Echo Burning (9 page)

“You
are
crazy,” he said.

“Am I?” The spots of color came back to her face, the size of quarters, burning red high above her cheekbones.

“Totally crazy,” he said. “And you can forget about it.”

“I
can't
forget about it.”

He said nothing.

“I want him dead, Reacher,” she said. “I really do. It's my only way out, literally. And he deserves it.”

“Tell me you're kidding.”

“I'm not kidding,” she said. “I want him killed.”

He shook his head. Stared out of the window.

“Just forget all about it,” he said. “It's absurd. This isn't the Wild West anymore.”

“Isn't it? Isn't it still O.K. to kill a man who needs killing?”

Then she went quiet, just driving, like she was waiting him out. He stared at the speeding landscape in front of him. They were heading for the distant mountains. The blazing afternoon sun made them red and purple. It changed the color of the air. The Trans-Pecos, she had called them.

“Please, Reacher,” she said. “Please. At least think about it.”

He said nothing.
Please? Think about it?
He was beyond reaction. He dropped his eyes from the mountains and watched the highway. It was busy with traffic. A river of cars and trucks, crawling across the vastness. She was passing them all, one after another. Driving way too fast.

“I'm not crazy,” she said. “Please. I tried to do this right. I really did. Soon as his lawyer told me about the deal, I saw a lawyer of my own, and then three more, and none of them could do anything for me as fast as a month. All they could do was tell me Ellie traps me exactly where I am. So then I looked for protection. I asked private detectives. They wouldn't do anything for me. I went to a security firm in Austin and they said yes, they could guard me around the clock, but it would be six men and nearly ten thousand dollars a week. Which is the same thing as saying no. So I tried, Reacher. I tried to do it right. But it's impossible.”

He said nothing.

“So I bought a gun,” she said.

“Wonderful,” he said.

“And bullets,” she said. “It took all the cash I had.”

“You picked the wrong guy,” he said.

“But why? You've killed people before. In the army. You told me that.”

“This is different.”

“How?”

“This would be murder. Cold-blooded murder. It would be an assassination.”

“No, it would be just the same. Just like the army.”

He shook his head. “Carmen, it wouldn't be the same.”

“Don't you take an oath or something? To protect people?”

“It's not the same,” he said again.

She passed an eighteen-wheeler bound for the coast, and the Cadillac rocked and shimmied through the superheated turbulent air.

“Slow down,” he said.

She shook her head. “I can't slow down. I want to see Ellie.”

He touched the dashboard in front of him, steadying himself. The freezing air from the vents blasted against his chest.

“Don't worry,” she said. “I'm not going to crash. Ellie needs me. If it wasn't for Ellie, I'd have crashed a long time ago, believe me.”

But she eased off a little, anyway. The big rig crept back alongside.

“I know this is a difficult conversation,” she said.

“You think?”

“But you have to look at it from my point of view. Please, Reacher. I've been through it a million times. I've thought it through. I've been from A to B to C to D, all the way to Z. Then again, and again. And again. I've examined all the options. So this is all logical to me. And this is the only way. I
know
that. But it's hard to talk about, because it's new to you. You haven't thought about it before. It comes out of the blue. So I sound crazy and cold-blooded to you. I know that. I appreciate that. But I'm not crazy or cold-blooded. It's just that I've had the time to reach the conclusion, and you haven't. And this is the only conclusion, I promise you.”

“Whatever, I'm not killing a guy I never saw before.”

“He hits me, Reacher,” she said. “He beats me, badly. Punches me, kicks me, hurts me. He enjoys it. He laughs while he does it. I live in fear, all the time.”

“So go to the cops.”

“The cop. There's only one. And he wouldn't believe me. And even if he did, he wouldn't do anything about it. They're all big buddies. You don't know how it is here.”

Reacher said nothing.

“He's coming home,” she said. “Can you
imagine
what he's going to do to me?”

He said nothing.

“I'm
trapped,
Reacher. I'm boxed in, because of Ellie. Do you see that?”

He said nothing.

“Why won't you help me? Is it the money? Is it because I can't pay you?”

He said nothing.

“I'm desperate,” she said. “You're my only chance. I'm begging you. Why won't you do it? Is it because I'm Mexican?”

He said nothing.

“It's because I'm just a greaseball, right? A beaner? You'd do it for a white woman? Like your girlfriend? I bet she's a white woman. Probably a blonde, right?”

“Yes, she's a blonde,” he said.

“Some guy was beating up on her, you'd kill him.”

Yes, I would,
he thought.

“And
she
ran off to Europe without you. Didn't want you to go with her. But you'd do it for her, and you won't do it for me.”

“It's not the same,” he said for the third time.

“I know,” she said. “Because I'm just beaner trash. I'm not worth it.”

He said nothing.

