14

 

Alice walked slowly across the tile.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“Tell me what you see,” Reacher said.

She dropped her eyes toward the corpse like it required a physical effort.

“Shot in the head,” she said. “Twice.”

“How far apart are the holes?”

“Maybe three inches.”

“What else do you see?”

“Nothing,” she said.

He nodded. “Exactly.”

“So?”

“Look closer. The holes are clean, right?”

She took a step nearer the drawer. Bent slightly from the waist.

“They look clean,” she said.

“That has implications,” he said. “It means they’re not contact wounds. A contact wound is where you put the muzzle of the gun directly against the forehead. You know what happens when you do that?”

She shook her head. Said nothing.

“First thing out of a gun barrel is an explosion of hot gas. If the muzzle was tight against the forehead, the gas punches in under the skin and then can’t go anyplace, because of the bone. So it punches right back out again. It tears itself a big star-shaped hole. Looks like a starfish. Right, doc?”

The pathologist nodded.

“Star-burst splitting, we call it,” he said.

“That’s absent here,” Reacher said. “So it wasn’t a contact shot. Next thing out of the barrel is flame. If it was a real close shot, two or three inches, but not a contact shot, we’d see burning of the skin. In a small ring shape.”

“Burn rim,” the pathologist said.

“That’s absent, too,” Reacher said. “Next thing out is soot. Soft, smudgy black stuff. So if it was a shot from six or eight inches, we’d see soot smudging on his forehead. Maybe a patch a couple inches wide. That’s not here, either.”

“So?” Alice asked.

“Next thing out is gunpowder particles,” Reacher said. “Little bits of unburned carbon. No gunpowder is perfect. Some of it doesn’t burn. It just blasts out, in a spray. It hammers in under the skin. Tiny black dots. Tattooing, it’s called. If it was a shot from a foot away, maybe a foot and a half, we’d see it. You see it?”

“No,” Alice said.

“Right. All we see is the bullet holes. Nothing else. No evidence at all to suggest they were from close range. Depends on the exact powder in the shells, but they look to me like shots from three or four feet away, absolute minimum.”

“Eight feet six inches,” the pathologist said. “That’s my estimation.”

Reacher glanced at him. “You tested the powder?”

The guy shook his head. “Crime scene diagrams. He was on the far side of the bed. The bed was near the window, gave him an alley two feet six inches wide on his side. He was found near the bedside table, up near the head, against the window wall. We know she wasn’t next to him there, or we’d have found all that close-range stuff you just mentioned. So the nearest she could have been was on the other side of the bed. At the foot end, probably. Firing across it, diagonally, according to the trajectories. He was probably retreating as far as he could get. It was a king-size bed, so my best guess is eight feet six inches, to allow for the diagonal.”

“Excellent,” Reacher said. “You prepared to say so on the stand?”

“Sure. And that’s only the theoretical minimum. Could have been more.”

“But what does it mean?” Alice asked.

“Means Carmen didn’t do it,” Reacher said.

“Why not?”

“How big is a man’s forehead? Five inches across and two high?”

“So?”

“No way she could have hit a target that small from eight feet plus.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I saw her shoot, the day before. First time she pulled a trigger in her life. She was hopeless. Literally hopeless. She couldn’t have hit the side of a barn from eight feet plus. I told her she’d have to jam the gun in his gut and empty the magazine.”

“You’re digging her grave,” Alice said. “That sort of testimony shouldn’t be volunteered.”

“She didn’t do it, Alice. She couldn’t have.”

“She could have gotten lucky.”

“Sure, once. But not twice. Twice means they were aimed shots. And they’re close together, horizontally. He’d have started falling after the first one. Which means it was a fast double-tap. Bang bang, like that, no hesitation. That’s skillful shooting.”

Alice was quiet for a second.

“She could have been faking,” she said. “You know, before. About needing to learn. She lied about everything else. Maybe she was really an expert shot, but she claimed not to be. Because she wanted you to do it for her. For other reasons.”

Reacher shook his head.

“She wasn’t faking,” he said. “All my life I’ve seen people shoot. Either you can or you can’t. And if you can, it shows. You can’t hide it. You can’t unlearn it.”

Alice said nothing.

“It wasn’t Carmen,” Reacher said. “Even I couldn’t have done it. Not with that piece of junk she bought. Not from that distance. A fast double-tap to the head? Whoever did this is a better shooter than me.”

Alice smiled, faintly. “And that’s rare?”

“Very,” he said, unselfconsciously.

“But she confessed to it. Why would she do that?”

“I have no idea.”

 

 

Ellie wasn’t sure she understood completely. She had hidden on the stairs above the foyer when her grandmother talked to the strangers. She had heard the words new family. She understood what they meant. And she already knew she needed a new family. The Greers had told her that her daddy had died and her mommy had gone far away and wasn’t ever coming back. And they had told her they didn’t want to keep her with them. Which was O.K. with her. She didn’t want to stay with them, either. They were mean. They had already sold her pony, and all the other horses, too. A big truck had come for them, very early that morning. She didn’t cry. She just somehow knew it all went together. No more Daddy, no more Mommy, no more pony, no more horses. Everything had changed. So she went with the strangers, because she didn’t know what else to do.

Then the strangers had let her talk to her mommy on the phone. Her mommy had cried, and at the end she said be happy with your new family. But the thing was, she wasn’t sure if these strangers were her new family, or if they were just taking her to her new family. And she was afraid to ask. So she just kept quiet. The back of her hand was sore, where she put it in her mouth.

 

 

“It’s a can of worms,” Hack Walker said. “You know what I mean? Best not to open it at all. Things could get out of hand, real quick.”

They were back in Walker’s office. It was easily fifty degrees hotter than the interior of the morgue building. They were both sweating heavily.

“You understand?” Walker asked. “It makes things worse again.”

“You think?” Alice said.

Walker nodded. “It muddies the waters. Let’s say Reacher is right, which is a stretch, frankly, because all he’s got is a highly subjective opinion here. He’s guessing, basically. And his guess is based on what, exactly? It’s based on an impression she chose to give him beforehand, that she couldn’t shoot, and we already know every other impression she chose to give him beforehand was total bullshit from beginning to end. But let’s say he’s right, just for the sake of argument. What does that give us?”

“What?”

“A conspiracy, is what. We know she tried to rope Reacher in. Now you’ve got her roping somebody else in. She gets ahold of somebody else, she tells them to come to the house, she tells them where and when, she tells them where her gun is concealed, they show up, get the gun, do the deed. If it happened that way, she’s instigated a conspiracy to commit murder for remuneration. Hired a killer, cold-blooded as hell. We go down that road, she’s headed for the lethal injection again. Because that looks a whole lot worse than a solo shot, believe me. In comparison, a solo shot looks almost benign. It looks like a crime of the moment, you know? We leave it exactly the way we got it, along with the guilty plea, I’m happy asking for a life sentence. But we start talking conspiracy, that’s real evil, and we’re back on track for death row.”

Alice said nothing.

“So you see what I mean?” Walker said. “There’s no net benefit. Absolutely the opposite effect. It makes things much worse for her. Plus, she already said she did it herself. Which I think is true. But if it isn’t, then her confession was a calculated lie, designed to cover her ass, because she knew a conspiracy would look worse. And we’d have to react to that. We couldn’t let that go. It would make us look like fools.”

Alice said nothing. Reacher just shrugged.

“So leave it alone,” Walker said. “That’s my suggestion. If it would help her, I’d look at it. But it won’t. So we should leave it alone. For her sake.”

“And for your judgeship’s sake,” Reacher said.

Walker nodded. “I’m not hiding that from you.”

“You happy to leave it alone?” Alice asked. “As a prosecutor? Somebody could be getting clean away with something.”

Walker shook his head. “If it happened the way Reacher thinks. If, if, if. If is a very big word. I got to say I think it’s highly unlikely. Believe me, I’m a real enthusiastic prosecutor, but I wouldn’t build a case and waste a jury’s time on one person’s purely subjective opinion about how well another person could shoot. Especially when that other person is as accomplished a liar as Carmen is. All we know, she’s been shooting every day since she was a kid. A rough kid from some barrio in L.A., certainly a rural Texas jury wouldn’t see any problem in swallowing that.”

Reacher said nothing. Alice nodded again.

“O.K.,” she said. “I’m not her lawyer, anyway.”

“What would you do if you were?”

She shrugged. “I’d leave it, probably. Like you say, blundering into a conspiracy rap wouldn’t help her any.”

She stood up, slowly, like it was an effort in the heat. She tapped Reacher on the shoulder. Gave him a what can we do? look and headed for the door. He stood up and followed her. Walker said nothing. Just watched them partway out of the room and then dropped his eyes to the old photograph of the three boys leaning on the pick-up’s fender.

 

 

They crossed the street together and walked as far as the bus depot. It was fifty yards from the courthouse, fifty yards from the legal mission. It was a small, sleepy depot. No buses in it. Just an expanse of diesel-stained blacktop ringed with benches shaded from the afternoon sun by small white fiberglass roofs. There was a tiny office hut papered on the outside with schedules. It had a through-the-wall air conditioner running hard. There was a woman in it, sitting on a high stool, reading a magazine.

“Walker’s right, you know,” Alice said. “He’s doing her a favor. It’s a lost cause.”

Reacher said nothing.

“So where will you head?” she asked.

“First bus out,” he said. “That’s my rule.”

They stood together and read the schedules. Next departure was to Topeka, Kansas, via Oklahoma City. It was due in from Phoenix, Arizona, in a half hour. It was making a long slow counterclockwise loop.

“Been to Topeka before?” Alice asked.

“I’ve been to Leavenworth,” he said. “It’s not far.”

He tapped on the glass and the woman sold him a one-way ticket. He put it in his pocket.

“Good luck, Alice,” he said. “Four and a half years from now, I’ll look for you in the Yellow Pages.”

She smiled.

“Take care, Reacher,” she said.

She stood still for a second, like she was debating whether to hug him or kiss him on the cheek, or just walk away. Then she smiled again, and just walked away. He watched her go until she was lost to sight. Then he found the shadiest bench and sat down to wait.

 

 

She still wasn’t sure. They had taken her to a very nice place, like a house, with beds and everything. So maybe this was her new family. But they didn’t look like a family. They were very busy. She thought they looked a bit like doctors. They were kind to her, but busy too, with stuff she didn’t understand. Like at the doctor’s office. Maybe they were doctors. Maybe they knew she was upset, and they were going to make her better. She thought about it for a long time, and then she asked.

“Are you doctors?” she said.

“No,” they answered.

“Are you my new family?”

“No,” they said. “You’ll go to your new family soon.”

“When?”

“A few days, O.K.? But right now you stay with us.”

She thought they all looked very busy.

 

 

The bus rolled in more or less on time. It was a big Greyhound, dirty from the road, wrapped in a diesel cloud, with heat shimmering visibly from its air conditioner grilles. It stopped twenty feet from him and the driver held the engine at a loud shuddering idle. The door opened and three people got off. Reacher stood up and walked over and got on. He was the only departing passenger. The driver took his ticket.

