They drove in convoy for five fast miles through the dark. There was no moonlight. No starlight. Cloud cover was low and thick but it held the rain to nothing more than occasional splattering drops, ten whole seconds between each of them, maybe six in every minute. They exploded against the windshield into wet patches the size of saucers. Reacher swatted each of them separately with the windshield wipers. He held steady around forty miles an hour and followed the track through the brush. It turned randomly left and right, heading basically south toward the storm. The ground was very rough. The Jeep was bouncing and jarring. The VW was struggling to keep pace behind him. Its headlights were swinging and jumping in his mirrors.
Five miles from the house the rain was still holding and the mesquite and the fractured limestone began to narrow the track. The terrain was changing under their wheels. They had started out across a broad desert plain that might have been cultivated grassland a century ago. Now the ground was rising slowly and shading into mesa. Rocky outcrops rose left and right in the headlight beams, channeling them roughly south and east. Taller stands of mesquite crowded in and funneled them tighter. Soon there was nothing more than a pair of deep ruts worn through the hardpan. Ledges and sinkholes and dense patches of thorny low brush meant they had no choice but to follow them. They curved and twisted and felt like a riverbed.
Then the track bumped upward and straightened and ran like a highway across a miniature limestone mesa. The stone was a raised pan as big as a football field, maybe a hundred twenty yards long and eighty wide, roughly oval in shape. There was no vegetation growing on it. Reacher swung the Jeep in a wide circle and used the headlights on bright to check the perimeter. All around the edges the ground fell away a couple of feet into rocky soil. Stunted bushes crowded anyplace they could find to put their roots. He drove a second circle, wider, and he liked what he saw. The miniature mesa was as bare as a dinner plate laid on a dead lawn. He smiled to himself. Timed out in his head what they needed to do. Liked the answer he came up with.
He drove all the way to the far end of the rock table and stopped where the track bumped down off it and disappeared onward. Alice pulled the VW alongside him. He jumped out of the Jeep and ducked down to her window. The night air was still hot. Still damp. The urgent breeze was back. Big raindrops fell lazily and vertically. He felt like he could have dodged each one of them individually. Alice used a switch and buzzed the window down.
"You O.K.?" he asked her.
"So far," she said.
"Turn it around and back it up to the edge," he said. "All the way back. Block the mouth of the track."
She maneuvered the car like she was parking on a city street and ran it backward until it was centered in the mouth of the track and the rear wheels were tight against the drop. She left the front facing exactly north, the way they had come. He nosed the Jeep next to her and opened the tailgate.
"Kill the motor and the lights," he called. "Get the rifles."
She passed him the big Winchesters, one at a time. He laid them sideways in the Jeep's load space. She passed him the .22s, and he pitched them away into the brush, as far as he could throw them. She passed him the two boxes of 30-30 ammunition. Winchester's own, and Bobby Greer's hand-loads. He laid them alongside the rifles. Ducked around to the driver's door and switched the engine off. The lumpy six-cylinder idle died. Silence fell. He listened hard and scanned the northern horizon. The mesquite sighed faintly in the wind. Unseen insects buzzed and chattered. Infrequent raindrops hit his shoulders. That was all. Nothing else. Absolute blackness and silence everywhere.
He came back to the tailgate and opened the ammunition boxes. They were both packed tight with cartridges standing on their firing pins, points upward. The factory shells were new and bright. Bobby's were a little scuffed. Recycled brass. He took one out and held it up to the Jeep's interior light and looked hard at it. I made them myself, Bobby had said. Extra power. Which was logical. Why else would a jerk like Bobby hand-load his own cartridges? Not for less power, that was for sure. Like, why do people tune hot-rod motors? Not to make them milder than stock. It's a boy thing. So Bobby had probably packed and tamped a whole lot of extra powder into each one, maybe thirty or forty extra grains. And maybe he had used hotter powder than normal. Which would give him a couple hundred extra foot-pounds of muzzle energy, and maybe a hundred miles an hour extra velocity. And which would give him the muzzle flash from hell, and which would ruin his breech castings and warp his barrels inside a couple of weeks. But Reacher smiled and took ten more of the shells out of the box anyway. They weren't his guns, and he had just decided muzzle flash was exactly what he was looking for.
He loaded the first Winchester with a single sample of Bobby's hand-loads. The second, he filled with seven more. The third, he loaded alternately one stock round, one of Bobby's, another stock round, until it was full with four stock and three hand-loads. The fourth rifle he filled entirely with factory ammo. He laid the guns left to right in sequence across the Jeep's load space and closed the tailgate on them.
"I thought we only needed one," Alice said.
"I changed the plan," he said.
He stepped around to the driver's seat and Alice climbed in beside him.
"Where are we going now?" she asked.
He started the engine and backed away from the parked VW.
"Think of this mesa like a clock face," he said. "We came in at the six o'clock position. Right now your car is parked at the twelve, facing backward. You're going to be hiding on the rim at the eight. On foot. Your job is to fire a rifle, one shot, and then scoot down to the seven."
"You said I wouldn't have to shoot."
"I changed the plan," he said again.
"But I told you, I can't fire a rifle."
"Yes, you can. You just pull the trigger. It's easy. Don't worry about aiming or anything. All I want is the sound and the flash."
"Then what?"
"Then you scoot down to the seven and watch. I'm going to be busy shooting. I need you to ID exactly who I'm shooting at."
"This isn't right."
"It isn't wrong, either."
"You think?"
"You ever seen Clay Allison's grave?"
She rolled her eyes. "You need to read the history books, Reacher. Clay Allison was a total psychopath. He once killed a guy bunking with him, just because he snored. He was an amoral maniac, plain and simple. Nothing too noble about that."
Reacher shrugged. "Well, we can't back out now."
"Two wrongs don't make a right, you know?"
"It's a choice, Alice. Either we ambush them, or get ambushed by them."
She shook her head.
"Great," she said.
He said nothing.
"It's dark," she said. "How will I see anything?"
"I'll take care of that."
"How will I know when to fire?"
"You'll know."
He pulled the Jeep close to the edge of the limestone table and stopped. Opened the tailgate and took out the first rifle. Checked his bearings and ran to the fractured rock lip and laid the gun on the ground with the butt hanging over the edge and the barrel pointing at the emptiness twenty feet in front of the distant VW. He leaned down and racked the lever. It moved precisely with a sweet metallic slick-slick. A fine weapon.
"It's ready to fire," he said. "And this is the eight o'clock spot. Stay down below the lip, fire the gun, and then move to the seven. Crouch low all the way. And then watch, real careful. They might fire in your direction, but I guarantee they'll miss, O.K.?"
