“You don’t need pajamas,” the man said. “It’s too hot for pajamas.” He stood there by the door, watching her. She dried herself with a small white towel. She needed to pee, but she wasn’t going to let him watch her do that. She had to squeeze very near him to get out of the room. Then the other two watched her all the way to the bed. The other man, and the woman. They were horrible. They were all horrible. She got into the bed and pulled the covers up over her head and tried hard not to cry.
“What now?” Alice asked.
“Back to Pecos,” Reacher said. “I want to keep on the move. And we’ve got a lot of stuff to do tonight. But go slow, O.K.? I need time to think.”
She drove out to the gate and turned north into the darkness. Switched the fan on high to blow the night heat away.
“Think about what?” Alice asked.
“About where Ellie is.”
“Why do you think it was the same people as killed Eugene?”
“It’s a deployment issue,” he said. “I can’t see anybody using a separate hit team and kidnap team. Not down here in the middle of nowhere. So I think it’s one team. Either a hit team moonlighting on the kidnap, or a kidnap team moonlighting on the hits. Probably the former, because the way they did Eugene was pretty expert. If that was moonlighting, I’d hate to see them do what they’re really good at.”
“All they did was shoot him. Anybody could do that.”
“No, they couldn’t. They got him to stop the car, they talked him into theirs. They kept him quiet throughout. That’s really good technique, Alice. Harder than you can imagine. Then they shot him through the eye. That means something, too.”
“What?”
He shrugged. “It’s a tiny target. And in a situation like that, it’s a snap shot. You raise the gun, you fire. One, two. No rational reason to pick such a tiny target. It’s a kind of exuberance. Not exactly showing off, as such. More like just celebrating your own skill and precision. Like reveling in it. It’s a joy thing.”
Silence in the car. Just the hum of the motor and the whine of the tires.
“And now they’ve got the kid,” Alice said.
“And they’re uneasy about it, because they’re moonlighting. They’re used to each other alone. They’re accustomed to their normal procedures. Having a live kid around makes them worried about being static and visible.”
“They’ll look like a family. A man, a woman, a little girl.”
“No, I think there’s more than two of them.”
“Why?”
“Because if it was me, I’d want three. In the service, we used three. Basically a driver, a shooter and a back-watcher.”
“You shot people? The military police?”
He shrugged. “Sometimes. You know, things better not brought to trial.”
She was quiet for a long moment. He saw her debating whether to hitch an inch farther away from him. Then he saw her decide to stay where she was.
“So why didn’t you do it for Carmen?” she asked. “If you’ve done it before?”
“She asked me the same question. My answer is, I really don’t know.”
She was quiet again, another mile.
“Why are they holding Ellie?” she said. “I mean, still holding her? They already coerced the confession. So what’s still to gain?”
“You’re the lawyer,” he said. “You have to figure that one out. When does it become set in stone? You know, irrevocable?”
“Never, really. A confession can be retracted anytime. But in practice, I guess if she answered nolo contendere to the grand jury indictment, that would be regarded as a milestone.”
“And how soon could that happen?”
“Tomorrow, easily. Grand jury sits more or less permanently. It would take ten minutes, maybe a quarter of an hour.”
“I thought justice ground real slow in Texas.”
“Only if you plead not guilty.”
Silence again, for many miles. They passed through the crossroads hamlet with the school and the gas station and the diner. It whipped backward through the headlight beams, three short seconds end to end. The sky up ahead was still clear. The stars were still visible. But the clouds were building fast behind them, in the south.