“Two minutes, O.K.?” the guy said. “I need a comfort stop.”

Reacher nodded and said nothing. Just shuffled down the aisle and found a double seat empty. It was on the left, which would face the evening sun all the way after they turned north at Abilene. But the windows were tinted dark blue and the air was cold, so he figured he’d be O.K. He sat down sideways. Stretched out and rested his head against the glass. The eight spent shells in his pocket were uncomfortable against the muscle of his thigh. He hitched up and moved them through the cotton. Then he took them out and held them in his palm. Rolled them together like dice. They were warm, and they made dull metallic sounds.

Abilene, he thought.

The driver climbed back in and hung off the step and looked both ways, like an old railroad guy. Then he slid into his seat and the door wheezed shut behind him.

“Wait,” Reacher called.

He stood up and shuffled forward again, all the way down the aisle.

“I changed my mind,” he said. “I’m getting off.”

“I already canceled your ticket,” the driver said. “You want a refund, you’ll have to mail a claim.”

“I don’t want a refund,” Reacher said. “Just let me out, O.K.?”

The driver looked blank, but he operated the mechanism anyway and the doors wheezed open again. Reacher stepped down into the heat and walked away. He heard the bus leave behind him. It turned right where he had turned left and he heard its noise fade and die into the distance. He walked on to the law office. Working hours elsewhere were over and it was crowded again with groups of quiet worried people, some of them talking to lawyers, some of them waiting to. Alice was at her desk in back, talking to a woman with a baby on her knee. She looked up, surprised.

“Bus didn’t come?” she asked.

“I need to ask you a legal question,” he said.

“Is it quick?”

He nodded. “Civilian law, if some guy tells an attorney about a crime, how far can the cops press the attorney for the details?”

“It would be privileged information,” Alice said. “Between lawyer and client. The cops couldn’t press at all.”

“Can I use your phone?”

She paused a moment, puzzled. Then she shrugged.

“Sure,” she said. “Squeeze in.”

He took a spare client chair and put it next to hers, behind the desk.

“Got phone books for Abilene?” he asked.

“Bottom drawer,” she said. “All of Texas.”

She turned back to the woman with the baby and restarted their discussion in Spanish. He opened the drawer and found the right book. There was an information page near the front, with all the emergency services laid out in big letters. He dialed the state police, Abilene office. A woman answered and asked how she could help him.

“I have information,” he said. “About a crime.”

The woman put him on hold. Maybe thirty seconds later the call was picked up elsewhere. Sounded like a squad room. Other phones were ringing in the background and there was faint people noise all around.

“Sergeant Rodríguez,” a voice said.

“I have information about a crime,” Reacher said again.

“Your name, sir?”

“Chester A. Arthur,” Reacher said. “I’m a lawyer in Pecos County.”

“O.K., Mr. Arthur, go ahead.”

“You guys found an abandoned automobile south of Abilene on Friday. A Mercedes Benz belonging to a lawyer called Al Eugene. He’s currently listed as a missing person.”

There was the sound of a keyboard pattering.

“O.K.,” Rodríguez said. “What can you tell me?”

“I have a client here who says Eugene was abducted from his car and killed very near the scene.”

“What’s your client’s name, sir?”

“Can’t tell you that,” Reacher said. “Privileged information. And the fact is I’m not sure I even believe him. I need you to check his story from your end. If he’s making sense, then maybe I can persuade him to come forward.”

“What is he telling you?”

“He says Eugene was flagged down and put in another car. He was driven north to a concealed location on the left-hand side of the road, and then he was shot and his body was hidden.”

Alice had stopped her conversation and was staring sideways at him.

“So I want you to search the area,” Reacher said.

“We already searched the area.”

“What kind of a radius?”

“Immediate surroundings.”

“No, my guy says a mile or two north. You need to look under vegetation, in the cracks in the rock, pumping houses, anything there is. Some spot near where a vehicle could have pulled off the road.”

“A mile or two north of the abandoned car?”

“My guy says not less than one, not more than two.”

“On the left?”

“He’s pretty sure,” Reacher said.

“You got a phone number?”

“I’ll call you back,” Reacher said. “An hour from now.”

He hung up. The woman with the baby was gone. Alice was still staring at him.

“What?” she said.

“We should have focused on Eugene before.”

“Why?”

“Because what’s the one solid fact we’ve got here?”

“What?”

“Carmen didn’t shoot Sloop, that’s what.”

“That’s an opinion, not a fact.”

“No, it’s a fact, Alice. Believe me, I know these things.”

She shrugged. “O.K., so?”

“So somebody else shot him. Which raises the question, why? We know Eugene is missing, and we know Sloop is dead. They were connected, lawyer and client. So let’s assume Eugene is dead, too, not just missing. For the sake of argument. They were working together on a deal that sprung Sloop from jail. Some kind of a big deal, because that isn’t easy. They don’t hand out remissions like candy. So it must have involved some heavy-duty information. Something valuable. Big trouble for somebody. Suppose that somebody took them both out, for revenge, or to stop the flow of information?”

“Where did you get this idea?”

“From Carmen, actually,” he said. “She suggested that’s how I should do it. Off Sloop and make like stopping the deal was the pretext.”

“So Carmen took her own advice.”

“No, Carmen’s parallel,” Reacher said. “She hated him, she had a motive, she’s all kinds of a liar, but she didn’t kill him. Somebody else did.”

“Yes, for her.”

“No,” Reacher said. “It didn’t happen that way. She just got lucky. It was a parallel event. Like he was run over by a truck someplace else. Maybe she’s thrilled with the result, but she didn’t cause it.”

“How sure are you?”

“Very sure. Any other way is ridiculous. Think about it, Alice. Anybody who shoots that well is a professional. Professionals plan ahead, at least a few days. And if she had hired a professional a few days ahead, why would she trawl around Texas looking for guys like me hitching rides? And why would she allow Sloop to be killed in her own bedroom, where she would be the number-one suspect? With her own gun?”

“So what do you think happened?”

“I think some hit team took Eugene out on Friday and covered their ass by hiding the body so it won’t be found until the trail is completely cold. Then they took Sloop out on Sunday and covered their ass by making it look like Carmen did it. In her bedroom, with her own gun.”

“But she was with him. Wouldn’t she have noticed? Wouldn’t she have said?”

He paused. “Maybe she was with Ellie at the time. Maybe she walked back into the bedroom and found it done. Or maybe she was in the shower. Her hair was wet when they arrested her.”

“Then she’d have heard the shots.”

“Not with that shower. It’s like Niagara Falls. And a .22 pistol is quiet.”

“How do you know where they’ll find Eugene’s body? Assuming you’re right?”

“I thought about how I would do it. They obviously had a vehicle of their own, out there in the middle of nowhere. So maybe they staged a breakdown or a flat. Flagged him down, forced him into their vehicle, drove him away. But they wouldn’t want to keep him in there long. Too risky. Two or three minutes maximum, I figure, which is a mile or two from a standing start.”

“Why north? Why on the left side?”

“I’d have driven way north first. Turned back and scouted the nearside shoulder. Picked my place and measured a couple of miles backward, turned around again and set up and waited for him.”

“Conceivable,” she said. “But the Sloop thing? That’s impossible. They went down to that house? In Echo, in the middle of nowhere? Hid out and crept in? While she was in the shower?”

“I could have done it,” he said. “And I’m assuming they’re as good as me. Maybe they’re better than me. They certainly shoot better.”

“You’re crazy,” she said.

“Maybe,” he said.

“No, for sure,” she said. “Because she confessed to it. Why would she do that? If it was really nothing at all to do with her?”

“We’ll figure that out later. First, we wait an hour.”

 

 

He left Alice with work to do and went back out into the heat. Decided he’d finally take a look at the Wild West museum. When he got there, it was closed. Too late in the day. But he could see an alley leading to an open area in back. There was a locked gate, low enough for him to step over. Behind the buildings was a collection of rebuilt artifacts from the old days. There was a small one-cell jailhouse, and a replica of Judge Roy Bean’s courthouse, and a hanging tree. The three displays made a nice direct sequence. Arrest, trial, sentence. Then there was Clay Allison’s grave. It was well tended, and the headstone was handsome. Clay was his middle name. His first name was Robert. Robert Clay Allison, born 1840, died 1887. Never killed a man that did not need killing. Reacher had no middle name. It was Jack Reacher, plain and simple. Born 1960, not dead yet. He wondered what his headstone would look like. Probably wouldn’t have one. There was nobody to arrange it.

He strolled back up the alley and stepped over the gate again. Facing him was a long low concrete building, two stories. Retail operations on the first floor, offices above. One of them had Albert E. Eugene, Attorney at Law painted on the window in old-fashioned gold letters. There were two other law firms in the building. The building was within sight of the courthouse. These were the cheap lawyers, Reacher guessed. Separated geographically from the free lawyers in Alice’s row and the expensive lawyers who must be on some other street. Although Eugene had driven a Mercedes Benz. Maybe he did a lot of volume. Or maybe he was just vain and had been struggling with a heavy lease payment.

He paused at the crossroads. The sun was dropping low in the west and there were clouds stacking up on the southern horizon. There was a warm breeze on his face. It was gusting strong enough to tug at his clothes and stir dust on the sidewalk. He stood for a second and let it flatten the fabric of his shirt against his stomach. Then it died and the dull heat came back. But the clouds were still there in the south, like ragged stains on the sky.

He walked back to Alice’s office. She was still at her desk. Still facing an endless stream of problems. There were people in her client chairs. A middle-aged Mexican couple. They had patient, trusting expressions on their faces. Her stack of paperwork had grown. She pointed vaguely at his chair, which was still placed next to hers. He squeezed in and sat down. Picked up the phone and dialed the Abilene number from memory. He gave his name as Chester Arthur and asked for Sergeant Rodríguez.

He was on hold a whole minute. Then Rodríguez picked up and Reacher knew right away they had found Eugene’s body. There was a lot of urgency in the guy’s voice.

“We need your client’s name, Mr. Arthur,” Rodriguez said.

“What did your people find?” Reacher asked.

“Exactly what you said, sir. Mile and a half north, on the left, in a deep limestone crevasse. Shot once through the right eye.”

“Was it a .22?”

“No way. Not according to what I’m hearing. Nine millimeter, at least. Some big messy cannon. Most of his head is gone.”

“You got an estimated time of death?”

“Tough question, in this heat. And they say the coyotes got to him, ate up some of the parts the pathologist likes to work with. But if somebody said Friday, I don’t think we’d argue any.”

Reacher said nothing.

“I need some names,” Rodríguez said.

“My guy’s not the doer,” Reacher said. “I’ll talk to him and maybe he’ll call you.”

Then he hung up before Rodríguez could start arguing. Alice was staring at him again. So were her clients. Clearly they spoke enough English to follow the conversation.

“Which president was Chester Arthur?” Alice asked.

“After Garfield, before Grover Cleveland,” Reacher replied. “One of two from Vermont.”

“Who was the other?”

“Calvin Coolidge.”

“So they found Eugene,” she said.

“Sure did.”