She said nothing.
"I promise," he said. "Don't worry about it."
"Are you sure?"
"Superman couldn't hit anything with a handgun in the dark at this distance."
"They might get lucky."
"No, Alice, tonight they're not going to get lucky. Believe me."
"But when do I fire?"
"Fire when ready," he said.
He watched her hide below the lip of the rock, an arm's length from her rifle.
"Good luck," he said. "I'll see you later."
"Great," she said again.
He climbed back into the Jeep and hustled it straight across the mesa to the four o'clock position. Spun the wheel and reversed the car and backed it straight off the rock. It bumped down two feet and came to a shuddering stop in the undergrowth. He killed the engine and the lights. Took the fourth rifle and propped it upright against the passenger door. Carried the second and third with him and climbed back onto the ledge and ran in the open to what he estimated was the two o'clock spot. Laid the third rifle carefully on the lip of the rock and ran the rest of the way to the parked VW. Ducked inside and unscrewed the dome light. Eased the driver's door back to three inches from closed and left it. Measured twenty feet clockwise and laid the second rifle on the ground, on the rim of the ledge, somewhere between the twelve and the one. Twelve-thirty, maybe. No, about twelve-seventeen, to be pedantic, he thought. Then he crawled back and lay face-down on the ground, tight up against the VW, with his right shoulder tucked under the little running board and the right side of his face pressed against the sidewall of the front tire. He was breathing deeply. The tire smelled like rubber. His left shoulder was out in the weather. Big ponderous raindrops hit it at infrequent intervals. He hitched in closer and settled down to wait. Eight minutes, perhaps, he thought. Maybe nine.
It was eleven minutes. They were a little slower than he expected. He saw a flash in the north and at first thought it was lightning, but then it happened again and he saw it was headlight beams bouncing across rough terrain and catching the low gray cloud overhead. A vehicle was pitching and rolling its way through the darkness. It was heading his way, which he knew it would, because the landscape gave it no other choice but to stay on the track. Its lights flared and died as the nose rose and fell. He was sweating. The air around him was hotter then ever. He could feel pressure and electricity in the sky above. The raindrops were falling harder and a little faster. It felt like a fuse was burning and the storm was set to explode. Not yet, he thought. Please, give me five minutes more.
Thirty seconds later he could hear an engine. A gasoline engine, running hard. Eight cylinders. The sound rose and fell as the driven wheels gripped the dirt and then bounced and lost traction. Hard suspension, he thought. Load-carrying suspension. Bobbys pick-up, probably. The one he used to hunt the armadillo.
He tucked himself tighter against the underside of the VW. The engine noise grew louder. It rose and fell. The lights bounced and swerved. They lit the northern horizon with a dull glow. Then they were near enough to make out as separate twin beams spearing through the mesquite. They threw harsh shadows and flicked left and right as the vehicle turned. Then the truck burst into sight. It bounced up onto the mesa traveling fast. The engine screamed like all four wheels were off the ground. The headlights flared high and then dipped low as it crashed back to earth. It landed slightly off course and the lights swept the perimeter for a second before they straightened ahead. It accelerated on the flatter terrain. The engine was loud. It came on and on, straight at him. Faster and faster. Forty miles an hour, fifty. Seventy yards away. Fifty. Forty. It came straight at him until the bouncing headlights washed over the stationary VW directly ahead of it. The yellow paint above Reacher's shoulder glowed impossibly bright. Then the truck jammed to a panic stop. All four wheels locked hard on the limestone grit and there was a howl of rubber and the truck slewed slightly left and came to rest facing eleven o'clock, maybe thirty yards in front of him. The far edge of the headlight beams washed over him. He forced himself tighter under the VW.
He could smell the raindrops in the dust.
Nothing happened for a second.
Then the pick-up driver killed his lights. They faded to weak orange filaments and died to nothing and total darkness came back. The insects went silent. No sound at all beyond the truck engine idling against the brake. Reacher thought: did they see me?
Nothing happened.
Now, Alice, Reacher thought.
Nothing happened.
Shoot, Alice, he thought. Shoot now, for God's sake.
Nothing happened.
Shoot the damn gun, Alice. Just pull the damn trigger.
Nothing happened.
He closed his eyes and paused another whole endless second and braced himself to launch outward anyway. Opened his eyes and took a breath and started moving.
Then Alice fired.
There was a monstrous muzzle flash easily ten feet long far away to his right and the buzzing whine of a supersonic bullet high in the air and a split second later an enormous barking crash clapped across the landscape. He rolled out from under the VW and reached in through the driver's door and flicked the headlights on. Jumped backward into the mesquite and kept rolling and came up into a low crouch six feet away to see the pick-up caught perfectly in the cone of bright light. Three people in it. A driver in the cab. Two figures crouching in the load bed, holding the roll bar one-handed. All three of them with their heads turned abruptly on their shoulders, rigid and frozen and staring backward at the spot Alice had fired from.
They were immobile a split second longer, and then they reacted. The driver flicked his own lights back on. The pick-up and the VW glared at each other like it was a contest. Reacher was dazzled by the light but he saw the figures in the load bed were wearing caps and blue jackets. One figure was smaller than the other. A woman, he thought. He fixed her position carefully in his mind. Shoot the women first. That was the standard counterterrorist doctrine. The experts figured they were more fanatical. And suddenly he knew she was the shooter. She had to be. Small hands, neat fingers. Carmen's Lorcin could have been built for her. She was crouched low alongside her partner on his left.
They both had handguns. They both stared sideways a half-second longer and then snapped forward into the glare and leaned on the pick-up's roof and started shooting at the VW's lights. Their caps said FBI on the front. He froze. What the hell? Then he relaxed. Beautiful. Fake apparel, fake ID, a tricked-up Crown Vic. They just went to Alice's place in it. And that's how they stopped Al Eugene on Friday. They were shooting continuously. He heard the flat dull thumps of powerful nine-millimeter pistols firing fast. He heard spent shells clattering out onto the pick-up's roof. He saw the VW's windshield explode and heard bullets punching through sheet metal and the tinkling of glass and then the VW's lights were gone and he could see nothing at all behind the dazzle of the pick-up's own lights. He sensed the pistols turning back to where they had Alice's firing position fixed in their memories. He saw tiny oblique muzzle flashes and heard bullets whining away from him. The left-hand gun stopped. The woman. Reloading already. Only thirteen shots, his subconscious mind told him. Has to be a SIG Sauer P228 or a Browning Hi-Power.
