Lee Child - Echo Burning

"O.K.," he said. "You tell me when you think it's been one more hour."

He let go of the sheet and she wrapped herself up in it again. Ducked her head under it and put her hands over her ears to block the noise of the thunder. Then she closed her eyes, but she could still see the lightning flashes through the sheet and through her eyelids. They looked red.

* * *

The next flash was sheet lightning again, vague and diffuse and flickering. He rolled the body over, just to be sure. Tore open her jacket and shirt. He had hit her in the left armpit. It was through-and-through, exiting in the opposite wall of her chest. Probably got her heart, both lungs and her spine. A .40 bullet was not a subtle thing. It took a lot to stop one. The entry wound was small and neat. The exit wound wasn't. The rain flushed it clean. Diluted blood leaked all over the place and instantly disappeared. Her chest cavity was filling with water. It looked like a medical diagram. He could have sunk his whole hand in there.

She was medium-sized. Blond hair, soaked and full of mud where it spilled out under the FBI cap. He pushed the bill of the cap upward so he could see her face. Her eyes were open and staring at the sky and filling with rain like tears. Her face was slightly familiar. He had seen her before. Where? The lightning died and he was left with the image of her face in his mind, harsh and white and reversed like a photograph's negative. The diner. The Coke floats. Friday, school quitting time, a Crown Victoria, three passengers. He had pegged them as a sales team. Wrong again.

"O.K.," he said out loud. "Ballgame over."

He put Alice's gun back in his pocket and walked away north, back to the Jeep. It was so dark and he had so much rain in his eyes he thumped right into the side of it before he knew he was there. He tracked around it with a hand on the hood and found the driver's door. Opened it and closed it and opened it again, just for the thrill of making the dome light come on inside, illumination he could control for himself.

It wasn't easy driving back up onto the limestone. The grit that should have been under the wheels and aiding traction was now slick mud. He put the headlights on bright and started the wipers beating fast and selected four-wheel drive and slid around for a while before the front tires caught and dragged the car up the slope. Then he hooked a wide curve ahead and left, all the way across to the seven o'clock position. He hit the horn twice and Alice walked out of the mesquite into the headlight beams. She was soaked to the skin. Water was pouring off her. Her hair was plastered flat. Her ears stuck out a little. She stepped to her left and ran around to the passenger door.

"I guess this is the storm people were expecting," he said.

Lightning flared again outside. A ragged bolt far to their left, accompanied by an explosion of thunder. The weather was moving north, and fast.

She shook her head. "This little shower? This is just a taste. Wait until tomorrow."

"I'll be gone tomorrow."

"You will?"

He nodded.

"You O.K.?" he asked.

"I didn't know when to fire."

"You did fine."

"What happened?"

He drove off again, turning south, zigzagging the Jeep to fan the headlight beams back and forth across the mesa. Thirty feet in front of the wrecked VW, he found the first guy's body. It was humped and inert. He dipped the lights so they would shine directly on it and jumped out into the rain. The guy was dead. He had taken the Winchester's bullet in the stomach. He hadn't died instantaneously. His hat was missing and he had torn open his jacket to clutch his wound. He had crawled quite a distance. He was tall and heavily built. Reacher closed his eyes and scanned back to the scene in the diner. By the register. The woman, two men. One big and fair, one small and dark. Then he walked back to the Jeep and slid inside. The seat was soaked.

"Two dead," he said. "That's what happened. But the driver escaped. Did you ID him?"

"They came to kill us, didn't they?"

"That was the plan. Did you ID the driver?"

She said nothing.

"It's very important, Alice," he said. "For Ellie's sake. We don't have a tongue. That part didn't work out. They're both dead."

She said nothing.

"Did you see him?"

She shook her head.

"No, not really," she said. "I'm very sorry. I was running, the lights were only on a second or two."

It had seemed longer than that to Reacher. Much longer. But in reality, she was probably right. She was maybe even overestimating. It might have been only three quarters of a second. They had been very quick with the triggers.

"I've seen these people before," he said. "On Friday, up at the crossroads. Must have been after they got Eugene. They must have been scouting the area. Three of them. A woman, a big guy, a small dark guy. I can account for the woman and the big guy. So was it the small dark guy driving tonight?"

"I didn't really see."

"Gut feeling?" Reacher said. "First impression? You must have gotten a glimpse. Or seen a silhouette."

"Didn't you?"

He nodded. "He was facing away from me, looking down to where you fired from. There was a lot of glare. Some rain on his windshield. Then I was shooting, and then he took off. But I don't think he was small."

She nodded, too. "Gut feeling, he wasn't small. Or dark. It was just a blur, but I'd say he was big enough. Maybe fair-haired."

"Makes sense," Reacher said. "They left one of the team behind to guard Ellie."

"So who was driving?"

"Their client. The guy who hired them. That's my guess. Because they were short-handed, and because they needed local knowledge."

"He got away."

Reacher smiled. "He can run, but he can't hide."

* * *

They went to take a look at the wrecked VW. It was beyond help. Alice didn't seem too concerned about it. She just shrugged and turned away. Reacher took the maps from the glove compartment and turned the Jeep around and headed north. The drive back to the Red House was a nightmare. Crossing the mesa was O.K. But beyond the end of it the desert track was baked so hard that it wasn't absorbing any water at all. The rain was flooding all over the surface. The part that had felt like a riverbed was a riverbed. It was pouring with a fast torrent that boiled up over the tires. Mesquite bushes had been torn off their deep taproots and washed out of their shallow toeholds and whole trees were racing south on the swirl. They dammed against the front of the Jeep and rode with it until cross-currents tore them loose. Sinkholes were concealed by the tide. But the rain was easing fast. It was dying back to drizzle. The eye of the storm had blown away to the north.

They were right next to the motor barn before they saw it. It was in total darkness. Reacher braked hard and swerved around it and saw pale lights flickering behind some of the windows in the house.

"Candles," he said.

"Power must be out," Alice said. "The lightning must have hit the lines."

He braked again and slid in the mud and turned the car so the headlights washed deep into the barn.

"Recognize anything?" he asked.

Bobby's pick-up was back in its place, but it was wet and streaked with mud. Water was dripping out of the load bed and pooling on the ground.

"O.K.," Alice said. "So what now?"

Reacher stared into the mirror. Then he turned his head and watched the road from the north.

"Somebody's coming," he said.

There was a faint glow of headlights behind them, rising and falling, many miles distant, breaking into a thousand pieces in the raindrops on the Jeep's windows.

"Let's go say howdy to the Greets," he said.

He pulled Alice's gun out of his pocket and checked it. Never assume. But it was O.K. Cocked and locked. Seven left. He put it back in his pocket and drove across the soaking yard to the foot of the porch steps. The rain was almost gone. The ground was beginning to steam. The vapor rose gently and swirled in the headlight beams. They got out into the humidity. The temperature was coming back. So was the insect noise. There was a faint whirring chant all around. It sounded wary and very distant.