Echo Burning by Lee Child

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

  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?”

  He pointed. “Tire marks. Some kind of a truck. Stopped here. Three people, crawled up to the edge on their knees.”

  He put himself where the tracks ended at the rim of the gulch. Lay down on the hot grit and hauled himself forward on his elbows. Raised his head.

  “Somebody was watching the house,” he said.

  “How do you know?”

  “Nothing else to see from here.”

  She knelt alongside him, the chromium pistol in her hand.

  “It’s too far away,” she said.

  “Must have used field glasses. Telescopes, even.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “You ever see reflections? The sun on glass? In the mornings, when the sun was in the east?”

  She shuddered.

  “No,” she said. “Never.”

  “Tracks are fresh,” he said. “Not more than a day or two old.”

  She shuddered again.

  “Sloop,” she said. “He thinks I’m going to take Ellie. Now I know he’s getting out. He’s having me watched.”

  Reacher stood up and walked back to the center of the bowl.

  “Look at the tire tracks,” he said. “They were here four or five times.”

  He pointed down. There were several overlapping sets of tracks in a complex network. At least four, maybe five. The tire treads were clearly pressed into the powdered sand. There was a lot of detail. The outside shoulder of the front right tire was nearly bald.

  “But they’re not here today,” Carmen said. “Why not?”

  “I don’t know,” Reacher said.

  Carmen looked away. Held out the gun to him.

  “Please show me how to use this,” she said.

  He moved his gaze from the tracks in the sand and looked at the gun. It was a Lorcin L-22 automatic, two-and-a-half-inch barrel, chrome frame, with plastic molded grips made to look like pink mother-of-pearl. Made in Mira Loma, California, not too long ago, and probably never used since it left the factory.

  “Is it a good one?” she asked.

  “How much did you pay for it?”

  “Over eighty dollars.”

  “Where?”

  “In a gun store up in Pecos.”

  “Is it legal?”

  She nodded. “I did all the proper paperwork. Is it any good?”

  “I guess,” he said. “As good as you’ll get for eighty bucks, anyway.”

  “The man in the store said it was ideal.”

  “For what?”

  “For a lady. I didn’t tell him why I needed it.”

  He hefted it in his hand. It was tiny, but reasonably solid. Not light, not heavy. Not heavy enough to be loaded, anyway.

  “Where are the bullets?” he asked.

  She stepped back toward the horses. Took a small box out of her bag. Came back and handed it to him. It was neatly packed with tiny .22 shells. Maybe fifty of them.

  “Show me how to load it,” she said.

  He shook his head.

  “You should leave it out here,” he said. “Just dump it and forget about it.”

  “But why?”

  “Because this whole thing is crazy. Guns are dangerous, Carmen. You shouldn’t keep one around Ellie. There might be an accident.”

  “I’ll be very careful. And the house is full of guns anyway.”

  “Rifles are different. She’s too small to reach the trigger and have it pointing at herself simultaneously.”

  “I keep it hidden. She hasn’t found it yet.”

  “Only a matter of time.”

  She shook her head.

  “My decision,” she said. “She’s my daughter.”

  He said nothing.

  “She won’t find it,” she said. “I keep it by the bed, and she doesn’t come in there.”

  “What happens to her if you decide to use it?”

  She nodded. “I know. I think about that all the time. I just hope she’s too young to really understand. And when she’s old enough, maybe she’ll see it was the lesser of two evils.”

  “No, what happens to her? There and then? When you’re in jail?”

  “They don’t send you to jail for self-defense.”

  “Who says it’s self-defense?”

  “You know it would be self-defense.”

  “Doesn’t matter what I know. I’m not the sheriff, I’m not the DA, I’m not the judge and jury.”

  She went quiet.

  “Think about it, Carmen,” he said. “They’ll arrest you, you’ll be charged with first-degree homicide. You’ve got no bail money. You’ve got no money for a lawyer either, so you’ll get a public defender. You’ll be arraigned, and you’ll go to trial. Could be six or nine months down the road. Could be a year. Then let’s say everything goes exactly your way from that point on. The public defender makes out it’s self-defense, the jury buys it, the judge apologizes that a wronged woman has been put through all of that, and you’re back on the street. But that’s a year from now. At least. What’s Ellie been doing all that time?”