“So now what?”

“Now we go warn Hack Walker.”

“Warn him?”

Reacher nodded. “Think about it, Alice. Maybe what we’ve got here is two out of two, but I think it’s more likely to be two out of three. They were a threesome, Hack and Al and Sloop. Carmen said they all worked together on the deal. She said Hack brokered it with the feds. So Hack knew what they knew, for sure. So he could be next.”

Alice turned to her clients.

“Sorry, got to go,” she said, in English.

 

 

Hack Walker was packing up for the day. He was on his feet with his jacket on and he was latching his briefcase closed. It was after six o’clock and his office windows were growing dim with dusk. They told him that Eugene was dead and watched the color drain out of his face. His skin literally contracted and puckered under a mask of sweat. He clawed his way around his desk and dumped himself down in his chair. He said nothing for a long moment. Then he nodded slowly.

“I guess I always knew,” he said. “But I was, you know, hoping.”

He turned to look down at the photograph.

“I’m very sorry,” Reacher said.

“Do they know why?” Walker asked. “Or who?”

“Not yet.”

Walker paused again. “Why did they tell you about it before me?”

“Reacher figured out where they should look,” Alice said. “He told them, effectively.”

Then she went straight into his two-for-three theory. The deal, the dangerous knowledge. The warning. Walker sat still and listened to it. His color came back, slowly. He stayed quiet, thinking hard. Then he shook his head.

“Can’t be right,” he said. “Because the deal was really nothing at all. Sloop caved in and undertook to pay the taxes and the penalties. That was all. Nothing more. He got desperate, couldn’t stand the jail time. It happens a lot. Al contacted the IRS, made the offer, they didn’t bat an eye. It’s routine. It was handled at a branch office. By junior-grade personnel. That’s how routine it was. The federal prosecutor needed to sign off on it, which is where I came in. I hustled it through, is all, a little faster than it might have gone without me. You know, the old boys’ club. It was a routine IRS matter. And believe me, nobody gets killed over a routine IRS matter.”

He shook his head again. Then he opened his eyes wide and went very still.

“I want you to leave now,” he said.

Alice nodded. “We’re very sorry for your loss. We know you were friends.”

But Walker just looked confused, like that wasn’t what he was worrying about.

“What?” Reacher said.

“We shouldn’t talk anymore, is what,” Walker said.

“Why not?”

“Because we’re going around in a circle, and we’re finishing up in a place where we don’t want to be.”

“We are?”

“Think about it, guys. Nobody gets killed over a routine IRS matter. Or do they? Sloop and Al were fixing to take the trust money away from Carmen and give most of it to the government. Now Sloop and Al are dead. Two plus two makes four. Her motive is getting bigger and better all the time. We keep talking like this, I’ve got to think conspiracy. Two deaths, not one. No choice, I’ve got to. And I don’t want to do that.”

“There was no conspiracy,” Reacher said. “If she’d already hired people, why did she pick me up?”

Walker shrugged. “To confuse the issue? Distance herself?”

“Is she that smart?”

“I think she is.”

“So prove it. Show us she hired somebody.”

“I can’t do that.”

“Yes, you can. You’ve got her bank records. Show us the payment.”

“The payment?”

“You think these people work for free?”

Walker made a face. Took keys from his pocket and unlocked a drawer in his desk. Lifted out the pile of financial information. Greer Non-Discretionary Trust, numbers 1 through 5. Reacher held his breath. Walker went through them, page by page. Then he squared them together again and reversed them on the desk. His face was blank.

Alice leaned forward and picked them up. Leafed through, scanning the fourth column from the left, which was the debit column. There were plenty of debits. But they were all small and random. Nothing bigger than two hundred and ninety-seven dollars. Several below a hundred.

“Add up the last month,” Reacher said.

She scanned back.

“Nine hundred, round figures,” she said.

Reacher nodded. “Even if she hoarded it, nine hundred bucks doesn’t buy you much. Certainly doesn’t buy you somebody who can operate the way we’ve seen.”

Walker said nothing.

“We need to go talk to her,” Reacher said.

“We can’t,” Walker said. “She’s on the road, headed for the penitentiary.”

“She didn’t do it,” Reacher said. “She didn’t do anything. She’s completely innocent.”

“So why did she confess?”

Reacher closed his eyes. Sat still for a moment.

“She was forced to,” he said. “Somebody got to her.”

“Who?”

Reacher opened his eyes.

“I don’t know who,” he said. “But we can find out. Get the bailiff’s log from downstairs. See who came to visit her.”

Walker’s face was still blank and sweaty. But he picked up the phone and dialed an internal number. Asked for the visitor’s log to be brought up immediately. Then they waited in silence. Three minutes later they heard the sound of heavy footsteps in the secretarial pen and the bailiff came in through the office door. It was the day guy. He was breathing hard after running up the stairs. He was carrying a thick book in his hand.

Walker took it from him and opened it up. Scanned through it quickly and reversed it on the desk. Used his finger to point. Carmen Greer was logged in during the early hours of Monday morning. She was logged out two hours ago, into the custody of the Texas Department of Correction. In between she had received one visitor, twice. Nine o’clock on Monday morning and again on Tuesday at noon, the same assistant DA had gone down to see her.

“Preliminary interview, and then the confession,” Walker said.

There were no other entries at all.

“Is this right?” Reacher asked.

The bailiff nodded.

“Guaranteed,” he said.

Reacher looked at the log again. The first ADA interview had lasted two minutes. Clearly Carmen had refused to say a word. The second interview had lasted twelve minutes. After that she had been escorted upstairs for the videotape.

“Nobody else?” he asked.

“There were phone calls,” the bailiff said.

“When?”

“All day Monday, and Tuesday morning.”

“Who was calling her?”

“Her lawyer.”

“Her lawyer?” Alice said.

The guy nodded.

“It was a big pain in the ass,” he said. “I had to keep bringing her in and out to the phone.”

“Who was the lawyer?” Alice asked.

“We’re not allowed to ask, ma’am. It’s a confidentiality thing. Lawyer discussions are secret.”

“Man or woman?”

“It was a man.”

“Hispanic?”

“I don’t think so. He sounded like a regular guy. His voice was a little muffled. I think it was a bad phone line.”

“Same guy every time?”

“I think so.”

There was silence in the office. Walker nodded vaguely and the bailiff took it for a dismissal. They heard him walk out through the secretarial pen. They heard the lobby door close behind him.

“She didn’t tell us she was represented,” Walker said. “She told us she didn’t want representation.”

“She told me the same thing,” Alice said.

“We need to know who this person was,” Reacher said. “We need to get the phone company to trace the calls.”

Walker shook his head. “Can’t do it. Legal discussions are privileged.”

Reacher stared at him. “You really think it was a lawyer?”

“Don’t you?”

“Of course not. It was some guy, threatening her, forcing her to lie. Think about it, Walker. First time your ADA saw her, she wouldn’t say a word. Twenty-seven hours later, she’s confessing. Only thing that happened in between was a bunch of calls from this guy.”

“But what kind of threat could make her say that?”

 

 

The killing crew was uneasy in its new role as baby-sitter. Each member felt exactly the same way, each for the exact same reasons. Holding a child hostage was not a normal part of their expertise. Taking her in the first place had been. That was a fairly standard operation, based as always on lure and deception. The woman and the tall fair man had gone to the Red House as a pair, because they figured that would match the public’s perception of how social workers operate. They had arrived in the big official-looking sedan and used a brisk professional manner. They had mixed it with a generous helping of pious do-gooder sanctimony, like they were desperately concerned with the child’s welfare above all else. They had a thick wad of bogus papers to display. The papers looked exactly like Family Services warrants and relevant authorizations from state agencies. But the grandmother hardly even looked at them. She offered no resistance at all. It struck them as unnatural. She just handed the kid over, like she was real glad about it.

The kid put up no resistance, either. She was very earnest and silent about the whole thing. Like she was trying to be on her best behavior. Like she was trying to please these new adults. So they just put her in the car and drove her away. No tears, no screaming, no tantrums. It went well, all things considered. Very well. About as effortless as the Al Eugene operation.

But then they departed from the usual. Radically. Standard practice would have been to drive straight to a scouted location and pull the triggers. Conceal the body and then get the hell out. But this task was different. They had to keep her hidden. And alive and unharmed. At least for a spell. Maybe days and days. It was something they had never done before. And professionals get uneasy with things they’ve never done before. They always do. That’s the nature of professionalism. Professionals feel best when they stick to what they know.

 

 

“Call Family Services,” Reacher said. “Right now.”

Hack Walker just stared at him.

“You asked the question,” Reacher said. “What kind of a threat could make her confess to something she didn’t do? Don’t you see? They must have gotten her kid.”

Walker stared a beat longer, frozen. Then he wrestled himself into action and unlocked another drawer and rattled it open. Lifted out a heavy black binder. Opened it up and thumbed through and grabbed his phone and dialed a number. There was no answer. He dabbed the cradle and dialed another. Some kind of an evening emergency contact. It was picked up and he asked the question, using Ellie’s full name, Mary Ellen Greer. There was a long pause. Then an answer. Walker listened. Said nothing. Just put the phone down, very slowly and carefully, like it was made out of glass.

“They never heard of her,” he said.

Silence. Walker closed his eyes, and then opened them again.

“O.K.,” he said. “Resources are going to be a problem. State police, of course. And the FBI, because this is a kidnap. But we’ve got to move immediately. Speed is absolutely paramount here. It always is, with kidnap cases. They could be taking her anywhere. So I want you two to go down to Echo right now, get the full story from Rusty. Descriptions and everything.”

“Rusty won’t talk to us,” Reacher said. “She’s too hostile. What about the Echo sheriff?”

“That guy is useless. He’s probably drunk right now. You’ll have to do it.”

“Waste of time,” Reacher said.

Walker opened another drawer and took two chromium stars from a box. Tossed them onto the desk.

“Raise your right hands,” he said. “Repeat after me.”

He mumbled his way through some kind of an oath. Reacher and Alice repeated it back, as far as they could catch it. Walker nodded.

“Now you’re sheriff’s deputies,” he said. “Valid throughout Echo County. Rusty will have to talk to you.”

Reacher just stared at him.

“What?” Walker said.

“You can still do that here? Deputize people?”

“Sure I can,” Walker said. “Just like the Wild West. Now get going, O.K.? I’ve got a million calls to make.”

Reacher took his chromium star and stood up, an accredited law enforcement official again for the first time in four and a quarter years. Alice stood up alongside him.

“Meet back here directly,” Walker called. “And good luck.”

Eight minutes later they were in the yellow VW again, heading south toward the Red House for the second time that day.

 

 

The woman took the call. She let the phone ring four times while she got the voice-altering device out of her bag and switched it on. But she didn’t need it. She didn’t need to talk at all. She just listened, because it was a one-sided message, long and complex but basically clear and concise and unambiguous, and the whole thing was repeated twice. When it was over, she hung up the phone and put the electronics back in her bag.

“It’s tonight,” she said.

“What is?” the tall man asked.

