Lee Child - Bad Luck and Trouble

He made a split-second decision to wait for O’Donnell.

O’Donnell’s angle was better. Much better. He had fallen on top of Dixon, toward the curb. Toward the gutter. His line of sight was inward. Toward the construction. A miss or a through-and-through would do no harm at all. The bullet would spend itself in a pile of sand.

Better to let O’Donnell fire.

Reacher twisted as he hit the ground. He was in that zone where his mind was fast but the physical world was slow. He felt like his body was mired in a vat of molasses. He was screaming at it to move move move but it was responding with extreme reluctance. Beyond him Neagley was thumping dustily to earth with slow-motion precision. In the corner of his eye he saw her shoulder hitting the ground and then her momentum moving her head like a rag doll’s. He moved his own head with enormous effort, like it was strapped with heavy weights, and he saw Dixon sprawling underneath O’Donnell.

He saw O’Donnell’s left arm moving with painful slowness. Saw his hand. Saw his thumb dropping the Hardballer’s safety lever.

Their attacker fired again.

And missed again. With a preplanned shot into empty air where O’Donnell’s back had been. The guy was following a sequence. He had rehearsed. Fire-move-fire , Reacher and O’Donnell first. A sound plan, but the guy was unable to react to unexpected contingencies. He was a slow, conventional thinker. His brain had vapor-locked. Good, but not good enough.

Reacher saw O’Donnell’s hand tighten around the grip of his gun. Saw his finger squeeze the slack out of the trigger. Saw the gun move up, up, up.

Reacher saw O’Donnell fire.

A snapshot, taken from an untidy uncompleted sprawl on the sidewalk. Taken before his body mass had even settled.

Too low , Reacher thought. That’s a leg wound at best .

He forced his head around. He was right. It was a leg wound. But a leg wound from a high-velocity jacketed.45 was not a pretty thing. It was like taking a high-torque power drill and fitting it with a foot-long half-inch masonry bit and drilling right through a limb. All in a lot less than a thousandth of a second. The damage was spectacular. The guy took the slug in the lower thigh and his femur exploded from the inside like it had been strapped with a bomb. Immense trauma. Paralyzing shock. Instant catastrophic blood loss from shattered arteries.

The guy stayed vertical but his gun hand dropped and O’Donnell was instantly on his feet. He scrambled up and his hand went in and out of his pocket and he covered the twenty feet full tilt and slammed the guy in the face with his knuckles. A straight right, with two hundred pounds of charging body mass behind it. Like hitting a watermelon with a sledgehammer.

The guy went down on his back. O’Donnell kicked his gun away and crouched at his side and jammed the Hardballer into his throat.

Game over, right there.

Reacher helped Dixon up. Neagley got up on her own. O’Donnell was scooting around in a tight circle, trying to keep his feet out of the big welling puddle of blood coming from the guy’s leg. Clearly his femoral artery was wide open. A healthy human heart was a pretty powerful pump and this guy’s was busy dumping the whole of his blood supply onto the street. A guy his size, there had been probably fifteen pints in there at the beginning. Most of them were already gone.

“Step away, Dave,” Reacher called. “Let him bleed out. No point ruining a pair of shoes.”

“Who is he?” Dixon asked.

“We may never know,” Neagley said. “His face is a real mess.”

She was right. O’Donnell’s ceramic knuckleduster had done its work well. The guy looked like he had been attacked with hammers and knives. Reacher walked a wide circle around his head and grabbed his collar and pulled him backward. The lake of blood changed to a teardrop shape. Reacher took advantage of dry pavement and squatted down and checked through his pockets.

Nothing in any of them.

No wallet, no ID, no nothing.

Just car keys and a remote clicker, on a plain steel ring.

The guy was pale and turning blue. Reacher put a finger on the pulse in his neck and felt an irregular thready beat. The blood coming out of his thigh was turning foamy. There was major air in his vascular system. Blood out, air in. Simple physics. Nature abhors a vacuum.

“He’s on the way out,” Reacher said.

“Good shooting, Dave,” Dixon said.

“Left-handed, too,” O’Donnell said. “I hope you noticed that.”

“You’re right-handed.”

“I was falling on my right arm.”

“Outstanding,” Reacher said.

“What did you hear?”

“The slide. It’s an evolution thing. Like a predator stepping on a twig.”

“So there’s an advantage in being closer to the cavemen than the rest of us.”

“You bet there is.”

“But who does that? Attacks without a round in the chamber?”

Reacher stepped away and looked down for a full-length view.

“I think I recognize him,” he said.

“How could you?” Dixon asked. “His own mother wouldn’t know him.”

“The suit,” Reacher said. “I think I saw it before.”

“Here?”

“I don’t know. Somewhere. I can’t remember.”

“Think hard.”

O’Donnell said, “I never saw that suit before.”

“Me either,” Neagley said.

“Nor me,” Dixon said. “But whatever, it’s a good sign, isn’t it? Nobody tried to shoot us in LA. We must be getting close.”

Reacher tossed the guy’s gun and car keys to Neagley and broke down a section of the construction site’s fence. He hauled the guy through the gap as fast as he could, to minimize the blood smear. The guy was still leaking a little. Reacher dragged him across rough ground past tall piles of gravel until he found a wide trench built up with plywood formwork. The trench was about eight feet deep. The bottom was lined with gravel. The formwork was there to mold concrete for a foundation. Reacher rolled the guy into the trench. He fell eight feet and crunched on the stones and settled heavily, half on his side.

“Find shovels,” Reacher said. “We need to cover him with more gravel.”

Dixon said, “Is he dead yet?”

“Who cares?”

O’Donnell said, “We should put him on his back. That way we need less gravel.”

“You volunteering?” Reacher said.

“I’ve got a good suit on. And I did all the hard work so far.”

So Reacher shrugged and vaulted down into the pit. Kicked the guy onto his back and stamped him flat and got him partway embedded in the gravel that was already there. Then he hauled himself back out and O’Donnell handed him a shovel. Between them they had to make ten trips to the gravel pile before the guy was adequately hidden. Neagley found a standpipe and unrolled a hose and turned on the water. She rinsed the sidewalk and chased watery blood into the gutter. Then she waited and followed the others out backward and hosed away their footprints from the construction site’s sand. Reacher pulled the fence back into shape. Turned a full circle and checked the view. Not perfect, but reasonable . He knew there would be plenty a competent CSI team could get its teeth into, but there was nothing that would attract anyone’s attention in the short term. They had a margin of safety. A few hours, at least. Maybe longer. Maybe concrete would get poured right at the start of the work day and the guy would become just one more missing person. Not the only person missing in a building’s foundation, he guessed, in Las Vegas.

He breathed out.

“OK,” he said. “ Now we take the rest of the night off.”

They dusted themselves down and formed up and resumed their walk down the Strip, slowly, four abreast, ready to relax. But Wright was waiting for them in the hotel lobby. The house security manager. For a Vegas guy, he didn’t have a great poker face. It was clear that he was uptight about something.