Страница 42 из 80
He held the gun right-handed and dry-fired against the locked trigger and rehearsed the sequence. He decided to prioritize and put the biggest targets down first. In his experience that always worked best. So, center-mass into Reacher’s back, then a small jog to the right into O’Do
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’Do
Better safe than sorry.
He used his right arm and shoved O’Do
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’Do
O’Do
Better to let O’Do
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’Do
He saw O’Do
Their attacker fired again.
And missed again. With a prepla
Reacher saw O’Do
Reacher saw O’Do
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’Do
The guy went down on his back. O’Do
Game over, right there.