One Shot

settled back to earth and the faint noise of the distant stone-crushing machines rolled back in and sounded like silence. Then the Zec clambered up into the Caterpillar’s cab and started the engine. The levers all had knobs as big as pool balls, which made them easy to manipulate with his palms.

    Reacher stopped fifteen miles north of the city and parked the Mustang on a big V-shaped gravel turnout made where the corners of two huge circular fields met. There were fields everywhere, north, south, east, and west, one after the other in endless ranks and files. Each one had its own irrigation boom. Each boom was turning at the same slow, patient pace.
    He shut the engine down and slid out of the seat. He stood and stretched and yawned. The air was full of mist from the booms. Up close, the booms were like massive industrial machines. Like alien spaceships recently landed. There was a central vertical standpipe in the middle of each field, like a tall metal chimney. The boom arm came off it horizontally and bled water out of a hundred spaced nozzles all along its length. At the outer end the arm had a vertical leg supporting its weight. At the bottom of the leg was a wheel with a rubber tire. The wheel was as big as an airplane’s landing gear. It rolled around a worn track, endlessly.
    Reacher watched and waited until the wheel in the nearest field came close. He walked over and stepped alongside it. Kept pace with it. The tire came almost to his waist. The boom itself was way over his head. He kept the wheel on his right and tracked it through its long clockwise circle. He was walking through fine mist. It was cold. The boom hissed loudly. The wheel climbed gentle rises and rolled into low depressions. It was a long, long circle. The boom was maybe a hundred and fifty feet long, which made the perimeter track more than three hundred yards.
Pi
times diameter. Area was
pi
times the radius squared, which would therefore be more than seventy-eight hundred square yards. More than one and a half acres. Which meant that the wasted corners added up to a little less than twenty-two hundred square yards. More than twenty-one percent. More than five hundred square yards in each corner. Like the shapes in the corners of a target. The Mustang was parked on one of the corners, proportionally the same size as a bullet hole.
    Like one of Charlie’s bullet holes, in the corners of the paper.
    Reacher arrived back where he had started, a little wet, his boat shoes muddy. He stepped away from the circle and stood still on the gravel, facing west. On the far horizon a cloud of crows rose suddenly and then settled. Reacher got back in the car and turned the ignition on. Found the clamps on the header rail and the switch on the dash and lowered the roof. He checked his watch. He had two hours until his rendezvous at Franklin’s office. So he lay back in the seat and let the sun dry his clothes. He took the folded target out of his pocket and looked at it for a long time. He sniffed it. Held it up to the sun and let the light shine through the crisp round holes. Then he put it away again in his pocket. He stared upward and saw nothing but sky. He closed his eyes against the glare and started to think about ego and motive, and illusion and reality, and guilt and innocence, and the true nature of randomness.

CHAPTER 13
    Emerson read through Bellantonio’s reports. Saw that Reacher had called Helen Rodin. He wasn’t surprised. It was probably just one of many calls. Lawyers and busybodies working hard to rewrite history. No big shock there. Then he read Bellantonio’s twin questions:
Is Reacher left-handed? Did he have access to a vehicle?
    Answers:
probably,
and
probably.
Southpaws weren’t rare. Line up twenty people, and four or five of them would be left-handed. And Reacher had access to a vehicle
now,
that was for damn sure. He wasn’t in town, and he hadn’t left on a bus. Therefore he had a vehicle, and probably had had one all along.
    Then Emerson read the final sheet: James Barr had been in Alexandra Dupree’s apartment. What the hell was
that
about?

    According to Ann Yanni’s road maps Franklin’s office was dead-center in a tangle of streets right in the heart of the city. Not an ideal destination. Not by any means. Construction, the start of rush hour, slow traffic on surface streets. Reacher was going to be putting a lot of trust in the tint in the Ford Motor Company’s glass. That was for sure.
    He started the