Echo Burning

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 laidthem 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