Echo Burning by Lee Child

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

  The road from Pecos to El Paso is more than two hundred miles long, and is dotted on both sides with occasional clumps of motels and gas stations and fast food outlets. The killing crew drove an hour west, which took them seventy miles, and then stopped at the second place they saw. That was the woman’s habit. Not the first place. Always the second place. And always arrive very late. It was close to a superstition, but she rationalized it as good security.

  The second place had a gas station big enough for eighteen-wheelers to use and a two-story motel and a twenty-four-hour diner. The tall fair man went into the motel office and paid cash for two rooms. They weren’t adjoining. One was on the first floor far from the office and the second was upstairs, halfway down the row. The woman took the upstairs room.

  “Get some sleep,” she told her partners. “We’ve still got work to do.”

  Reacher heard Josh and Billy come back at two in the morning. The air was still hot. The insects were still loud. He heard the pick-up engine a couple of miles south, growing nearer and louder, slowing, turning in at the gate. He heard the squeal of springs as it bounced across the yard. He heard it drive into the shed beneath him, and he heard the motor switch off. Then there was just tinkling and clicking as it cooled, and footsteps on the stairs. They were loud and clumsy. He stayed as deeply asleep as he could and tracked their sounds past him, over to the bathroom, back to their bunks. Their bedsprings creaked as they threw themselves down. Then there was nothing but the insects and the wet rhythmic breathing of men who had worked hard all day and drunk hard all night. It was a sound he was familiar with. He had spent seventeen years in dormitories, off and on.

  The insect noise was completely gone when he woke. So were the stars. The high window showed luminous streaks of dawn in their place. Maybe six in the morning, he thought, summer, this far south. It was already hot. He lifted his arm and checked his watch. Ten past six, Saturday morning. He thought about Jodie, in London. It was ten past twelve in London. Six hours ahead. She would have been up for ages. Probably at a museum, looking at pictures. Maybe thinking about lunch, in some English tearoom. Then he thought about Carmen Greer, over in the main house, forty-eight hours away from waking up on the day Sloop came home. And then Ellie, maybe hot and restless on her tiny cot, innocently barreling on toward the day her little life would change again.

  He threw back the crumpled sheet and walked naked to the bathroom, carrying his clothes balled in his hand. Josh and Billy were still deep asleep. They were both still dressed. Josh still had his boots on. They were snoring half-heartedly, sprawled out and inert. There was a vague smell of old beer in the air. The smell of hangovers.

  He set the shower going warm until he had soaped the sweat off his body and then turned it to cold to wake himself up. The cold water was nearly as warm as the hot. He imagined it pumping out of the baked ground, picking up heat all the way. He filled a sink with water and soaked his clothes. It was a trick he’d picked up as a kid, long ago, somewhere out in the Pacific, from sentries on the midday watch. If you dress in wet clothes, you’ve got a built-in air conditioner that keeps you cool until they dry out. An evaporative principle, like a swamp cooler. He dressed with the clammy cotton snagging against his skin and headed down the stairs and outside into the dawn. The sun was over the horizon ahead of him. The sky was arching purple overhead. No trace of cloud. The dust under his feet was still hot from yesterday.

  The watchers assembled piecemeal, like they had five times before. It was a familiar routine by then. One of the men drove the pick-up to the boy’s place and found him outside and waiting. Then they drove together to the second man’s place, where they found that the routine had changed.

  “He just called me,” the second man explained. “Some different plan. We got to go to someplace up on the Coyanosa Draw for new instructions, face to face.”

  “Face to face with who?” the first man said. “Not him, right?”

  “No, some new people we’re going to be working with.”

  The boy said nothing. The first man just shrugged.

  “O.K. with me,” he said.

  “Plus, we’re going to get paid,” the second man said.

  “Even better,” the first man said.

  The second man squeezed onto the bench seat and closed his door and the pick-up turned and headed north.

  Reacher walked around the corner of the bunkhouse and past the corrals to the barn. He could hear no sound at all. The whole place felt stunned by the heat. He was suddenly curious about the horses. Did they lie down to sleep? He ducked in the big door and found the answer was no, they didn’t. They were sleeping standing up, heads bowed, knees locked against their weight. The big old mare he’d tussled with the night before smelled him and opened an eye. Looked at him blankly and moved a front foot listlessly and closed her eye again.

  He glanced around the barn, rehearsing the work he might be expected to perform. The horses would need feeding, presumably. So there must be a food store someplace. What did they eat? Hay, he guessed. There were bales of it all over the place. Or was that straw, for the floor? He found a separate corner room stacked with sacks of some kind of food supplement. Big waxed-paper bags, from some specialist feed supplier up in San Angelo. So probably the horses got mostly hay, with some of the supplement to make up the vitamins. They’d need water, too. There was a faucet in one corner, with a long hose attached to it. A trough in each stall.

  He came out of the barn and walked up the track to the house. Peered in through the kitchen window. Nobody in there. No activity. It looked the same as it had when he left the night before. He walked on toward the road. Heard the front door open behind him and turned to see Bobby Greer stepping out on the porch. He was wearing the same T-shirt and the same ball cap, but now it was the right way around. The peak was low over his eyes. He was carrying a rifle in his right hand. One of the pieces from the rack in the hallway. A fine .22 bolt-action, modern and in good condition. He put it up on his shoulder and stopped short.

  “I was on my way to get you up,” he said. “I need a driver.”

  “Why?” Reacher asked. “Where are you going?”

