One Shot

periods when he had been too lazy to care, and a couple of six-month stretches when he had favored an all-over number-one buzz cut.
    The barber did the thing with the hand mirror, to show Reacher the back.
    “Happy?” he asked.
    Reacher nodded. It looked OK, except that there was a half-inch margin all around where his skin was dead white. He had had longer hair in Miami and the tan hadn’t penetrated. The barber brushed the clippings off his collar and removed the towel. Reacher gave him his seven bucks and tipped him a dollar. Then he walked around the block. Nobody followed him. He unlocked his room and washed his face and shaved under his sideburns again. There was a new half-inch of stubble there. The barber’s clippers had been a little blunt.

    The Metropole interviews were finished by nine-twenty and they gave Emerson absolutely nothing at all. The night porter swore blind that he knew nothing about the girl. There were only eleven guests and none of them was promising. Emerson was an experienced and talented detective and he knew that people sometimes tell the truth. And he knew that accepting the truth was as important a part of a detective’s professional arsenal as rejecting lies. So he conferred with Donna Bianca and together they concluded they had just wasted the best part of three hours on a faulty hunch.
    Then a guy named Gary called, from the auto parts store.

    Gary had gotten to work at eight and had found himself
really
short-staffed. There was still no sign of Jeb Oliver and Sandy hadn’t shown, either. At first he had been annoyed. He had called her apartment and gotten no reply.
On her way,
he had assumed.
Late.
But she never showed. Thereafter he called every thirty minutes. By nine-thirty the annoyance had given way to worry and he started thinking about auto wrecks. So he called the cops for information. The desk guy told him there had been no traffic accidents that morning. Then there was a pregnant pause and the desk guy seemed to consider another possibility and asked for a name and a description. Gary said Alexandra Dupree, known as Sandy, nineteen years old, white, petite, green and red. Ten seconds after that Gary was speaking to a detective called Emerson on a cell phone.

    Gary agreed to close the store for the day and Emerson sent a patrol car to pick him up. First stop was the morgue. Gary identified the body and was white and badly shaken when he arrived in Emerson’s office. Donna Bianca calmed him down and Emerson watched him carefully. Statistics show that women get killed by husbands, boyfriends, brothers, employers, and workmates—in descending order of likelihood—well before passing strangers show up on the list of possible suspects. And sometimes a boyfriend and a workmate can be the same guy. But Emerson knew that Gary was in the clear. He was too shaken. No way could a person fake that kind of sudden shock and surprise over something he had already known about for eight or ten hours.
    So Emerson started in, gently, with all the usual cop questions. Last time you saw her? Know anything about her private life? Family? Boyfriends? Ex-boyfriends? Weird phone calls? Did she have any enemies? Problems? Money troubles?
    And then, inevitably: Anything unusual over the last couple of days?
    And so by ten-fifteen Emerson knew all about the stranger that had come to the store the day before. Very tall, heavily built, tan, aggressive, demanding, wearing olive-green pants and an olive-green flannel shirt. He had spent two mysterious sessions with Sandy in the back office, and had borrowed her car, and had demanded Jeb Oliver’s address with menace, and Jeb Oliver was missing, too.

    ______

    Emerson left Gary with Donna Bianca and went out to the corridor and used his cell to call Alex Rodin in his office.
    “Your lucky day,” he said. “We’ve got a nineteen-year-old female homicide victim. Someone broke her neck.”
    “How does that make me lucky?”
    “Her last unexplained contact was yesterday, at her place of work, with a guy that sounds a whole lot like our pal Jack Reacher.”
    “Really?”
    “We got a pretty good description from her boss. And her neck was busted by a single blow to the side of the head, which ain’t easy unless you’re built like Reacher is.”
    “Who was the girl?”
    “A redhead from the auto parts store out toward the highway. There’s also a boy missing from the same store.”
    “Where did this thing happen?”
    “Outside the