The Essential Jack Reacher 12-Book Bundle

by Lee Child

  “How does this help us?” Helen said.

  “Just a train of thought,” Reacher said. “I sat all afternoon in Ms. Yanni’s car, enjoying the sun, thinking about how hard it is to achieve true randomness.”

  “Your train is on the wrong track,” Franklin said. “James Barr shot five people. The evidence is crushing.”

  “You were a cop,” Reacher said. “You put yourself in danger. Stakeouts, takedowns, high-pressure situations, moments of extreme stress. What’s the first thing you did afterward?”

  Franklin glanced at the women.

  “Went to the bathroom,” he said.

  “Correct,” Reacher said. “Me too. But James Barr didn’t. Bellantonio’s report from Barr’s house shows cement dust in the garage, the kitchen, the living room, the bedroom, and the basement. But not in the bathroom. So he got home, but he didn’t take a leak until after he changed and showered? And how could he shower anyway without going into the bathroom?”

  “Maybe he stopped on the way.”

  “He was never there.”

  “He was there, Reacher. What about the evidence?”

  “There’s no evidence that says he was there.”

  “Are you nuts?”

  “There’s evidence that says his van was there, and his shoes, and his pants, and his coat, and his gun, and his ammo, and his quarter, but there’s nothing that says he was there.”

  “Someone impersonated him?” Ann Yanni asked.

  “Down to the last detail,” Reacher said. “Drove his car, wore his shoes and his clothes, used his gun.”

  “This is fantasy,” Franklin said.

  “It explains the raincoat,” Reacher said. “A big roomy garment that covered everything except the denim jeans? Why else wear a raincoat on a warm dry day?”

  “Who?” Rosemary asked.

  “Watch,” Reacher said.

  He stood still, and then he took a single pace forward.

  “My pants are thirty-seven-inch legs,” he said. “I crossed the new part of the garage in thirty-five strides. James Barr has a thirty-four-inch leg, which means he should have done it in about thirty-eight strides. But Bellantonio’s footprint count shows forty-eight strides.”

  “A very short person,” Helen said.

  “Charlie,” Rosemary said.

  “I thought so, too,” Reacher said. “But then I went to Kentucky. Initially because I wanted to confirm something else. I got around to thinking that maybe James Barr just wasn’t good enough. I looked at the scene. It was tough shooting. And fourteen years ago he was good, but he wasn’t great. And when I saw him in the hospital the skin on his right shoulder was unmarked. And to shoot as well as he apparently did, a guy’s got to practice. And a guy who practices builds up bruising on his shoulder. Like a callus. He didn’t have it. So I figured a guy who started out average could only have gotten worse with time. Especially if he wasn’t practicing much. That’s logical, right? Maybe he’d gotten to the point where he couldn’t have done the thing on Friday. Through a simple lack of ability. That’s what I was thinking. So I went down to Kentucky to find out for sure how much worse he’d gotten.”

  “And?” Helen asked.

  “He’d gotten better,” Reacher said. “Way better. Not worse. Look at this.” He took the target out of his shirt pocket and unfolded it. “This is the latest of thirty-two sessions over the last three years. And this is much better than he was shooting when he was in the army fourteen years ago. Which is weird, right? He’s fired only three hundred twenty rounds in the last three years, and he’s great? Whereas he was firing two thousand a week back when he was only average?”

  “So what does this mean?”

  “He went down there with Charlie, every time. And the guy who runs the range is a Marine champion. And a real anal pack rat. He files all the used targets. Which means that Barr had at least two witnesses to what he was scoring, every time.”

  “I’d want witnesses,” Franklin said. “If I was shooting like that.”

  “It’s not possible to get better by not practicing,” Reacher said. “I think the truth is he had actually gotten really bad. And I think his ego couldn’t take it. Any shooter is competitive. He knew he was lousy now, and he couldn’t face it, and he wanted to cover it up. He wanted to show off.”

