One Shot

The highway rose gently on its stilts. Helen drove onward, with the roofs of low edge-of-town buildings flashing past on the left and the right.
    “Be ready to take the spur that runs behind the library,” Reacher said.
    It was going to be a right exit. It was announced well in advance with a sign. The broken line separating the right lane from the center lane became a solid line. Then the solid line became a narrow wedge. The through traffic was forced away to the left. The exit lane angled slightly right. They stayed in it. The wedge grew wider and was filled in with bold cross-hatched lines. Up ahead were yellow drums. They passed them by, onto the spur that would lead behind the library. Reacher twisted in his seat and checked the rear window. Nobody behind them.
    “Go slow,” he said.
    Two hundred yards ahead the spur started to curve, behind the library, behind the black glass tower. The roadbed was wide enough for two lanes. But the radius was too tight to make it safe for two lanes to run side by side at high speed into the corner. Traffic engineers had thought better of it. They had advised a gentler trajectory. They had marked out a single lane through the curve. It was a little wider than a normal lane, to allow for misjudgments. It started way on the left and then swung sharply to the right and cut across the apex of the curve at a more shallow angle.
    “Go real slow now,” Reacher said.
    The car slowed. Way up ahead of them on the left was a crescent-moon shape of white cross-hatching. Beginning right next to them on the right was a long thin triangle of white cross-hatching. Just lines of paint on the blacktop, but they shepherded people along and kept them safe.
    “Pull over,” Reacher said. “Here, on the right.”
    “Can’t stop here,” Helen said.
    “Like you had a flat. Just pull over. Right here.”
    She braked hard and turned the wheel and steered onto the cross-hatched no-man’s-land on their right. They felt the thick painted lines thumping under the tires. A juddery little rhythm. It slowed as she slowed.
    She stopped.
    “Back up a little,” Reacher said.
    She backed up, like she was parallel parking against the concrete parapet.
    “Now forward a yard,” Reacher said.
    She drove forward a yard.
    “OK,” he said.
    He wound his window down. The traffic lane on their left was clear and smooth, but the cross-hatched no-man’s-land they were stopped on was covered with grit and trash and debris blown across it by years of passing vehicles. There were cans and bottles and detached mud flaps and tiny cubes of broken headlight glass and plastic splinters from old fender benders. Far away to the left the through traffic rumbled north on a separate bridge. There was a constant stream over there. But they sat for a whole minute before anyone else came the way they had taken. A lone pickup passed close on their left and rocked them with its slipstream. Then the spur went quiet again.
    “Not busy,” Reacher said.
    “It never is,” Helen said. “This doesn’t really go anywhere people need to get. It was a total waste of money. But I guess they’ve always got to be building something.”
    “Look down,” Reacher said.
    The highway was raised up on tall stilts. The roadbed was maybe forty feet above ground level. The parapet wall was three feet high. Beyond it, ahead and to their right, was the upper story of the library building. It had an intricate cornice, carved from limestone, and a slate roof. It felt close enough to touch.
    “What?” Helen asked.
    Reacher pointed with his thumb and then leaned way back so she could see across him. Directly to their right was an unobstructed view down into the plaza, with a perfectly straight line of sight along the narrow bottleneck between the end of the ornamental pool and the plaza wall. And beyond it, dead ahead, perfectly aligned, was the door of the DMV office.
    “James Barr was a sniper,” Reacher said. “Not the best, not the worst, but he was one of ours and he trained for more than five years. And training has a purpose. It takes people who aren’t necessarily very smart and it makes them
seem
smart by beating some basic tactical awareness into them. Until it becomes instinctive.”
    “I don’t understand.”
    “
This
is where a trained sniper would have fired from. Up here on the highway. Because from here he’s got his targets walking directly toward him in a straight line. Single file, into a bottleneck. He sets up