Echo Burning by Lee Child

by Echo Burning (com v2. 0) (lit)

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 shad
ows 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.