Echo Burning (20 page)

“Then I guess I'll stay too,” Bobby said. “Keep an eye on things. Sloop will understand.”

Reacher glanced at him. Carmen turned abruptly and walked back into the house. Rusty and Hack Walker drifted after her. The sheriff and Bobby stayed on the porch, each taking a half-step toward the other, to put a subliminal human barrier between Reacher and the door.

“So why did they quit?” Bobby asked.

Reacher glanced at them both and shrugged.

“Well, they didn't exactly quit,” he said. “I was trying to sugar the pill, for the family, was all. Truth is we were in a bar, and they picked a fight with some guy. You saw us in the bar, right, Sheriff?”

The sheriff nodded, cautiously.

“It was after you left,” Reacher said. “They picked a fight and lost.”

“Who with?” Bobby asked. “What guy?”

“The wrong guy.”

“But who was he?”

“Some big guy,” Reacher said. “He smacked them around for a minute or two. I think somebody called the ambulance for them. They're probably in the hospital now. Maybe they're dead, for all I know. They lost, and they lost real bad.”

Bobby stared. “Who was the guy?”

“Just some guy, minding his own business.”

“Who?”

“Some stranger, I guess.”

Bobby paused. “Was it you?”

“Me?” Reacher said. “Why would they pick a fight with me?”

Bobby said nothing.

“Why would they pick a fight with me, Bobby?” Reacher asked again. “What possible kind of a reason would they have for that?”

Bobby made no reply. Just stared and then turned and stalked into the house. Slammed the door loudly behind him. The sheriff stayed where he was.

“So they got hurt bad,” he said.

Reacher nodded. “Seems that way. You should make some calls, check it out. Then start spreading the news. Tell people
that's what happens, if they start picking fights with the wrong strangers.”

The sheriff nodded again, still cautious.

“Maybe it's something you should bear in mind, too,” Reacher said. “Bobby told me down here folks sort out their own differences. He told me they're reluctant to involve law enforcement people. He implied cops stay out of private disputes. He said it's some kind of a big old West Texas tradition.”

The sheriff was quiet for a moment.

“I guess it might be,” he said.

“Bobby said it definitely was. A definite tradition.”

The sheriff turned away.

“Well, you could put it that way,” he said. “And I'm a very traditional guy.”

Reacher nodded.

“I'm very glad to hear it,” he said.

The sheriff paused on the porch steps, and then moved on again without looking back. He slid into his car and killed the flashing lights and started the engine. Maneuvered carefully past the lime green Lincoln and headed out down the driveway and under the gate. His engine was running rich. Reacher could smell unburned gasoline in the air, and he could hear the muffler popping with tiny explosions. Then the car accelerated into the distance and he could hear nothing at all except the grasshoppers clicking and chattering.

 

He came down
off the porch and walked around to the kitchen door. It was standing open, either for ventilation or so the maid could eavesdrop on the excitement. She was standing just inside the room, close to an insect screen made of plastic strips hanging down in the doorway.

“Hey,” Reacher said. He had learned long ago to be friendly with the cookhouse detail. That way, you eat better. But she didn't answer him. She just stood there, warily.

“Let me guess,” he said. “You only made two suppers for the bunkhouse.”

She said nothing, which was as good as a yes.

“You were misinformed,” he said. “Was it Bobby?”

She nodded. “He told me you weren't coming back.”

“He was mistaken,” he said. “It was Josh and Billy who didn't come back. So I guess I'll eat their dinners. Both of them. I'm hungry.”

She paused. Then she shrugged.

“I'll bring them down,” she said. “In a minute.”

He shook his head.

“I'll eat them here,” he said. “Save you the walk.”

He parted the plastic strips with the backs of his hands and stepped inside the kitchen. It smelled of chili, left over from lunchtime.

“What did you make?” he asked.

“Steaks,” she said.

“Good,” he said. “I like bovines better than edentates.”

“What?”

“I like beef better than I like armadillo.”

“So do I,” she said.

She used pot holders and took two plates out of a warming oven. Each held a medium-sized rib-eye steak, and a large mound of mashed potato and a smaller mound of fried onions. She put them side by side on the kitchen table, with a fork on the left of the left-hand plate and a knife all the way to the right. It looked like a double-barreled meal.

