Echo Burning by Lee Child

by Echo Burning (com v2. 0) (lit)

  “So where is he?”

  “He’s gone missing. I just told you that.”

  “Have they looked for him?”

  “Of course they have. But they can’t find him.”

  Carmen took a deep breath. Then another.

  “Does it change anything?” she asked.

  “You mean, is Sloop still coming home?”

  Carmen nodded weakly, like she was terribly afraid of the answer.

  “Don’t you worry none,” Rusty said. She was smiling. “Sloop will be back here Monday, just like he always was going to be. Al being missing doesn’t change a thing. The sheriff made that clear. It was a done deal.”

  Carmen paused a long moment, with her eyes closed, and her hand on her lips. Then she forced the hand down and forced the lips into a trembling smile.

  “Well, good,” she said.

  “Yes, good,” her mother-in-law said.

  Carmen nodded, vaguely. Reacher thought she was about to faint.

  “What do you suppose happened to him?” she asked.

  “How would I know? Some sort of trouble, I expect.”

  “But who would make trouble for Al?”

  Rusty’s smile thinned to a sneer.

  “Well, take your best guess, dear,” she said.

  Carmen opened her eyes. “What does that mean?”

  “It means, who would want to make trouble for their lawyer?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, I do,” Rusty said. “Somebody who buys them a big old Mercedes Benz and gets sent to jail anyhow, that’s who.”

  “Well, who did that?”

  “Anybody could have. Al Eugene takes anybody for a client. He has no standards. He’s halfway to being plain crooked. Maybe all the way crooked, for all I know. Three-quarters of his clients are the wrong sort.”

  Carmen was still pale. “The wrong sort?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “You mean Mexican? Why don’t you just come right out and say it?”

  Rusty was still smiling.

  “Well, tell me different,” she said. “Some Mexican boy gets sent to jail, he doesn’t just stand up and accept his punishment like we do. No, he blames his lawyer, and he gets all his brothers and his cousins all riled up about it, and of course he’s got plenty of those come up here after him, all illegals, all cholos, all of them in gangs, and now you see exactly how that turns out. Just like it is down there in Mexico itself. You of all people should know what it’s like.”

  “Why should I of all people? I’ve never even been to Mexico.”

  Nobody replied to that. Reacher watched her, standing up shaken and proud and alone like a prisoner in the enemy camp. The room was quiet. Just the thump and click of the old air conditioner running somewhere else.

  “You got an opinion here, Mr. Reacher?” Rusty Greer asked.

  It felt like a left-field question in a job interview. He wished he could think of something smart to say. Some diversion. But it wouldn’t help any to start some big clumsy fight and get himself thrown off the property inside the first ten minutes.

  “I’m just here to work, ma’am,” he said.

  “I’d like to know your opinion, all the same.”

  Just like a job interview. A character reference. Clearly she wanted exactly the right sort of person shoveling horseshit for her.

  “Mr. Reacher was a cop himself,” Carmen said. “In the army.”

  Rusty nodded. “So what’s your thinking, ex–army cop?”

  Reacher shrugged. “Maybe there’s an innocent explanation. Maybe he had a nervous breakdown and wandered off.”

  “Doesn’t sound very likely. Now I see why they made you an ex-cop.”

  Silence for a long moment.

  “Well, if there was trouble, maybe white folks made it,” Reacher said.

  “That’s not going to be a popular view around here, son.”

  “It’s not looking to be popular. It’s looking to be right or wrong. And the population of Texas is three-quarters white, therefore I figure there’s a three-in-four chance white folks were involved, assuming people are all the same as each other.”

  “That’s a big assumption.”

  “Not in my experience.”

  Rusty bounced her gaze off the tabletop, back to Carmen.

  “Well, no doubt you agree,” she said. “With your new friend here.”

  Carmen took a breath.

  “I never claim to be better than anyone else,” she said. “So I don’t see why I should agree I’m worse.”

  The room stayed quiet.