  “Hunting,” Bobby said. “In the pick-up.”

  “You can’t drive?”

  “Of course I can drive. But it takes two. You drive while I shoot.”

  “You shoot from a truck?”

  “I’ll show you,” Bobby said.

  He walked across to the motor barn. Stopped next to the newer pick-up. It had a roll bar built into the load bed.

  “You drive,” he said. “Out on the range. I’m here in back, leaning on the bar. Gives me a three-hundred-sixty-degree field of fire.”

  “While we’re moving?”

  “That’s the skill of it. It’s fun. Sloop invented it. He was real good.”

  “What are you hunting?”

  “Armadillo,” Bobby said. He stepped sideways and pointed down the track into the desert. It was a narrow dirt road scuffed into the landscape, meandering left and right to avoid rock formations, taking the path of least resistance.

  “Hunting country,” he said. “It’s pretty good, south of here. And they’re all out there, good fat ones. ’Dillo chili, can’t beat it for lunch.”

  Reacher said nothing.

  “You never ate armadillo?” Bobby asked.

  Reacher shook his head.

  “Good eating,” Bobby said. “Back when my granddaddy was a boy, Depression times, it was about all the eating there was. Texas turkey, they called it. Or Hoover hog. Kept people alive. Now the tree-huggers have got it protected. But if it’s on our land, it’s ours to shoot. That’s the way I see it.”

  “I don’t think so,” Reacher said. “I don’t like hunting.”

  “Why not? It’s a challenge.”

  “For you, maybe,” Reacher said. “I already know I’m smarter than an armadillo.”

  “You work here, Reacher. You’ll do what you’re told.”

  “We need to
discuss some formalities, before I work here.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like wages.”

  “Two hundred a week,” Bobby said. “Bed and three squares a day thrown in.”

  Reacher said nothing.

  “O.K.?” Bobby asked. “You wanted work, right? Or is it just Carmen you want?”

  Reacher shrugged. Two hundred a week? It was a long time since he’d worked for two hundred a week. But then, he wasn’t there for the money.

  “O.K.,” he said.

  “And you’ll do whatever Josh and Billy tell you to.”

  “O.K.,” Reacher said again. “But I won’t take you hunting. Not now, not ever. Call it a matter of conscience.”

  Bobby was quiet for a long moment. “I’ll find ways to keep you away from her, you know. Every day, I’ll find something.”

  “I’ll be in the barn,” Reacher said, and walked away.

  Ellie brought his breakfast to him there. She was wearing a miniature set of blue denim dungarees. Her hair was wet and loose. She was carrying a plate of scrambled eggs. She had silverware in her breast pocket, upright, like pens. She was concentrating on remembering a message.

  “My mommy says, don’t forget the riding lesson,” she recited. “She wants you to meet her here in the barn after lunch.”

  Then she ran back toward the house without another word. He sat down on a bale and ate the eggs. Took the empty plate back to the kitchen and headed down to the bunkhouse. Josh and Billy weren’t there to tell him to do anything. Suits me, he thought. He didn’t go looking for them. Just lay down and dozed in the heat.

  The Coyanosa Draw was a watercourse with a bed wide enough to carry the runoff from the Davis Mountains to the Pecos River, which took it to the Rio Grande all the way down on the border with Mexico. But runoff was seasonal and unreliable, so the region was sparsely populated. There were abandoned farmsteads built close to the dry riverbed, far from each other, far from anywhere. One of them had an old swaybacked house baked gray by the sun. In front of it was an empty barn. The barn had no doors, just an open wall facing west toward the house. The way the buildings were set in the landscape, the interior of the barn was invisible except from the yard right in front of it.

  The Crown Victoria was waiting inside the barn, its engine idling to keep the air going. The barn had an exterior staircase leading up to a hayloft, with a small platform outside the door at the top. The woman was out in the heat, up on the platform, where she could survey the meandering approach road. She saw the watchers’ pick-up two miles away. It was traveling fast and kicking up a plume of dust. She waited until she was sure it was unaccompanied and then she turned and walked down the stairs. Signaled to the others.

  They got out of the car and stood waiting in the heat. They heard the pick-up on the road, and then it pulled around the corner of the barn and slowed in the yard. They directed it with hand signals, like traffic cops. They pointed into the barn. One of them led the truck on foot, gesturing like the guy on the airport apron. He brought it tight up to the rear wall, gesturing all the time, and then he gave a thumbs-up to halt it. He stepped alongside the driver’s window and his partner stepped to the passenger door.

  The driver shut off the motor and relaxed. Human nature. The end of a fast drive to a secret rendezvous, the intrigue of new instructions, the prospect of a big payday. He wound down his window. On the passenger’s side, the second man did the same thing. Then they both died, shot in the side of the head with nine-millimeter bullets. The boy in the middle lived exactly one second longer, both sides of his face splattered with blood and brain tissue, his notebook clutched in his hands. Then the small dark man leaned in and shot him twice in the chest. The woman pushed him out of the way and adjusted the window winders on both doors to leave the glass cracked open about an inch. An inch would let insects in and keep scavengers out. Insects would help with decomposition, but scavengers could drag body parts away, which would risk visibility.

  Reacher dozed a couple of hours before Josh and Billy got back. They didn’t give him any instructions. They just got cleaned up for lunch. They told him they were invited inside the house to eat. And he wasn’t, because he had refused to drive.

  “Bobby told me you ran some guy off,” he said.

  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.”