“Billy was my cousin,” she said.

“He probably still is,” Reacher said. “Josh got it worse.”

“Josh was my cousin, too.”

“Well, I'm sorry to hear that.”

“Different branch of the family,” she said. “More distant. And they were both fools.”

Reacher nodded. “Not the sharpest chisels in the box.”

“But the Greers are sharp,” she said. “Whatever it is you're doing with the Mexican woman, you should remember that.”

Then she left him alone to eat.

 

* * *

 

He rinsed both
plates when he finished and left them stacked in the sink. Walked down to the horse barn and sat down to wait in the foul heat inside because he wanted to stay close to the house. He sat on a hay bale and kept his back to the horses. They were restless for a spell, and then they got used to his presence. He heard them fall asleep, one by one. The shuffling hooves stopped moving and he heard lazy huffs of breath.

Then he heard feet over on the boards of the porch, and then on the steps, and then the crunch of dry dust under them as they crossed the yard. He heard the Lincoln's doors open, then shut again. He heard the engine start, and the transmission engage. He stood up and stepped to the barn door and saw the Lincoln turning around in front of the house. It was lit from behind by the porch lights, and he could see Hack Walker silhouetted at the wheel, with Rusty Greer beside him. The porch lights turned her teased-up hair to cotton candy. He could see the shape of her skull underneath it.

The big car drove straight out under the gate and swooped right without pausing and accelerated away down the road. He watched the bright cone of its headlights through the picket fence, bouncing left to right through the darkness. Then it was gone and the sounds of the night insects came back and the big moths around the lights were all that was moving.

 

He waited just
inside the barn door, trying to guess who would come for him first. Carmen, probably, he thought, but it was Bobby who stepped out on the porch, maybe five minutes after his mother had left to bring his brother home. He came straight down the steps and headed across the yard, down toward the path to the bunkhouse. He had his ball cap on again, reversed on his head. Reacher stepped out of the barn and cut him off.

“Horses need watering,” Bobby said. “And I want their stalls cleaned out.”

“You do it,” Reacher said.

“What?”

“You heard.”

Bobby stood still.

“I'm not doing it,” he said.

“Then I'll make you do it.”

“What the hell is this?”

“A change, is what,” Reacher said. “Things just changed for you, Bobby, big time, believe me. Soon as you decided to set Josh and Billy on me, you crossed a line. Put yourself in a whole different situation. One where you do exactly what I tell you.”

Bobby said nothing.

Reacher looked straight at him. “I tell you
jump,
you don't even ask how high. You just start jumping. That clear? I own you now.”

Bobby stood still. Reacher swung his right hand, aiming a big slow roundhouse slap. Bobby ducked away from it, straight into Reacher's left, which pulled the ball cap off his head.

“So go look after the horses,” Reacher said. “Then you can sleep in there with them. I see you again before breakfast time, I'll break your legs.”

Bobby stood still.

“Who are you going to call, little brother?” Reacher asked him. “The maid, or the sheriff?”

Bobby said nothing. The vastness of the night closed in. Echo County, a hundred and fifty souls, most of them at least sixty or a hundred miles beyond the black horizons. The absolute definition of isolation.

“O.K.,” Bobby said quietly.

He walked slowly toward the barn. Reacher dropped the ball cap in the dirt and strolled up to the house, with the porch lights shining in his eyes and the big papery moths swarming out to greet him.

 

Two-thirds of
the killing crew saw him stroll. They were doing it better than the watchers had. The woman had checked the map and rejected the tactic of driving in from the west. For one thing, the Crown Vic wouldn't make it over the desert terrain. For another, to hide a mile away made no sense at all. Especially during the hours of darkness. Far better to
drive straight down the road and stop a hundred yards shy of the house, long enough for two of the team to jump out, then turn the car and head back north while the two on foot ducked behind the nearest line of rocks and worked south toward the red gate and holed up in the small craters ten yards from the blacktop.

It was the two men on foot. They had night-vision devices. Nothing fancy, nothing military, just commercial equipment bought from a sporting goods catalog and carried along with everything else in the black nylon valise. They were binoculars, with some kind of electronic enhancement inside. Some kind of infrared capability. It picked up the night heat rising off the ground, and made Reacher look like he was wobbling and shimmering as he walked.