  Franklin pointed at the target. “Doesn’t look lousy to me.”

  “This is faked,” Reacher said. “You’re going to give this to Bellantonio and Bellantonio is going to prove it to you.”

  “Faked how?”

  “I’ll bet this was done with a handgun. Nine-millimeter, from point-blank range. If Bellantonio measures the holes, my guess is he’ll find they’re forty-six thousandths of an inch bigger than .308 holes. And if he tests the paper, he’ll find gunpowder residue on it. Because my guess is James Barr took a stroll down the range and made these holes from an inch away, not three hundred yards. Every time.”

  “That’s a stretch.”

  “It’s simple metaphysics. Barr was never this good. And it’s fair to assume he must have gotten worse. If he’d gotten a little worse, he’d have owned up to it. But he didn’t own up to it, so we can assume he’d gotten a lot worse. Bad enough to be seriously embarrassed about it. Maybe bad enough that he couldn’t hit the paper at all.”

  Nobody spoke.

  “It’s a theory that proves itself,” Reacher said. “To fake the score because of embarrassment proves he couldn’t shoot well anymore. If he couldn’t shoot well anymore, he didn’t do the thing on Friday.”

  “You’re just guessing,” Franklin said.

  Reacher nodded. “I was. But I’m not now. Now I know for sure. I fired a round down in Kentucky. The guy made me, like a rite of passage. I was full of caffeine. I was twitching like crazy. Now I know James Barr will have been way worse.”

  “Why?” Rosemary asked.

  “Because he has Parkinson’s disease,” Reacher said to her. “PA means paralysis agitans, and paralysis agitans is what doctors call Parkinson’s disease. Your brother is getting sick, I’m afraid. Shaking and twitching. And no way on earth can you fire a rifle accurately with Parkinson’s disease. My opinion, not only didn’t he do the thing on Friday, he couldn’t possibly have done it.”

  Rosemary went quiet. Good news and bad news. She glanced at the window. Looked at the floor. She was dressed like a widow. Black silk blouse, black pencil skirt, black nylons, black patent leather shoes with a low heel.

  “Maybe that’s why he was so angry all the time,” she said. “Maybe he felt it coming on. Felt helpless and out of control. His body started to let him down. He would have hated that. Anyone would.”

  Then she looked straight at Reacher.

  “I told you he was innocent,” she said.

  “Ma’am, I apologize unreservedly,” Reacher said. “You were right. He reformed. He kept to his bargain. He deserves credit. And I’m sorry he’s sick.”

  “Now you’ve got to help him. You promised.”

  “I am helping him. Since Monday night I haven’t done anything else.”

  “This is crazy,” Franklin said.

  “No, it’s exactly the same as it always was,” Reacher said. “It’s someone setting James Barr up for the fall. But instead of actually making him do it, they just made it look like he did it. That’s the only practical difference here.”

  “But is it possible?” Ann Yanni asked.

  “Why not? Think it through. Walk it through.”

  Ann Yanni walked it through. She rehearsed little movements, slowly, thoughtfully, like an actress. “He dresses in Barr’s clothes, and shoes, and maybe finds a quarter in a jar. Or in a pocket somewhere. He wears gloves, so as not to mess up Barr’s fingerprints. He’s already taken the traffic cone from Barr’s garage, maybe the day before. He gets the rifle from the basement. It’s already been loaded, by Barr himself, previously. He drives to town in Barr’s minivan. He leaves all the clues. Covers himself in cement dust. Comes back to the hous
e and puts everything away and leaves. Fast, not even taking the time to use the bathroom. Then James Barr comes home sometime later and walks into a trap he doesn’t even know is there.”

  “That’s exactly how I see it,” Reacher said.

  “But where was Barr at the time?” Helen said.

  “Out,” Reacher said.

  “That’s a nice coincidence,” Franklin said.