He crawled forward to the rim of the mesa and tracked fifteen feet left and found the rifle he had placed at twelve-seventeen. Winchester number two, full of Bobby Greer's hand-loads. He fired without aiming and the recoil almost knocked him off his knees. A tremendous flame leapt out of the muzzle. It was like the strobe on a camera. He had no idea where the bullet went. He racked the lever slick-slick and hustled right, toward the wrecked VW. Fired again. Two huge visible flashes, moving progressively counterclockwise. From the pick-up's vantage point it would look like a person traversing right-to-left. A smart shooter would fire ahead of the last flash and hope to hit the moving target. Deflection shooting. They went for it. He heard bullets whining off the rock near the car. Heard one hit it.
But by then he was on the move in the opposite direction, clockwise again. He dropped the rifle and bent low and ran for the next one. It was there at two o'clock. The third Winchester, the one with the sequenced load. The first shot was a factory bullet. Worth some care. He steadied himself on the lip of the ledge and aimed into the blackness eight feet behind the pick-up's headlights and four feet above them. Fired once. Now they think there are three riflemen out here, one behind them on the left, two ahead on the right. There was ringing in his ears and he couldn't see where his bullet went but he heard the woman's voice shout a faint command and the pick-up's headlights promptly died. He fired again at the same spot with the next shell, which was a hand-load. The gout of flame spat out and lit up the mesa and he jinked five feet right. Tracked the frozen visual target in his mind and fired the next. The second factory bullet, neat and straight and true. He heard a sharp scream. Danced one pace to his right and fired the next hand-load. The muzzle flash showed him a body falling head first out of the pick-up bed. It was caught entirely motionless in midair. One down. But the wrong one. It was too big. It was the man. Factory round next. He concentrated hard and aimed again slightly left of the place the guy had fallen from. Racked the lever. It moved a quarter-inch and jammed solid on the worn cartridge case from the last hand-load.
Then two things happened. First the pick-up moved. It lurched forward and peeled away fast in a tight desperate circle and headed back north, the way it had come. Then a handgun started firing close to the VW. The woman was out of the truck. She was on foot in the dark. She was firing fast. A hail of bullets. They were missing him by three or four feet. The truck raced away. Its lights flicked on again. He tracked them in the corner of his eye. They jerked and bounced and swerved and grew smaller. Then they disappeared off the end of the mesa. The truck just thumped down off the edge of the rock table and hurtled back toward the Red House. Its noise faded to nothing and its lights dimmed to a distant glow moving on the far black horizon. The handgun stopped firing. Reloading again. There was sudden total silence. Total darkness. A second later the insect chant swam back into focus. It sounded softer than usual. Less frantic.
He realized the rain had changed. The heavy drops had stopped and in their place was an insistent patter of drizzle. He held his hand palm-up and felt it building. It grew perceptibly harder and harder within seconds like he was standing in a shower stall and an unseen hand was opening the faucet wider and wider.
He wiped water off his forehead to keep it out of his eyes and laid the jammed rifle quietly in the dust. The dust was already wet under his fingers. It was turning to mud. He moved left, tracking back toward the hidden Jeep. It was maybe forty yards away. The rain got harder. It built and built like there was going to be no limit to its power. It hissed and roared on the mesquite bushes all around him. Good news and bad news. The good news was it took making noise out of the equation. He wouldn't have backed himself to move as quietly as the woman could. Not through desert vegetation at night. A frame six feet five in height and two hundred fifty pounds in weight was good for a lot of things, but not for silent progress through unseen thorny plants. The noise of the rain would help him more than her. That was the good news. The bad news was visibility was soon going to be worse than zero. They could bump into each other back-to-back before either of them knew the other was there.
So a lever-action repeater was not going to be the weapon of choice. Too slow for a snap shot. Too cumbersome to maneuver. And a Winchester throws the spent shell out of the top, not out of the side. Which means in a heavy rainstorm it can let water in through the ejection port. And this was going to be a heavy rainstorm. He could sense it. It was going to try to compensate for ten years of drought in a single night.
He made it back to the Jeep at the four o'clock position. Found the fourth rifle propped against its door, full of factory shells. It was already soaked. He shook it off and aimed obliquely across the mesa toward the eleven. Pulled the trigger. It fired. It still worked fine. He fired four more spaced shots, at the twelve, the one, the two, the three. Fan fire. A gamble. The upside was he might get lucky and hit the woman. Downside was it would tell her he was on his own. One guy, more than one rifle. That was now an easy deduction. And it would tell her where he was. If she was counting it would suggest to her he was waiting there with the last two shells still in the magazine.
So he slid the gun under the Jeep and waded west through the brush until he was forty feet from the edge of the rock. Pulled Alice's Heckler & Koch out of his pocket and knocked the safety off. Knelt down and smeared mud over his hands and arms and face and waited for lightning to strike. Summer storms he had witnessed before in hot parts of the world always featured lightning. Gigantic thunderheads rubbed and jostled overhead and the voltage built to an unbearable level. Five more minutes, he guessed. Then lightning would fire in bolts or sheets and the landscape would flash with brightness. He was in khaki clothes and had smeared khaki mud on his skin. He doubted that she had.
He worked south, away from the Jeep, back toward the wrecked VW, keeping forty feet in the undergrowth. The darkness was total. The rain was building relentlessly. It built to the point where it was absolutely impossible that it could build any harder, and then it just kept on building. The limestone sinkholes were already full of water. Rain was lashing their surfaces. Small rivers were running around his feet, gurgling into bottomless crevasses all around. The noise was astonishing. The rain was roaring against the ground so hard that it was impossible to imagine a louder sound. Then it fell harder and the sound got louder.
He realized the camouflage mud had rinsed straight off his skin. Impossible for it not to. Carmen's shower was like a grudging trickle in comparison. He began to worry about breathing. How could there be air to breathe, with so much water? It was running down his face in solid streams and running straight into his mouth. He put his hand over his jaw and sucked air through his fingers and spat and spluttered the rainwater away.
He was opposite the two o'clock position and thirty feet from the ledge when the lightning started. Far to the south a ragged bolt exploded from the sky and hit the earth five miles away. It was pure intense white and shaped like a bare tree hurled upside down by a hurricane. He fell to a crouch and stared straight ahead, looking for peripheral vision. Saw nothing. The thunder followed the lightning five seconds later, a ragged tearing rumble. Where is she? Does she think she's smarter than she thinks I am? In which case she'll be behind me. But he didn't turn around. Life is always about guessing and gambling, and he had her pegged as a slick operator, for sure. In her world. Put her out on the street face-to-face with Al Eugene, and she's got the smarts to charm the birds out of the trees. But put her down all alone in open combat territory at night in a storm, and she's struggling. I'm good at this. She's not. She's in front of me, clinging to the edge of the mesa somewhere, scared like she's never been scared before. She's mine.
