One Shot (43 page)

The beginning of never wanting to do the same thing
twice.

'Thousand yards is a long way,' Gunny Cash said.

'Truth is since I left the Corps I haven't met a man who
could even put a mark on the paper.'

'I might have been able to clip the edge,' Reacher said.

Cash took the frame off the counter and turned and
hung it back on its hook.

He used the ball of his right thumb to level it.

'I don't have a thousand-yard range here,' he said. 'It
would be a waste of ammunition and it would make the
customers feel bad about themselves. But I've got a
nice three-hundred that's not being used this morning.

You could try it.

A guy who could clip the paper at a thousand should
be able to do pretty well at three hundred.'

Reacher said nothing.

'Don't you think?' Cash said.

'I guess,' Reacher said.

Cash opened a drawer and took out a new paper
target. What's your name?'

'Bobby Richardson,' Reacher said. Robert Clinton
Richardson, hit.301 in 1959, 141 hits in 134 games, but
the Yanks still only finished third.

Cash took a roller ball pen from his shirt pocket and
wrote R. Richardson, 300 yards, and the date, and the
time, on the paper.

'Record keeper,' Reacher said.

'Habit,' Cash said. Then he drew an X inside the inner
ring. It was about half an inch tall and because of the
slant of his handwriting a little less than half an inch
wide. He left the paper on the counter and walked away
into the room with the refrigerator noise. Came back out
a minute later carrying a rifle. It was a Remington M24,
with a Leupold Ultra scope and a front bipod. A
standard-issue Marine sniper's weapon. It looked to be
well used but in excellent condition. Cash placed it
sideways on the counter. Detached the magazine and
showed Reacher that it was empty. Operated the bolt
and showed Reacher that the chamber was empty, too.

Reflex, routine, caution, professional courtesy.

'Mine,' he said. 'Zeroed for three hundred yards
exactly. By me myself, personally.'

'Good enough,' Reacher said. Which it was. An ex-Marine who in 1978 had been the third-best shooter in
the world could be trusted on such matters.

'One shot,' Cash said. He took a single cartridge from
his pocket. Held it up.

It was a.300 Winchester round. Match grade. He stood
it upright on the X on the paper target. It hid it entirely.

Then he smiled. Reacher smiled back. He understood
the challenge. He understood it perfectly. Hit the X and
I'll talk to you about James Barr.

At least it's not hand-to-hand combat, Reacher
thought.

'Let's go,' he said.

Outside the air was still and it was neither hot nor cold.

Perfect shooting weather. No shivering, no risk of
thermals or currents or shimmer. No wind.

Cash carried the rifle and the target and Reacher
carried the cartridge in the palm of his hand. They
climbed into Cash's Humvee together and Cash fired it
up with a loud diesel clatter.

'You like this thing?' Reacher asked, over the noise.

'Not really,' Cash said. 'I'd be happier with a sedan. But
it's a question of image. Customers like it'

The landscape was all low hills, covered in grass and
stunted trees. Someone had used a bulldozer to carve
wide straight paths through it. The paths were hundreds
of yards apart and hundreds of yards long, and all of
them were parallel. Each path was a separate rifle range.

Each range was isolated from the others by natural hills
and backed by high berms made from the earth scraped
up by the bulldozer. The whole place looked like a half-built golf course. It was part green, part raw, all covered
with red earth gashes.

White-painted rocks and boulders delineated tracks
through it, some for vehicles, some for foot traffic.

'My family owned this land for ever,' Cash said. 'The
range was my idea. I thought I could be like a golf pro,
or tennis. You know those guys, they've been on the
tour, they retire, they set up teaching afterwards.'

'Did it work?' Reacher asked.

'Not really,' Cash said. 'People come here to shoot, but
to get a guy to admit he doesn't really know how is like
pulling teeth.'

Reacher saw three pickup trucks parked at separate
shooting stations. The guys who had been waiting at
eight o'clock were well into their morning sessions.

They were all prone on coconut mats, firing, pausing,
sighting, firing again.

'It's a living,' Cash said, in answer to a question
Reacher hadn't asked. Then he pulled the Humvee off
the main track and drove three hundred yards down the
length of an empty range. He got out and clipped the
paper target to a frame and got back in and K-turned the
truck and headed back. He parked it neatly and shut it
down.

'Good luck,' he said.

Reacher sat still for a moment. He was more nervous
than he should have been.

He breathed in and held it and felt the thrill of caffeine
in his veins. Just a tiny microscopic tremble. Four fast
cups of strong coffee were not an ideal preparation for
accurate long-distance shooting.

But it was only three hundred yards. Three hundred
yards, with a good rifle, no heat, no cold, still air. More or
less the same thing as pressing the muzzle into the
centre of the target and pulling the trigger. He could do
it with his eyes closed. There was no fundamental
problem with the marksmanship.