“The supplementary job,” she said. “The Pecos thing. Seems like the situation up there is unraveling slightly. They found Eugene’s body.”

“Already?”

“Shit,” the dark man said.

“Yes, shit,” the woman said. “So we move on the supplementary right away, tonight, before things get any worse.”

“Who’s the target?” the tall man asked.

“His name is Jack Reacher. Some drifter, ex-military. I’ve got a description. There’s a girl lawyer in the picture, too. She’ll need attention as well.”

“We do them simultaneous with this baby-sitting gig?”

The woman shrugged. “Like we always said, we keep the baby-sitting going as long as possible, but we reserve the right to terminate when necessary.”

The men looked at each other. Ellie watched them from the bed.

 

15

 

Reacher was not good company on the ride south. He didn’t talk at all for the first hour and a half. Evening dark had fallen fast and he kept the VW’s dome light on and studied the maps from the glove compartment. In particular he concentrated on a large-scale topographical sheet that showed the southern part of Echo County. The county boundary was a completely straight line running east to west. At its closest point, it was fifty miles from the Rio Grande. That made no sense to him.

“I don’t understand why she lied about the diamond,” he said.

Alice shrugged. She was pushing the little car as fast as it was willing to go.

“She lied about everything,” she said.

“The ring was different,” he said.

“Different how?”

“A different sort of lie. Like apples are different from oranges.”

“I don’t follow.”

“The ring is the only thing I can’t explain to myself.”

“The only thing?”

“Everything else is coherent, but the ring is a problem.”

She drove on, another mile. The power line poles came and went, flashing through the headlight beams for a split second each.

“You know what’s going on, don’t you?” she said.

“You ever done computer-aided design?” he asked.

“No,” she said.

“Me neither.”

“So?”

“Do you know what it is?”

She shrugged again. “Vaguely, I guess.”

“They can build a whole house or car or whatever, right there on the computer screen. They can paint it, decorate it, look at it. If it’s a house, they can go in it, walk around. They can rotate it, look at the front, look at the back. If it’s a car, they can see how it looks in daylight and in the dark. They can tilt it up and down, spin it around, examine it from every angle. They can crash it and see how it holds up. It’s like a real thing, except it isn’t. I guess it’s a virtual thing.”

“So?” she said again.

“I can see this whole situation in my mind, like a computer design. Inside and out, up and down. From every angle. Except for the ring. The ring screws it up.”

“You want to explain that?”

“No point,” he said. “Until I figure it out.”

“Is Ellie going to be O.K.?”

“I hope so. That’s why we’re making this trip.”

“You think the grandmother can help us?”

He shrugged. “I doubt it.”

“So how is this trip helping Ellie?”

He said nothing. Just opened the glove compartment and put the maps back. Took out the Heckler & Koch handgun. Clicked out the magazine and checked the load. Never assume. But it still held its full complement of ten shells. He put the magazine back in and jacked the first round into the chamber. Then he cocked the pistol and locked it. Eased up off the passenger seat and slipped it into his pocket.

“You think we’re going to need that?” she asked.

“Sooner or later,” he said. “You got more ammo in your bag?”

She shook her head. “I never thought I’d actually use it.”

He said nothing.

“You O.K.?” she asked.

“Feeling good,” he said. “Maybe like you did during that big trial, before the guy refused to pay.”

She nodded at the wheel. “It was a good feeling.”

“That’s your thing, right?”

“I guess it is.”

“This is my thing,” he said. “This is what I’m built for. The thrill of the chase. I’m an investigator, Alice, always was, always will be. I’m a hunter. And when Walker gave me that badge my head started working.”

“You know what’s going on, don’t you?” she asked again.

“Aside from the diamond ring.”

“Tell me.”

He said nothing.

“Tell me,” she said again.

“Did you ever ride a horse?”

“No,” she said. “I’m a city girl. Openest space I ever saw was the median strip in the middle of Park Avenue.”

“I just rode one with Carmen. First time ever.”

“So?”

“They’re very tall. You’re way up there in the air.”

“So?” she said again.

“You ever ride a bike?”

“In New York City?”

“Inline skating?”

“A little, back when it was cool.”

“You ever fall?”

“Once, pretty badly.”

He nodded. “Tell me about that meal you made for me.”

“What about it?”

“Homemade, right?”

“Sure.”

“You weighed out the ingredients?”

“You have to.”

“So you’ve got a scale in your kitchen?”

“Sure,” she said again.

“The scales of justice,” he said.

“Reacher, what the hell are you talking about?”

He glanced to his left. The red picket fence was racing backward through the edge of her headlight beams.

“We’re here,” he said. “I’ll tell you later.”

She slowed and turned in under the gate and bumped across the yard.

“Face it toward the motor barn,” he said. “And leave the headlights on. I want to take a look at that old pick-up truck.”

“O.K.,” she said.

She coasted a yard or two and hauled on the steering wheel until the headlight beams washed into the right-hand end of the barn. They lit up half of the new pick-up, half of the Jeep Cherokee, and all of the old pick-up between them.

“Stay close to me,” he said.

They got out of the car. The night air felt suddenly hot and damp. Different than before. It was cloudy and there were disturbed insects floating everywhere. But the yard was quiet. No sound. They walked over together for a better look at the abandoned truck. It was some kind of a Chevrolet, maybe twenty years old, but still a recognizable ancestor of the newer truck alongside it. It had bulbous fenders and dulled paint and a roll bar built into the load bed. It must have had a million miles on it. Probably hadn’t been started in a decade. The springs sagged and the tires were flat and the rubber was perished by the relentless heat.

“So?” Alice said.

“I think it’s the truck in the photograph,” Reacher said. “The one in Walker’s office? Him and Sloop and Eugene leaning on the fender?”

“Trucks all look the same to me,” she said.

“Sloop had the same photograph.”

“Is that significant?”

He shrugged. “They were good friends.”

They turned away. Alice ducked back into the VW and killed the lights. Then he led her to the foot of the porch steps. Up to the main entrance. He knocked. Waited. Bobby Greer opened the door. Stood there, surprised.

“So you came home,” Reacher said.

Bobby scowled, like he had already heard it.

“My buddies took me out,” he said. “To help with the grieving process.”

Reacher opened his palm to show off the chromium star. The badge flip. It felt good. Not quite as good as flashing a United States Army Criminal Investigation Division credential, but it had an effect on Bobby. It stopped him closing the door again.

“Police,” Reacher said. “We need to see your mother.”

“Police? You?”

“Hack Walker just deputized us. Valid throughout Echo County. Where’s your mother?”

Bobby paused a beat. Leaned forward and glanced up at the night sky and literally sniffed the air.

“Storm’s rolling in,” he said. “It’s coming now. From the south.”

“Where’s your mother, Bobby?”

Bobby paused again.

“Inside,” he said.

Reacher led Alice past Bobby into the red foyer with the rifles and the mirror. It was a degree or two cooler inside the house. The old air conditioner was running hard. It thumped and rattled patiently, somewhere upstairs. They walked through the foyer and into the parlor in back. Rusty Greer was sitting at the table in the same chair as the first time he had seen her. She was wearing the same style of clothes. Tight jeans and a fringed blouse. Her hair was lacquered up into a halo as hard as a helmet.

“We’re here on official business, Mrs. Greer,” Reacher said. He showed her the badge in his palm. “We need some answers.”

“Or what, big man?” Rusty said. “You going to arrest me?”

Reacher pulled out a chair and sat opposite her. Just looked at her.

“I’ve done nothing wrong,” she said.

Reacher shook his head. “As a matter of fact, you’ve done everything wrong.”

“Like what?”

“Like, my grandmother would have died before she let her grandchildren get taken away. Literally. Over her dead body, she’d have said, and she’d have damn well meant every word.”

Silence for a second. Just the endless tick of the fan.

“It was for the child’s own good,” Rusty said. “And I had no choice. They had papers.”

“You given grandchildren away before?”

“No.”

“So how do you know they were the right papers?”

Rusty just shrugged. Said nothing.

“Did you check?”

“How could I?” Rusty said. “And they looked right. All full of big words, aforementioned, hereinafter, the State of Texas.”

“They were fakes,” Reacher said. “It was a kidnap, Mrs. Greer. It was coercion. They took your granddaughter to threaten your daughter-in-law with.”

He watched her face, for dawning realization, for guilt or shame or fear or remorse. There was some expression there. He wasn’t exactly sure what it was.

“So we need descriptions,” he said. “How many were there?”

She said nothing.

“How many people, Mrs. Greer?”

“Two people. A man and a woman.”

“White?”

“Yes.”

“What did they look like?”

Rusty shrugged again.

“Ordinary,” she said. “Normal. Like you would expect. Like social workers. From a city. They had a big car.”

“Hair? Eyes? Clothes?”

“Fair hair, I think. Both of them. Cheap suits. The woman wore a skirt. Blue eyes, I think. The man was tall.”

“What about their car?”

“I don’t know about cars. It was a big sedan. But kind of ordinary. Not a Cadillac.”

“Color?”

“Gray or blue, maybe. Not dark.”

“You got any humble pie in the kitchen?”

“Why?”

“Because I should cram it down your throat until it chokes you. Those fair-haired white people with the blue eyes are the ones who killed Al Eugene. And you gave your own granddaughter to them.”

She stared at him. “Killed? Al is dead?”

“Two minutes after they took him out of his car.”

She went pale and her mouth started working. She said what about, and then stopped. And again, what about. She couldn’t add the word Ellie.

“Not yet,” Reacher said. “That’s my guess. And my hope. Ought to be your hope, too, because if they hurt her, you know what I’m going to do?”

She didn’t answer. Just clamped her lips and shook her head from side to side.

“I’m going to come back down here and break your spine. I’m going to stand you up and snap it like a rotten twig.”

 

 

They made her take a bath, which was awful, because one of the men watched her do it. He was quite short and had black hair on his head and his arms. He stood inside the bathroom door and watched her all the time she was in the tub. Her mommy had told her, never let anybody see you undressed, especially not a man. And he was right there watching her. And she had no pajamas to put on afterward. She hadn’t brought any. She hadn’t brought anything.

“You don’t need pajamas,” the man said. “It’s too hot for pajamas.”

He stood there by the door, watching her. She dried herself with a small white towel. She needed to pee, but she wasn’t going to let him watch her do that. She had to squeeze very near him to get out of the room. Then the other two watched her all the way to the bed. The other man, and the woman. They were horrible. They were all horrible. She got into the bed and pulled the covers up over her head and tried hard not to cry.

 

 

“What now?” Alice asked.

“Back to Pecos,” Reacher said. “I want to keep on the move. And we’ve got a lot of stuff to do tonight. But go slow, O.K.? I need time to think.”

She drove out to the gate and turned north into the darkness. Switched the fan on high to blow the night heat away.

“Think about what?” Alice asked.

“About where Ellie is.”

“Why do you think it was the same people as killed Eugene?”

“It’s a deployment issue,” he said. “I can’t see anybody using a separate hit team and kidnap team. Not down here in the middle of nowhere. So I think it’s one team. Either a hit team moonlighting on the kidnap, or a kidnap team moonlighting on the hits. Probably the former, because the way they did Eugene was pretty expert. If that was moonlighting, I’d hate to see them do what they’re really good at.”