“What's her name?” she asked. “Your girlfriend?”

“Jodie,” he said.

“O.K., imagine Jodie over there in Europe. She's trapped in some bad situation, getting beat up every day by some maniac sadist. She tells you all about it. Bares her soul. Every horrible humiliating detail. What are you going to do?”

Kill him,
he thought.

She nodded like she could read his mind. “But you won't do that for me. You'd do it for the gringa, but not for me.”

He paused a beat with his mouth halfway open. It was true. He would do it for Jodie Garber, but he wouldn't do it for Carmen Greer.
Why not?
Because it comes in a rush. You can't force it. It's a hot-blooded thing, like a drug in your veins, and you go with it. If it's not there, you can't go with it. Simple as that. He'd gone with it before in his life, many times. People mess with him, they get what they get. They mess with Jodie, that's the same thing as messing with him. Because Jodie
was
him. Or at least she used to be. In a way that Carmen wasn't. And never would be. So it just wasn't
there
.

“It's not about gringas or latinas,” he said quietly.

She said nothing.

“Please, Carmen,” he said. “You need to understand that.”

“So what
is
it about?”

“It's about I know her and I don't know you.”

“And that makes a difference?”

“Of course it does.”

“Then get to know me,” she said. “We've got two days. You're about to meet my daughter. Get to know us.”

He said nothing. She drove on. Pecos 55 miles.

“You were a policeman,” she said. “You should want to help people. Or are you scared? Is that it? Are you a coward?”

He said nothing.

“You could do it,” she said. “You've done it before. So you know how. You could do it and get clean away. You could dump his body where nobody would find it. Out in the desert. Nobody would ever know. It wouldn't come back on you, if you were careful. You'd never get caught. You're smart enough.”

He said nothing.

“Are you smart enough? Do you know how? Do you?”

“Of course I know how,” he said. “But I won't do it.”

“Why not?”

“I told you why not. Because I'm not an assassin.”

“But I'm desperate,” she said. “I need you to do this. I'm begging you. I'll do anything if you'll help me.”

He said nothing.

“What do you want, Reacher? You want sex? We could do that.”

“Stop the car,” he said.

“Why?”

“Because I've had enough of this.”

She jammed her foot down hard on the gas. The car leapt forward. He glanced back at the traffic and leaned over toward her and knocked the transmission into N. The engine unloaded and screamed and the car coasted and slowed. He used his left hand on the wheel and hauled it around against her desperate grip and steered the car to the shoulder. It bounced off the blacktop and the gravel bit against the tires and the speed washed away. He jammed the lever into P and opened his door, all in one movement. The car skidded to a stop with the transmission locked. He slid out and stood up unsteadily. Felt the heat on his body like a blow from a hammer and slammed the door and walked away from her.

He was sweating
heavily twenty yards after getting out of the car. And already regretting his decision. He was in the middle of nowhere, on foot on a major highway, and the slowest vehicles were doing sixty. Nobody was going to want to stop for him. Even if they did want to, give them a little reaction time, give them a little time to check their mirrors, a little braking time, they'd be more than a mile away before they knew it, and then they'd shrug their shoulders and speed up again and keep on going.
Dumb place to hitch a ride,
they'd think.

It was worse than dumb. It was suicidal. The sun was fearsome and the temperature was easily a hundred and twelve degrees. The slipstream from the cars was like a hot gale, and the suction from the giant trucks wasn't far from pulling him off his feet. He had no water. He could barely breathe. There was a constant stream of people five yards away, but he was as alone as if he was stumbling blind through the desert. If a state trooper didn't come by and arrest him for jaywalking, he could die out there.

He turned and saw the Cadillac, still sitting inert on the
shoulder. But he kept on walking away from it. He made it about fifty yards and stopped. Turned to face east and stuck out his thumb. But it was hopeless, like he knew it would be. After five minutes, a hundred vehicles, the nearest thing he'd gotten to a response was some trucker blasting his air horn, a huge bass sound roaring past him with a whine of stressed tires and a hurricane of dust and grit. He was choking and burning up.

He turned again. Saw the Cadillac lurch backward and start up the shoulder toward him. Her steering was imprecise. The rear end was all over the place. It was close to slewing out into the traffic. He started walking back to it. It came on to meet him, fishtailing wildly. He started running. He stopped alongside the car as she braked hard. The suspension bounced. She buzzed the passenger window down.

“I'm sorry,” she said.

He didn't hear it in the noise, but he caught the shape of the words.

“Get in,” she said.

His shirt was sticking to his back. He had grit in his eyes. The howl of sound from the road was deafening him.

“Get in,” she mouthed. “I'm sorry.”

He got in. It felt exactly the same as the first time. The air roaring, the freezing leather seat. The small cowed woman at the wheel.

