Echo Burning (16 page)

Joshua just smiled.

“What guy?” Billy said.

“Some guy came down here with Carmen.”

“The Mexican?”

“Some friend of hers.”

Billy shook his head. “Don't know anything about it. We never ran any guy off. What are we, cops?”

“You're the cop,” Joshua said.

“Am I?”

Joshua nodded. “Bobby said so. You were a military cop.”

“You been discussing me?”

Joshua shrugged and went quiet.

“Got to go,” Billy said.

Twenty minutes later Carmen herself brought his armadillo lunch to him. It was in a covered dish and smelled
strongly of chili. She left, nervous and in a hurry, without saying a word. He tried the meal. The meat was halfway between sweet and ordinary. It had been shredded and chopped and mixed with beans and two-alarm sauce from a bottle. Then slightly overdone in a warm oven. He had eaten worse, and he was hungry, which helped. He took his time, and then carried the dish back to the kitchen. Bobby was standing out on the porch steps, like a sentry.

“Horses need more feed supplement,” he called. “You'll go with Josh and Billy to pick it up. After siesta. Get as many bags as fit in the truck.”

Reacher nodded and walked on to the kitchen. Gave the used dish to the maid, and thanked her for the meal. Then he walked down to the barn and went inside and sat on a bale of straw to wait. The horses turned around in their stalls to watch him do it. They were patient and listless in the heat. One of them was chewing slowly. There were hay stalks stuck to its lips.

Carmen came in ten minutes later. She had changed into faded blue jeans and a checked cotton shirt with no sleeves. She was carrying a straw hat and her pocketbook. She looked tiny and afraid.

“Bobby doesn't know you called the IRS,” he said. “He thinks it was random snooping. So maybe Sloop does, too.”

She shook her head. “Sloop knows.”

“How?”

She shrugged. “Actually, he doesn't
know
. But he convinced himself it had to be me. He was looking for somebody to blame, and who else is there? No evidence or anything, but as it happens he's right. Ironic, isn't it?”

“But he didn't tell Bobby.”

“He wouldn't. He's too stubborn to agree with them. They hate me, he hates me, he keeps it a secret, they keep it a secret. From him, I mean. They make sure I know it.”

“You should get out. You've got forty-eight hours.”

She nodded. “Forty-eight hours exactly, I think. They'll let him out at seven in the morning. They'll drive all night to be there for him. It's about seven hours. So he'll be back home this time on Monday. Just after lunch.”

“So get out, right now.”

“I can't.”

“You should,” he said. “This place is impossible. It's like the outside world doesn't exist.”

She smiled, bitterly. “Tell me about it. I've lived here nearly seven years. My whole adult life, give or take.”

She hung her hat and her pocketbook on a nail in the wall. Did all the saddling work herself, quickly and efficiently. She was lithe and deft. The slim muscles in her arms bunched and relaxed as she lifted the saddles. Her fingers were precise with the buckles. She readied two horses in a quarter of the time he had taken to do one.

“You're pretty good at this,” he said.

“Gracias, señor,”
she said. “I get a lot of practice.”

“So how can they believe you keep falling off, regular as clockwork?”

“They think I'm clumsy.”

He watched her lead his horse out of its stall. It was one of the geldings. She was tiny beside it. In the jeans, he could have spanned her waist with his hand.

“You sure don't look clumsy,” he said.

She shrugged. “People believe what they need to.”

He took the reins from her. The horse huffed through its nose and shifted its feet. Moved its head up and down, up and down. His hand went with it.

“Walk him out,” she said.

“Shouldn't we have leather pants? And riding gloves?”

“Are you kidding? We never wear that stuff here. It's way too hot.”

He waited for her. Her horse was the smaller mare. She wedged her hat on her head and took her pocketbook off the nail and put it in a saddlebag. Then she followed him, leading her mare confidently out into the yard, into the heat and the sun.

