday night,” Reacher said.
    The woman smiled again. “A mother can share with her kid. Can’t she? What else is a mother for?”
    Reacher turned away and looked at the truck one more time. “Why would he keep an old truck locked in here and a new truck out in the weather?”
    “Beats me,” the woman said. “Jeb always does things his own way.”
    Reacher backed out of the barn and walked each door closed. Then he used the balls of his thumbs to press the bolts back into their splintered holes. The weight of the lock dragged them all halfway out again. He got it looking as neat as he could, and then he left it alone and walked away.
    “Is Jeb ever coming back?” the woman called after him.
    Reacher didn’t answer.

    The Mustang was facing north, so Reacher drove north. He put the CD player on loud and kept going ten miles down an arrow-straight road, aiming for a horizon that never arrived.

    Raskin dug his own grave with a Caterpillar backhoe. It was the same machine that had been used to level the Zec’s land. It had a twenty-inch entrenching shovel with four steel teeth on it. The shovel took long slow bites of the soft earth and laid them aside. The engine roared and slowed, roared and slowed, and pulsed clouds of diesel exhaust filled the Indiana sky.
    Raskin had been born during the Soviet Union, and he had seen a lot. Afghanistan, Chechnya, unthinkable upheaval in Moscow. A guy in his position could have been dead many times over, and that fact combined with his natural Russian fatalism made him utterly indifferent to his fate.
    “Ukase,”
the Zec had said.
An order from an absolute authority.
    “Nichevo,”
Raskin had said in reply.
Think nothing of it.
    So he worked the backhoe. He chose a spot concealed from the stone-crushers’ view by the bulk of the house. He dug a neat trench twenty inches wide, six feet long, six feet deep. He piled the excavated earth to his right, to the east, like a high barrier between himself and home. When he was finished he backed the machine away from the hole and shut it down. Climbed down from the cab and waited. There was no escape. No point in running. If he ran, they would find him anyway, and then he wouldn’t need a grave. They would use garbage bags, five or six of them. They would use wire ties to seal the several parts of him into cold black plastic. They would put bricks in with his flesh and throw the bags in the river.
    He had seen it happen before.
    In the distance the Zec came out of his house. A short wide man, ancient, stooped, walking at a moderate speed, exuding power and energy. He picked his way across the uneven ground, glancing down, glancing forward. Fifty yards, a hundred. He came close to Raskin and stopped. He put his ruined hand in his pocket and came out with a small revolver, his thumb and the stump of his index finger pincered through the trigger guard. He held it out, and Raskin took it from him.
    “Ukase,”
the Zec said.
    “Nichevo,”
Raskin replied. A short, amiable, self-deprecating sound, like
de rien
in French, like
de nada
in Spanish, like
prego
in Italian.
Please. I’m yours to command.
    “Thank you,” the Zec said.
    Raskin stepped away to the narrow end of the trench. Opened the revolver’s cylinder and saw a single cartridge. Closed the cylinder again and turned it until it was lined up right. Then he pulled the hammer back and put the barrel in his mouth. He turned around, so that he was facing the Zec and his back was to the trench. He shuffled backward until his heels were on the edge of the hole. He stood still and straight and balanced and composed, like an Olympic diver preparing for a difficult backward pike off the high board.
    He closed his eyes.
    He pulled the trigger.
    For a mile around black crows rose noisily into the air. Blood and brain and bone arced through the sunlight in a perfect parabola. Raskin’s body fell backward and landed stretched out and flat in the bottom of the trench. The crows