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 Alli-son 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.?”