“All they did was shoot him. Anybody could do that.”

“No, they couldn’t. They got him to stop the car, they talked him into theirs. They kept him quiet throughout. That’s really good technique, Alice. Harder than you can imagine. Then they shot him through the eye. That means something, too.”

“What?”

He shrugged. “It’s a tiny target. And in a situation like that, it’s a snap shot. You raise the gun, you fire. One, two. No rational reason to pick such a tiny target. It’s a kind of exuberance. Not exactly showing off, as such. More like just celebrating your own skill and precision. Like reveling in it. It’s a joy thing.”

Silence in the car. Just the hum of the motor and the whine of the tires.

“And now they’ve got the kid,” Alice said.

“And they’re uneasy about it, because they’re moonlighting. They’re used to each other alone. They’re accustomed to their normal procedures. Having a live kid around makes them worried about being static and visible.”

“They’ll look like a family. A man, a woman, a little girl.”

“No, I think there’s more than two of them.”

“Why?”

“Because if it was me, I’d want three. In the service, we used three. Basically a driver, a shooter and a back-watcher.”

“You shot people? The military police?”

He shrugged. “Sometimes. You know, things better not brought to trial.”

She was quiet for a long moment. He saw her debating whether to hitch an inch farther away from him. Then he saw her decide to stay where she was.

“So why didn’t you do it for Carmen?” she asked. “If you’ve done it before?”

“She asked me the same question. My answer is, I really don’t know.”

She was quiet again, another mile.

“Why are they holding Ellie?” she said. “I mean, still holding her? They already coerced the confession. So what’s still to gain?”

“You’re the lawyer,” he said. “You have to figure that one out. When does it become set in stone? You know, irrevocable?”

“Never, really. A confession can be retracted anytime. But in practice, I guess if she answered nolo contendere to the grand jury indictment, that would be regarded as a milestone.”

“And how soon could that happen?”

“Tomorrow, easily. Grand jury sits more or less permanently. It would take ten minutes, maybe a quarter of an hour.”

“I thought justice ground real slow in Texas.”

“Only if you plead not guilty.”

Silence again, for many miles. They passed through the crossroads hamlet with the school and the gas station and the diner. It whipped backward through the headlight beams, three short seconds end to end. The sky up ahead was still clear. The stars were still visible. But the clouds were building fast behind them, in the south.

“So maybe tomorrow they’ll let her go,” Alice said.

“And maybe tomorrow they won’t. They’ll be worried she could make the ID. She’s a smart kid. She sits quiet, watching and thinking all the time.”

“So what do we do?”

“We try to figure out where she is.”

He opened the glove compartment and took out the maps again. Found a large-scale plan of Pecos County and spread it on his knee. Reached up and clicked on the dome light.

“How?” Alice asked. “I mean, where do you start?”

“I’ve done this before,” Reacher said. “Years and years, I hunted deserters and AWOLs. You train yourself to think like them, and you usually find them.”

“That easy?”

“Sometimes,” he said.

Silence in the speeding car.

“But they could be anywhere,” Alice said. “I mean, there must be a million hide-outs. Abandoned farmsteads, ruined buildings.”

“No, I think they’re using motels,” Reacher said.

“Why?”

“Because appearances are very important to them. Part of their technique. They suckered Al Eugene somehow, and they looked plausible to Rusty Greer, not that she cared too much. So they need running water and showers and closets and working electricity for hairdryers and shavers.”

“There are hundreds of motels here,” she said. “Thousands, probably.”

He nodded. “And they’re moving around, almost certainly. A different place every day. Basic security.”

“So how do we find the right one tonight?”

He held the map where it caught the light.

“We find it in our heads. Think like them, figure out what we’d do. Then that should be the same thing as what they’d do.”

“Hell of a gamble.”

“Maybe, maybe not.”

“So are we going to start now?”

“No, we’re going back to your office now.”

“Why?”

“Because I don’t like frontal assaults. Not against people this good, not with a kid in the crossfire.”

“So what do we do?”

“We divide and rule. We lure two of them out. Maybe we capture a tongue.”

“A tongue? What’s that?”

“An enemy prisoner who’ll talk.”

“How do we do that?”

“We decoy them. They’re already aware we know about them. So they’ll come for us, try a little damage control.”

“They know we know? But how?”

“Somebody just told them.”

“Who?”

Reacher didn’t reply. Just stared down at the map. Looked at the faint red lines that represented roads meandering across thousands of empty miles. Closed his eyes and tried hard to imagine what they looked like in reality.

 

 

Alice parked in the lot behind the law offices. She had a key to the rear door. There were a lot of shadows, and Reacher was very vigilant as they walked. But they made it inside O.K. The old store was deserted and dusty and silent and hot. The air conditioner had been turned off at the end of the day. Reacher stood still and listened for the inaudible quiver of people waiting. It’s a primeval sensation, received and understood far back in the brain. It wasn’t there.

“Call Walker and give him an update,” he said. “Tell him we’re here.”

He made her sit back-to-back with him at somebody else’s desk in the center of the room, so he could watch the front entrance while she watched the rear. He rested the pistol in his lap with the safety off. Then he dialed Sergeant Rodríguez’s number in Abilene. Rodríguez was still on duty, and he sounded unhappy about it.

“We checked with the bar association,” he said. “There are no lawyers licensed in Texas called Chester A. Arthur.”

“I’m from Vermont,” Reacher said. “I’m volunteering down here, pro bono.”

“Like hell you are.”

The line went quiet.

“I’ll deal,” Reacher said. “Names, in exchange for conversation.”

“With who?”

“With you, maybe. How long have you been a Ranger?”

“Seventeen years.”

“How much do you know about the border patrol?”

“Enough, I guess.”

“You prepared to give me a straight yes-no answer? No comebacks?”

“What’s the question?”

“You recall the border patrol investigation twelve years ago?”

“Maybe.”

“Was it a whitewash?”

Rodríguez paused a long moment, and then he answered, with a single word.

“I’ll call you back,” Reacher said.

He hung up and turned and spoke over his shoulder to Alice.

“You get Walker?” he asked.

“He’s up to speed,” she said. “He wants us to wait for him here, for when he’s through with the FBI.”

Reacher shook his head. “Can’t wait here. Too obvious. We need to stay on the move. We’ll go to him, and then we’ll get back on the road.”

She paused a beat. “Are we in serious danger?”

“Nothing we can’t handle,” he said.

She said nothing.

“You worried?” he asked.

“A little,” she said. “A lot, actually.”

“You can’t be,” he said. “I’m going to need your help.”

“Why was the lie about the ring different?”

“Because everything else is hearsay. But I found out for myself the ring wasn’t a fake. Direct personal discovery, not hearsay. Feels very different.”

“I don’t see how it’s important.”

“It’s important because I’ve got a whole big theory going and the lie about the ring screws it up like crazy.”

“Why do you want to believe her so much?”

“Because she had no money with her.”

“What’s the big theory?”

“Remember that Balzac quotation? And Marcuse?”

Alice nodded.

“I’ve got another one,” Reacher said. “Something Ben Franklin once wrote.”

“What are you, a walking encyclopedia?”

“I remember stuff I read, is all. And I remember something Bobby Greer said, too, about armadillos.”

She just looked at him.

“You’re crazy,” she said.

He nodded. “It’s only a theory. It needs to be tested. But we can do that.”

“How?”

“We just wait and see who comes for us.”

She said nothing.

“Let’s go check in with Walker,” he said.

 

 

They walked through the heat to the courthouse building. There was a breeze again, blowing in from the south. It felt damp and urgent. Walker was on his own in his office, looking very tired. His desk was a mess of phone books and paper.

“Well, it’s started,” he said. “Biggest thing you ever saw. FBI and state police, roadblocks everywhere, helicopters in the air, more than a hundred and fifty people on the ground. But there’s a storm coming in, which ain’t going to help.”

“Reacher thinks they’re holed up in a motel,” Alice said.

Walker nodded, grimly. “If they are, they’ll find them. Manhunt like this, it’s going to be pretty relentless.”

“You need us anymore?” Reacher asked.

Walker shook his head. “We should leave it to the professionals now. I’m going home, grab a couple hours rest.”

Reacher looked around the office. The door, the floor, the windows, the desk, the filing cabinets.

“I guess we’ll do the same thing,” he said. “We’ll go to Alice’s place. Call us if you need us. Or if you get any news, O.K.?”

Walker nodded.

“I will,” he said. “I promise.”

 

 

“We’ll go as FBI again,” the woman said. “It’s a no-brainer.”

“All of us?” the driver asked. “What about the kid?”

The woman paused. She had to go, because she was the shooter. And if she had to split the team two and one, she wanted the tall guy with her, not the driver.

“You stay with the kid,” she said.

There was a moment’s silence.

“Abort horizon?” the driver asked.

It was their standard operating procedure. Whenever the team was split, the woman set an abort horizon. Which meant that you waited until the time had passed, and then, if the team wasn’t together again, you got the hell out, every man for himself.

“Four hours, O.K.?” the woman said. “Done and dusted.”

She stared at him a second longer, eyebrows raised, to make sure he understood the implication of her point. Then she knelt and unzipped the heavy valise.

“So let’s do it,” she said.

They did the exact same things they had done for Al Eugene, except they did them a whole lot faster because the Crown Vic was parked in the motel’s lot, not hidden in a dusty turnout miles from anywhere. The lot was dimly lit and mostly empty, and there was nobody around, but it still wasn’t a secure feeling. They pulled the wheel covers off and threw them in the trunk. They attached the communications antennas to the rear window and the trunk lid. They zipped blue jackets over their shirts. They loaded up with spare ammunition clips. They squared the souvenir ballcaps on their heads. They checked the loads in their nine-millimeter pistols and racked the slides and clicked the safety catches and jammed the guns in their pockets. The tall fair man slipped into the driver’s seat. The woman paused outside the motel room door.

“Four hours,” she said again. “Done and dusted.”

The driver nodded and closed the door behind her. Glanced over at the kid in the bed. Done and dusted meant leave nothing at all behind, especially live witnesses.

 

 

Reacher took the Heckler & Koch and the maps of Texas and the FedEx packet out of the VW and carried them into Alice’s house, straight through the living room and into the kitchen area. It was still and cool inside. And dry. The central air was running hard. He wondered for a second what her utility bills must be like.

“Where’s the scale?” he asked.

She pushed past him and squatted down and opened a cupboard. Used two hands and lifted a kitchen scale onto the countertop. It was a big piece of equipment. It was new, but it looked old. A retro design. It had a big white upright face the size of a china plate, like the speedometer on an old-fashioned sedan. It was faced with a bulbous plastic window with a chromium bezel. There was a red pointer behind the window and large numbers around the circumference. A manufacturer’s name and a printed warning: Not Legal For Trade.

“Is it accurate?” he asked.

Alice shrugged.

“I think so,” she said. “The nut roast comes out O.K.”