  “I don’t think it was,” Reacher said. “I think they arranged something to get him out of the way. He remembers going out somewhere, previously. Then being optimistic, like something good was about to happen. I think they set him up with someone. I think they engineered a chance meeting that led somewhere. I think he had a date on Friday.”

  “With who?”

  “Sandy, maybe. They turned her loose on me. Maybe they turned her loose on him, too. He dressed well on Friday. The report shows his wallet was in a decent pair of pants.”

  “So who really did it?” Helen asked.

  “Someone cold as ice,” Reacher said. “Someone who didn’t even need to use the bathroom afterward.”

  “Charlie,” Rosemary said. “Got to be. Has to be. He’s small. He’s weird. He knew the house. He knew where everything was. The dog knew him.”

  “He was a terrible shooter too,” Reacher said. “That’s the other reason why I went to Kentucky. I wanted to test that theory.”

  “So who was it?”

  “Charlie,” Reacher said. “His evidence was faked, too. But in a different way. The holes in his targets were all over the place. Except they weren’t really all over the place. The distribution wasn’t entirely random. He was trying to disguise how good he actually was. He was aiming at arbitrary points on the paper, and he was hitting those points, every time, dead-on, believe me. Once in a while he would get bored, and he’d put one through the inner ring. Or he’d pick on a quadrant outside the outer ring and put a round straight through it. One time he drilled all four corners. The point is, it doesn’t really matter what you aim at, as long as you hit it. It’s only convention that makes us aim at the ten-ring. It’s just as good practice to aim at some other spot. Even a spot off the paper, like a tree. That’s what Charlie was doing. He was a tremendous shot, training hard, but trying to look like he was missing all the time. But like I said, true randomness is impossible for a human to achieve. There are always patterns.”

  “Why would he do that?” Helen asked.

  “For an alibi.”

  “Making people think he couldn’t shoot?”

  Reacher nodded. “He noticed that the range master was saving the used targets. He’s an ice-cold pro who thinks about every wrinkle ahead of time.”

  “Who is he?” Franklin asked.

  “His real name is Chenko and he hangs with a bunch of Russians. He’s probably a Red Army veteran. Probably one of their snipers. And they’re real good. They always have been.”

  “How do we get to him?”

  “Through the victim.”

  “Square one. The victims are all dead ends. You’ll have to come up with something better than that.”

  “His boss calls himself the Zec.”

  “What kind of a name is that?”

  “It’s a word, not a name. Old-time Soviet slang. A zec was a labor camp inmate. In the Gulag in Siberia.”

  “Those camps are ancient history.”

  “Which makes the Zec a very old man. But a very tough old man. Probably way tougher than we can imagine.”

  The Zec was tired after his stint with the backhoe. But he was used to being tired. He had been tired for sixty-three years. He had been tired since the day the recruiter came to his village, in the early fall of 1942. His village was four thousand miles from anywhere, and the recruiter was a type of Moscow Russian nobody had ever seen before. He was brisk, and self-assured, and confident. He permitted no argument. No discussion. All males between the ages of sixteen and fifty were to come with him.

  The Zec was seventeen at that point. Initially he was overlooked, because he was in prison. He had slept with an older man’s wife, and then beaten the guy badly when he complained about it. The beaten guy claimed exemption from the draft because of his physical condition, and then he told the recruiter about his assailant in prison. The recruiter was anxious to make his numbers, so the Zec was hauled out of his cell and told to line up with the others in the village square. He did so quite happily. He assumed he was being given a ride to freedom. He assumed there would be a hundred opportunities just to walk away.

  He was wrong.

  The recruits were locked into a truck, and then a train, for a journey that lasted five weeks. Formal induction into the Red Army happened along the way. Uniforms were issued, thick woolen garments, and a coat, and a pair of felt-lined boots, and a pay book. But no actual pay. No weapons. And no training either, beyond a brief stop in a snow-covered rail yard, where a commissar brayed over and over again at the locked train through a huge metal megaphone. The guy repeated a simple twenty-word speech, which the Zec remembered ever afterward: The fate of the world is being decided at Stalingrad, where you will fight to the last for the Motherland.

