Persuader

about fifteen seconds. They had deafened me. They must have sounded like World War Three to Beck.
    I ran straight down the driveway. I was coughing and trailing gunsmoke like a cloud. I headed for the cars. Beck had already scrambled across into the Cadillac's driver's seat.
    He saw me coming and opened his door an inch. Faster than using the window.
    "Ambush," I said. I was out of breath and I could hear my own voice loud inside my head. "There were at least eight of them."
    "Where's Duke?"
    "Dead. We got to go. Right now, Beck." He froze for a second. Then he moved.
    "Take his car," he said.
    He already had the Cadillac rolling. He jammed his foot down and slammed his door and reversed down the driveway and out of sight. I jumped into the Lincoln. Fired it up. Stuck the selector in Reverse and got one elbow up on the back of the seat and stared through the rear window and hit the gas. We shot out backward onto the road one after the other and slewed around and took off again north, side by side like a stoplight drag race. We howled around the curves and fought the camber and stayed up around seventy miles an hour. Didn't slow until we reached the turn that would take us back toward Hartford.
    Beck edged ahead of me and I fell in behind him and followed. He drove five fast miles and turned in at a closed package store and parked at the back of the lot. I parked ten feet from him and just lay back in the seat and let him come to me. I was too tired to get out.
    He ran around the Cadillac's hood and pulled my door open.
    "It was an ambush?" he said.
    I nodded. "They were waiting for us. Eight of them. Maybe more. It was a massacre." He said nothing. There was nothing for him to say. I picked up Duke's Steyr from the seat beside me and handed it over.
    "I recovered it," I said.
    "Why?"
    "I thought you might want me to. I thought it might be traceable." He nodded. "It isn't. But that was good thinking." I gave him the H&K, too. He stepped back to the Cadillac and I watched him zip both pieces into his bag. Then he turned around. Clenched both hands and looked up at the black sky. Then at me.
    "See any faces?" he asked.
    I shook my head. "Too dark. But we hit one of them. He dropped this." I handed him the PSM. It was like punching him in the gut. He turned pale and put out a hand and steadied himself against the Lincoln's roof.
    "What?" I said.
    He looked away. "I don't believe it."
    "What?"
    "You hit somebody and he dropped this?"
    "I think Duke hit him."
    "You saw it happen?"
    "Just shapes," I said. "It was dark. Lots of muzzle flashes. Duke was firing and he hit a shape and this was on the floor when I came out."
    "This is Angel Doll's gun."
    "Are you sure?"
    "Million to one it isn't. You know what it is?"
    "Never saw one like it."
    "It's a special KGB pistol," he said. "From the old Soviet Union. Very rare in this country." Then he stepped away into the darkness of the lot. I closed my eyes. I wanted to sleep.
    Even five seconds would have made a difference.
    "Reacher," he called. "What evidence did you leave?" I opened my eyes.
    "Duke's body," I said.
    "That won't lead anybody anywhere. Ballistics?" I smiled in the dark. Imagined Hartford PD forensic scientists trying to make sense of the trajectories. Walls, floors, ceilings. They would conclude the hallway had been full of heavily-armed disco dancers.
    "A lot of bullets and shell cases," I said.
    "Untraceable," he said.
    He moved deeper into the dark. I closed my eyes again. I had left no fingerprints. No part of me had touched any part of the house except for the soles of my shoes. And I hadn't fired Duffy's Glock. I had heard something about a central registry somewhere that stored data on rifling marks. Maybe her Glock was a part of it. But I hadn't used it.
    "Reacher," Beck called. "Drive me home." I opened my eyes.
    "What about this car?" I called back.
    "Abandon it here." I yawned and forced myself to move and used the tail of my coat to wipe the wheel and all the controls I had touched. The unused Glock nearly fell out of my pocket. Beck didn't notice. He was so preoccupied I could have taken it out and twirled it around my finger like the Sundance Kid and he wouldn't have noticed. I wiped the door handle and then leaned in and pulled the keys and wiped them and tossed them into the scrub at the edge of the lot.
    "Let's go," Beck said.
    He was silent until we were thirty miles north and east of Hartford. Then he started talking. He had spent the time