  “Well, time will tell, I guess,” Rusty said. “One or other of us is going to be eating humble pie.”

  She said it paah. The long syllable trailed into silence.

  “Now, where’s Sloop’s little girl?” she asked, with an artificial brightness in her voice, like the conversation had never happened. “You bring her back from school?”

  Carmen swallowed and turned to face her. “She’s in the barn, I think. She saw the sheriff and got worried her pony had been stolen.”

  “That’s ridiculous. Who would steal her damn pony?”

  “She’s only a child,” Carmen said.

  “Well, the maid is ready to give the child its supper, so take it to the kitchen, and show Mr. Reacher to the bunkhouse on your way.”

  Carmen just nodded, like a servant with new instructions. Reacher followed her out of the parlor, back to the hallway. They went outside into the heat again and paused in the shadows on the porch.

  “Ellie eats in the kitchen?” Reacher asked.

  Carmen nodded.

  “Rusty hates her,” she said.

  “Why? She’s her granddaughter.”

  Carmen looked away.

  “Her blood is tainted,” she said. “Don’t ask me to explain it. It’s not rational. She hates her, is all I know.”

  “So why all the fuss if you took her away?”

  “Because Sloop wants her here. She’s his weapon against me. His instrument of torture. And his mother does what he wants.”

  “She make you eat in the kitchen, too?”

  “No, she makes me eat with her,” she said. “Because she knows I’d rather not.”

  He paused, at the edge of the shadow.

  “You should have gotten out of here,” he said. “We should be in Vegas by now.”

  “I was hopeful, for a second,” she said. “About Al Eugene. I thought there might be a delay.”

  He nodded. “So was I. It would have been useful.”

  She nodded, tears in her eyes.

  “I know,” she said. “Too good to be true.”

  “So you should still think about running.”

  She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. Shook her head.

  “I won’t run,” she said. “I won’t be a fugitive.”

  He said nothing.

  “And you should have agreed with her,” she said. “About the Mexicans. I’d have understood you were bluffing. I need her to keep you around.”

  “I couldn’t.”

  “It was a risk.”

  She led him down the steps into the sun and across the yard. Beyond the motor barn was a horse barn. That structure was red like everything else, big as an aircraft hangar, with clerestory vents in the roof. There was a big door standing a foot open. There was a strong smell coming out of it.

  “I’m not much of a country guy,” he said.

  “You’ll get used to it,” she said.

  Behind the barn were four corrals boxed in with red fences. Two of them were covered in scrubby grass, and two of them had desert sand piled a foot thick. There were striped poles resting on oil drums to make jumping courses. Behind the corrals was another red building, long and low, with small windows high up under the eaves.

  “The bunkhouse,” she said.

  She stood still for a moment, lost in thought. Then she shivered in the heat and came back, all business.

  “The door is
around the other side,” she said. “You’ll find two guys in there, Joshua and Billy. Don’t trust either one of them. They’ve been here forever and they belong to the Greers. The maid will bring your meals down to you in about an hour, after Ellie eats, before we do.”

  “O.K.,” he said.

  “And Bobby will come down to check you out, sooner or later. Watch him carefully, Reacher, because he’s a snake.”

  “O.K.,” he said again.

  “I’ll see you later,” she said.

  “You going to be all right?”

  She nodded once and walked away. He watched her until she was behind the horse barn, and then he walked around and found the door into the bunkhouse.

  5

  The boy filled a whole new page in his notebook. The men with the telescopes called out descriptions and the exact sequence of events. The arrival of the sheriff, the return of the beaner and the kid with the new guy in tow, the kid running off to the barn, the sheriff leaving, the beaner and the new guy entering the house, a long period of nothing doing, the emergence of the beaner and the new guy onto the porch, their walk together down toward the bunkhouse, her return alone.

  “Who is he?” the boy asked.

  “Hell should we know?” one of the men replied.

