She shook her head. “This little shower? This is just a taste. Wait until tomorrow.”
“I’ll be gone tomorrow.”
“You will?”
He nodded.
“You O.K.?” he asked.
“I didn’t know when to fire.”
“You did fine.”
“What happened?”
He drove off again, turning south, zigzagging the Jeep to fan the headlight beams back and forth across the mesa. Thirty feet in front of the wrecked VW, he found the first guy’s body. It was humped and inert. He dipped the lights so they would shine directly on it and jumped out into the rain. The guy was dead. He had taken the Winchester’s bullet in the stomach. He hadn’t died instantaneously. His hat was missing and he had torn open his jacket to clutch his wound. He had crawled quite a distance. He was tall and heavily built. Reacher closed his eyes and scanned back to the scene in the diner. By the register. The woman, two men. One big and fair, one small and dark. Then he walked back to the Jeep and slid inside. The seat was soaked.
“Two dead,” he said. “That’s what happened. But the driver escaped. Did you ID him?”
“They came to kill us, didn’t they?”
“That was the plan. Did you ID the driver?”
She said nothing.
“It’s very important, Alice,” he said. “For Ellie’s sake. We don’t have a tongue. That part didn’t work out. They’re both dead.”
She said nothing.
“Did you see him?”
She shook her head.
“No, not really,” she said. “I’m very sorry. I was running, the lights were only on a second or two.”
It had seemed longer than that to Reacher. Much longer. But in reality, she was probably right. She was maybe even overestimating. It might have been only three quarters of a second. They had been very quick with the triggers.
“I’ve seen these people before,” he said. “On Friday, up at the crossroads. Must have been after they got Eugene. They must have been scouting the area. Three of them. A woman, a big guy, a small dark guy. I can account for the woman and the big guy. So was it the small dark guy driving tonight?”
“I didn’t really see.”
“Gut feeling?” Reacher said. “First impression? You must have gotten a glimpse. Or seen a silhouette.”
“Didn’t you?”
He nodded. “He was facing away from me, looking down to where you fired from. There was a lot of glare. Some rain on his windshield. Then I was shooting, and then he took off. But I don’t think he was small.”
She nodded, too. “Gut feeling, he wasn’t small. Or dark. It was just a blur, but I’d say he was big enough. Maybe fair-haired.”
“Makes sense,” Reacher said. “They left one of the team behind to guard Ellie.”
“So who was driving?”
“Their client. The guy who hired them. That’s my guess. Because they were short-handed, and because they needed local knowledge.” “He got away.” Reacher smiled. “He can run, but he can’t hide.”
They went to take a look at the wrecked VW. It was beyond help. Alice didn’t seem too concerned about it. She just shrugged and turned away. Reacher took the maps from the glove compartment and turned the Jeep around and headed north. The drive back to the Red House was a nightmare. Crossing the mesa was O.K. But beyond the end of it the desert track was baked so hard that it wasn’t absorbing any water at all. The rain was flooding all over the surface. The part that had felt like a riverbed was a riverbed. It was pouring with a fast torrent that boiled up over the tires. Mesquite bushes had been torn off their deep taproots and washed out of their shallow toeholds and whole trees were racing south on the swirl. They dammed against the front of the Jeep and rode with it until cross-currents tore them loose. Sinkholes were concealed by the tide. But the rain was easing fast. It was dying back to drizzle. The eye of the storm had blown away to the north.
They were right next to the motor barn before they saw it. It was in total darkness. Reacher braked hard and swerved around it and saw pale lights flickering behind some of the windows in the house.