Free One Shot by Lee Child Page A

all have colours. Some are grey. This one was brown. Reacher guessed the brick was made from local clay and had carried the colour of old farmland into the facades. Even the stone was flecked with tan, like it carried deposits of iron. There were accents of dark red here and there, like old barns.
    It was a warm place, not busy, but it was surviving. It would rebound after the tragedy. There was progress and optimism and dynamism. All the new construction proved it. There were work zones and raw concrete kerbs everywhere. Lots of planning, lots of rebuilding.
    Lots of hope. The new parking garage extension anchored the north end of the downtown strip. It suggested commercial expansion. It was south and slightly west of the kill zone. Very close. Directly west and maybe twice as distant was a length of the raised highway. It ran free and clear through a curve for maybe thirty yards before curling in behind the library. Then it straightened a little and passed behind the black glass tower. The tower was due north of the plaza. It had an NBC sign near the door, on a black granite slab. Ann Yanni's workplace, Reacher guessed, as well as Rodin's daughter's. East of the plaza was the office building with the DMV and the recruiting office. That was where the victims had come from. They had spilled out the door. What had Ann Yanni said? At the end of a long working week? They had hustled west across the plaza towards their parked cars or the bus depot and had stumbled into a nightmare. The narrow walkway would have slowed them down and lined them up. Like shooting fish in a barrel.
    Reacher walked the length of the empty ornamental pool to the revolving door at the base of the tower. He went in and checked the lobby for a directory.
    There was a glassed-in board made of ridged black felt with press-in white letters. NBC was on the second floor. Some of the other suites were empty and Reacher guessed the rest changed hands fast enough to make it worth holding on to the press-in letter system. Law Offices of Helen Rodin was listed on four.
    The letters were a little misaligned and the spacing was off. Rockefeller Center it ain't, Reacher thought.
    He waited for the elevator in a queue of two, him and a pretty blonde woman.
    He looked at her and she looked at him. She got out on two and he realized it was Ann Yanni. He recognized her from the broadcast. Then he figured all he needed to do was meet Emerson from the local PD and he would have brought the whole breaking-news tableau to life.
    He found Helen Rodin's suite. It was at the front of the building. Her windows were going to overlook the plaza.
    He knocked. Heard a muffled reply and went in. There was an empty reception room with a secretary's desk.
    The desk was unoccupied. It was secondhand, but not recently used. No secretary yet, Reacher thought. Early days.
     
    He knocked on the inner office door. Heard the same voice make a second reply.
    He went in and found Helen Rodin at another secondhand desk. He recognized her from her father's photograph. But face to face she looked even better.
    She was probably no more than thirty, quite tall, lightly built. Slim, in an athletic sort of a way.
    Not anorexic. Either she ran or she played soccer or she had been very lucky with her metabolism. She had long blond hair and her father's blue eyes. There was intelligence behind them. She was dressed all in black, in a trouser suit with a tight stretch top under the coat.
    Lycra, Reacher thought. Can't beat it. 'Hello,' she said.
    'I'm Jack Reacher,' he said.
    She stared at him. 'You're kidding. Are you really?'
    He nodded. 'Always have been, always will be.'
    'Unbelievable.'
    'Not really. Everybody's somebody.'
    'I mean, how did you know to come? We couldn't find you.'
    'I saw it on the TV. Ann Yanni, Saturday morning.'
     
    'Well, thank God for TV,' she said. 'And thank God you're here.'
    'I was in Miami,' he said. 'With a dancer.'
    'A dancer?'
    'She was Norwegian,' he said.
    He walked to