The problem was with the stakes. He wanted the
puppet master more than he had wanted the Marines'

cup all those years before. A lot more. He didn't know
why. But that was the problem.

He breathed out. It was only three hundred yards. Not
six. Not eight. Not a thousand. No big deal.

He slid out of the Humvee and took the rifle off the
back seat. Carried it across rough earth to the coconut
mat. Placed it gently with its bipod feet a yard back from
the edge. Bent down and loaded it. Stepped back
behind it and lined himself up and crouched, knelt, lay
full length. He snuggled the stock into his shoulder.

full length. He snuggled the stock into his shoulder.

Eased his neck left and right and looked around. It felt
like he was alone in the middle of nowhere. He ducked
his head. Closed his left eye and moved his right eye to
the scope. Draped his left hand over the barrel and
pressed down and back. Now he had a tripod mount.

The bipod, and his shoulder. Solid. He spread his legs
and turned his feet out so they were flat on the mat.

Drew his left leg up a little and dug the sole of his shoe
into the mat's fibres so the dead weight of the limb
anchored his position. He relaxed and let himself
sprawl. He knew he must look like a guy who had been
shot, instead of a guy preparing to shoot.

He gazed through the scope. Saw the hyper-vivid
image of great optics. He acquired the target. It looked
close enough to touch. He laid the reticle where the two
strokes of the X met. Squeezed the slack out of the
trigger.

Relaxed. Breathed out. He could feel his heart. It felt
like it was loose in his chest. The caffeine was buzzing
in his veins. The reticle was dancing over the X. It was
hopping and jerking, left and right, up and down, in a
tiny random circle.

He closed his right eye. Willed his heart to stop.

Breathed out and kept his lungs empty, one second,
two. Then again, in, out, hold. He pulled all his energy
downward, into his gut. Let his shoulders slacken. Let
his muscles relax. Let himself settle. He opened his eye
again and saw that the reticle was still. He stared at the
target. Feeling it. Wanting it. He pulled the trigger. The
gun kicked and roared and the muzzle blast blew a
cloud of dust out of the coconut mat and obscured his
view. He lifted his head and coughed once and ducked
back to the scope. Bull's eye.

The X was gone. There was a neat hole drilled through
the centre of it, leaving only four tiny ballpoint ticks
visible, one at the top and one at the bottom of each
stroke. He coughed again and pushed back and stood
up. Cash dropped down in his place and used the
scope to check the result. 'Good shooting,' he said.

'Good rifle,' Reacher said.

Cash operated the bolt and the spent case fell out on
the mat. He got to his knees and picked it up and put it
in his pocket. Then he stood up and carried the rifle
back towards the Humvee. 'So do I qualify?' Reacher
called after him.

'For what?'

'For talking to.'

Cash turned round. 'You think this was a test?'

'I sincerely hope it was.'

'You might not want to hear what I've got to say.'

'Try me,' Reacher said.

Cash nodded. We'll talk in the office.'

They detoured up the length of the range for Cash to
retrieve the target. Then they turned and drove back to
the huts. They passed the pickup guys. They were still
blasting away. Cash parked and they went inside and
Cash filed Reacher's target in a drawer, under R for
Richardson. Then he danced his fingers forward to B

for Barr and pulled out a thick sheaf of paper. 'You
looking to show your old buddy didn't do it?' he asked.

'He wasn't my buddy,' Reacher said. 'I knew him once,
is all.'

'And?'

'I don't remember him being that great a shooter.'

'TV news said it was pretty short range.'

'With moving targets and deflection angles.'

'TV said the evidence is pretty clear.'

'It is,' Reacher said. 'I've seen it.'

'Check these out,' Cash said.

He dealt the filed targets like a deck of cards, all along
the length of the counter. Then he butted them edge-to-edge and squared them off to make room for more.

Then he started a second row, directly underneath the
first. In the end he had thirty-two sheets of paper
displayed, two long rows of repetitive concentric
circles, all of them marked /. Barr, 300 yards, with times
and dates stretching back three years. 'Read them and
weep,' Cash said.

Every single target showed an expert score.

Reacher stared at them, one after the other. Each inner
ring was tightly packed with clean, crisp holes. Tight
clusters, big and obvious. Thirty-two targets, ten rounds
each, three hundred and twenty rounds, all of them
dead-on maximum scores. 'This is everything he did?'

Reacher asked.

Cash nodded. 'Like you said, I'm a record keeper.'

'What gun?'

'His own Super Match. Great rifle.'

'Did the cops call you?'

'Guy called Emerson. He was pretty decent about it.

Because I've got to think about my own ass, because
Barr trained here. I don't want to damage my
professional reputation. I've put in a lot of work here,
and this place could get a bad name.' Reacher scanned
the targets, one more time. Remembered telling Helen
Rodin: They don't forget. 'What about his buddy
Charlie?' he asked.

'Charlie was hopeless by comparison.'

Cash butted James Barr's targets into a pile and put
them back in the B slot.