Lee Child - Make Me

So far so good.

Reacher nudged Evan one way and Chang the other and pulled Emily out of the crowd. He reeled her in, all thrashing knees and elbows, and he turned her around and shoved her onward, hard, into the hallway with the silver-framed photographs of the unknown relatives.

He said, “The bedroom is that way.”

Evan scrambled past him, grabbing at his daughter, and McCann’s sister jostled him, almost as quick, and Chang piled in behind her, with the first-base guy following, some sudden concern on his face about the emerging chaos, and behind him the second-base spokesperson crowded in, with the third-base guy coming in from the rear. Eight people in total, clumsy, stumbling, forced nearly to single file, funneling into a dark narrow hallway.

Reacher dropped down in the crowd and scooped up the Python, two-handed to stop it skittering on the polished wood, and he snugged the butt in his palm, solid and reassuring, and he fit his finger in the guard, against the trigger, hard and substantial, and he brought the gun up, three pounds of weight, and he put his left hand on the top of Lydia Lair’s head, and buckled her knees, and forced her down, and he aimed over Chang’s right shoulder and fired, at the center of the man-on-first’s face.

There were many factors that made a handgun either accurate or not accurate. The velocity of the round and the length of the barrel were the most important, aided or not by aerodynamic subtleties like the degree of spin imparted by the rifling grooves, which either worked well or didn’t, depending on the bullet. Precision of manufacture was influential, with careful machining of quality metal much preferred over casting from leftover slag. Not that anything much mattered at seven feet. A pore to the left or a wrinkle to the right was immaterial. The human face was a big enough target, generally hard to miss at close quarters, and the man-on-first’s was no exception.

It was a through-and-through, obviously, given the short range and the power of the Magnum round. Twenty feet behind the guy’s head the wall instantly cratered, the size of a punch bowl, and a ghastly split second later the contents of the guy’s brain pan arrived to fill it, with a wet slap, all red and gray and purple. Meanwhile the guy himself was going down vertically, as if he had stepped into an elevator shaft, and Reacher was turning fractionally left, from the waist, shoulders braced, looking for the third-base guy, the furthest away, because some back-of-the-brain calculation was telling him the guy had a better line of return fire, and he wasn’t drooling as bad as the second-base guy, so maybe he was less invested in the upcoming entertainment, and therefore more likely to start blasting, even at the risk of damaged goods.

Reacher eased the trigger home, and he felt the mechanism turn, gears and cams and levers, effortless, and the gun fired, in his mind a considered shot, a decent interval after his first, but in the real world almost a double tap, a fast bang-move-bang, a craftsman going about his business, calmly, using his natural born gifts. It was a through-and-through again, inevitably, in the guy’s upper lip, out the base of his skull, shattering the slider window, and exploding a pile of wedding presents on the table in the yard outside, in a cloud of paper fragments, white and silver, like confetti a few days early. The broken glass came down like a waterfall, governed by gravity, and therefore at the same downward speed as the third-base guy, who was also governed by gravity. Reacher saw an inch of their synchronized descent, and then he whipped away to the right, to find the second-base guy.

Because at that point the race was really on, and Reacher was losing. One guy was nothing, and two guys were never really a problem either, but a third guy could get tricky. The bang-bang of his pals going down tended to concentrate his mind, and worse than that gave him time to get his head in the game, to react, to finally realize oh yeah I’ve got a gun in my hand, to bring the gun up, slower than usual, because of the fat suppressor tube, because the gun was twice as long as his muscle memory thought it was, and also heavier, and therefore less controllable, which was all good, because his traverse was a whole lot shorter than Reacher’s needed to be. He was almost there already. Just inches away. Game almost over. But Reacher kept on moving, in what felt like hopeless slow motion, like forcing the back of his hand through molasses on a cold winter’s day, his left eye on the Python’s front sight, his right eye on the hole in the end of the suppressor tube, which was still elliptical, but only slightly. It was an inch away from dead on.

The Python was a foot away from dead on.

Reacher chopped it downward, like cracking a whip backhand, mainly for extra speed and power, but also because the guy was widest at the shoulders, and aiming was a luxury Reacher could no longer afford. The Python was a double-action weapon, which meant the same trigger pull cocked the hammer and then dropped it, so he started early, getting the cylinder turning while the gun was still moving, seeing the hammer come up, feeling the cams and the levers, waiting, then firing, trusting millisecond timing and momentum and deflection and complex four-dimensional calculations.

In other words, a wing and a prayer.

But it worked, apparently.

Because the guy didn’t fire back, and a red chunk came out of his neck. Big enough to feed a family.

A triple play.

Unassisted.

Baseball immortality.

Behind the guy the bullet smashed its way in and out of a powder room and shattered a lamp in the hallway. The guy himself went down in a heap, with what should have been a thump and a clatter, but Reacher heard none of it, because a Magnum’s downside was deafness, at least temporary, especially inside. Around him the others were helpless with shock, as if frozen in place by a camera strobe or a flash of lightning. McCann’s sister was on her knees, her mouth wide open in a scream Reacher couldn’t hear, and Emily was crouched against the base of the hallway wall. Understandable. A Magnum inside was like a stun grenade. Three times.

Then the hiss and the roar dulled a little, and people started moving. Chang went for Emily, and Evan helped his wife up and then shouldered his way through for a look at the living room, whereupon he turned around and started herding people back toward the bedroom again, shaking his head emphatically, saying, “We can’t go in there,” over and over again. Not because of personal discomfort, Reacher supposed, the guy being a doctor and so on, but to spare his family the sight. Although he supposed they had been in a butcher’s shop, and survived the experience. Although three guys was a lot of dead meat. Or maybe he was worried about crime scene integrity. Too much TV.

The Lair family sat on the bed, smaller somehow, except for their eyes, all of them panting hard, all of them trying to hold it together. Chang paced. Reacher wiped the big old Colt and left it on Evan Lair’s night stand.

Lair said, “We should call the police. We have a legal responsibility.”

Chang said, “Yes, sir, that would be my advice. You need to get out in front of this.”

McCann’s sister said, “Peter’s dead, isn’t he?”

No answer.

“They got him and now they came to get me. Because they think I know what he knows. Or knew. Everyone thinks that. That’s what you think.”

Chang said, “We have no proof or first-hand evidence about Peter. It would be most improper for us to tell you anything. And Michael must be told first, anyway.”

“I expect he’s dead too.”

“We have no information.”

The room went quiet.

Then Evan said, “What are we going to do?”