  Very tall, heavy, not neatly dressed, shirt and pants, can’t tell how old, the boy wrote. Then he added: Not a wrangler, wrong shoes. Trouble?

  The grade fell away behind the bunkhouse and made it a two-story building. The lower floor had huge sliding doors, frozen open on broken tracks. There was another pick-up in there, and a couple of green tractors. At the far end to the right was a wooden staircase without a handrail leading upward through a rectangular hole in the ceiling. Reacher spent a minute on the ground floor looking at the vehicles. The pick-up had a gun rack in the rear window. The air was hot and heavy and smelled of gasoline and motor oil.

  Then he used the staircase and came out on the second level. All the interior carpentry was painted red, walls, floor and roof beams alike. The air was hotter still up there, and stale. No air conditioning, and not much ventilation. There was a closed-off area at the far end, which he guessed was the bathroom. Apart from that the whole of the floor was one big open space, with sixteen beds facing each other eight to a side, with simple iron frames and thin striped mattresses and bedside cabinets and footlockers.

  The two beds nearest the bathroom were occupied. Each had a small, wiry man lying half-dressed on top of the sheets. Both men wore blue jeans and fancy tooled boots and no shirts. Both had their hands folded behind their heads. They both turned toward the staircase as Reacher stepped up inside the room. They both unlaced their nearer arms to get a better look at him.

  Reacher had done four years at West Point, and then thirteen years in the service, so he had a total seventeen years’ experience of walking into a new dormitory and being stared at by its occupants. It wasn’t a sensation that bothered him. There was a technique involved in handling it. An etiquette. The way to do it was to just walk in, select an unoccupied bed, and say absolutely nothing at all. Make somebody else speak first. That way, you could judge their disposition before you were forced to reveal your own.

  He walked to a bed two places away from the head of the staircase, against the north wall, which he judged would be cooler than the south. In the past, in the army, he would have had a heavy canvas kit bag to dump on the bed as a symbol of possession. The kit bag would be stenciled with his name and his rank, and the number of restencilings on it would offer a rough guide to his biography. Kit bags saved a lot of talking time. But the best he could do in this new situation was take his folding toothbrush from his pocket and prop it on the bedside cabinet. As a substitute gesture, it lacked physical impact. But it made the same point. It said I live here now, same as you do. You got any kind of a comment to make about that?

  Both men kept on staring at him, saying nothing. Lying down, it was hard to judge their physiques with any degree of certainty, but they were both small. Maybe five-six or -seven each, maybe a hundred and fifty pounds. But they were wiry and muscular, like middleweight boxers. They had farmers’ tans, deep brown on their arms and their faces and their necks, and milky white where T-shirts had covered their bodies. They had random knobs and old swellings here and there on their ribs and arms and collarbones. Reacher had seen marks like that before. Carmen had one. He had one or two himself. They were where old fractures had set and healed.

  He walked past the two men to the bathroom. It had a door, but it was a communal facility inside, four of everything with no interior partitioning. Four toilets, four sinks, four shower heads in a single elongated stall. It was reasonably clean, and it smelled of warm water and cheap soap, like the two guys had recently showered, maybe ready for Friday evening off. There was a high window with a clogged insect screen and no glass. By standing tall he could see past the corner of the horse barn all the way up to the house. He could see half of the porch and a sliver of the front door.

  He came back into the dormitory room. One of the guys had hauled himself upright and was sitting with his head turned, watching the bathroom door. His back was as pale as his front, and it had more healed fractures showing through the skin. The ribs, the right scapula. Either this guy spent a lot of time getting run over by trucks, or else he was a retired rodeo rider who had passed his career a little ways from the top of his trade.

  “Storm coming,” the guy said.

  “What I heard,” Reacher said.

  “Inevitable, with a temperature like this.”

  Reacher said nothing.

  “You hired on?” the guy asked.

  “I guess,” Reacher said.

  “So you’ll be working for us.”

  Reacher said nothing.

  “I’m Billy,” the guy said.

