One Shot (29 page)

'Who's there?' she asked.

'It's me,' he said.

"What do you want?'

'We need to talk.'

'I was asleep.'

'I'm sorry.'

'It's awful late.'

'I know,' Chenko said. 'But it's very urgent.'

There was a pause.

Wait a minute,' she said.

Chenko heard her shuffle back towards her bedroom.

Then silence. Then she came back. The door opened.

She was standing there, clutching a robe around her.

"What?' she said.

'You need to come with us,' Chenko said.

Vladimir stepped out of the shadow. 'Why is he here?'

Sandy asked. 'He's helping me tonight,' Chenko said.

'What do you want?' You need to go out'

'Like this? I can't'

'I agree,' Chenko said. 'You need to get dressed. Like
for a date.' 'A date?'

'You need to look really good.' 'But I'll have to shower.

Do my hair.' 'We have time.' 'A date with who?'

You just have to be seen. Like you were ready for a
date.' 'At this time of night? The whole town is asleep.'

'Not the whole town. We're awake, for instance.' 'How
much do I get?'

'Two hundred,' Chenko said. 'Because it's so late.'

'How long will it take?'

'Just a minute. You just have to be seen walking
somewhere.' 'I don't know.'

'Two hundred for a minute's work isn't bad.' 'It isn't a
minute's work. It'll take me an hour to get ready.' 'Two-fifty, then,' Chenko said. 'OK,' Sandy said.

Chenko and Vladimir waited in her living room,
listening through the thin walls, hearing the shower
running, hearing the hair dryer, the held breaths as she
put on her makeup, the elastic snap of undergarments,
the whisper of fabric on skin. Chenko saw that Vladimir
was restless and sweating. Not because of the task
ahead. But because there was a woman in a state of
undress in a nearby room. Vladimir was unreliable, in
certain situations. Chenko was glad he was there to
supervise. If he hadn't been, the plan would have
derailed for sure.

Sandy walked into the living room after an hour
looking, as the Americans would say, like a million
dollars. She was wearing a filmy black blouse that was
nearly transparent. Underneath it was a black bra that
moulded her breasts into twin mounds of implausible
roundness. She had on tight black pants that ended just
below the knee. Pedal pushers? Capri pants? Chenko
wasn't sure of the name. She was wearing black high-heeled shoes. With her pale skin and her red hair and
her green eyes she looked like a picture in a magazine.

Pity, Chenko thought.

'My money?' Sandy asked.

'Afterwards,' Chenko said. 'When we bring you back.'

'Let me see it.'

'It's in the car.'

'So let's go look at it,' Sandy said.

They walked in single file. Chenko led the way. Sandy
came next. Vladimir brought up the rear. They walked
under the highway. The car was right there ahead of
them. It was cold and misted over. There was no money
in it. None at all. Chenko knew that. So he stopped six
feet short and turned around. Nodded to Vladimir. 'Now,'

he said.

Vladimir reached forward with his right hand and put it
on Sandy's right shoulder from behind. He used it to
turn her upper body sideways and then he crashed his
left fist into her right temple, a little above and in front of
her ear. It was a colossal blow. Explosive. Her head
snapped violently sideways and round and her legs
gave way and she fell to the ground vertically like an
empty suit of clothes slipping off a hanger. Chenko
squatted down next to her. Waited a moment for the
body to settle and then felt the neck for a pulse. There
wasn't one. 'You broke her neck,' he said.

Vladimir nodded.

'It's about placement,' he said. 'The main vector is
mostly sideways, obviously, but you try for a little
rotation, too. So it's not so much a break. It's more like a
wrenching action. Like a hangman's noose.' 'Is your
hand OK?'

'It will be tender tomorrow.'

'Good work.'

'I try my best'

They unlocked the car and raised the rear armrest and
laid the body across the back seat. There was just
enough space, side to side. She had been a small girl.

Not tall. Then they got in the front together and drove
off. They looped well to the east and came up on the
Metropole Palace from behind. They avoided the bay
where the garbage was piled and found a side alley.

They stopped outside a fire exit. Vladimir slid out and
opened the rear door. Pulled the body out by the
shoulders and left it where it fell. Then he got back in.

Chenko drove on and paused after five yards and
turned in his seat. The body was lying in a heap against
the alley's far wall. Directly opposite the fire door. It
looked like a plausible scenario. She had fled the
soldier's room in shame and panic, chosen not to wait
for the elevator, and run down the fire stairs and out into
the night. Maybe she had stumbled at that point and
aggravated an injury already done to her. Maybe she
had tripped and fallen against the wall, and the shock
had dislodged an already wrenched vertebra.

Chenko turned back and faced front and drove on, not
fast, not slow, not drawing attention, not standing out,
eight miles north and west, all the way back to the Zee's
house.

