One Shot (Page 51)

Eventually he got the number entered and he concentrated hard and pressed the call button with his left-hand pinkie. Then he juggled the phone into his other palm and cupped it near his ear. He didn’t need to hold it close. His hearing was still excellent, which was a miracle all by itself.

"Yes?" Linsky said.

"They can’t find him," the Zec said. "I shouldn’t have told you to break off our own surveillance. My mistake."

"Where have they looked?"

"Here and there. He stayed last night at the motor court. They’ve got it staked out, but I’m sure he won’t go back. They’ve got a man at the lawyer’s office. Other than that, they’re stumbling around in the dark."

"What do you want me to do?"

"I want you to find him. Use Chenko and Vladimir. And I’ll send Raskin to you. Work together. Find him tonight and then call me."

Reacher stopped two blocks short of the Marriott. He knew what Emerson would be doing. He had been Emerson for thirteen years. Emerson would be running down a mental list. Likely haunts, known associates. Likely haunts at this time of day would include eating places. So Emerson would be sending cars to diners and restaurants and cafes, including the salad place that Helen Rodin liked and the sports bar. Then he would move on to known associates, which pretty much limited him to Helen Rodin herself. He would have the lobby cop ride up to the fourth floor and knock on the office door.

Then he would take a chance on Eileen Hutton.

So Reacher stopped two blocks short of the Marriott and looked around for a place to wait. He found one behind a shoe store. There was a three-sided corral made of head-high brick walls shielding a shoulder-high plastic garbage receptacle from public view. Reacher stepped in and found that if he leaned his shoulder on the trash can he could see a yard-wide sliver of the Marriott’s main door. He wasn’t uncomfortable. And it was the best-smelling garbage dump he had ever been in. The can smelled of fresh cardboard and new shoes. Better than the kind of place you find behind a fish store.

He figured if Emerson was efficient he would have to wait less than thirty minutes. Very efficient, less than twenty. Average, somewhere up around an hour. He leaned on the trash can and passed the time. It wasn’t late but the streets were already quiet. There were very few people out and about. He watched, and waited. Then the smell of new leather from the discarded shoe boxes distracted him. It started him thinking about footwear. Maybe he should drop by the store sometime and pick out a brand-new pair. He stuck his foot out and looked down. The boat shoes he had on were soft and light and the soles were thin. They had been fine for Miami. Not so good for his current situation. He could foresee a time when he would appreciate something heavier.

Then he looked down again. Rocked back and brought his feet together and took the same pace forward. And stopped. He tried it again with his other foot, and stopped again, like a freeze-frame of a man walking. He stared down, with something in the back of his mind. Something from Bellantonio’s evidence. Something among all those hundreds of printed pages.

Then he looked up again, because he sensed movement in the corner of his eye at the Marriott’s door two blocks away. He saw a squad car’s hood. It moved into his field of view and dipped once as it braked and stopped. Then two cops appeared, in uniform, walking forward. He glanced at his watch. Twenty-three minutes. He smiled. Emerson was good, but not unbelievable. The cops went in through the door. They would spend five minutes with the desk clerk. The clerk would give up Hutton’s room number without a fight. Generally speaking, hotel clerks from small heartland cities weren’t ACLU activists. And guests were gone tomorrow, but the local PD was always there.

So the cops would go to Hutton’s room. They would knock on her door. Hutton would let them in. She had nothing to hide. The cops would poke around and be on their way. Ten minutes, tops, beginning to end.

Reacher checked his watch again, and waited.

The cops were back out after eight minutes. They paused outside the doors, tiny figures far in the distance. One of them ducked his head to his collar and used his radio, calling in a negative progress report, listening for the next destination. The next likely haunt. The next known associate. Pure routine. Have a fun evening, boys, Reacher thought. Because I’m going to. That’s for damn sure. He watched them drive off and waited another minute in case they were driving his way. Then he stepped out of the brick corral and headed for Eileen Hutton.

Grigor Linsky waited in his car in a fire lane in a supermarket parking lot, framed against a window that was entirely pasted over with a gigantic orange advertisement for ground beef at a very low price. Old and spoiled, Linsky thought. Or full of Listeria. The kind of thing the Zec and I would once have killed to eat. And killed was the truth. Linsky had no illusions. None at all. The Zec and he were bad people made worse by experience. Their shared suffering had conferred no grace or nobility. Quite the reverse. Men in their situation inclined toward grace and nobility had died within hours. But the Zec and he had survived, like sewer rats, by abandoning inhibition, by fighting and clawing, by betraying those stronger than themselves, by dominating those weaker.

And they had learned. What works once works always.

Linsky watched in his mirror and saw Raskin’s car coming toward him. It was a Lincoln Town Car, the old square style, black and dusty, listing like a holed battleship. It stopped nose-to-tail with him and Raskin got out. He looked exactly like what he was, which was a second-rate Moscow hoodlum. Square build, flat face, cheap leather jacket, dull eyes. Forty-some years old. A stupid man, in Linsky’s opinion, but he had survived the Red Army’s last hurrah in Afghanistan, which had to count for something. Plenty of people smarter than Raskin hadn’t come back whole, or come back at all. Which made Raskin a survivor, which was the quality that meant more than any other to the Zec.

Raskin opened the rear door and slid into the back seat behind Linsky. He didn’t speak. Just handed over four copies of Emerson’s Wanted poster. A delivery from the Zec. How the Zec had gotten the posters, Linsky wasn’t sure. But he could make a guess. The posters themselves were pretty good. The likeness was pretty accurate. It would serve its purpose.

"Thank you," Linsky said politely.

Raskin didn’t respond.

Chenko and Vladimir showed up two minutes later, in Chenko’s Cadillac. Chenko was driving. Chenko always drove. He parked behind Raskin’s Lincoln. Three large black cars, all in a line. Jack Reacher’s funeral procession. Linsky smiled to himself. Chenko and Vladimir got out of their car and walked forward, one small and dark, the other big and fair. They got into Linsky’s own Cadillac, Chenko in the front, Vladimir in the back next to Raskin, so that 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.