He said, “OK.”

“I can show you, if you like.”

“I’m sure I’ll find it when the time is right.”

Emily said, “She wants to talk to you in private.”

So Reacher got up and joined Chang in the outer hallway. She said, quietly, “You think Hackett’s friends are coming?”

“We should have been more cautious with the phone. They could have equipment all over the country. If so, we just sold out the sister. We gave Westwood chapter and verse. So we can’t leave them alone. Not here. Not now. Either we get them out or we babysit them all night. Close personal protection. A wide range of services.”

“I’d rather get them out.”

“I already offered them dinner.”

“The guy on the gate is useless.”

“Which way is the bedroom?”

“The other wing. Through the living room again.”

“You try asking them to dinner. Maybe they thought it was weird from me.”

“It’s weird from either one of us. We don’t know them. And they’re in the middle of a high-precision wedding countdown. Two strangers suddenly taking them out for a bucket of chicken would make their heads explode.”

“I said anywhere they want. Doesn’t have to be KFC.”

“Same difference. Doesn’t matter where we go.”

They heard a car on the driveway.

Metallic thumps, as doors opened and closed.

Footsteps on the rivers of stone.

Modern automotive design puts no more than four seats behind regular wide-open doors. Some sedans might be five-seaters, and some trucks were seven-seaters, but no tough guy grows up wanting to sit on the transmission hump, and no one is effective in the way back of a minivan. So worst case would be four incoming. Best case would be one. Likelihood was either two or three. Reacher turned instantly and headed across the living room, charting his course many steps ahead, as straight as possible, setting himself to graze the corners of tables and the arms of chairs, like a downhill slalom against the clock. The Lair family was still all in a line on the sofa, frozen, not understanding, Lydia, Emily, Evan, the linen shift, the shirt and bikini, the shorts and the loud Hawaiian, all watching, so Reacher patted the air as he passed them by, telling them to stay where they were, and then he hustled onward, out the far side of the living room, into a short hallway, past more silver-framed photographs of unknown people, maybe relatives, including a thin man and a sad boy, perhaps Peter and Michael McCann, and finally onward into the bedroom.

The back of his brain said women usually take the side near the bathroom and he sidestepped and scrambled around a pillow-stacked king-size bed to a night table with nothing on it but an alarm clock and an unread book.

He heard them kick down the front door.

He wrenched open the drawer under the book and saw reading glasses and headache pills and a box of tissues and a Colt Python with a six-inch barrel. Hatched walnut grips lacquered to a soupy shine, an immense blued-steel frame, brawny .357 Magnum rounds in the wheel. One hell of a nighttime gun. Smart in some ways. No complexity. No safety, no jams. But dumb in other ways. It weighed three pounds. Too heavy to lift while blinking awake. And the recoil would blow a sleepy arm through the headboard.

Reacher took it and checked the cylinder. All there. A six-shooter. Six rounds.

He heard boots in the hallway.

Inside the front door. Moving six feet to the right. Two people. A third would be coming around the back. If there was a third. Along the decorative path, past the plantings, between the solar lights, through the gate.

Please go in.

No spare rounds in the drawer.

A six-shooter.

Reacher stepped back to the bedroom door. Still he heard boots in the hallway. Then he moved out, past the silver-framed photographs again, edging sideways, Python at arm’s length, eyes on the front sight, crisp and clear, everything else blurred, the light soft, the house shuttered and shaded against the sun, and full of dim shadows.

He stopped at the mouth of the living room. On his left was the Lair family, still on the sofa, but starting to stir. Shock was giving way to fear. And in Emily’s case, outrage. She was going to break forward. Her folks were going to break back. On his right was the sofa he and Chang had sat on, and beyond it was a partial view to the door.

He saw the bulk of a moving shoulder. A silhouette, against the light. Tense and pumped up and ready to go.

On his left through the slider he saw a guy in the back yard. Behind the wedding gifts. Then out in clear air. Black T-shirt, black pants. And a Ruger P-85, with a suppressor tube fitted. Carried easy, down by his side, from above his knee to the top of his boot. Which was also black. They were dressed the part. That was for damn sure.

Where was Chang?

Reacher did not want to fire without knowing where she was. Not a Magnum round. Not in her general direction. Too many dim shadows. Too much dazzling contrast. Too many crazy outcomes. Rounds could deflect off bone and go through walls. Plural. They could exit the building completely, and break a window down the street.

Where was she?

Emily was drawing breath, ready to start yelling and screaming, bikini and all, in Reacher’s view a natural primeval reaction, the instinctive defense of family and territory, plus in her case a measure of righteous indignation, as in, this was her special week and who the hell did they think they were anyway? Evan was a calm man, accustomed to calamity, trained in science and reason, in tests and evidence and careful diagnosis, and he was a smart guy, and all his circuits were sparking, but he couldn’t make anything fit in his mind, so his body was left waiting for a final decision. Lydia was pressed back in her corner, the wife and mother, the sister and the aunt, retreating into herself, Reacher thought, or into an earlier version of herself, perhaps the true McCann version, raised tougher, maybe in the kind of place where splintering wood and a heavy tread was never good news.

Then the guy in the yard opened the slider and stepped inside, and the back of Reacher’s brain showed him the whole chess game right there, laid out, obvious, like flashing neon arrows, in immense and grotesque detail, the snap pivot left and the round into the meat of the yard guy’s chest, where it was less likely than a head shot to go through-and-through, which was good, given a neighborhood behind them full of wooden fences, but where it was more likely to soak the Lair family with thick pink mist, from behind, hair and all, which wasn’t good, because it would be traumatic, especially during such a week, except on reflection Reacher figured the week was already pretty much a disaster from that exact point onward, given that the chess game said there would be a dead guy at that very moment sliding to the floor of their private house, even as the homeowner-owned Python was snapping right again for two rounds at where the silhouette of the shoulder had been, which two rounds might or might not hit anything, but which would give a second’s cover for the scramble around the sofa and the capture of the dead guy’s Ruger, for a total of three rounds expended and fifteen gained.

But Reacher made none of those shots or moves, because by then he knew where Chang was. She was being pushed into view, toward the living room from the front door, struggling, two guys holding her, her hands trapped behind her back, a palm clamped over her mouth, a gun at her head. Another Ruger, with another suppressor. Unstable and unwieldy in its present role, because of its length. But no doubt effective.

Reacher put the Python on the floor behind him, very quietly, in the shadows against the hallway baseboard, under the last of the silver-framed photographs.