“O.K., like this,” she said. She stood on the mare's left and put her left foot in the stirrup. Gripped the horn with her left hand and bounced twice on her right leg and jacked herself smoothly into the saddle. He tried it the same way. Put his left foot in the stirrup, grasped the horn, put all his weight on the stirrup foot and straightened his leg and pulled with his
hand. Leaned his weight forward and right and suddenly he was up there in the seat. The horse felt very wide, and he was very high in the air. About the same as riding on an armored personnel carrier.

“Put your right foot in,” she said.

He jammed his foot into the other stirrup and squirmed around until he was as comfortable as he was ever going to get. The horse waited patiently.

“Now bunch the reins on the horn, in your left hand.”

That part was easy. It was just a question of imitating the movies. He let his right hand swing free, like he was carrying a Winchester repeater or a coil of rope.

“O.K., now just relax. And kick gently with your heels.”

He kicked once and the horse lurched into a walk. He used his left hand on the horn to keep himself steady. After a couple of paces he began to understand the rhythm. The horse was moving him left and right and forward and back with every alternate step. He held tight to the horn and used pressure from his feet to keep his body still.

“Good,” she said. “Now I'll go in front and he'll follow. He's pretty docile.”

I would be, too,
he thought,
a hundred ten degrees and two hundred fifty pounds on my back
. Carmen clicked her tongue and kicked her heels and her horse moved smoothly around his and led the way through the yard and past the house. She swayed easily in the saddle, the muscles in her thighs bunching and flexing as she kept her balance. Her hat was down over her eyes. Her left hand held the reins and her right was hanging loose at her side. He caught the blue flash of the fake diamond in the sun.

She led him out under the gate to the road and straight across without looking or stopping. He glanced left and right, south and north, and saw nothing at all except heat shimmer and distant silver mirages. On the far side of the road was a step about a foot high onto the limestone ledge. He leaned forward and let the horse climb it underneath him. Then the rock rose gently into the middle distance, reaching maybe fifty feet of elevation in the best part of a mile. There were deep fissures running east-west and washed-out holes the
size of shell craters. The horses picked their way between them. They seemed pretty sure on their feet. So far, he hadn't had to do any conscious steering. Which he was happy about, because he wasn't exactly sure how to.

“Watch for rattlesnakes,” Carmen called.

“Great,” he called back.

“Horses get scared by anything that moves. They'll spook and run. If that happens, just hang on tight and haul on the reins.”

“Great,” he said again.

There were scrubby plants rooting desperately in cracks in the rock. There were smaller holes, two or three feet across, some of them with undercut sides.
Just right for a snake,
he thought. He watched them carefully at first. Then he gave it up, because the shadows were too harsh to see anything. And the saddle was starting to wear on him.

“How far are we going?” he called.

She turned, like she had been waiting for the question.

“We need to get over the rise,” she said. “Down into the gulches.”

The limestone smoothed out into broader unbroken shelves and she slowed to let his horse move up alongside hers. But it stayed just short of level, which kept him behind her. Kept him from seeing her face.

“Bobby told me you had a key,” he said.

“Did he?”

“He said you lost it.”

“No, that's not true. They never gave me one.”

He said nothing.

“They made a big point of not giving me one,” she said. “Like it was a symbol.”

“So he was lying?”

She nodded, away from him. “I told you, don't believe anything he says.”

“He said the door's never locked, anyway.”

“Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't.”

“He told me you don't have to knock, either.”

“That's a lie, too,” she said. “Since Sloop's been gone, if I don't knock, they run and grab a rifle. Then they go,
oh sorry,
but strangers prowling around the house make us nervous
. Like a big pretend show.”

He said nothing.

“Bobby's a liar, Reacher,” she said. “I told you that.”

“I guess he is. Because he also told me you brought some other guy down here, and he got Josh and Billy to run him off. But Josh and Billy didn't know anything about any guy.”

She was quiet for a long moment.

“No, that was true,” she said. “I met a man up in Pecos, about a year ago. We had an affair. At first just at his place up there. But he wanted more.”

