One Shot

like an amphetamine hangover.”
    “They were doped up? Then you were lucky.”
    Reacher shook his head. “You want to fight with me, your best choice would be aspirin.”
    “Where does this get us?”
    “Look at it from Jeb Oliver’s point of view. He was doing something for somebody. Part work, part favor. Worth a thousand bucks. Had to be for someone higher up on one of his various food chains. And it probably wasn’t for the auto parts manager.”
    “So you think James Barr was involved with a dope dealer?”
    “Not necessarily involved. But maybe coerced by one for some unknown reason.”
    “This raises the stakes,” Helen said.
    “A little,” Reacher said.
    “What should we do?”
    “We should go to the hospital. Let Dr. Mason find out if Barr is bullshitting about the amnesia. If he is, then the fastest way through all of this is to slap him around until he tells us the truth.”
    “What if he isn’t bullshitting?”
    “Then there are other approaches.”
    “Like what?”
    “Later,” Reacher said. “Let’s hear what the shrinks have to say first.”

    Helen Rodin drove out to the hospital in her Saturn with the lawyer Alan Danuta sitting beside her in the front and Reacher sprawling in the back. Mason and Niebuhr followed her in the Taurus they had rented that morning in Bloomington. They parked side by side in a large visitors’ lot, and all five people got out and stood for a moment and then headed together toward the building’s main entrance.

    Grigor Linsky watched them walk. He was fifty feet across the lot, in the Cadillac that Jeb Oliver’s mother had seen in the dark the night before. He kept the motor running and dialed his cell phone. The Zec answered on the first ring.
    “Yes?” he said.
    “The soldier is very good,” Linsky said. “He’s already been out to the boy’s house.”
    “And?”
    “Nothing. The boy is no longer there.”
    “Where is the boy?”
    “Distributed.”
    “Specifically?”
    “His head and his hands are in the river. The rest of him is under eight yards of crushed stone in the new First Street roadbed.”
    “What’s happening now?”
    “The soldier and the lawyer are at the hospital. With three others. Another lawyer and two doctors, I think. Specialist counsel and expert witnesses, I imagine.”
    “Are we relaxed?”
    “We should be. They have to try. That’s the system here, as you know. But they won’t succeed.”
    “Make sure they don’t,” the Zec said.

    The hospital was on the outer edge of the city and therefore relatively spacious. Clearly there had been no real estate restraints. Just county budget restrictions, Reacher figured, that had limited the building to plain concrete and six stories. The concrete was painted white inside and out, and the stories were short of headroom. But other than those factors the place looked like any hospital anywhere. And it smelled like any hospital anywhere. Decay, disinfectant, disease. Reacher didn’t like hospitals very much. He was following the other four down a long bright corridor that led to an elevator. The two shrinks were leading the way. They seemed pretty much at home. Helen Rodin and Alan Danuta were right behind them. They were side by side, talking. The shrinks reached the elevator bank and Niebuhr hit the button. The little column of people closed up behind him. Then Helen Rodin turned back and stopped Reacher before he caught up with the others. Stepped close and spoke quietly.
    “Does the name Eileen Hutton mean anything to you?”
    “Why?”
    “My father faxed a new witness list. He added her name.”
    Reacher said nothing.
    “She seems to be from the army,” Helen said. “Do you know her?”
    “Should I?”
    Helen came closer and turned away from the others.
    “I need to know what she knows,” she said quietly.
    This could complicate things,
Reacher thought.
    “She was the prosecutor,” he said.
    “When? Fourteen years ago?”
    “Yes.”
    “So how much does she know?”
    “I think she’s at the Pentagon now.”
    “How much does she know, Reacher?”
    He looked away.
    “She knows it all,” he said.
    “How? You never got anywhere near a courtroom.”
    “Even so.”
    “How?”
    “Because I was sleeping with her.”
    She stared at him. “Tell me you’re kidding.”
    “I’m not kidding.”
    “You told her
everything
?”
    “We were in a relationship. Naturally I told her everything. We were on the same side.”
    “Just two lonely people in