One Shot

or enough nonchampionship years.
    “We’re on our way, sir,” the desk cop said.
    Reacher hung up and slid back into the Mustang. Sat still until he heard the first sirens battling north.

    Helen Rodin was halfway down Second Street when she caught a commotion in her mirror. A gray Impala sedan lurched out of the lane three cars behind her and pulled a crazy U-turn through the traffic and took off back the way it had come.
    “Asshole,” she said.
    Ann Yanni twisted in her seat.
    “Cop car,” she said. “You can tell by the antennas.”

    Reacher made it to Franklin’s place about ten minutes late. It was a two-story brick building. The lower floor looked like some kind of a light industrial unit, abandoned. It had steel shutters over its doors and windows. But the upstairs windows had venetian blinds with lights behind them. There was an outside staircase leading to an upper door. The door had a white plastic plate on it:
Franklin Investigations.
There was a parking apron at street level, just a patch of blacktop one- car deep and about six wide. Helen Rodin’s green Saturn was there, and a blue Honda Civic, and a black Chevy Suburban so long that it was overhanging the sidewalk by a foot. The Suburban was Franklin’s, Reacher guessed. The Honda was Rosemary Barr’s, maybe.
    He drove past the place without slowing and circled the block. Saw nothing he didn’t want to see. So he slotted the Mustang next to the Saturn and got out and locked it. Ran up the staircase and went in the door without knocking. He found himself in a short hallway with a kitchenette to his right and what he guessed was a bathroom to his left. Up ahead he could hear voices in a large room. He went in and found Franklin at a desk, Helen Rodin and Rosemary Barr in two chairs huddled in conversation, and Ann Yanni looking out the window at her car. All four turned as he came in.
    “Do you know any medical terminology?” Helen asked him.
    “Like what?”
    “PA,” she said. “A doctor wrote it. Some kind of an abbreviation.”
    Reacher glanced at her. Then at Rosemary Barr.
    “Let me guess,” he said. “The hospital diagnosed James Barr. Probably a mild case.”
    “Early onset,” Rosemary said. “Whatever it is.”
    “How did you know?” Helen asked.
    “Intuition,” Reacher said.
    “What is it?”
    “Later,” Reacher said. “Let’s do this in order.” He turned to Franklin. “Tell me what you know about the victims.”
    “Five random people,” Franklin said. “No connection between any of them. No real connection with anything at all. Certainly no connection to James Barr. I think you were absolutely right. He didn’t shoot them for any reason of his own.”
    “No, I was absolutely wrong,” Reacher said. “Thing is, James Barr didn’t shoot them at all.”

    Grigor Linsky stepped back into a shadowed doorway and dialed his phone.
    “I followed a hunch,” he said.
    “Which was?” the Zec asked.
    “With the cops at the lawyer’s office, I figured the soldier wouldn’t be able to go see her. But obviously they still have business. So I thought maybe she would go to him. And she did. I followed her. They’re together in the private detective’s office right now. With the sister. And that woman from the television news.”
    “Are the others with you?”
    “We’ve got the whole block covered. East, west, north, and south.”
    “Sit tight,” the Zec said. “I’ll get back to you.”

    Helen Rodin said, “You want to explain that statement?”
    “The evidence is rock solid,” Franklin said.
    Ann Yanni smiled.
A story.
    Rosemary Barr just stared.
    “You bought your brother a radio,” Reacher said to her. “A Bose. For the ballgames. He told me that. Did you ever buy him anything else?”
    “Like what?”
    “Like clothes.”
    “Sometimes,” she said.
    “Pants?”
    “Sometimes,” she said.
    “What size?”
    “Size?” she repeated blankly.
    “What size pants does your brother wear?”
    “Thirty-four waist, thirty-four leg.”
    “Exactly,” Reacher said. “He’s relatively tall.”
    “How does this help us?” Helen asked.
    “You know anything about numbers games?” Reacher asked her. “Old-fashioned illegal numbers, state lotteries, the Powerball, things like that?”
    “What about them?”
    “What’s the hardest part of them?”
    “Winning,” Ann Yanni said.
    Reacher smiled. “From the players’ point of view, sure. But the hardest part for the organizers is picking