The storm was moving. The second lightning strike came three minutes later and a mile north and east of the first one. It was a jagged sheet that flickered insanely for eight or ten seconds before dying into darkness. Reacher craned upward and scanned ahead and right. Saw nothing. Turned and scanned left. Saw the woman seventy feet away, crouched in the lee of the ledge. He could see the white writing on her cap. FBI. Big letters. She was looking straight at him and her gun was rigid in her hand and her arm was fully extended from the shoulder. He saw the muzzle flash as she fired at him. It was a tiny dull spark completely overwhelmed by the storm.
* * *
The storm drifted slowly north and east and pushed the leading edge of rain ahead of it. It reached the motel building and built steadily and quickly from a whisper to a patter to a hard relentless drumming on the roof. It was a metal roof and within thirty seconds the noise was very loud. It woke Ellie from a restless troubled sleep. She opened her eyes wide and saw the small dark man with hair on his arms. He was sitting very still in a chair near the bed, watching her.
"Hi, kid," he said.
Ellie said nothing.
"Can't sleep?"
Ellie looked up at the ceiling.
"Raining," she said. "It's noisy."
The man nodded, and checked his watch.
* * *
She missed him. Impossible to tell by how much. The lightning died and plunged the world back into absolute darkness. Reacher fired once at the remembered target and listened hard. Nothing. Probably a miss. Seventy feet in heavy rain, not an easy shot. Then the thunderclap came. It was a shuddering bass boom that rocked the ground and rolled slowly away. He crouched again. He had nine bullets left. Then he threw the double-bluff dice. She'll think I'll move, so I won't. He stayed right where he was. Waited for the next lightning bolt. It would tell him how good she was. An amateur would move away from him. A good pro would move closer. A really good pro would double-bluff the double-bluff and stay exactly where she was.
By then the rain was as heavy as it was going to get. That was his guess. He had once been caught in a jungle storm in Central America and gotten wet faster than falling fully clothed into the sea. That was the hardest rain imaginable and this was easily comparable. He was completely soaked to the skin. Beyond soaked. Water was running in continuous torrents under his shirt. Pouring off him, not dripping. It sluiced out of his buttonholes like jets. He was cold. The temperature had plummeted twenty or thirty degrees in less than twenty minutes. As much water was bouncing upward around him as was lashing down. The noise was unbearable. Leaves and stalks were tearing off the bushes. They were flowing and eddying away and building tiny beaver dams against every rock on the ground. The hard hot grit had washed into slushy mud six inches deep. His feet were sinking in it. His gun was soaked. That's O.K. A Heckler & Koch will fire wet. But so will a Browning or a SIG.
The next lightning flash was still well to the south, but it was nearer. And brighter. It was a gigantic lateral bolt that hissed and crackled across the sky. He scanned left. The woman had moved closer. She was sixty feet away from him, still tight against the mesa. Good, but not really good. She fired at him and missed by four feet. It was a hasty shot and her arm was still swinging in from the south. The south? She figured I'd moved away. He felt mildly insulted and leveled his arm and fired back. The incoming thunderclap buried the sound of the shot. Probably a miss. Eight left.
Then it was back to the calculations. What will she do? What will she figure I'll do? She had been wrong the last time. So this time she'll gamble. She'll guess I'll move in closer. So she'll move in closer too. She'll go for the killing shot immediately.
He stayed in a crouch, exactly where he was. Triple-bluff. He tracked his gun hand left-to-right along the theoretical direction she must be moving. Waited for the precious lightning. It came sooner than he expected. The storm was ripping in fast. It exploded not more than a half-mile away and was followed almost immediately by a bellow of thunder. The flash was brighter than the sun. He squinted ahead. The woman was gone. He jerked left and saw a smudge of vivid blue backtracking away in the opposite direction. He fired instinctively just ahead of it and the lightning died and darkness and noise and chaos collapsed around him. Seven left. He smiled. But now I only need one more.
* * *
The sound of thunder frightened her. It sounded like when Joshua and Billy had put a new roof on the motor barn. They had used big sheets of tin and they boomed and flexed when they were carrying them and made a horrible noise when they hammered the nails through. Thunder was like a hundred million billion sheets of roofing tin all flexing and booming in the sky. She ducked her head under the sheets and watched the room light up with bright wobbling flashes of lightning outside the window.
"Are you scared?" the man asked.
She nodded, under the sheets. It scrubbed her hair, but she was sure the man could see her head moving.
"Don't be scared," the man said. "It's only a storm. Big girls aren't scared of storms."
She said nothing. He checked his watch again.
* * *
Her tactics were transparent. She was good, but not good enough to be unreadable. She was working close in to the rim of the mesa, because it offered an illusion of safety. She was working an in-out-in-in move. Double-bluffing, triple-bluffing, aiming to be unpredictable. Smart, but not smart enough. She had moved close, and then moved away. Now she would move close again, and then the next time not away again, but closer still. She figured he would begin to read the pattern and anticipate the yo-yo outward. But she would come inward instead. To wrong-foot him. And because she wanted to be close. She liked close. A head-shot artiste like her, he guessed her preferred range would be something less than ten feet.
He jumped out of his crouch and ran as hard as he could, like a sprinter, backward and left, curving around in a fast wide circle. He crashed through the brush like a panicked animal, big leaping strides, hurdling mesquite, splashing through puddles, sliding through the mud. He didn't care how much noise he was making. He would be inaudible a yard away. All that mattered was how fast he was. He needed to outflank her before the next lightning bolt.
He ran wildly in a big looping curve and then slowed and skidded and eased in close to the limestone ledge maybe twenty feet north of where he had first seen her. She had moved south, and then back, so now she would be on her way south again. She ought to be thirty feet ahead by now. Right in front of him. He walked after her, fast and easy, like he was on a sidewalk somewhere. Kept loose, trying to second-guess the rhythm of the lightning, staying ready to hit the wet dirt.
* * *
The small dark man checked his watch again. Ellie hid under the sheet.
"Over three hours," the man said.
Ellie said nothing.
"Can you tell the time?"
Ellie straightened up in the bed and pulled the sheet down slowly, all the way past her mouth.
"I'm six and a half," she said.