There was a chromium bowl resting in a cradle above the dial. He tapped on it with his finger and the pointer bounced up to a pound and then back down to zero. He took the magazine out of the Heckler & Koch and laid the empty gun in the bowl. It made a light metallic sound. The pointer spun up to two pounds and six ounces. Not an especially light weapon. About right, he figured. His memory told him the catalog weight was in the region of forty-three ounces, with an empty magazine.

He put the gun back together and opened cupboards until he found a store of food. He lifted out an unopened bag of granulated sugar. It was in a gaudy yellow packet that said 5 lbs. on the side.

“What are you doing?” Alice asked.

“Weighing things,” he said.

He stood the sugar upright in the chromium bowl. The pointer spun up to five pounds exactly. He put the sugar back in the cupboard and tried a cellophane-wrapped packet of chopped nuts. The pointer read two pounds. He looked at the label on the packet and saw 2 lbs.

“Good enough,” he said.

He folded the maps and laid them across the top of the bowl. They weighed one pound and three ounces. He took them off and put the nuts back on. Still two pounds. He put the nuts back in the cupboard and tried the FedEx packet. It weighed one pound and one ounce. He added the maps and the pointer inched up to two pounds and four ounces. Added the loaded gun on top and the pointer jerked around to five pounds and three ounces. If he had wanted to, he could have calculated the weight of the bullets.

“O.K., let’s go,” he said. “But we need gas. Long ride ahead. And maybe you should get out of that dress. You got something more active?”

“I guess,” she said, and headed for the stairs.

“You got a screwdriver?” he called after her.

“Under the sink,” she called back.

He bent down and found a brightly colored toolbox in the cupboard. It was made out of plastic and looked like a lunch pail. He clicked it open and selected a medium-sized screwdriver with a clear yellow handle. A minute later Alice came back down the stairs wearing baggy khaki cargo pants and a black T-shirt with the sleeves torn off at the shoulder seams.

“O.K.?” she asked.

“Me and Judith,” he said. “Got a lot in common.”

She smiled and said nothing.

“I’m assuming your car is insured,” he said. “It could get damaged tonight.”

She said nothing. Just locked up her door and followed him out to the VW. She drove out of her complex, with Reacher craning his neck, watching the shadows. She got gas at a neon-bright all-night station out on the El Paso road. Reacher paid for it.

“O.K., back to the courthouse,” he said. “Something I want from there.”

She said nothing. Just turned the car and headed east. Parked in the lot behind the building. They walked around and tried the street door. It was locked up tight.

“So what now?” she asked.

It was hot on the sidewalk. Still up there around ninety degrees, and damp. The breeze had died again. There were clouds filling the sky.

“I’m going to kick it in,” he said.

“There’s probably an alarm.”

“There’s definitely an alarm. I checked.”

“So?”

“So I’m going to set it off.”

“Then the cops will come.”

“I’m counting on it.”

“You want to get us arrested?”

“They won’t come right away. We’ve got three or four minutes, maybe.”

He took two paces back and launched forward and smashed the flat of his sole above the handle. The wood splintered and sagged open a half inch, but held. He kicked again and the door crashed back and bounced off the corridor wall. A blue strobe high up outside started flashing and an urgent electric bell started ringing. It was about as loud as he had expected.

“Go get the car,” he said. “Get it started and wait for me in the alley.”

He ran up the stairs two at a time and kicked in the outer office door without breaking stride. Jinked through the secretarial pen like a running back and steadied himself and kicked in Walker’s door. It smashed back and the venetian blind jerked sideways and the glass pane behind it shattered and the shards rained down like ice in winter. He went straight for the bank of filing cabinets. The lights were off and the office was hot and dark and he had to peer close to read the labels. It was an odd filing system. It was arranged partly in date order and partly by the alphabet. That was going to be a minor problem. He found a cabinet marked B and jammed the tip of the screwdriver into the keyhole and hammered it in with the heel of his hand. Turned it sharp and hard and broke the lock. Pulled the drawer and raked through the files with his fingers.

The files all had tiny labels encased in plastic tabs arranged so they made a neat diagonal from left to right. The labels were all typed with words starting with B. But the contents of the files were way too recent. Nothing more than four years old. He stepped two paces sideways and skipped the next B drawer and went to the next-but-one. The air was hot and still and the bell was ringing loud and the glare of the flashing blue strobe pulsed in through the windows. It was just about keeping time with his heartbeat.

He broke the lock and slid the drawer. Checked the labels. No good. Everything was either six or seven years old. He had been inside the building two minutes and thirty seconds. He could hear a distant siren under the noise of the bell. He stepped sideways again and attacked the next B drawer. He checked the dates on the tabs and walked his fingers backward. Two minutes and fifty seconds. The bell seemed louder and the strobe seemed brighter. The siren was closer. He found what he was looking for three-quarters of the way back through the drawer. It was a two-inch-thick collection of paperwork in a heavy paper sling. He lifted the whole thing out and tucked it under his arm. Left the drawer all the way open and kicked all the others shut. Ran through the secretarial pen and down the stairs. Checked the street from the lobby and when he was certain it was clear he ducked around into the alley and straight into the VW.

“Go,” he said.

He was a little breathless, and that surprised him.

“Where?” Alice asked.

“South,” he said. “To the Red House.”

“Why? What’s there?”

“Everything,” he said.

She took off fast and fifty yards later Reacher saw red lights pulsing in the distance behind them. The Pecos Police Department, arriving at the courthouse just a minute too late. He smiled in the dark and turned his head in time to catch a split-second glimpse of a big sedan nosing left two hundred yards ahead of them into the road that led down to Alice’s place. It flashed through the yellow wash of a streetlight and disappeared. It looked like a police-spec Crown Victoria, plain steel wheels and four VHF antennas on the back. He stared into the darkness that had swallowed it and turned his head as they passed.

“Fast as you can,” he said to Alice.

Then he laid the captured paperwork on his knees and reached up and clicked on the dome light so he could read it.

 

 

The B was for “border patrol,” and the file summarized the crimes committed by it twelve years ago and the measures taken in response. It made for unpleasant reading.

The border between Mexico and Texas was very long, and for an accumulated total of about half its length there were roads and towns near enough on the American side to make it worth guarding pretty closely. Theory was if illegals penetrated there, they could slip away into the interior fast and easily. Other sectors had nothing to offer except fifty or a hundred miles of empty parched desert. Those sectors weren’t really guarded at all. Standard practice was to ignore the border itself and conduct random vehicle sweeps behind the line by day or night to pick the migrants up at some point during their hopeless three- or four-day trudge north across the wastelands. It was a practice that worked well. After the first thirty or so miles on foot through the heat the migrants became pretty passive. Often they surrendered willingly. Often the vehicle sweeps turned into first-aid mercy missions, because the walkers were sick and dehydrated and exhausted because they had no food or water.

They had no food or water because they had been cheated. Usually they would pay their life savings to some operator on the Mexican side who was offering them a fully accompanied one-way trip to paradise. Vans and minibuses would take them from their villages to the border, and then the guide would crouch and point across a deserted footbridge to a distant sandhill and swear that more vans and minibuses were waiting behind it, full of supplies and ready to go. The migrants would take a deep breath and sprint across, only to find nothing behind the distant sandhill. Too hopeful and too afraid to turn back, they would just blindly walk ahead into exhaustion.

Sometimes there would be a vehicle waiting, but its driver would demand a separate substantial payment. The migrants had nothing left to offer, except maybe some small items of personal value. The new driver would laugh and call them worthless. Then he would take them anyway and offer to see what cash he could raise on them up ahead. He would drive off in a cloud of hot dust and never be seen again. The migrants would eventually realize they had been duped, and they would start stumbling north on foot. Then it became a simple question of endurance. The weather was key. In a hot summer, the mortality rate was very high. That was why the border patrol’s random sweeps were often seen as mercy missions.

Then that suddenly changed.

For a whole year, the roving vehicles were as likely to bring sudden death as arrest or aid. At unpredictable intervals, always at night, rifles would fire and a truck would roar in and swoop and maneuver until one lone runner was winnowed out from the pack. Then the lone runner would be hunted for a mile or so and shot down. Then the truck would disappear into the dark again, engine roaring, headlights bouncing, dust trailing, and stunned silence would descend.

Sometimes it wasn’t so clean.

Some victims were wounded and dragged away and tortured. The corpse of one teenage boy was found tied to a cactus stump with barbed wire. He had been partially flayed. Some were burned alive or beheaded or mutilated. Three teenage girls were captured over a period of four months. Their autopsy details were gruesome.

None of the survivor families made official complaints. They all shared the illegal’s basic fear of involvement with bureaucracy. But stories began to circulate around the community of legal relatives and their support groups. Lawyers and rights advocates started compiling files. Eventually the subject was broached at the appropriate level. A low-level inquiry was started. Evidence was gathered, anonymously. A provable total of seventeen homicides was established. Added to that was an extrapolated figure of eight more, to represent cases where bodies had never been found or where they had been buried by the survivors themselves. Young Raoul García’s name was included in the second total.

There was a map in the file. Most of the ambushes had taken place inside a pear-shaped pocket of territory enclosing maybe a hundred square miles. It was marked on the map like a stain. It was centered on a long north-south axis with the southerly bulge sitting mostly inside the Echo County line. That meant the victims had already made it fifty miles or more. By then they would be weak and tired and in no shape to resist.

Border patrol brass launched a full-scale investigation one August, eleven months after the first vague rumors surfaced. There was one more attack at the end of that month, and then nothing ever again. Denied an ongoing forensic basis for examination, the investigation got nowhere at all. There were preventive measures enforced, like strict accounting of ammunition and increased frequency of radio checks. But no conclusions were reached. It was a thorough job, and to their credit the brass kept hard at it, but a retrospective investigation into a closed paramilitary world where the only witnesses denied ever having been near the border in the first place was hopeless. The matter wound down. Time passed. The homicides had stopped, the survivors were building new lives, the immigration amnesties had insulated the outrage. The tempo of investigation slowed to a halt. The files were sealed four years later.

“So?” Alice said.

Reacher butted the papers together with the heel of his hand. Closed the file. Pitched it behind him into the rear seat.

“Now I know why she lied about the ring,” he said.

“Why?”

“She didn’t lie. She was telling the truth.”

“She said it was a fake worth thirty bucks.”

“And she thought that was the truth. Because some jeweler in Pecos laughed at her and told her it was a fake worth thirty bucks. And she believed him. But he was trying to rip her off, was all, trying to buy it for thirty bucks and sell it again for sixty thousand. Oldest scam in the world. Exact same thing happened to some of these immigrants in the file. Their first experience of America.”

“The jeweler lied?”

He nodded. “I should have figured it before, because it’s obvious. Probably the exact same guy we went to. I figured he didn’t look like the Better Business Bureau’s poster boy.”

“He didn’t try to rip us off.”

“No, Alice, he didn’t. Because you’re a sharp-looking white lawyer and I’m a big tough-looking white guy. She was a small Mexican woman, all alone and desperate and scared. He saw an opportunity with her that he didn’t see with us.”

