floor. He went the other way with his right arm and folded it around Jodie’s waist. The steel hook was bright against her suit. He was moving her before the other guy had even hit the floor. He clamped his right arm hard around her and lifted her off her feet and dragged her backward. The crash of the shot from the Steyr was still rumbling.
“How many?” Reacher screamed.
She was as fast as Leon ever was.
“Two down, one up,” she screamed back.
So the guy with the hook was the only one, but he was already swinging the shotgun around. It arced up through the air and he used the momentum to crunch the pump. Reacher was caught half-exposed, low down, scrambling out from behind the counter. It was only a tiny fractional opportunity, but the guy went right ahead and took it. He fired low and the gun flashed and boomed and the reception counter splintered into ten thousand pieces. Reacher ducked his head but sharp needles of wood and metal and hot stray pellets smashed him in the side of the face like a blow from a sledgehammer, all the way from his cheek to his forehead. He felt the dull crump and the sharp agonizing sting of serious injury. It was like falling from a window and hitting the ground headfirst. He rolled up dazed and the guy was hauling Jodie backward through the doorway, crunching the pump once more against the shotgun’s weight as it moved. Reacher was dull and motionless against the back wall and the muzzle was coming up on him. His forehead was numb and icy. There was terrible pain there.
He raised the Steyr. The silencer pointed straight at Jodie. He jerked it a fraction left and right. It still pointed at Jodie. The guy was making himself small behind her. He was craning around with his left hand, leveling the shotgun. His finger was tightening on the trigger. Reacher was immobile against the wall. He stared at Jodie, fixing her face in his mind before he died. Then a fair-haired woman was suddenly behind her, shouldering desperately into the guy’s back, pushing him off-balance. He staggered and whirled and clubbed at her with the shotgun barrel. Reacher caught a glimpse of a pink dress as she went down.
Then the shotgun was swinging back toward him. But Jodie was bouncing and wrestling against the guy’s arm. She was stamping and kicking. The guy was staggering around against her energy. He blundered with her all the way back out into the reception area and tripped against the Suburban driver’s legs. He fell with Jodie and the shotgun fired against the corpse. There was deafening sound and smoke and the obscene bloom and spray of dead blood and tissue. The guy came up on his knees and Reacher tracked him all the way with the Steyr. The guy dropped the shotgun and went for his pocket and came back with a shiny short-barrel revolver. He thumbed the hammer. The click was loud. Jodie was heaving left and right against his arm tight around her waist. Left and right, left and right, furiously, randomly. Reacher had no clear shot. Blood was pouring into his left eye. His forehead was pounding and bleeding. He closed the useless eye against the wetness and squinted with the right. The shiny revolver came all the way up and jammed hard into Jodie’s side. She gasped and stopped moving and the guy’s face came out from behind her head, smiling savagely.
“Drop the gun, asshole,” he panted.
Reacher kept the Steyr exactly where it was. One eye open, one eye closed, jagged bolts of pain hammering in his head, the length of the silencer trained on the guy’s distorted grin.
“I’ll shoot her,” the guy snarled.
“Then I’ll shoot you,” Reacher said. “She dies, you die.”
The guy stared. Then he nodded.
“Impasse,” he said.
Reacher nodded back. It looked that way. He shook his head to clear it. It just made the pain worse. Stalemate. Even if he could fire first, the guy might still get a shot off. With his finger tense on the trigger like that and the gun hard in her side, the pulse of death would probably be enough to do it. It was too much to risk. He kept the Steyr where it was and stood up slowly and pulled his shirttail out and wiped his face with it, all the time squinting one-eyed down the barrel. The guy took a breath and stood up, too, hauling Jodie with him. She tried to ease away from the pressure of the gun, but he kept her pulled in tight with his right arm. He turned his elbow outward and the hook pivoted and the point dug in against her waist.
“So we need to deal,” he said.
Reacher stood and mopped his eye and said nothing. His head was buzzing with pain. Buzzing and screaming. He was beginning to understand and he was in serious trouble.