The man nodded.
"Look," he said.
He held out his arm and twisted his wrist.
"One more hour," he said.
"Then what?"
The man looked away. Ellie watched him a long moment more. Then she pulled the sheet back over her head. The thunder boomed and the lightning flashed.
* * *
The flash lit up the whole landscape for miles ahead. The crash of thunder crowded in on top of it. Reacher dropped to a crouch and stared. She wasn't there. She was nowhere in front of him. The lightning died and the thunder rolled on. For a second he wondered whether he would hear her gun over it. Would he? Or would the first he knew be the sickening impact of the bullet? He dropped full length into the mud and lay still. Felt the rain lashing his body like a thousand tiny hammers. O.K., rethink. Had she outflanked him? She could have attempted an exact mirror-image of his own move. In which case they had each sprinted a wide fast circle in opposite directions and essentially exchanged positions. Or she could have found a sinkhole or a crevasse and gone to ground. She could have found the Jeep. If she'd glanced backward during a lightning strike she would have seen it. It was an easy conclusion that he'd have to get back to it eventually. How else was he going to get out of the desert? So maybe she was waiting there. Maybe she was inside it, crouching low. Maybe she was under it, in which case he had just presented her with a Winchester rifle with two factory rounds still in the magazine.
He stayed down in the mud, thinking hard. He ignored the next lightning flash altogether. Just pressed himself into the landscape, calculating, deciding. He rejected the possibility of the flanking maneuver. That was military instinct. He was dealing with a street shooter, not an infantry soldier. No infantryman would aim for a guy's eye. Percentages were against it. So maybe she had gone for the Jeep. He swam himself through a stationary muddy circle and raised his head and waited.
The next flash was a sheet, rippling madly and lighting the underside of the clouds like a battlefield flare. The Jeep was a long way away. Too far, surely. And if she had gone for it, she was no immediate threat. Not all the way back there, not at that distance. So he swiveled back around and crawled on south. Check and clear, zone by zone. He moved slowly, on his knees and elbows. Ten feet, twenty, twenty-five. It felt exactly like basic training. He crawled on and on, and then he smelled perfume.
It was somehow intensified by the rain. He realized the whole desert smelled different. The rain had changed things entirely. He could smell plants and earth. They made a strong, pungent, natural odor. But mixed into it was a woman's perfume. Was it perfume? Or was it something from nature, like a night flower suddenly blooming in the storm? No, it was perfume. A woman's perfume. No question about it. He stopped moving and lay completely still.
He could hear the mesquite moving, but it was only the wind. The rain was easing back toward torrential and a strong wet breeze was coming in from the south, teasing him with the smell of perfume. It was absolutely dark. He raised his gun and couldn't see it in his hand. Like he was a blind man.
Which way is she facing? Not east. She had to be crouched low, so to the east there would be nothing to see except the blank two-foot wall that was the edge of the mesa. If she was looking south or west, no problem. If she's looking north, she's looking straight at me, except she can't see me. Too dark. She can't smell me either, because I'm upwind. He raised himself on his left forearm and pointed his gun straight from his right shoulder. If she was facing south or west, it would give him an easy shot into her back. But worst case, she's looking north and we're exactly facing each other. We could be five feet apart. So it's a gamble now. When the lightning flashes, who reacts first?
He held his breath. Waited for the lightning. It was the longest wait of his life. The storm had changed. Thunder was rumbling long and loud, but it wasn't sharp anymore. The rain was still heavy. It kicked mud and grit up onto his face. Thrashed against the brush. Brand-new streams gurgled all around his prone body. He was half-submerged in water. He was very cold.
Then there was a split-second tearing sound in the sky and a gigantic thunderclap crashed and a bolt of lightning fired absolutely simultaneously. It was impossibly white and harsh and the desert lit up brighter than day. The woman was three feet in front of him. She was slumped face down on the ground, already battered by rain and silted with mud. She looked small and collapsed and empty. Her legs were bent at the knees and her arms were folded under her. Her gun had fallen next to her shoulder. A Browning Hi-Power. It was half-submerged in the mud and a small thicket of twigs had already dammed against one side of it. He used the last of the lightning flash to scrabble for it and hurl it far away. Then the light died and he used the after-image retained in his eyes to find her neck.
There was no pulse. She was already very cold.
Deflection shooting. His third bullet, instinctively placed just ahead of her as she scrambled away from him. She had jumped straight into its path. He kept the fingers of his left hand on the still pulse in her neck, afraid to lose contact with her in the dark. He settled down to wait for the next lightning flash. His left arm started shaking. He told himself it was because he was holding it at an unnatural angle. Then he started laughing. It built quickly, like the rain. He had spent the last twenty minutes stalking a woman he had already shot dead. Accidentally. He laughed uncontrollably until the rain filled his mouth and set him coughing and spluttering wildly.
* * *
The man stood up and walked over to the credenza. Picked up his gun from where it was lying on the polished wood. Ducked down to the black nylon valise and took out a long black silencer. Fitted it carefully to the muzzle of the gun. Walked back to the chair and sat down again.
"It's time," he said.
He put his hand on her shoulder. She felt it through the sheet. She wriggled away from him. Swam down in the bed and curled up. She needed to pee. Very badly.
"It's time," the man said again.
He folded the sheet back. She scrabbled away, holding the opposite hem tight between her knees. Looked straight at him.
"You said one more hour," she said. "It hasn't been a hour yet. I'll tell that lady. She's your boss."
The man's eyes went blank. He turned and looked at the door, just for a moment. Then he turned back.
"O.K.," he said. "You tell me when you think it's been one more hour."
He let go of the sheet and she wrapped herself up in it again. Ducked her head under it and put her hands over her ears to block the noise of the thunder. Then she closed her eyes, but she could still see the lightning flashes through the sheet and through her eyelids. They looked red.
* * *
The next flash was sheet lightning again, vague and diffuse and flickering. He rolled the body over, just to be sure. Tore open her jacket and shirt. He had hit her in the left armpit. It was through-and-through, exiting in the opposite wall of her chest. Probably got her heart, both lungs and her spine. A .40 bullet was not a subtle thing. It took a lot to stop one. The entry wound was small and neat. The exit wound wasn't. The rain flushed it clean. Diluted blood leaked all over the place and instantly disappeared. Her chest cavity was filling with water. It looked like a medical diagram. He could have sunk his whole hand in there.