Alice was quiet for a second.

“So what does it mean?” she asked.

Reacher clicked off the dome light. Smiled in the dark and stretched. Put his palms on the dash in front of him and flexed his massive shoulders against the pressure.

“It means we’re good to go,” he said. “It means all our ducks are in a neat little row. And it means you should drive faster, because right now we’re maybe twenty minutes ahead of the bad guys, and I want to keep it that way as long as I can.”

 

 

She blew straight through the sleeping crossroads hamlet once again and made the remaining sixty miles in forty-three minutes, which Reacher figured was pretty good for a yellow four-cylinder import with a bud vase next to the steering wheel. She made the turn in under the gate and braked hard and stopped at the foot of the porch steps. The porch lights were on and the VW’s dust fogged up around them in a khaki cloud. It was close to two o’clock in the morning.

“Leave it running,” Reacher said.

He led her up to the door. Hammered hard on it and got no reply. Tried the handle. It was unlocked. Why would it be locked? We’re sixty miles from the nearest crossroads. He swung it open and they stepped straight into the red-painted foyer.

“Hold your arms out,” he said.

He unloaded all six .22 hunting rifles out of the rack on the wall and laid them in her arms, alternately muzzle to stock so they would balance. She staggered slightly under the weight.

“Go put them in the car,” he said.

There was the sound of footsteps overhead, then creaking from the stairs, and Bobby Greer came out of the parlor door, rubbing sleep out of his eyes. He was barefoot and wearing boxers and a T-shirt and staring at the empty gun rack.

“Hell you think you’re doing?” he said.

“I want the others,” Reacher said. “I’m commandeering your weapons. On behalf of the Echo County sheriff. I’m a deputy, remember?”

“There aren’t any others.”

“Yes, there are, Bobby. No self-respecting redneck like you is going to be satisfied with a bunch of .22 popguns. Where’s the heavy metal?”

Bobby said nothing.

“Don’t mess with me, Bobby,” Reacher said. “It’s way too late for that.”

Bobby paused. Then he shrugged.

“O.K.,” he said.

He padded barefoot across the foyer and pushed open a door that led into a small dark space that could have been a study. He flicked on a light and Reacher saw black-and-white pictures of oil wells on the walls. There was a desk and a chair and another gun rack filled with four 30–30 Winchesters. Seven-shot lever-action repeaters, big handsome weapons, oiled wood, twenty-inch barrels, beautifully kept. Wyatt Earp, eat your heart out.

“Ammunition?” Reacher asked.

Bobby opened a drawer in the gun rack’s pedestal. Took out a cardboard box of Winchester cartridges.

“I’ve got some special loads, too,” he said. Took out another box.

“What are they?”

“I made them myself. Extra power.”

Reacher nodded. “Take them all out to the car, O.K.?”

He took the four rifles out of the rack and followed Bobby out of the house. Alice was sitting in the car. The six .22s were piled on the seat behind her. Bobby leaned in and placed the ammunition next to them. Reacher stacked the Winchesters upright behind the passenger seat. Then he turned back to Bobby.

“I’m going to borrow your Jeep,” he said.

Bobby shrugged, barefoot on the hot dirt.

“Keys are in it,” he said.

“You and your mother stay in the house now,” Reacher said. “Anybody seen out and about will be considered hostile, O.K.?”

Bobby nodded. Turned and walked to the foot of the steps. Glanced back once and went inside the house. Reacher leaned into the VW to talk to Alice.

“What are we doing?” she said.

“Getting ready.”

“For what?”

“For whatever comes our way.”

“Why do we need ten rifles?”

“We don’t. We need one. I don’t want to give the bad guys the other nine, is all.”

“They’re coming here?”

“They’re about ten minutes behind us.”

“So what do we do?”

“We’re all going out in the desert.”

“Is there going to be shooting?”

“Probably.”

“Is that smart? You said yourself, they’re good shots.”

“With handguns. Best way to defend against handguns is hide a long way off and shoot back with the biggest rifle you can find.”

She shook her head. “I can’t be a part of this, Reacher. It’s not right. And I’ve never even held a rifle.”

“You don’t have to shoot,” he said. “But you have to be a witness. You have to identify exactly who comes for us. I’m relying on you. It’s vital.”

“How will I see? It’s dark out there.”

“We’ll fix that.”

“It’s going to rain.”

“That’ll help us.”

“This is not right,” she said again. “The police should handle this. Or the FBI. You can’t just shoot at people.”

The air was heavy with storm. The breeze was blowing again and he could smell pressure and voltage building in the sky.

“Rules of engagement, Alice,” he said. “I’ll wait for an overtly hostile act before I do anything. Just like the U.S. Army. O.K.?”

“We’ll be killed.”

“You’ll be hiding far away.”

“Then you’ll be killed. You said it yourself, they’re good at this.”

“They’re good at walking up to somebody and shooting them in the head. What they’re like out in the open in the dark against incoming rifle fire is anybody’s guess.”

“You’re crazy.”

“Seven minutes,” he said.

She glanced backward at the road from the north. Then she shook her head and shoved the gearstick into first and held her foot on the clutch. He leaned in and squeezed her shoulder.

“Follow me close, O.K.?” he said.

He ran down to the motor barn and got into the Greer family’s Cherokee. Racked the seat back and started the engine and switched on the headlights. Reversed into the yard and straightened up and looped around the motor barn and headed straight down the dirt track into open country. Checked the mirror and saw the VW right there behind him. Looked ahead again and saw the first raindrop hit his windshield. It was as big as a silver dollar.

 

16

 

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 facedown 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. Bobby’s 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 headfirst 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 facedown 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 Greers,” 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 Sloop’s 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, FedEx charges by weight. And I weighed the packet on Alice’s kitchen scales. One pound, one ounce. But the label said two pounds and nine ounces. So one of two things must have happened. Either FedEx ripped off the hospital by padding the charge, or you took out about sixty percent of the contents and trashed them. And you know what? I vote for you checking the contents before you sent them over to us. You’ve been a DA for a spell, you’ve tried a lot of cases, you know what convincing evidence looks like. So anything about the beatings went straight in the trash. All you left were the genuine accidents. But the road rash thing passed you by, so you left the collarbone in by mistake. Or maybe you felt you had to leave it in, because you know she’s got a healed knot clearly visible and you figured I’d have noticed it.”

Walker said nothing. The lantern hissed.

“The broken arm, the jaw, the teeth,” Reacher said. “My guess is there are five or six more folders in a Dumpster somewhere. Probably not behind the courthouse. Probably not in your backyard, either. I guess you’re smarter than that. Maybe they’re in a trashcan at the bus station. Some big public place.”

Walker said nothing. The candle flames danced. Reacher smiled.

“But you were mostly pretty good,” he said. “When I figured Carmen wasn’t the shooter, you steered it straight back to a conspiracy involving Carmen. You didn’t miss a beat. Even when I made the link to Eugene, you kept on track. You were very shocked. You went all gray and sweaty. Not because you were upset about Al. But because he’d been found so soon. You hadn’t planned on that. But still, you thought for ten seconds and came up with the IRS motive. But you know what? You were so busy thinking, you forgot to be scared enough. About the two-for-three possibility. It was a plausible threat. You should have been much more worried. Anybody else would have been.”

Walker said nothing.

“And you got Sloop out on a Sunday,” Reacher said. “Not easy to do. But you didn’t do it for him. You did it so he could be killed on a Sunday, so Carmen could be framed on a Sunday and spend the maximum time in jail before visitors could get near her the next Saturday. To give yourself five clear days to work on her.”

Walker said nothing.

“Lots of mistakes, Hack,” Reacher said. “Including sending people after me. Like old Copernicus says, what were the chances they’d be good enough?”

Walker said nothing. Bobby was leaning forward, staring sideways across his mother, looking straight at him. Catching on, slowly.

“You sent people to kill my brother?” he breathed.

“No,” Walker said. “Reacher’s wrong.”

Bobby stared at him like he’d answered yes instead.

“But why would you?” he asked. “You were friends.”

Then Walker looked up, straight at Reacher.

“Yes, why would I?” he said. “What possible motive could I have?”

“Something Benjamin Franklin once wrote,” Reacher said.

“What the hell does that mean?”

“You wanted to be a judge. Not because you wanted to do good. That was all sanctimonious bullshit. It was because you wanted the trappings. You were born a poor boy and you were greedy for money and power. And it was right there in front of you. But first you had to get elected. And what sort of a thing stops a person getting elected?”

Walker just shrugged.

“Old scandals,” Reacher said. “Among other things. Old secrets, coming back at you from the past. Sloop and Al and you were a threesome, way back when. Did all kinds of stuff together. You three against the world. You told me that. So there’s Sloop, in prison for cheating on his taxes. He can’t stand it in there. So he thinks, how do I get out of here? Not by repaying my debts. By figuring, my old pal Hack is running for judge this year. Big prize, all that money and power. What’s he prepared to do to get it? So he calls you up and says he could start some serious rumors about some old activities if you don’t broker his way out of there. You think it over carefully. You figure Sloop wouldn’t incriminate himself by talking about something you all did together, so at first you relax. Then you realize there’s a large gap between the sort of facts that would convict you and the sort of rumors that would wreck your chances in the election. So you cave in. You take some of your campaign donations and arrange to pay off the IRS with it. Now Sloop’s happy. But you’re not. In your mind, the cat is out of the bag. Sloop’s threatened you once. What about the next time he wants something? And Al’s involved, because he’s Sloop’s lawyer. So now it’s all fresh in Al’s mind too. Your chances of making judge are suddenly vulnerable.”

Walker said nothing.

“You know what Ben Franklin once wrote?” Reacher asked.

“What?”

“ ‘Three can keep a secret, if two of them are dead.’”

Silence in the room. No movement, no breathing. Just the soft hiss of the lantern and the flickering of the tiny candle flames.

“What was the secret?” Alice whispered.

“Three boys in rural Texas,” Reacher said. “Growing up together, playing ball, having fun. They get a little older, they turn their attention to what their dads are doing. The guns, the rifles, the hunting. Maybe they start with the armadillos. They shouldn’t, really, because they’re protected. By the tree-huggers. But the attitude is, they’re on my land, they’re mine to hunt. Bobby said that to me. An arrogant attitude. A superior attitude. I mean, hey, what’s an armadillo worth? But armadillos are slow and boring prey. Too easy. The three boys are growing up. They’re three young men now. High school seniors. They want a little more excitement. So they go looking for coyotes, maybe. Worthier opponents. They hunt at night. They use a truck. They range far and wide. And soon they find bigger game. Soon they find a real thrill.”

“What?”

“Mexicans,” Reacher said. “Poor anonymous no-account brown families stumbling north through the desert at night. And I mean, hey, what are they worth? Are they even human? But they make great prey. They run, and they squeal. Almost like hunting actual people, right, Hack?”

Silence in the room.

