Echo Burning

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, splashingthrough 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 mudand 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