She was medium-sized. Blond hair, soaked and full of mud where it spilled out under the FBI cap. He pushed the bill of the cap upward so he could see her face. Her eyes were open and staring at the sky and filling with rain like tears. Her face was slightly familiar. He had seen her before. Where? The lightning died and he was left with the image of her face in his mind, harsh and white and reversed like a photograph's negative. The diner. The Coke floats. Friday, school quitting time, a Crown Victoria, three passengers. He had pegged them as a sales team. Wrong again.
"O.K.," he said out loud. "Ballgame over."
He put Alice's gun back in his pocket and walked away north, back to the Jeep. It was so dark and he had so much rain in his eyes he thumped right into the side of it before he knew he was there. He tracked around it with a hand on the hood and found the driver's door. Opened it and closed it and opened it again, just for the thrill of making the dome light come on inside, illumination he could control for himself.
It wasn't easy driving back up onto the limestone. The grit that should have been under the wheels and aiding traction was now slick mud. He put the headlights on bright and started the wipers beating fast and selected four-wheel drive and slid around for a while before the front tires caught and dragged the car up the slope. Then he hooked a wide curve ahead and left, all the way across to the seven o'clock position. He hit the horn twice and Alice walked out of the mesquite into the headlight beams. She was soaked to the skin. Water was pouring off her. Her hair was plastered flat. Her ears stuck out a little. She stepped to her left and ran around to the passenger door.
"I guess this is the storm people were expecting," he said.
Lightning flared again outside. A ragged bolt far to their left, accompanied by an explosion of thunder. The weather was moving north, and fast.
She shook her head. "This little shower? This is just a taste. Wait until tomorrow."
"I'll be gone tomorrow."
"You will?"
He nodded.
"You O.K.?" he asked.
"I didn't know when to fire."
"You did fine."
"What happened?"
He drove off again, turning south, zigzagging the Jeep to fan the headlight beams back and forth across the mesa. Thirty feet in front of the wrecked VW, he found the first guy's body. It was humped and inert. He dipped the lights so they would shine directly on it and jumped out into the rain. The guy was dead. He had taken the Winchester's bullet in the stomach. He hadn't died instantaneously. His hat was missing and he had torn open his jacket to clutch his wound. He had crawled quite a distance. He was tall and heavily built. Reacher closed his eyes and scanned back to the scene in the diner. By the register. The woman, two men. One big and fair, one small and dark. Then he walked back to the Jeep and slid inside. The seat was soaked.
"Two dead," he said. "That's what happened. But the driver escaped. Did you ID him?"
"They came to kill us, didn't they?"
"That was the plan. Did you ID the driver?"
She said nothing.
"It's very important, Alice," he said. "For Ellie's sake. We don't have a tongue. That part didn't work out. They're both dead."
She said nothing.
"Did you see him?"
She shook her head.
"No, not really," she said. "I'm very sorry. I was running, the lights were only on a second or two."
It had seemed longer than that to Reacher. Much longer. But in reality, she was probably right. She was maybe even overestimating. It might have been only three quarters of a second. They had been very quick with the triggers.
"I've seen these people before," he said. "On Friday, up at the crossroads. Must have been after they got Eugene. They must have been scouting the area. Three of them. A woman, a big guy, a small dark guy. I can account for the woman and the big guy. So was it the small dark guy driving tonight?"
"I didn't really see."
"Gut feeling?" Reacher said. "First impression? You must have gotten a glimpse. Or seen a silhouette."
"Didn't you?"
He nodded. "He was facing away from me, looking down to where you fired from. There was a lot of glare. Some rain on his windshield. Then I was shooting, and then he took off. But I don't think he was small."
She nodded, too. "Gut feeling, he wasn't small. Or dark. It was just a blur, but I'd say he was big enough. Maybe fair-haired."
"Makes sense," Reacher said. "They left one of the team behind to guard Ellie."
"So who was driving?"
"Their client. The guy who hired them. That's my guess. Because they were short-handed, and because they needed local knowledge."
"He got away."
Reacher smiled. "He can run, but he can't hide."
* * *
They went to take a look at the wrecked VW. It was beyond help. Alice didn't seem too concerned about it. She just shrugged and turned away. Reacher took the maps from the glove compartment and turned the Jeep around and headed north. The drive back to the Red House was a nightmare. Crossing the mesa was O.K. But beyond the end of it the desert track was baked so hard that it wasn't absorbing any water at all. The rain was flooding all over the surface. The part that had felt like a riverbed was a riverbed. It was pouring with a fast torrent that boiled up over the tires. Mesquite bushes had been torn off their deep taproots and washed out of their shallow toeholds and whole trees were racing south on the swirl. They dammed against the front of the Jeep and rode with it until cross-currents tore them loose. Sinkholes were concealed by the tide. But the rain was easing fast. It was dying back to drizzle. The eye of the storm had blown away to the north.
They were right next to the motor barn before they saw it. It was in total darkness. Reacher braked hard and swerved around it and saw pale lights flickering behind some of the windows in the house.
"Candles," he said.
"Power must be out," Alice said. "The lightning must have hit the lines."
He braked again and slid in the mud and turned the car so the headlights washed deep into the barn.
"Recognize anything?" he asked.
Bobby's pick-up was back in its place, but it was wet and streaked with mud. Water was dripping out of the load bed and pooling on the ground.
"O.K.," Alice said. "So what now?"
Reacher stared into the mirror. Then he turned his head and watched the road from the north.
"Somebody's coming," he said.
There was a faint glow of headlights behind them, rising and falling, many miles distant, breaking into a thousand pieces in the raindrops on the Jeep's windows.
"Let's go say howdy to the Greets," he said.
He pulled Alice's gun out of his pocket and checked it. Never assume. But it was O.K. Cocked and locked. Seven left. He put it back in his pocket and drove across the soaking yard to the foot of the porch steps. The rain was almost gone. The ground was beginning to steam. The vapor rose gently and swirled in the headlight beams. They got out into the humidity. The temperature was coming back. So was the insect noise. There was a faint whirring chant all around. It sounded wary and very distant.
He led her up the porch steps and pushed open the door. The hallway had candles burning in holders placed here and there on all the available horizontal surfaces. They gave a soft orange glow and made the foyer warm and inviting. He ushered Alice through to the parlor. Stepped in behind her. More candles were burning in there. Dozens of them. They were glued to saucers with melted wax. There was a Coleman lantern standing on a credenza against the end wall. It was hissing softly and burning bright.
Bobby and his mother were sitting together at the red-painted table. Shadows were dancing and flickering all around them. The candlelight was kind to Rusty. It took twenty years off her. She was fully dressed, in jeans and a shirt. Bobby sat beside her, looking at nothing in particular. The tiny flames lit his face and made it mobile.
