Make Me

She said, “What?”

He leaned past Evan and grabbed the kid’s wrist and pulled her upright. Immediately Evan stood up to fight him, and Chang too, and McCann’s sister, all of them breathless and panicked and unbelieving. Suddenly there was a small knot of people all vertical and active, clustered together on the rug between the sofas, moving, swaying, bumping, glancing desperately left and right.

The moment of truth.

The three guys did nothing. Their smart play at that point would have been to start blasting away, there and then, no hesitation, recognizing that the situation was turning to shit right in front of their eyes. But by then they were heavily invested in a plan of their own devising, in a course of action, in a procedure, in the promise of extreme future physical pleasure, and the two major components of that coming nirvana were knotted tight in the swaying crowd, collateral damage just waiting to happen, and they didn’t want them damaged. Not so soon. They wanted them just the way they were, whole, aware, reacting, all smooth tan flesh and bikinis and T-shirts and low-cut jeans. So they didn’t shoot. They didn’t think. Not with their brains, anyway.

So far so good.

Reacher nudged Evan one way and Chang the other and pulled Emily out of the crowd. He reeled her in, all thrashing knees and elbows, and he turned her around and shoved her onward, hard, into the hallway with the silver-framed photographs of the unknown relatives.

He said, “The bedroom is that way.”

Evan scrambled past him, grabbing at his daughter, and McCann’s sister jostled him, almost as quick, and Chang piled in behind her, with the first-base guy following, some sudden concern on his face about the emerging chaos, and behind him the second-base spokesperson crowded in, with the third-base guy coming in from the rear. Eight people in total, clumsy, stumbling, forced nearly to single file, funneling into a dark narrow hallway.

Reacher dropped down in the crowd and scooped up the Python, two-handed to stop it skittering on the polished wood, and he snugged the butt in his palm, solid and reassuring, and he fit his finger in the guard, against the trigger, hard and substantial, and he brought the gun up, three pounds of weight, and he put his left hand on the top of Lydia Lair’s head, and buckled her knees, and forced her down, and he aimed over Chang’s right shoulder and fired, at the center of the man-on-first’s face.

There were many factors that made a handgun either accurate or not accurate. The velocity of the round and the length of the barrel were the most important, aided or not by aerodynamic subtleties like the degree of spin imparted by the rifling grooves, which either worked well or didn’t, depending on the bullet. Precision of manufacture was influential, with careful machining of quality metal much preferred over casting from leftover slag. Not that anything much mattered at seven feet. A pore to the left or a wrinkle to the right was immaterial. The human face was a big enough target, generally hard to miss at close quarters, and the man-on-first’s was no exception.

It was a through-and-through, obviously, given the short range and the power of the Magnum round. Twenty feet behind the guy’s head the wall instantly cratered, the size of a punch bowl, and a ghastly split second later the contents of the guy’s brain pan arrived to fill it, with a wet slap, all red and gray and purple. Meanwhile the guy himself was going down vertically, as if he had stepped into an elevator shaft, and Reacher was turning fractionally left, from the waist, shoulders braced, looking for the third-base guy, the furthest away, because some back-of-the-brain calculation was telling him the guy had a better line of return fire, and he wasn’t drooling as bad as the second-base guy, so maybe he was less invested in the upcoming entertainment, and therefore more likely to start blasting, even at the risk of damaged goods.

Reacher eased the trigger home, and he felt the mechanism turn, gears and cams and levers, effortless, and the gun fired, in his mind a considered shot, a decent interval after his first, but in the real world almost a double tap, a fast bang-move-bang, a craftsman going about his business, calmly, using his natural born gifts. It was a through-and-through again, inevitably, in the guy’s upper lip, out the base of his skull, shattering the slider window, and exploding a pile of wedding presents on the table in the yard outside, in a cloud of paper fragments, white and silver, like confetti a few days early. The broken glass came down like a waterfall, governed by gravity, and therefore at the same downward speed as the third-base guy, who was also governed by gravity. Reacher saw an inch of their synchronized descent, and then he whipped away to the right, to find the second-base guy.