Reacher found Carmen
in the parlor. The light was dim and the air was hot and thick. She was sitting alone at the red-painted table. Her back was perfectly straight and her forearms were resting lightly on the wooden surface and her gaze was blank and absolutely level, focused on a spot on the wall where there was nothing to see.

“Twice over,” she said. “I feel cheated, twice over. First it was a year, and then it was nothing. Then it was forty-eight hours, but really it was only twenty-four.”

“You can still get out,” he said.

“Now it's less than twenty-four,” she said. “It's sixteen hours, maybe. I'll have breakfast by myself, but he'll be back for lunch.”

“Sixteen hours is enough,” he said. “Sixteen hours, you could be anywhere.”

“Ellie's fast asleep,” she said. “I can't wake her up and bundle her in a car and run away and be chased by the cops forever.”

Reacher said nothing.

“I'm going to try to face it,” she said. “A fresh start. I'm planning to tell him, enough is enough. I'm planning to tell him, he lays a hand on me again, I'll divorce him. Whatever it takes. However long.”

“Way to go,” he said.

“Do you believe I can?” she asked.

“I believe anybody can do anything,” he said. “If they want it enough.”

“I want it,” she said. “Believe me, I want it.”

She went quiet. Reacher glanced around the silent room.

“Why did they paint everything red?” he asked.

“Because it was cheap,” she said. “During the fifties, nobody down here wanted red anything, because of the Communists. So it was the cheapest color at the paint store.”

“I thought they were rich, back then. With the oil.”

“They were rich. They still are rich. Richer than you could ever imagine. But they're also mean.”

He looked at the places where the fifty-year-old paint was worn back to the wood.

“Evidently,” he said.

She nodded again. Said nothing.

“Last chance, Carmen,” he said. “We could go, right now. There's nobody here to call the cops. By the time they get back, we could be anywhere you want.”

“Bobby's here.”

“He's going to stay in the barn.”

“He'd hear the car.”

“We could rip out the phones.”

“He'd chase us. He could get to the sheriff inside two hours.”

“We could fix the other cars so they wouldn't work.”

“He'd hear us doing it.”

“I could tie him up. I could drown him in a horse trough.”

She smiled, bitterly. “But you won't drown Sloop.”

He nodded. “Figure of speech, I guess.”

She was quiet for a beat. Then she scraped back her chair and stood up.

“Come and see Ellie,” she said. “She's so beautiful when she's asleep.”

She passed close to him and took his hand in hers. Led him out through the kitchen and into the rear lobby and up the back stairs, toward the noise of the fan turning slowly. Down the long hot corridor to Ellie's door. She eased it open with her foot and maneuvered him so he could see inside the room.

There was a night-light plugged into an outlet low on the wall and its soft orange glow showed the child sprawled on her back, with her arms thrown up around her head. She had kicked off her sheet and the rabbit T-shirt had ridden up and was showing a band of plump pink skin at her waist. Her hair was tumbled over the pillow. Long dark eyelashes rested on her cheeks like fans. Her mouth was open a fraction.

“She's six and a half,” Carmen whispered. “She needs this. She needs a bed of her own, in a place of her own. I can't make her live like a fugitive.”

He said nothing.

“Do you see?” she whispered.

He shrugged. He didn't, really. At age six and a half, he had lived exactly like a fugitive. He had at every age, right from birth to yesterday. He had moved from one service base to another, all around the world, often with no notice at all. He recalled days when he got up for school and instead was driven to an airstrip and ended up on the other side of the planet thirty hours later. He recalled stumbling tired and bewildered into dank bungalow bedrooms and sleeping on unmade beds. The next morning, his mother would tell him which country they were in. Which continent they were on. If she knew yet. Sometimes she didn't. It hadn't done him any harm.

Or, maybe it had.

“It's your call, I guess,” he said.

She pulled him back into the corridor and eased Ellie's door shut behind him.

“Now I'll show you where I hid the gun,” she said. “You can tell me if you approve.”