“Maybe they started with a girl,” Reacher said. “Maybe they didn’t mean to kill her. But they did anyway. Maybe they had to. Couple of days, they’re nervous. They hold their breath. But there’s no comeback. Nobody reacts. Nobody even cares. So hey, this is suddenly fun. Then they’re out often. It becomes a sport. The ultimate kill. Better than armadillos. They take that old pick-up, one of them driving, two of them riding in the load bed, they hunt for hours. Bobby said Sloop invented that technique. Said he was real good at it. I expect he was. I expect they all were. They got plenty of practice. They did it twenty-five times in a year.”

“That was the border patrol,” Bobby said.

“No, it wasn’t. The report wasn’t a whitewash. It didn’t read like one, and the inside word is it was kosher. Sergeant Rodríguez told me that. And people like Sergeant Rodríguez know things like that, believe me. The investigation got nowhere because it was looking in the wrong place. It wasn’t a bunch of rogue officers. It was three local boys called Sloop Greer and Al Eugene and Hack Walker. Having fun in that old pick-up truck that’s still parked in your barn. Boys will be boys, right?”

Silence in the room.

“The attacks were mostly in Echo County,” Reacher said. “That struck me as odd. Why would the border patrol come so far north? Truth is, they didn’t. Three Echo boys went a little ways south instead.”

Silence.

“The attacks stopped in late August,” Reacher said. “Why was that? Not because the investigation scared them off. They didn’t know about the investigation. It was because college opens early September. They went off to be freshmen. The next summer it was too dangerous or they’d grown out of it, and they didn’t ever do it again. The whole thing faded into history, until twelve years later Sloop was sitting in a cell somewhere and dragged it all up because he was so desperate to get out.”

Everybody was staring straight at Walker. His eyes were closed tight and he was deathly pale.

“It seemed so unfair, right?” Reacher said to him. “All that was way in the past. Maybe you weren’t even a willing participant in the first place. Maybe the others dragged you into it. And now it was all coming back at you. It was a nightmare. It was going to ruin your life. It was going to take away the big prize. So you made some calls. Made some decisions. Three can keep a secret, if two of them are dead.”

Another candle died. The wick hissed and smoke plumed.

“No,” Walker said. “It wasn’t like that.”

The lantern flickered behind him. Shadows danced on the ceiling.

“So what was it like?” Reacher asked.

“I was just going to take Ellie. Just temporarily. I hired some local people to do it. I had plenty of campaign money. They watched her for a week. I went up to the jail and told Sloop, don’t mess with me. But he didn’t care. He said, go ahead and take Ellie. He didn’t want her. He was all conflicted. He married Carmen to punish himself for what we did, I think. That’s why he hit her all the time. She was a permanent reminder. He thought she could read it in him. See it in his eyes. Like voodoo. Ellie, too. He thought she could see it in him. So taking her wasn’t a threat to Sloop.”

“So then you hired some more people.”

Walker nodded. “They took over and got rid of the watchers for me.”

“And then they got rid of Al and Sloop.”

“It was a long time ago, Reacher. He shouldn’t have brought it up. We were kids at the time. We all agreed we would never even mention it again. We promised each other. Never, ever. It was the unmentionable thing. Like it had never happened. Like it was just a bad dream, a year long.”

There was silence.

“You were driving the truck tonight,” Reacher said.

Walker nodded again, slowly. “You two, then it would have been over. I knew you knew, you see. I mean, why else would you steal the files and lead us out into the desert? So I drove the truck. Why not? I’d driven out there at night before, many times.”

Then he went quiet. Swallowed hard, twice. Closed his eyes.

“But I got scared,” he said. “I got sick. I couldn’t go through with it. Not again. I’m not that person anymore. I changed.”

Silence in the room.

“Where’s Ellie?” Reacher asked.

Walker shrugged and shook his head. Reacher fished in his pocket and came out with the chromium star.

“Is this thing legal?” he asked.

Walker opened his eyes. Nodded.

“Technically, I guess,” he said.

“So I’m going to arrest you.”

Walker shook his head, vaguely.

“No,” he said. “Please.”

“Are you armed?” Reacher asked him.

Walker nodded. “Pistol, in my pocket.”

“Get it for me, Mrs. Greer,” Reacher said.

Rusty turned in her chair and went for Walker’s pocket. He offered no resistance. Even leaned sideways to make it easier for her. She came out with a small blued-steel revolver. A Colt Detective Special, .38 caliber, six shots, two-inch barrel. A small weapon. Rusty cradled it in her palm, and it looked right at home in a woman’s hand.

“Where’s Ellie, Hack?” Reacher asked again.

“I don’t know,” Walker said. “I really don’t. They use motels. I don’t know which one. They wouldn’t tell me. They said it’s safer that way.”

“How do you contact them?”

“A Dallas number. It must be rerouted.”

“Phones are out,” Bobby said.

“Where is she, Hack?” Reacher asked again.

“I don’t know. I’d tell you if I did.”

Reacher raised Alice’s gun. Held it straight out across the table. His arms were long, and the muzzle came to rest two feet from Walker’s face.

“Watch the trigger finger, Hack,” he said.

He tightened his finger until the skin shone white in the candlelight. The trigger moved backward, a sixteenth of an inch, then an eighth.

“You want to die, Hack?”

Walker nodded.

“Yes, please,” he whispered.

“Tell me first,” Reacher said. “Make it right. Where is she?”

“I don’t know,” Walker said.

He stared at the muzzle. It was so close, his eyes were crossing. The candle flames were reflected in the polished nickel. Reacher sighed and slackened his finger and lowered the gun all the way back to the tabletop. It hit the wood with a quiet sound. Nobody spoke. And nobody moved, until Rusty’s hand came up with the tiny revolver in it. She raised it in a wavering circle and it finished up pointing at nobody in particular.

“Sloop wouldn’t hit a woman,” she whispered. “Those were all riding accidents.”

Reacher shook his head. “He beat Carmen for five years, Rusty, almost every day they were married, until he went to jail. Broke her bones and split her lips and bruised her flesh. And that was after raping and torturing and murdering twenty-five human beings, at night, in the desert, twelve years ago.”

She trembled wildly.

“No,” she said. “That isn’t true.”

The gun wavered unsteadily.

“Point that thing at me and I’ll shoot you,” Reacher said. “Believe me, it would be an absolute pleasure.”

She stared at him for a second and then crooked her arm and touched the gun to the side of her own head, just above her ear. The metal penetrated her lacquered hair like a stick thrust through a bird’s nest. She kept it there for a long moment and then pulled it away and turned and twisted in her chair and moved it again and brought it level with Hack Walker’s forehead, with the muzzle no more than two inches from his skin.

“You killed my boy,” she whispered.

Walker made no attempt to move. He just nodded, very slightly.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered back.

No revolver has a safety mechanism. And a Colt Detective Special is a double-action pistol. Which means the first half of the trigger’s travel clicks the hammer back and revolves the cylinder under it, and then, if you keep on pulling, the hammer drops and the gun fires.

“No, Rusty,” Reacher said.

“Mom,” Bobby called.

The hammer clicked back.

“No,” Alice shouted.

The hammer tripped. The gun fired. There was colossal noise and flame, and the crown of Walker’s head blasted backward into the candlelit gloom. It just came off like a lid and splintered into mist. Colt Super Autos with hollow points, Reacher’s subconscious mind told him. The flame died abruptly and he saw a blackened hole between Walker’s eyes and his hair on fire from the muzzle flash. Then Rusty fired again. The second bullet followed the first straight through Walker’s head and he went down and Rusty kept the gun rock-steady in the air above him and fired into space, three, four, five, six. The third shot splintered the wall, and the fourth hit the Coleman lantern and shattered its glass, and the fifth hit its kerosene reservoir and exploded it over a ten-foot square of wall. It blew sideways and ignited with a bright flash and the sixth shot hit the exact center of the flames. She kept on pumping the trigger even after the gun was empty. Reacher watched her finger flexing and the hammer clicking and the cylinder stepping around obediently. Then he turned and watched the wall.

The kerosene was thicker than water and had more surface tension. It flung outward and dripped and ran and burned fiercely. It set the wall on fire immediately. The dry old wood burned with no hesitation at all. Blue flames crept upward and sideways and the faded red paint bubbled and peeled ahead of them. Tongues of flame found the vertical seams between the boards and raced up them like they were hungry. They reached the ceiling and paused momentarily and then curved horizontally and spread outward. The air in the room stirred to feed them. The candles guttered in the sudden draft. Within five seconds the wall was burning along its full height. Then the fire started creeping sideways. The flames were blue and smooth and curled and liquid, like they were sculpted out of something wet and soft. They glowed with mysterious inner light. Flakes of burning paint were drifting on hot currents and landing randomly. The fire was creeping clockwise, very fast, coming around behind everybody in the room.

“Out,” Reacher shouted.

Alice was already on her feet and Bobby was staring at the fire. Rusty was sitting absolutely motionless, still patiently working the trigger. The clicking of the firing mechanism was lost behind the crackle of the flames.

“Get her out,” Reacher shouted.

“We’ve got no water,” Bobby shouted back. “The well pump won’t work without electricity.”

“Just get your mother out,” Reacher shouted.

Bobby stood completely still. The flames had found the floorboards. The paint bubbled and peeled outward in a wide arc and the fire started a patient journey in pursuit. Reacher kicked chairs out of the way and lifted the table and overturned it on top of the flames. They died under it and then detoured neatly around it. The ceiling was well alight. Walker’s body was sprawled on the floor near the window. His hair was still on fire from the muzzle flash. It smoked and smoldered with flames of a different color. The fire had found the door frame. Reacher stepped across and pulled Rusty out of her chair. Spun her around and straight-armed her through the smoke and out of the room ahead of him. Alice was already in the foyer. She had the front door open. Reacher could feel damp air sucking in to feed the fire. It was keeping low, down by his feet. It was already a strong breeze.

Alice ran down the steps to the yard and Reacher pushed Rusty after her. She clattered down and staggered out onto the wet dirt and got steady on her feet and just stood there, still holding the empty gun straight out from her shoulder, still clicking the useless trigger. Walker’s Lincoln was parked next to the Jeep, wet and dirty and travel-stained. Reacher ducked back inside the foyer. It was filling with smoke. It was pooling near the ceiling and crowding downward in layers. The air was hot and paint was scorching everywhere. Bobby was coughing hard near the parlor door. The parlor was already a mass of flame. An inferno. The fire was curling out of the door. The door itself was on fire. The red-framed mirror cracked in the heat and Reacher turned and saw two of himself staring back. He took a deep spluttering breath and ran toward the flames and grabbed Bobby by the wrist. Twisted his arm and grabbed the back of his belt like he was arresting him and ran him out into the darkness. Hustled him down the steps and shoved him toward the center of the yard.

“It’s burning down,” Bobby screamed. “All of it.”

The windows were alive with yellow light. Flames were dancing behind them. Smoke was drifting through the screens and there were loud random cracking sounds from inside as timbers yielded and moved. The soaked roof was already steaming gently.

“It’s burning down,” Bobby screamed again. “What are we going to do?”

“Go live in the barn,” Reacher said. “That’s where people like you belong.”

Then he grabbed Alice’s hand and ran straight for the Jeep.