“I apologize,” she said. “I'm sorry. I said stupid things.”

He slammed the door. There was sudden silence. He put his hand in the chill stream from the vents.

“I didn't mean them,” she said.

“Whatever,” he said back.

“Really, I didn't mean them. I'm just so desperate I can't tell right from wrong anymore. And I'm very sorry for the thing about the sex. It was a crass thing to say.”

Then her voice went small. “It's just that some of the guys I've picked up, I figured that was what it was going to have to be.”

“You'd have sex with them so they'd kill your husband?”

She nodded. “I told you, I'm trapped and I'm scared and I'm desperate. And I don't have anything else to offer.”

He said nothing.

“And I've seen movies where that happens,” she said.

He nodded back.

“I've seen those movies, too,” he said. “They never get away with it.”

She paused a long moment.

“So you're not going to do it,” she said, like a statement of fact.

“No, I'm not,” he said.

She paused again, longer.

“O.K., I'll let you out in Pecos,” she said. “You can't be out there walking. You could die in heat like this.”

He paused too, much longer than she had. Then he shook his head. Because he had to be
somewhere
. When you live on the road, you learn pretty quick that any one place is about as good as any other place.

“No, I'll come with you,” he said. “I'll hang out a couple of days. Because I'm sorry about your situation, Carmen. I really am. Just because I won't walk in and shoot the guy doesn't mean I don't want to help you some other way. If I can. And if you still want me to, that is.”

She paused another beat.

“Yes, I still want you to,” she said.

“And I want to meet Ellie. She looks like a great kid, from her picture.”

“She is a great kid.”

“But I'm not going to murder her father.”

She said nothing.

“Is that completely clear?” he asked.

She nodded.

“I understand,” she said. “I'm sorry I asked.”

“It's not just me, Carmen,” he said. “Nobody would do it. You were fooling yourself. It wasn't a good plan.”

She looked small and lost.

“I thought nobody could refuse,” she said. “If they knew.”

She turned and watched the traffic coming up behind her. Waited for a gap. Six cars later, she pulled back onto the highway and gunned the motor. Within a minute she was doing eighty again, passing one car after another. The trucker
who had used his air horn as he left Reacher in the dust lasted seven whole minutes, before she reeled him in.

 

The Crown Victoria
made it to the destination the woman had selected within eighty minutes. It was an inch-wide empty brown stain on the map, and it was a forty-mile-wide empty brown stain in reality. One road ran through it, meandering roughly north and east in the lee of distant mountains. Hot, lonely, valueless country. But it had all the features she had predicted. It would serve her purposes. She smiled to herself. She had an instinct for terrain.

“O.K.,” she said. “First thing tomorrow. Right here.”

The big car turned and headed back south. The dust from its tires hung in the air for long minutes and then floated down to the powdery ground.

 

Carmen came off
the highway just short of Pecos and speared south on a small county road that led down into total emptiness. Within five miles, they could have been on the surface of the moon.

“Tell me about Echo,” he said.

She shrugged. “What's to tell? It's nothing. When they were first mapping Texas a hundred years ago, the Census Bureau called a place settled if it had more than six people to the square mile, and we
still
don't qualify. We're still the frontier.”

“But it's very beautiful,” he said.

And it was. The road was snaking and diving through endless contours, with red rock canyons either side of it, tall and noble to the east, fractured and pierced to the west, where ancient streams had sought the banks of the Rio Grande. Tall dry mountains reared beyond, with an immense technicolor sky above, and even in the speeding car he could sense the stunning silence of thousands of square miles of absolute emptiness.

“I hate it,” she said.

“Where will I be?” he asked.

“On the property. In the bunkhouse, I guess. They'll hire you for the horses. We're always a man short. You show up with a pulse, they'll be interested. You can say you're a wrangler. It'll be a good disguise. It'll keep you close by.”

“I don't know anything about horses.”

She shrugged. “Maybe they won't notice. They don't notice much. Like me getting beaten half to death.”

 

An hour later,
they were tight for time. She was driving fast enough that the tire squeal from the curves was more or less continuous. They came up a long steep grade and then turned out between two rock pillars on a peak and suddenly there was flat land below them as far as the eye could see. The road fell away like a twisted tan ribbon and was crossed twenty miles ahead by another, just visible through the haze like a faint line on a map. The distant crossroads was studded with a handful of tiny buildings, and apart from them and the two roads there was no evidence humans had ever lived on the planet.

“Echo County,” she said. “Everything you see, and a lot more besides. A thousand square miles, and a hundred and fifty people. Well, a hundred and forty-eight, because one of them is sitting right here with you, and one of them is still in jail.”

Her mood had improved, because she said it with a wry smile. But she was looking at a tiny plume of dust on the road far below them. It was puffing out like a squirrel's tail, crawling slowly south, a quarter of the way to the crossroads.

