One Shot

counting clockwise there was Linsky in the driver’s seat, then Chenko, then Vladimir, then Raskin. The proper pecking order, instinctively obeyed. Linsky smiled again and handed out three copies of the poster. He kept one for himself, even though he didn’t need it. He had seen Jack Reacher many times already.
    “We’re going to start over,” he said. “Right from the beginning. We can assume the police will have missed something.”

    ______

    Reacher pulled the fire door open and removed the cardboard plug from the lock and put it in his pocket. He stepped inside and let the door latch behind him. He followed the back corridor to the elevator and rode up to three. Knocked on Hutton’s door. He had a line in his head, from Jack Nicholson playing a hard-ass Marine colonel in some movie about Navy lawyers:
Nothing beats a woman you have to salute in the morning.
    Hutton took her time opening the door. He guessed she had settled down somewhere after getting rid of the cops. She hadn’t expected to be disturbed again so soon. But eventually the door opened and she was standing there. She was wearing a robe, coming fresh out of the shower. The light behind her haloed her hair. The corridor was dim and the room looked warm and inviting.
    “You came back,” she said.
    “Did you think I wouldn’t?”
    He stepped into the suite and she closed the door behind him.
    “The cops were just here,” she said.
    “I know,” he said. “I watched them all the way.”
    “Where were you?”
    “In a garbage dump two blocks away.”
    “You want to wash up?”
    “It was a very clean garbage dump. Behind a shoe store.”
    “You want to go out to dinner?”
    “I’d prefer room service,” he said. “I don’t want to be walking around more than I have to.”
    “OK,” she said. “That makes sense. Room service it is.”
    “But not just yet.”
    “Should I get dressed?”
    “Not just yet.”
    She paused a beat.
    “Why not?” she said.
    “Unfinished business,” he said.
    She said nothing.
    “It’s good to see you again,” he said.
    “It’s been less than three hours,” she said.
    “I mean today,” he said. “As a whole. After all this time.”
    Then he stepped close and cupped her face in his hands. Pushed his fingertips into her hair like he used to and traced the contours of her cheekbones with his thumbs.
    “Should we do this?” she said.
    “Don’t you want to?”
    “It’s been fourteen years,” she said.
    “Like riding a bicycle,” he said.
    “Think it will be the same?”
    “It’ll be better.”
    “How much better?” she asked.
    “We were always good,” he said. “Weren’t we? How much better could it get?”
    She held still for a long moment. Then she put her hands behind his head. She pulled and he bent down and they kissed. Then again, harder. Then again, longer. Fourteen years melted away. Same taste, same feel. Same excitement. She pulled his shirt out of his pants and unbuttoned it from the bottom upward, urgently. When the last button was open she smoothed the flat of her hands over his chest, his shoulders, his back, down to his waistband, around to the front. His boat shoes came off easily. And his socks. He kicked his pants across the room and untied her belt. Her robe fell open.
    “Damn, Hutton,” he said. “You haven’t changed a bit.”
    “You either,” she said.
    Then they headed for the bed, stumbling, fast and urgent, locked together like an awkward four-legged animal.

    Grigor Linsky took the south side of town. He checked the salad place and then cruised down to the docks. Turned around and quartered the narrow streets, covering three sides of every block, pausing at the turns to scan the sidewalks on the fourth. The Cadillac idled along. The power steering hissed at every corner. It was slow, patient work. But it wasn’t a large city. There was no bustle. No crowds. And nobody could hide forever. That had been Grigor Linsky’s experience.

    ______

    Afterward Hutton lay in Reacher’s arms and used her fingertips to trace a long slow inventory of the body she had known so well. It had changed in fourteen years. He had said
You haven’t changed a bit
and she had said
You either,
but she knew both of them had been generous. Nobody stays the same. The Reacher she had known in the desert had been younger and baked lean by the heat, as fluid and graceful as a greyhound. Now he was heavier, with knotted muscles as hard as old mahogany. The scars she