  The five-week journey ended on the eastern bank of the Volga, where the recruits were unloaded like cattle and forced to run straight for a small assemblage of old river ferries and pleasure cruisers. Half a mile away on the opposite bank was a vision from hell. A city, larger than anything the Zec had ever seen before, was in ruins, belching smoke and fire. The river was burning and exploding with mortar shells. The sky was full of airplanes, which lined up and fell into dives, dropping bombs, firing guns. There were corpses everywhere, and body parts, and screaming wounded.

  The Zec was forced onto a small boat that had a gaily-colored striped sunshade. It was crammed tight with soldiers. Nobody had room to move. Nobody had a weapon. The boat lurched out into the freezing current and airplanes fell on it like flies on shit. The crossing lasted fifteen minutes and at the end of it the Zec was slimy with his neighbors’ blood.

  He was forced off onto a narrow wooden pier and made to line up single file and then made to run toward the city, past a staging post where the second phase of his military training took place: two quartermasters were doling out loaded rifles and spare ammunition clips in an endless alternate sequence and chanting what later struck the Zec as a poem, or a song, or a hymn to complete and utter insanity, over and over again without pausing:

  The one with the rifle shoots

  The one without follows him

  When the one with the rifle is killed

  The one who is following picks up the rifle and shoots.

  The Zec was handed an ammunition clip. No rifle. He was shoved forward, and blindly followed the back of the man ahead. He turned a corner. Passed in front of a Red Army machine-gun nest. At first he thought the front line must therefore be very close. But then a commissar with a flag and another huge megaphone roared at him: No retreat! If you turn back even one step we will shoot you down! So the Zec ran helplessly onward and turned another corner and stepped into a hail of German bullets. He stopped, half-turned, and was hit three times in the arms and legs. He was bowled over and came to rest lying on the shattered remains of a brick wall and within minutes was buried under a mounting pile of corpses.

  He came to forty-eight hours later in an improvised hospital and made his first acquaintance with Soviet military justice: harsh, ponderous, ideological, but running strictly in accordance with its own arcane rules. The matter at issue was caused by his having half-turned: Were his wounds inflicted by the Motherland’s enemy, or had he been retreating toward his own side’s guns? Because of the physical ambiguity he was spared execution and sentenced to a penal battalion instead. Thus began a process of survival that had so far lasted sixty-three years.

  A process he intended to continue.

  He dialed Grigor Linsky’s number.

  “We can assume the soldier is talking,” he said. “Whatever he knows, they all know now. Th
erefore it’s time to get ourselves an insurance policy.”

  Franklin said, “We’re really no further ahead. Are we? No way is Emerson going to accept a damn thing unless we give him more than we’ve got right now.”

  “So work the victim list,” Reacher said.

  “That could take forever. Five lives, five life histories.”

  “So let’s focus.”

  “Great. Terrific. Just tell me which one you want me to focus on.”

  Reacher nodded. Recalled Helen Rodin’s description of what she had heard. The first shot, and then a tiny pause, and then the next two. Then another pause, a little longer, but really only a split second, and then the last three. He closed his eyes. In his mind he pictured Bellantonio’s audio graph from the cell phone voice mail. Pictured his own mute simulation, in the gloom of the new parking garage, his right arm extended like a rifle: click, click-click, click-click-click.

  “Not the first one,” he said. “Not the first cold shot. No guarantee of hitting anything with that. Therefore the first victim was meaningless. Part of the window dressing. Not the last three, either. That was bang-bang-bang. The deliberate miss, and more window dressing. The job was already done by then.”

  “So, the second or the third. Or both of them.”

  Click, click-click.

  Reacher opened his eyes.

  “The third,” he said. “There’s a rhythm there. The first cold shot, then a lead-in, and then the money shot. The target. Then a break. His eye is lagging in the scope. He’s making sure the target is down. It is. So then the last three.”