  The other guy moved up on his elbows.

  “Josh,” he said.

  Reacher nodded to them both.

  “I’m Reacher,” he said. “Pleased to meet you.”

  “You’ll do the scut work for us,” the guy called Billy said. “Shoveling shit and toting bales.”

  “Whatever.”

  “Because you sure don’t look like much of a horse rider to me.”

  “I don’t?”

  Billy shook his head. “Too tall. Too heavy. Center of gravity way up there. No, my guess is you’re not much of a horse rider at all.”

  “The Mexican woman bring you in?” Josh asked.

  “Mrs. Greer,” Reacher said.

  “Mrs. Greer is Rusty,” Billy said. “She didn’t bring you in.”

  “Mrs. Carmen Greer,” Reacher said.

  Billy said nothing. The guy called Josh just smiled.

  “We’re heading out after supper,” Billy said. “Bar, couple hours south of here. You could join us. Call it a get-to-know-you type of thing.”

  Reacher shook his head. “Maybe some other time, when I’ve earned something. I like to pay my own way, situation like that.”

  Billy thought about it and nodded.

  “That’s a righteous attitude,” he said. “Maybe you’ll fit right in.”

  The guy called Josh just smiled.

  Reacher walked back to his bed and stretched himself out, keeping still, fighting the heat. He stared up at the red-painted rafters for a minute, and then he closed his eyes.

  The maid brought supper forty minutes later. She was a middle-aged white woman who could have been a relative of Billy’s. She greeted him with familiarity. Maybe a cousin. Certainly she looked a little like him. Sounded like him. The same genes in there somewhere. She greeted Josh with ease and Reacher himself with coolness. Supper was a pail of pork and beans, which she served into metal bowls with a ladle taken from her apron pocket. She handed out forks and spoons, and empty metal cups.

  “Water in the bathroom faucet,” she said, for Reacher’s benefit.

  Then she went back down the stairs and Reacher turned his attention to the food. It was the first he
had seen all day. He sat on his bed with the bowl on his knees and ate with the spoon. The beans were dark and soupy and mixed with a generous spoonful of molasses. The pork was tender and the fat was crisp. It must have been fried separately and mixed with the beans afterward.

  “Hey, Reacher,” Billy called over. “So what do you think?”

  “Good enough for me,” he said.

  “Bullshit,” Josh said. “More than a hundred degrees all day, and she brings us hot food? I showered already and now I’m sweating like a pig again.”

  “It’s free,” Billy said.

  “Bullshit, it’s free,” Josh said back. “It’s a part of our wages.”

  Reacher ignored them. Bitching about the food was a staple of dormitory life. And this food wasn’t bad. Better than some he’d eaten. Better than what came out of most barracks cookhouses. He dumped his empty bowl on the cabinet next to his toothbrush and lay back down and felt his stomach go to work on the sugars and the fats. Across the room Billy and Josh finished up and wiped their mouths with their forearms and took clean shirts out of their footlockers. Shrugged them on and buttoned them on the run and combed through their hair with their fingertips.

  “See you later,” Billy called.

  They clattered down the stairs and a moment later Reacher heard the sound of a gasoline engine starting up directly below. The pick-up, he guessed. He heard it back out through the doors and drive away. He stepped into the bathroom and saw it come around the corner and wind around the horse barn and bounce across the yard past the house.

  He walked back through the dormitory and piled the three used bowls on top of each other, with the silverware in the topmost. Threaded the three cup handles onto his forefinger and walked down the stairs and outside. The sun was nearly below the horizon but the heat hadn’t backed off at all. The air was impossibly hot. Almost suffocating. And it was getting humid. A warm damp breeze was coming in from somewhere. He walked up past the corrals, past the barn, through the yard. He skirted around the porch and looked for the kitchen door. Found it and knocked. The maid opened up.

  “I brought these back,” he said.

  He held up the bowls and the cups.

  “Well, that’s kind of you,” she said. “But I’d have come for them.”