She walked ahead of him down the corridor. The air conditioner was loud. He passed under a vent and a breath of air played over him. It was warm. Carmen's dress swayed with
every step. She was wearing heels and they put tension in the muscles of her legs. He could see tendons in the backs of her knees. Her hair hung down her back and merged with the black pattern on the red fabric of the dress. She turned left and then right and stepped through an archway. There was another staircase, leading down.

“Where are we going?” he asked.

“Separate wing,” she said. “It was added. By Sloop's grandfather, I think.”

The staircase led to a long narrow ground-floor hallway that led out of the main building to a master suite. It was as big as a small house. There was a dressing area, and a spacious bathroom, and a sitting room with a sofa and two armchairs. Beyond the sitting room was a broad archway. Beyond the archway, there was a bedroom.

“In here,” she said.

She walked straight through the sitting room and led him to the bedroom.

“You see what I mean?” she said. “We're a long way from anywhere. Nobody hears anything. And I try to be quiet, anyway. If I scream, he hits me harder.”

He nodded and looked around. There was a window, facing east, with insects loud beyond the screen. There was a king-size bed close to it, with side tables by the head, and a chest-high piece of furniture full of drawers opposite the foot. It looked like it had been made a hundred years ago, out of some kind of oak trees.

“Texas ironwood,” she said. “It's what you get if you let the mesquite grow tall.”

“You should have been a teacher,” he said. “You're always explaining things.”

She smiled, vaguely. “I thought about it, in college. It was a possibility, back then. In my other life.”

She opened the drawer on the top right.

“I moved the gun,” she said. “I listened to your advice. Bedside cabinet was too low. Ellie could have found it. This is too high for her.”

He nodded again and moved closer. The drawer was a couple of feet wide, maybe eighteen inches deep. It was her
underwear drawer. The pistol was lying on top of her things, which were neatly folded, and silky, and insubstantial, and fragrant. The mother-of-pearl plastic on the grips looked right at home there.

“You could have told me where it was,” he said. “You didn't need to show me.”

She was quiet for a beat.

“He'll want sex, won't he?” she said.

Reacher made no reply.

“He's been locked up a year and a half,” she said. “But I'm going to refuse.”

Reacher said nothing.

“It's a woman's right, isn't it?” she asked. “To say no?”

“Of course it is,” he said.

“Even though the woman is married?”

“Most places,” he said.

She was quiet for a beat.

“And it's also her right to say yes, isn't it?” she asked.

“Equally,” he said.

“I'd say yes to you.”

“I'm not asking.”

She paused. “So is it O.K. for me to ask you?”

He looked straight at her. “Depends on why, I guess.”

“Because I want to,” she said. “I want to go to bed with you.”

“Why?”

“Honestly?” she said. “Just because I want to.”

“And?”

She shrugged. “And I want to hurt Sloop a little, I guess, in secret. In my heart.”

He said nothing.

“Before he gets home,” she said.

He said nothing.

“And because Bobby already thinks we're doing it,” she said. “I figure, why get the blame without getting the fun?”

He said nothing.

“I just want a little fun,” she said. “Before it all starts up again.”

He said nothing.

“No strings attached,” she said. “I'm not looking for it to change anything. About your decision, I mean. About Sloop.”

He nodded.

“It wouldn't change anything,” he said.

She looked away.

“So what's your answer?” she asked.

He watched her profile. Her face was blank. It was like all other possibilities were exhausted for her, and all that was left was instinct. Early in his service career, when the threat was still plausible, people talked about what they would do when the enemy missiles were airborne and incoming. This was absolutely the number-one pick, by a huge, huge margin. A universal instinct. And he could see it in her. She had heard the four-minute warning, and the sirens were sounding loud in her mind.

“No,” he said.

She was quiet for a long moment.

“Will you at least stay with me?” she asked.

 

The killing crew
moved fifty miles closer to Pecos in the middle of the night. They did it secretly, some hours after booking in for a second night at their first location. It was the woman's preferred method. Six false names, two overlapping sets of motel records, the confusion built fast enough to keep them safe.