"Isn't this romantic," Reacher said.
Rusty moved, awkwardly.
"I'm scared of the dark," she said. "Can't help it. Always have been."
"You should be," Reacher said. "Bad things can happen in the dark."
She made no reply to that.
"Towel?" Reacher asked. He was dripping water all over the floor. So was Alice.
"In the kitchen," Rusty said.
There was a thin striped towel on a wooden roller. Alice blotted her face and hair and patted her shirt. Reacher did the same, and then he stepped back into the parlor.
"Why are you both up?" he asked. "It's three o'clock in the morning."
Neither of them answered.
"Your truck was out tonight," Reacher said.
"But we weren't," Bobby said. "We stayed inside, like you told us to."
Rusty nodded. "Both of us, together."
Reacher smiled.
"Each other's alibi," he said. "That would get them rolling in the aisles, down in the jury room."
"We didn't do anything," Bobby said.
Reacher heard a car on the road. Just the faint subliminal sound of tires slowing on soaked blacktop. The faint whistle of drive belts turning under a hood. Then there was a slow wet crunch as it turned under the gate. Grit and pebbles popped under the wheels as it drove up to the porch. There was a tiny squeal from a brake rotor and then silence as the engine died. The clunk of a door closing. Feet on the porch steps. The house door opening, footsteps crossing the foyer. Then the parlor door opened. The candle flames swayed and flickered. Hack Walker stepped into the room.
"Good," Reacher said. "We don't have much time."
"Did you rob my office?" Walker replied.
Reacher nodded. "I was curious."
"About what?"
"About details," Reacher said. "I'm a details guy."
"You didn't need to break in. I'd have shown you the files."
"You weren't there."
"Whatever, you shouldn't have broken in. You're in trouble for it. You can understand that, right? Big trouble."
Reacher smiled. Bad luck and trouble, been my only friends.
"Sit down, Hack," he said.
Walker paused a second. Then he threaded his way around all the chairs and sat down next to Rusty Greer. Candlelight lit his face. The lantern glowed to his left.
"You got something for me?" he asked.
Reacher sat opposite. Laid his hands palm-down on the wood.
"I was a cop of sorts for thirteen years," he said.
"So?"
"I learned a lot of stuff."
"Like?"
"Like, lies are messy. They get out of control. But the truth is messy, too. So any situation you're in, you expect rough edges. Anytime I see anything that's all buttoned up, I get real suspicious. And Carmen's situation was messy enough to be real."
"But?"
"I came to see there were a couple of edges that were just too rough."
"Like what?"
"Like, she had no money with her. I know that. Two million in the bank, and she travels three hundred miles with a single dollar in her purse? Sleeps in the car, doesn't eat? Leapfrogs from one Mobil station to the next, just to keep going? That didn't tie up for me."
"She was playacting. That's who she is."
"You know who Nicolaus Copernicus is?"
"Was," Walker said. "Some old astronomer. Polish, I think. Proved the earth goes around the sun."
Reacher nodded. "And much more than that, by implication. He asked us all to consider how likely is it that we're at the absolute center of things? What are the odds? That what we're seeing is somehow exceptional? The very best or the very worst? It's an important philosophical point."
"So?"
"So if Carmen had two million bucks in the bank but traveled with a single dollar just in case she bumped into a guy as suspicious as me, then she is undoubtedly the number-one best-prepared con artist in the history of the world. And old Copernicus asks me, how likely is that? That I should by chance happen to bump into the best con artist in the history of the world? His answer is, not very likely, really. He says the likelihood is, if I bump into a con artist at all, it'll be a very average and mediocre one."
"So what are you saying?"
"I'm saying it didn't tie up for me. So it got me thinking about the money. And then something else didn't tie up."
"What?"
"Al Eugene's people messengered Sloops financial stuff over, right?"
"This morning. Feels like a long time ago."
"Thing is, I saw Al's office. When I went to the museum. It's literally within sight of the courthouse. It's a one-minute walk. So how likely is it they would messenger something over? Wouldn't they just walk it over? For a friend of Al's? Especially if it was urgent? It would take them ten times as long just to dial the phone for the courier service."
The candlelight danced and flickered. The red room glowed.
"People messenger things all the time," Walker said. "It's routine. And it was too hot for walking."
Reacher nodded. "Maybe. It didn't mean much at the time. But then something else didn't tie up. The collarbone."
"What about it?"
Reacher turned to face Alice. "When you fell off your inline skates, did you break your collarbone?"
"No," Alice said.
"Any injuries at all?"
"I tore up my hand. A lot of road rash."
"You put your hand out to break your fall?"
"Reflex," she said. "It's impossible not to."
Reacher nodded. Turned back through the candlelit gloom to Walker.
"I rode with Carmen on Saturday," he said. "My first time ever. My ass got sore, but the thing I really remember is how high I was. It's scary up there. So the thing is, if Carmen fell off, from that height, onto rocky dirt, hard enough to bust her collarbone, how is it that she didn't get road rash, too? On her hand?"
"Maybe she did."
"The hospital didn't write it up."
"Maybe they forgot."
"It was a very detailed report. New staff, working hard. I noticed that, and Cowan Black did, too. He said they were very thorough. They wouldn't have neglected lacerations to the palm."
"She must have worn riding gloves."
Reacher shook his head. "She told me nobody wears gloves down here. Too hot. And she definitely wouldn't have said that if gloves had once saved her from serious road rash. She'd have been a big fan of gloves, in that case. She'd have certainly made me wear them, being new to it."
"So?"
"So I started to wonder if the collarbone thing could have been from Sloop hitting her. I figured it was possible. Maybe she's on her knees, a big clubbing fist from above, she moves her head. Only she also claimed he had broken her arm and her jaw and knocked her teeth loose, too, and there was no mention of all that stuff, so I stopped wondering. Especially when I found out the ring was real."
A candle on the left end of the table died. It burned out and smoke rose from it in a thin plume that ran absolutely straight for a second and then spiraled crazily.
"She's a liar," Walker said. "That's all."
"She sure is," Bobby said.
"Sloop never hit her," Rusty said. "A son of mine would never hit a woman, whoever she was."
"One at a time, O.K.?" Reacher said, quietly.
He could feel the impatience in the room. Elbows shifting on the table, feet moving on the floor. He turned to Bobby first.
"You claim she's a liar," he said. "And I know why. It's because you don't like her, because you're a racist piece of shit, and because she had an affair with the schoolteacher. So among other things you took it on yourself to try and turn me off of her. Some kind of loyalty to your brother."