“That must be the school bus,” she said. “We have to beat it to town, or Ellie will get on and we'll miss her.”

“Town?” Reacher said.

She smiled again, briefly.

“You're looking at it,” she said. “Uptown Echo.”

She accelerated down the grade and the Cadillac's own dust swirled and hung behind it. The landscape was so vast that speed seemed slowed to absurdity. Reacher figured the bus might be a half hour from the crossroads, and the Cadillac was traveling twice as fast, so they should catch it inside fifteen minutes, even though the elevation and the clear
desert air made it look close enough to reach out and touch, like a child's toy on the floor of a room.

“It's good of you to be coming,” she said. “Thank you. I mean it.”

“No hay de que, señorita,”
he said.

“So you do know more than a few words.”

He shrugged. “There were a lot of Spanish-speaking people in the army. Most of the new generation, in fact. Some of the best of them.”

“Like baseball,” she said.

“Yes,” he said. “Like baseball.”

“But you should call me
señora. Señorita
makes me too happy.”

She accelerated again when the road leveled out and about a mile before they caught up with the bus she swung out into the wrong lane, ready to pass it. Safe enough, he figured. The chances of meeting oncoming traffic in that part of the world were worse than winning the lottery. She reeled in the bus and pulled through the cone of dust and blasted past and stayed on the left for another mile. Then she eased back right and five minutes later they were slowing as they approached the crossroads.

From ground level the hamlet looked ragged and defeated, the way small places do under the heat of the sun. There were lots partially overrun with dry thorny weeds, delineated with raw block walls, commercially zoned but never developed. There was a diner on the right on the northwest corner, nothing more than a long, low shack made of wood with all the color baked right out of it. Diagonally opposite was the school, a one-room building like something out of a history book.
The beginnings of rural education
. Opposite that on the southwest corner was a gas station with two pumps and a small yard filled with stalled cars behind it. Diagonally opposite the gas station and across the road from the school the northeast corner was an empty lot, with concrete blocks spilled randomly across it, like an optimistic new venture had been planned and then abandoned, maybe while LBJ was still in office. There were four other buildings, all one story, all plain concrete, all set back with thin rough driveways leading
to them from the road. Houses, Reacher guessed. Their yards were littered with junk, children's bikes and tired automobiles on blocks and old living room furniture. The yards were baked dry and hard and had low chicken-wire fences around them, maybe to keep the big snakes out.

The crossroads itself had no stop signs, just thick lines on the blacktop, melted in the heat. Carmen drove straight through and past the school and U-turned across the full width of the road, bumping down into shallow drainage ditches on both shoulders. She came back and stopped with the school gate close to Reacher's window. The school yard was ringed by a wire hurricane fence like a dog pound, and the gate was an inexact hinged rectangle made of galvanized tubing and faced with the same wire.

She stared past him at the school door. The bus came laboring down from the north and stopped on its own side of the road, parallel to the Cadillac, facing the other direction. The schoolhouse door opened and a woman stepped out. She moved slow and looked tired. The teacher, Reacher guessed, ready to end her day. She saw the bus and waved to the children. They spilled out in a long stream. Seventeen of them, nine girls and eight boys, he counted. Ellie Greer was seventh in line. She was wearing a blue dress. She looked damp and hot. He recognized her from her photograph and by the way Carmen moved beside him. He heard her catch her breath and scrabble for the door handle.

She skipped around the hood and met her daughter outside the car on the beaten earth strip that passed for a sidewalk. She scooped her up in a wild hug. Spun her around and around. Her little feet windmilled outward and her blue lunch box swung and hit her mother on the back. Reacher could see the child laughing and tears in Carmen's eyes. They came back around the rear of the car clutched tight together. Carmen opened the door and Ellie scrambled straight into the driver's seat and stopped dead when she saw him. She went instantly silent and her eyes went wide.

“This is Mr. Reacher,” Carmen said.

Ellie turned to look at her.

“He's my friend,” Carmen said. “Say hello to him.”

Ellie turned back.

“Hello,” she said.

“Hey, Ellie,” Reacher said. “School O.K.?”

Ellie paused. “It was O.K.”

“Learn anything?”

“How to spell some words.”

She paused again, and then tilted her chin upward a fraction.

“Not easy ones,” she said.
“Ball
and
fall.”

Reacher nodded gravely.

“Four letters,” he said. “That's pretty tough.”

“I bet you can spell them.”

“B-A-L-L,” Reacher said. “F-A-L-L. Like that, right?”

“You're grown up,” Ellie said, like he had passed a test. “But you know what? The teacher said four letters, but there's only three, because the L comes twice. Right there at the end.”

“You're a smart kid,” Reacher said. “Now hop in the back and let your mom in out of the heat.”