They drove east on I-10 until they passed the I-20 interchange. They headed down toward Fort Stockton until they saw signs for the first group of motels serving the Balmorhea state recreation area. Those motels were far enough from the actual tourist attraction to make them cheap and anonymous. There wasn't going to be a lot of cutesy decor and personal service. But they would be clean and decent. And they would be full of people exactly like themselves. That was what the woman wanted. She was a chameleon. She had an instinct for the right type of place. She chose the second establishment they came to, and sent the small dark man to pay cash for two rooms.

 

Reacher woke up
on Sloop Greer's sofa with the Sunday dawn. Beyond him, the bedroom window faced east and the night insects were gone and the sky was bright. The bed sheet looked damp and tangled. Carmen wasn't under it. He could hear the shower running in the bathroom. And he could smell coffee.

He got off the sofa and stretched. Wandered through the archway to the bedroom. He saw Carmen's dress on the floor. He went to the window and checked the weather. No change. The sky was hazed with heat. He wandered back to the sitting area. There was a credenza in one corner, set up with a small coffee machine. There were two upturned mugs beside it, with spoons, like a hotel. The bathroom door was closed. The shower sounded loud behind it. He filled a mug with coffee and wandered into the dressing area. There were two large closets there, parallel, one on each side. Not walk-ins, just long deep alcoves screened with sliding doors made out of mirrored glass.

He opened the left-hand closet. It was hers. It was full of dresses and pants on hangers. There were blouses. There was a rack of shoes. He closed it again and turned around and opened the other one. It was Sloop's. There were a dozen suits, and rows and rows of chinos and blue jeans. Cedar shelves stacked with T-shirts, and dress shirts folded into plastic wraps. A row of neckties. Belts, with fancy buckles. A long row of dusty shoes on the floor. The shoes looked to be about size eleven. He swapped his coffee cup into his other hand and nudged open a suit coat, looking for the label. It was a forty-four long. It would fit a guy about six feet two or three, maybe a hundred and ninety or two hundred pounds. So Sloop was not an especially big guy. Not a giant. But he was a foot taller and twice the weight of his wife. Not the world's fairest match-up.

There was a photograph frame face-down on top of a stack of shirts. He turned it over. There was a five-by-seven color print under a cream card mat glassed into a lacquered wooden surround. The print showed three guys, young,
halfway between boyhood and manhood. Maybe seventeen years old, maybe eighteen. They were standing close together, leaning on the bulging fender of an old-fashioned pick-up truck. They were peering expectantly at the camera, like maybe it was perched close by on a rock and they were waiting for the self-timer to click in. They looked full of youthful energy and excitement. Their whole lives ahead of them, full of infinite possibilities. One of them was Hack Walker, a little slimmer, a little more muscular, a lot more hair. He guessed the other two were Al Eugene and Sloop Greer himself. Teen-aged buddies. Eugene was a head shorter than Sloop, and chubby. Sloop looked like a younger version of Bobby.

He heard the shower shut off and put the photograph back and closed the slider. Moved back to the sitting area. A moment later the bathroom door opened and Carmen came out in a cloud of steam. She was wrapped in two white towels, one around her body, the other bound like a turban around her hair. He looked at her and stayed quiet, unsure of what to say.

“Good morning,” she said in the silence.

“To you, too,” he said.

She unwrapped the turban and shook out her hair. It hung wet and straight.

“It isn't, though, is it?” she said. “A good morning? It's a bad morning.”

“I guess,” he said.

“He could be walking out the gate, this exact minute.”

He checked his watch. It was almost seven.

“Any time now,” he said.

“Use the shower if you want,” she said. “I have to go and see to Ellie.”

“O.K.”

He stepped into the bathroom. It was huge, and made out of some kind of reconstituted marble with gold tones in it. It looked like a place he'd once stayed, in Vegas. He used the john and rinsed his mouth at the sink and stripped off his stale clothes and stepped into the shower stall. It was enclosed with bronze-tinted glass and it was enormous. There was a shower head the size of a hubcap above him, and tall
pipes in each corner with additional water jets pointing directly at him. He turned the faucet and a huge roaring started up. Then a deluge of warm water hit him from all sides. It was like standing under Niagara Falls. The side jets started pulsing hot and cold and he couldn't hear himself think. He washed as quickly as he could and soaped his hair and rinsed off and shut it all down.