“So you brought him here?”

“It was his idea. He thought he could get work, and be close to me. I thought it was crazy, but I went along with it. That's where I got the idea to ask you to come. Because it actually worked for a spell. Two or three weeks. Then Bobby caught us.”

“And what happened?”

“That was the end of it. My friend left.”

“So why would Josh and Billy deny it to me?”

“Maybe it wasn't Josh and Billy who ran him off. Maybe they didn't know about it. Maybe Bobby did it himself. My friend wasn't as big as you. He was a schoolteacher, out of work.”

“And he just disappeared?”

“I saw him again, just once, back in Pecos. He was scared. Wouldn't talk to me.”

“Did Bobby tell Sloop?”

“He promised he wouldn't. We had a deal.”

“What kind of a deal?”

She went quiet again. Just rode on, sitting slackly on the swaying horse.

“The usual kind,” she said. “If I'd do something for him, he'd keep quiet.”

“What kind of something?”

She paused again.

“Something I really don't want to tell you about,” she said.

“I see.”

“Yes, you see.”

“And did he keep quiet?”

“I really have no idea. He made me do it twice. It was disgusting.
He's
disgusting. But he promised faithfully. But he's a liar, so I'm assuming he told Sloop anyway. On one of his brotherly visits. I always knew it was a lose-lose gamble, but what could I do? What choice did I have?”

“Bobby figures that's why I'm here. He thinks we're having an affair, too.”

She nodded. “That would be my guess. He doesn't know Sloop hits me. Even if he did, he wouldn't expect me to do anything about it.”

Reacher was quiet for a spell. Another twenty yards, thirty, at the slow patient pace of a walking horse.

“You need to get out,” he said. “How many times do you have to hear it?”

“I won't run,” she answered.

They reached the top of the rise and she made a small sound and her horse stopped walking. His stopped, too, at her shoulder. They were about fifty feet above the plain. Ahead of them, to the west, the caliche sloped gently down again, pocked by dry gulches the size of ballparks. Behind them, to the east, the red house and the other buildings in the compound were spread out a mile away, flat on the baked land like a model. The road ran like a gray ribbon, north and south. Behind the tiny motor barn the dirt track wandered south and east through the desert, like a scar on burned and pockmarked skin. The air was dry and unnaturally clear all the way to both horizons, where it broke up into haze. The heat was a nightmare. The sun was fearsome. Reacher could feel his face burning.

“Take care as we go down,” Carmen said. “Stay balanced.”

She moved off ahead of him, letting her horse find its own way down the incline. He kicked with his heels and followed her. He lost the rhythm as his horse stepped short and he started bouncing uncomfortably.

“Follow me,” she called.

She was moving to the right, toward a dry gulch with a flat floor, all stone and sand. He started trying to figure which
rein he should pull on, but his horse turned anyway. Its feet crunched on gravel and slipped occasionally. Then it stepped right down into the gulch, which jerked him violently backward and forward. Ahead of him Carmen was slipping out of the saddle. Then she was standing on the ground, stretching, waiting for him. His horse stopped next to hers and he shook his right foot free of the stirrup and got off by doing the exact opposite of what had got him on a half hour before.

“So what do you think?” she asked.

“Well, I know why John Wayne walked funny.”

She smiled briefly and led both horses together to the rim of the gulch and heaved a large stone over the free ends of both sets of reins. He could hear absolute silence, nothing at all behind the buzz and shimmer of the heat. She lifted the flap of her saddlebag and took out her pocketbook. Zipped it open and slipped her hand in and came out with a small chromium handgun.

“You promised you'd teach me,” she said.

“Wait,” he said.

“What?”

He said nothing. Stepped left, stepped right, crouched down, stood tall. Stared at the floor of the gulch, moving around, using the shadows from the sun to help him.

“What?” she said again.

“Somebody's been here,” he said. “There are tracks. Three people, a vehicle driving in from the west.”

“Tracks?” she said. “Where?”