EIGHT

REACHER WOKE HIMSELF UP AT SEVEN IN THE

MORNING AND WENT out to check for a tail and to look
for a drugstore. He walked a zigzag half-mile and saw
nobody behind him. He found a drugstore two blocks
east of the motor court and bought black coffee in a
cardboard cup, a pack of throwaway razors, a can of
shaving foam, and a new tube of toothpaste. He carried
his purchases back by a roundabout route and put his
clothes back under the mattress and sat on the bed and
drank the coffee. Then he showered and shaved, using
his full twenty-two minute routine. He washed his hair
twice. Then he dressed again and went out for breakfast
to the only place he could find, which was the drive-through he had seen the day before. It had a small
counter inside. He had more coffee and an English
muffin filled with a round piece of ham and something
that might have once been egg, first dried and
powdered and then reconstituted. His threshold of
culinary acceptability was very low, but right then he felt
he might be pushing at the bottom edge of his personal
envelope.

He followed the muffin with a piece of lemon pie, for a
sugar hit. It was better than the muffin, so he had a
second piece, with a second cup of coffee.

Then he walked south to the barbershop. He pulled the
door and sat down in the chair at eight thirty exactly.

By which time the homicide investigation outside the
Metropole Palace was already three hours old. The body
in the alley had been discovered at half past five in the
morning by a cleaner coming in to work. The cleaner
was a middle-aged man from Honduras. He didn't touch
the body. Didn't check for vital signs. The way it was
lying there told him all he needed to know. The slack
emptiness of death is recognizable anywhere. The guy
just rushed inside and told the night porter. Then he
went home again, because he had no green card and
didn't want to be around a police investigation. The
night porter dialled 911 from the desk phone and then
went out through the fire door to take a look. Came back
inside thirty seconds later, not having enjoyed it.

Two patrol cars and an ambulance showed up within
eight minutes. Paramedics confirmed the DOA and the
ambulance went away again. The patrolmen blocked off
the alley and the fire exit and then took a statement from
the night porter.

He said he had stepped out for some air and
discovered the body himself, to protect the illegal from
Honduras. It was close to true. Certainly the patrolmen
had no reason to doubt his word. They just stood back
and waited for Emerson.

Emerson got there by six twenty-five. He brought his
number two, a woman called Donna Bianca, and the city
ME, and Bellantonio himself to run the crime scene.

Technical work occupied the first thirty minutes.

Measurement, photography, the accumulation of trace
evidence. Then Emerson got the OK and stepped close
to the body and ran into his first major problem. The girl
had no purse and no ID. Nobody had the slightest idea
who she was.

Ann Yanni showed up behind the Metropole at seven
fifteen. She had an NBC crew with her, consisting of a
cameraman and a sound guy with a microphone on a
long boom. The microphone had a grey fur windsock on
it and the boom was ten feet long. The guy put his hips
against the police tape and extended his arms as far as
he could and heard Emerson's voice in his
headphones. Emerson was talking to Bianca about
prostitution.

The ME had checked the girl's arms and thighs and
between her toes and found no needle tracks. So she
hadn't been there to score. So maybe she was hooking.

Who else would come out the side door of a
downtown hotel in the middle of the night, dressed like
that? She was young and she still had her looks.

Therefore she wouldn't have been cheap. Therefore she
would have been carrying a big purse full of twenties
that had just come out of some businessman's ATM.

She had run into somebody waiting for her. Either
somebody waiting for her specifically, or somebody
waiting on the off chance for someone like her.

Whoever, he had snatched her purse and hit her in the
head, a little harder than necessary.

A nineteen-or twenty-year-old who wasn't an addict
wouldn't necessarily have been fingerprinted, unless
she had a vice conviction somewhere. Emerson wasn't
willing to count on that, therefore he didn't expect to
discover her identity through the databases. He
expected to discover it inside the hotel, either from the
night porter who had pimped her in and out, or through
the John who had called her.

'Nobody leaves,' he said to Bianca. We'll talk to all the
guests and all the staff one by one. So find a room
somewhere. And tell all units to be on the lookout for a
guy with more new twenties than he should have.'

'A big guy,' Bianca said.

Emerson nodded. 'A real big guy. That was some
punch.'

The ME took the body away to the morgue and Donna
Bianca commandeered the hotel bar and the interviews
were two-thirds through by eight thirty in the morning.

The barber was a competent old guy who had
probably been cutting the same style for close to fifty
years. He went for what the military would have called a
whitewall. He left an inch and a half on the top and used
his clippers to shave the bottom and the sides up
towards it. Then he flipped the clippers over and
squared off the sideburns and cleaned the fuzz off the
neck.

It was a style Reacher was familiar with. He had worn it
most of his life, except for periods when he had been
too lazy to care, and a couple of six-month stretches
when he had favoured an all-over number-one buzz cut.

The barber did the thing with the hand mirror, to show
Reacher the back.