One Shot

headed straight for the
No Admittance
door. The redhead was still behind the desk. She was almost through with the invoices. The stack on her right was tall, and the stack on her left had just one sheet of paper in it. She wasn’t doing anything with it. She was leaning back in the chair, unwilling to finish, unwilling to get back out to the public. Or to Gary.
    Reacher put the car keys on the desk.
    “Thanks for the loan,” he said.
    “Did you find him?” she asked.
    “He’s gone.”
    She said nothing.
    “You look tired,” Reacher said.
    She said nothing.
    “Like you’ve got no energy. No sparkle. No enthusiasm.”
    “So?”
    “Last night you were full of beans.”
    “I’m at work now.”
    “You were at work last night, too. You were getting paid.”
    “You said you were going to forget all about that.”
    “I am. Have a nice life, Sandy.”
    She watched him for a minute.
    “You too, Jimmy Reese,” she said.
    He turned around and closed the door on her again and headed out to the daylight. Started walking south, back to town.

    There were four people in Helen Rodin’s office when he got there. Helen herself, and three strangers. One of them was a guy in an expensive suit. He was sitting in Helen’s chair, behind her desk. She was standing next to him, head bent, talking. Some kind of an urgent conference. The other two strangers were standing near the window, like they were waiting, like they were next in line. One was a man, one was a woman. The woman had long dark hair and glasses. The man had no hair and glasses. Both were dressed casually. Both had lapel badges with their names printed large. The woman had
Mary Mason
followed by a bunch of letters that had to be medical. The man had
Warren Niebuhr
with the same bunch of letters. Doctors, Reacher figured, probably psychiatrists. The name badges made them look like they had been dragged out of a convention hall. But they didn’t seem unhappy about it.
    Helen looked up from her discussion.
    “Folks, this is Jack Reacher,” she said. “My investigator dropped out and Mr. Reacher agreed to take over his role.”
    News to me,
Reacher thought. But he said nothing. Then Helen gestured at the guy in her chair, proudly.
    “This is Alan Danuta,” she said. “He’s a lawyer specializing in veterans’ issues. From D.C. Probably the best there is.”
    “You got here fast,” Reacher said to him.
    “I had to,” the guy said back. “Today is the critical day for Mr. Barr.”
    “We’re all headed for the hospital,” Helen said. “The doctors say he’s ready for us. I was hoping that Alan would consult by phone or e-mail, but he flew right in.”
    “Easier for me that way,” Danuta said.
    “No, I got lucky,” Helen said. “And then even luckier, because there’s a psychiatric conference in Bloomington all week. Dr. Mason and Dr. Niebuhr drove straight down.”
    “I specialize in memory loss,” Dr. Mason said.
    “And I specialize in coercion,” Dr. Niebuhr said. “Dependency issues in the criminal mind, and so on.”
    “So this is the team,” Helen said.
    “What about his sister?” Reacher asked.
    “She’s already with him.”
    “We need to talk.”
    “Privately?”
    “Just for a moment.”
    She made an excuse-me face to the others and led Reacher into the outer office.
    “You get anywhere?” she asked him.
    “The bimbo and the four other guys were recruited by a friend of theirs called Jeb Oliver. He paid them a hundred bucks each. I figure he kept another five for his trouble. I went to his house, but he’s gone.”
    “Where?”
    “Nobody knows. He was picked up by a guy in a car.”
    “Who is he?”
    “He works at the store with the bimbo. But he’s also a small-time dope dealer.”
    “Really?”
    Reacher nodded. “There’s a barn behind his house with a fancy lock on it. Maybe a meth lab, maybe a storeroom. He spends a lot of time on his cell phone. He owns a truck that had to cost twice what a store clerk makes in a year. And he lives with his mother.”
    “What does that prove?”
    “Drug dealers are more likely than anyone else to live with their mothers. I read it in the paper.”
    “Why?”
    “They’ve usually got small-time priors. They can’t pass the kind of background checks that landlords like to run.”
    Helen said nothing.
    “They were all hopped up last night,” Reacher said. “All six of them. Speed, probably, judging by the way the bimbo looked today. She was different. Really down,