“We need to deal,” the guy said again.
“No deal,” Reacher replied.
The guy twisted the hook a little more and jammed the revolver in a little harder. Jodie gasped. It was a Smith and Wesson Model 60. Two-inch barrel, stainless steel,.38 caliber, five shots in the cylinder. The sort of thing a woman carries in her purse or a man conceals on his body. The barrel was so short and the guy was digging it in so hard his knuckles were hard up against Jodie’s side. She was hanging forward against the pressure of his arm. Her hair was falling over her face. Her eyes were looking up straight at Reacher, and they were the loveliest eyes he had ever seen.
“Nobody says no deal to Victor Hobie,” the guy snarled.
Reacher fought the pain and kept the Steyr steady and level on the guy’s forehead, right where the pink scars met the gray skin.
“You’re not Victor Hobie,” he said. “You’re Carl Allen, and you’re a piece of shit.”
There was silence. Pain was hammering in his head. Jodie was staring harder at him, questions in her eyes.
“You’re not Victor Hobie,” he said again. “You’re Carl Allen.”
The name hung in the air and the guy seemed to recoil away from it. He dragged Jodie backward, stepping over the corpse of the thickset guy, turning her to keep her body between himself and Reacher, walking slowly backward into the dark office. Reacher followed unsteadily with the Steyr held high and level. There were people in the office. Reacher saw dimmed windows and living-room furniture and three people milling around, the fair-haired woman in the silk dress and two men in suits. They were all staring at him. Staring at his gun, and the silencer, and his forehead, and the blood pouring down onto his shirt. Then they were regrouping themselves like automatons and moving toward a tight square group of sofas. They threaded their separate ways inside and sat down and placed their hands on the glass coffee table which was filling the space. Six hands on the table, three faces turned toward him, expressions of hope and fear and astonishment visible on each of them.
“You’re wrong,” the guy with the hook said.
He backed away with Jodie in a wide circle until he was behind the farthest sofa. Reacher moved with them all the way and stopped opposite. His Steyr was leveled right over the heads of the three cowering people leaning on the coffee table. His blood was dripping off his chin onto the back of the sofa below him.
“No, I’m right,” he said. “You’re Carl Allen. Born April eighteenth, 1949, south of Boston, some leafy suburb. Normal little family, going nowhere. You got drafted in the summer of 1968. Private soldier, capabilities rated below average in every category. Sent to Vietnam as an infantryman. A grunt, a humble foot soldier. War changes people, and when you got there you turned into a real bad guy. You started scamming. Buying and selling, trading drugs and girls and whatever else you could get your filthy hands on. Then you started lending money. You turned really vicious. You bought and sold favors. You lived like a king for a long time. Then somebody got wise. Pulled you out of your cozy little situation and put you in-country. The jungle. The real war. A tough unit, with a tough officer riding you. It pissed you off. First chance you got, you fragged the officer. And then his sergeant. But the unit turned you in. Very unusual. They didn’t like you, did they? Probably owed you money. They called it in and two cops called Gunston and Zabrinski came out to pick you up. You want to deny anything yet?”
The guy said nothing. Reacher swallowed. His head was hurting badly. There was real pain digging in deep behind the cuts. Real serious pain.
“They came in a Huey,” he said. “A decent young kid called Kaplan was flying it. Next day he came back, flying copilot for an ace named Victor Hobie. Gunston and Zabrinski had you ready and waiting on the ground. But Hobie’s Huey was hit on takeoff. It went down again, four miles away. He was killed, along with Kaplan and Gunston and Zabrinski and three other crew called Bamford and Tardelli and Soper. But you survived. You were burned and you lost your hand, but you were alive. And your evil little brain was still ticking over. You swapped dog tags with the first guy you got to. Happened to be Victor Hobie. You crawled away with his tags around your neck. Left yours on his body. Right then and there Carl Allen and his criminal past ceased to exist. You made it to a field hospital, and they thought they were treating Hobie. They wrote his name down in their records. Then you killed an orderly and
