He glanced all around.
Clear.
He looked behind.
Clear.
He pushed the safety down and gripped the Daewoo's barrel in his left hand and racked the slide with his right. Felt the first fat shell push upward, neatly into the chamber.
***
The night was not quiet. There was a lot of urban ambient noise. Traffic on the Strip, distant rooftop condensers roaring, extractors humming, the muted rumble of a hundred thousand people playing hard. But Reacher heard the rack of the slide twenty feet behind him. He heard it very clearly. It was exactly the kind of sound he had trained himself never to miss. To his ears it was a complete complex split-second symphony, and every component registered precisely. The scrape of alloy on alloy, its metallic resonance partially damped by a fleshy palm and the ball of a thumb and the side of an index finger, the grateful expansion of a magazine spring, the smack of a brass-cased shell socketing home, the return of the slide. Those sounds took about a thirtieth of a second to reach his ears and he spent maybe another thirtieth of a second processing them.
His life and his history lacked many things. He had never known stability or normality or comfort or convention. He had never counted on anything except surprise and unpredictability and danger. He took things exactly as they came, for exactly what they were. Therefore he heard the slide rack back and felt no disabling shock. No panic. No stab of disbelief. It seemed entirely natural and reasonable to him that he should be walking down a street at night and listening to a man preparing to shoot him in the back. There was no hesitation, no second-guessing, no self-doubt, no inhibition. There was just evidence of a purely mechanical problem laid out behind him like an invisible four-dimensional diagram showing time and space and targets and fast bullets and slow bodies.
And then there was reaction, another thirtieth of a second later.
He knew where the first bullet would be aimed. He knew that any reasonable attacker would want to put the biggest target down first. That was nothing more than common sense. So the first shot would be aimed at him.
Or possibly at O'Donnell.
Better safe than sorry.
He used his right arm and shoved O'Donnell hard in the left shoulder and sent him sprawling into Dixon and then fell away in the opposite direction and crashed into Neagley. They both stumbled and as he was going down to his knees he heard the gun fire behind him and felt the bullet pass through the V-shaped void of empty air where the center of his back had been just a split second before.
He had his hand on his Hardballer before he hit the sidewalk. He was calculating angles and trajectories before he had it out of the waistband of his pants. The Hardballer had two safeties. A conventional lever at the left rear of the frame, and a grip safety released when the butt was correctly held.
Before he had either one set to fire he had decided not to shoot.
Not immediately, anyway.
He had fallen on top of Neagley toward the inside edge of the sidewalk. Their attacker was in the center of the sidewalk. Any angle vectoring from the inside of the sidewalk through the center would launch a bullet out toward the roadway. If he missed the guy, he could hit a passing car. Even if he hit the guy, he could still hit a passing car. A jacketed.45 could go right through flesh and bone. Easily. Lots of power. Lots of penetration.
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.
46
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.