Echo Burning

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 inCentral 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 firedinstinctively 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