One Shot

and the city would move on to the next thing.
    He sat for a moment on the NBC monolith, with his back to the tower, like a guy wasting time because he was early. Which he was. It was only seven forty-five. There were other people in the same situation. They stood around, singly or in groups of two or three, smoking last cigarettes, reading the morning news, chilling before the daily grind. Reacher looked first at men on their own with newspapers. That was a pretty traditional surveillance cover. Although in his opinion it was due for replacement with a new exiled-smoker cover. Guys standing near doorways and smoking were the new invisibles. Or guys on cell phones. You could stand there with a Nokia up to your ear forever and nobody thought twice.
    In the end he settled on a guy who was smoking
and
talking on a cell phone. He was a short man of about sixty. Maybe more. A damaged man. There was a permanent lopsided tension in the way he held himself. An old spinal injury, maybe. Or busted ribs that had been badly set, years ago. Whatever it was, it made him look uncomfortable and querulous. He wasn’t the type of guy who would happily converse at length. But there he was, on his phone, just talking, aimlessly. He had thin gray hair, recently barbered but not stylishly. He was in a double-breasted suit that had been expensively tailored, but not in the United States. It was square and boxy, too heavy for the weather. Polish, maybe. Or Hungarian. Eastern European, certainly. His face was pale and his eyes were dark. They didn’t glance Reacher’s way, even once.
    Reacher checked his watch. Seven fifty-five. He slid off the shiny granite and walked into the tower’s lobby.

    ______

    Grigor Linsky stopped pretending and dialed an actual number on his phone.
    “He’s here,” he said. “He just went up.”
    “Did he see you?” the Zec asked.
    “Yes, I’m sure he did.”
    “So make that the last time. Now you stay in the shadows.”

    Reacher found Helen Rodin already at her desk. She looked settled in, like she had been there a long time already. She was in the same black suit, but her shirt was different. It was a simple scoop neck, not tight. It was china blue and matched her eyes exactly. Her hair was tied back in a long pony tail. Her desk was covered with legal books. Some were facedown, some were faceup. They were all open. She had about eight pages of notes going, on a yellow legal pad. References, case notes, decisions, precedents.
    “James Barr is conscious,” she said. “Rosemary called me at five this morning.”
    “Is he talking?”
    “Only to the doctors. They won’t let anyone else near him yet. Not even Rosemary herself.”
    “What about the cops?”
    “They’re waiting. But I’ll need to be there first. I can’t let him talk to the cops without representation.”
    “What is he saying to the doctors?”
    “That he doesn’t know why he’s there. That he doesn’t remember anything about Friday. The doctors say that’s to be expected. Amnesia is predictable with head injuries, possibly covering several days before the trauma. Several weeks, sometimes.”
    “Where does that leave you?”
    “With two big problems. First, he might be faking the amnesia. And that’s actually very hard to test, either way. So now I’m going to have to find a specialist opinion on
that,
too. And if he isn’t faking, we’re in a real gray area. If he’s sane now, and he was sane before, but he’s missing a week, then how can he get a fair trial? He won’t be able to participate in his own defense. Not if he hasn’t got the slightest idea what anyone is talking about. And the state put him in that position. They let him get hurt. It was their jail. They can’t do that and then go ahead and try him.”
    “What’s your father going to think?”
    “He’s going to fight it tooth and nail. Obviously. No prosecutor can afford to admit the possibility that amnesia might screw up a trial. Otherwise everyone would jump right on it. Everyone would be looking to get beat up in pretrial detention. Suddenly nobody would be able to remember anything.”
    “It must have happened before.”
    Helen nodded. “It has.”
    “So what do the law books say?”
    “I’m reading them now. As you can see.
Dusky versus the United States, Wilson versus the United States.
”
    “And?”
    “There are lots of ifs and buts.”
    Reacher said nothing. Helen looked straight at him.
    “It’s spinning out of control,”