Then he turned to Rusty. "We'll get to what Sloop did and didn't do real soon. But right now, you keep quiet, O.K.? Hack and I have business."
"What business?" Walker said.
"This business," Reacher said, and propped Alice's gun on the tabletop, the butt resting on the wood and the muzzle pointing straight at Walker's chest.
"What the hell are you doing?" Walker said.
Reacher clicked the safety off with his thumb. The snick sounded loud in the room. Candles flickered and the lantern hissed softly.
"I figured out the thing with the diamond," he said. "Then everything else made sense. Especially with you giving us the badges and sending us down here to speak with Rusty."
"What are you talking about?"
"It was like a conjuring trick. The whole thing. You knew Carmen pretty well. So you knew what she must have told me. Which was the absolute truth, always. The truth about herself, and about what Sloop was doing to her. So you just exactly reversed everything. It was simple. A very neat and convincing trick. Like she told me she was from Napa, and you said, hey, I bet she told you she's from Napa, but she isn't, you know. Like she told me she'd called the IRS, and you said, hey, I bet she told you she called the IRS, but she didn't, really. It was like you knew the real truth and were reluctantly exposing commonplace lies she had told before. But it was you who was lying. All along. It was very, very effective. Like a conjuring trick. And you dressed it all up behind pretending you wanted to save her. You fooled me for a long time."
"I did want to save her. I am saving her."
"Bullshit, Hack. Your only aim all along was to coerce a confession out of her for something she didn't do. It was a straightforward plan. Your hired guns kidnapped Ellie today so you could force Carmen to confess. I was your only problem. I stuck around, I recruited Alice. We were in your face from Monday morning onward. So you misled us for twenty-seven straight hours. You let us down slowly and regretfully, point by point. It was beautifully done. Well, almost. To really make it work, you'd have to be the best con artist in the world. And like old Copernicus says, what are the odds that the best con artist in the world would happen to be up there in Pecos?"
There was silence. Just sputtering wax, the hissing of the lantern, five people breathing. The old air conditioner wasn't running. No power.
"You're crazy," Walker said.
"No, I'm not. You decoyed me by being all regretful about what a liar Carmen was and how desperate you were to save her. You were even smart enough to reveal a cynical reason for wanting to save her. About wanting to be a judge, so I wouldn't think you were too good to be true. That was a great touch, Hack. But all the time you were talking to her on the phone, muffling your voice to get past the desk clerk, telling him you were her lawyer, telling her if she ever spoke to a real lawyer, you'd hurt Ellie. Which is why she refused to speak with Alice. Then you wrote out a bunch of phony financial statements on your own computer right there at your desk. One printout looks much the same as any other. And you drafted the phony trust deeds. And the phony Family Services papers. You knew what real ones looked like, I guess. Then as soon as you heard your people had picked up the kid you got back on the phone and coached Carmen through the phony confession, feeding back to her all the lies you'd told to me. Then you sent your assistant downstairs to listen to them."
"This is nonsense."
Reacher shrugged. "So let's prove it. Let's call the FBI and ask them how the hunt for Ellie is going."
"Phones are out," Bobby said. "Electrical storm."
Reacher nodded. "O.K., no problem."
He kept the gun pointed at Walker's chest and turned to face Rusty.
"Tell me what the FBI agents asked you," he said.
Rusty looked blank. "What FBI agents?"
"No FBI agents came here tonight?"
She just shook her head. Reacher nodded.
"You were playacting, Hack," he said. "You told us you'd called the FBI and the state police, and there were roadblocks in place, and helicopters up, and more than a hundred fifty people on the ground. But you didn't call anybody. Because if you had, the very first thing they would have done is come down here. They'd have talked to Rusty for hours. They'd have brought sketch artists and crime scene technicians. This is the scene of the crime, after all. And Rusty is the only witness."
"You're wrong, Reacher," Walker said.
"There were FBI people here," Bobby said. "I saw them in the yard."
Reacher shook his head.
"There were people wearing FBI hats," he said. "Two of them. But they aren't wearing those hats anymore."
Walker said nothing.
"Big mistake, Hack," Reacher said. "Giving us those stupid badges and sending us down here. You're in law enforcement. You knew Rusty was the vital witness. You also knew she wouldn't cooperate fully with me. So it was an inexplicable decision for a DA to take, to send us down here. I couldn't believe it. Then I saw why. You wanted us out of the way. And you wanted to know where we were, at all times. So you could send your people after us."
"What people?"
"The hired guns, Hack. The people in the FBI hats. The people you sent to kill Al Eugene. The people you sent to kill Sloop. They were pretty good. Very professional. But the thing with professionals is, they need to be able to work again in the future. Al Eugene was no problem. Could have been anybody, out there in the middle of nowhere. But Sloop was harder. He was just home from prison, wasn't going anyplace for a spell. So it had to be done right here, which was risky. They made you agree to cover their asses by framing Carmen. Then you made them agree to help you do it by moonlighting as the kidnap team."
"This is ridiculous," Walker said.
"You knew Carmen had bought a gun," Reacher said. "You told me, the paperwork comes through your office. And you knew why she bought it. You knew all about Sloop and what he did to her. You knew their bedroom was a torture chamber. So she wants to hide a gun in there, where does she put it? Three choices, really. Top shelf of her closet, in her bedside table, or in her underwear drawer. Common sense. Same for any woman in any bedroom. I know it, and your people knew it. They probably watched through the window until she went to shower, they slipped some gloves on, a minute later they're in the room, they cover Sloop with their own guns until they find Carmen's, and they shoot him with it. They're outside again thirty seconds later. A quick sprint back to where they left their car on the road, and they're gone. This house is a warren. But you know it well. You're a friend of the family. You assured them they could be in and out without being seen. You probably drew them a floor plan."
Walker closed his eyes. Said nothing. He looked old and pale. The candlelight wasn't helping him.
"But you made mistakes, Hack," Reacher said. "People like you always make mistakes. The financial reports were clumsy. Lots of money, but hardly any expenditure? How likely is that? What is she, a miser, too? And the messenger thing was a bad slip. If they had been messengered, you'd have left them in the courier packet, like you did with the medical reports, to make them look even more official."
Walker opened his eyes, defiant.
"The medical reports," he repeated. "You saw them. They prove she was lying. You heard Cowan Black say it."
Reacher nodded. "Leaving them in the FedEx packet was neat. They looked real urgent, like they were hot off the truck. But you should have torn the label off the front. Because the thing is, Fed
310
