Page 6 of Bulletproof Jack: Hunting Lee Child's Jack Reacher

Kim whipped her head back and forth, peering into the darkened hallway, checking for the shooter.

No one there.

Which didn’t mean he wouldn’t come back.

She couldn’t close the door with the body blocking the threshold. For a moment she considered leveraging his upper torso back into the hallway somehow.

No. A dead man leaning against her door would prompt actions and reactions she wanted to avoid.

Too risky.

Or she could call her boss. Request an extraction.

Cooper would send a small army of agents and technicians to swarm the place like flies on a dead fish.

The briefest of thoughts flashed into her head. Once she’d absorbed it, she couldn’t shake the idea.

Cooper watched Kim like a hawk watches a mouse. Since she’d been assigned to find Reacher with that first four o’clock phone call seven months ago, she’d barely had a minute free from Cooper’s prying eyes.

Which meant Cooper probably knew about this dead guy already. He’d probably known before she did.

What if he was one of Cooper’s guys?

Or what if one of Cooper’s guys had killed him?

The shooter was probably long gone. But what if he wasn’t?

She couldn’t leave her door open indefinitely.

Questions continued to flood her thoughts until she shook her head violently to clear them

“Cooper can wait,” she murmured and made a different choice.

She found a pair of surgical gloves in the same drawer where she kept her handgun and pulled them on before she stepped into the hallway.

Blood and brain matter had splattered against her door and onto the carpet, but there was nothing she could do about that now. As the human tissue dried, the mess would be slightly less visible to casual glances in the dim lighting. If she could get the body out of the hallway, the murder might remain undiscovered for a few hours. She hoped.

First things first.

After what seemed an eternity of backbreaking work of shoving and maneuvering the dead weight, panting with the effort, she was able to get him inside and secure the door again.

Kim enabled and reset all of her alarms.

Then she plopped down onto a chair, placed the gun on the table beside her, and stared at the corpse of a man she’d never seen before.

“Who are you? Where did you come from? What did you want? What am I going to do with you?” She asked the first set of a thousand questions as if he might actually answer.

He said nothing.

“Okay. Let’s figure this out.” Kim found her phone and snapped several photos of the body. The side of his face would be unrecognizable to his own mother, but maybe the tech wizards could reconstruct it well enough to identify the man.

She opened the app on her phone and used it to record his fingerprints and ear prints. She pulled DNA swabs from the drawer, swabbed his blood and the inside of his mouth.

After that, she paused for a couple of sips of the wine. She’d be lucky if she could get him out of her apartment before he started to stink up the place. She really didn’t want to move.

Fortified with liquid courage, Kim took a deep breath and bent over the corpse again. She patted him down.

Nothing in any of the jacket pockets. No wallet. No keys.

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