“She must have worn riding gloves.”
Reacher shook his head. “She told me nobody wears gloves down here. Too hot. And she definitely wouldn’t have said that if gloves had once saved her from serious road rash. She’d have been a big fan of gloves, in that case. She’d have certainly made me wear them, being new to it.”
“So?”
“So I started to wonder if the collarbone thing could have been from Sloop hitting her. I figured it was possible. Maybe she’s on her knees, a big clubbing fist from above, she moves her head. Only she also claimed he had broken her arm and her jaw and knocked her teeth loose, too, and there was no mention of all that stuff, so I stopped wondering. Especially when I found out the ring was real.”
A candle on the left end of the table died. It burned out and smoke rose from it in a thin plume that ran absolutely straight for a second and then spi-raled crazily.
“She’s a liar,” Walker said. “That’s all.”
“She sure is,” Bobby said.
“Sloop never hit her,” Rusty said. “A son of mine would never hit a woman, whoever she was.”
“One at a time, O.K.?” Reacher said, quietly.
He could feel the impatience in the room. Elbows shifting on the table, feet moving on the floor. He turned to Bobby first.
“You claim she’s a liar,” he said. “And I know why. It’s because you don’t like her, because you’re a racist piece of shit, and because she had an affair with the schoolteacher. So among other things you took it on yourself to try and turn me off of her. Some kind of loyalty to your brother.”
Then he turned to Rusty. “We’ll get to what Sloop did and didn’t do real soon. But right now, you keep quiet, O.K.? Hack and I have business.”
“What business?” Walker said.
“This business,” Reacher said, and propped Alice’s gun on the tabletop, the butt resting on the wood and the muzzle pointing straight at Walker’s chest.
“What the hell are you doing?” Walker said.
Reacher clicked the safety off with his thumb. The snick sounded loud in the room. Candles flickered and the lantern hissed softly.
“I figured out the thing with the diamond,” he said. “Then everything else made sense. Especially with you giving us the badges and sending us down here to speak with Rusty.”
“What are you talking about?”
“It was like a conjuring trick. The whole thing. You knew Carmen pretty well. So you knew what she must have told me. Which was the absolute truth, always. The truth about herself, and about what Sloop was doing to her. So you just exactly reversed everything. It was simple. A very neat and convincing trick. Like she told me she was from Napa, and you said, hey, I bet she told you she’s from Napa, but she isn’t, you know. Like she told me she’d called the IRS, and you said, hey, I bet she told you she called the IRS, but she didn’t, really. It was like you knew the real truth and were reluctantly exposing commonplace lies she had told before. But it was you who was lying. All along. It was very, very effective. Like a conjuring trick. And you dressed it all up behind pretending you wanted to save her. You fooled me for a long time.”
“I did want to save her. I am saving her.”
“Bullshit, Hack. Your only aim all along was to coerce a confession out of her for something she didn’t do. It was a straightforward plan. Your hired guns kidnapped Ellie today so you could force Carmen to confess. I was your only problem. I stuck around, I recruited Alice. We were in your face from Monday morning onward. So you misled us for twenty-seven straight hours. You let us down slowly and regretfully, point by point. It was beautifully done. Well, almost. To really make it work, you’d have to be the best con artist in the world. And like old Copernicus says, what are the odds that the best con artist in the world would happen to be up there in Pecos?”