  She said nothing.

  “She’ll have spent a year with Rusty,” he said. “On her own. Because that’s where the court would leave her. The grandmother? Ideal solution.”

  “Not when they understood what the Greers are like.”

  “O.K., so partway through the year Family Services will arrive and haul her off to some foster home. Is that what you want for her?”

  She winced. “Rusty would send her there anyway. She’d refuse to keep her, if Sloop wasn’t around anymore.”

  “So leave the gun out here in the desert. It’s not a good idea.”

  He handed it back to her. She took it and cradled it in her palms, like it was a precious object. She tumbled it from one hand to another, like a child’s game. The fake pearl grips flashed in the sun.

  “No,” she said. “I want to learn to use it. For self-confidence. And that’s a decision that’s mine to make. You can’t decide for me.”

  He was quiet for a beat. Then he shrugged.

  “O.K.,” he said. “Your life, your kid, your decision. But guns are serious business. So pay attention.”

  She passed it back. He laid it flat on his left palm. It reached from the ball of his thumb to the middle knuckle of his middle finger.

  “Two warnings,” he said. “This is a very, very short barrel. See that?” He traced his right index finger from the chamber to the muzzle. “Two and a half inches, is all. Did they explain that at the store?”

  She nodded. “The guy said it would fit real easy in my bag.”

  “It makes it a very inaccurate weapon,” he said. “The longer the barrel, the straighter it shoots. That’s why rifles are three feet long. If you’re going to use this thing, you need to get very, very close, O.K.? Inches away would be best. Right next to the target. Touching the target if you can. You try to use this thing across a room, you’ll miss by miles.”

  “O.K.,” she said.

  “Second warning.” He dug a bullet out of the box and held it up. “This thing is tiny. And slow. The pointy part is the bullet, and the rest of it is the powder in the shell case. Not a very big bullet, and not very much powder behind it. So it’s not necessarily going to do a lot of damage. Worse than a bee sting, but one shot isn’t going to be enough. So you need to get real close, and you need to keep on pulling the trigger until the gun is empty.”

  “O.K.,” she said again.

  “Now
watch.”

  He clicked out the magazine and fed nine bullets into it. Clicked the magazine back in and jacked the first shell into the breech. Took out the magazine again and refilled the empty spot at the bottom. Clicked it back in and cocked the gun and left the safety catch on.

  “Cocked and locked,” he said. “You do two things. Push the safety catch, and pull the trigger ten times. It’ll fire ten times before it’s empty, because there’s one already in the mechanism and nine more in the magazine.”

  He handed the gun to her.

  “Don’t point it at me,” he said. “Never point a loaded gun at anything you don’t definitely want to kill.”

  She took it and held it away from him, cautiously.

  “Try it,” he told her. “The safety, and the trigger.”

  She used her left hand to unlatch the safety. Then she pointed it in her right and closed her eyes and pulled the trigger. The gun twisted in her grip and pointed down. The blast of the shot sounded quiet, out there in the emptiness. A chip of rock and a spurt of dust kicked off the floor ten feet away. There was a metallic ricochet whang and a muted ring as the shell case ejected and the horses shuffled in place and then silence closed in again.

  “Well, it works,” she said.

  “Put the safety back on,” he said.

  She clicked the catch and he turned to look at the horses. He didn’t want them to run. Didn’t want to spend time chasing them in the heat. But they were happy enough, standing quietly, watching warily. He turned back and undid his top button and slipped his shirt off over his head. Walked fifteen feet south and laid the shirt on the rim of the gulch, hanging it down and spreading it out to represent a man’s torso. He walked back and stood behind her.

  “Now shoot my shirt,” he said. “You always aim for the body, because it’s the biggest target, and the most vulnerable.”

  She raised the gun, and then lowered it again.

  “I can’t do this,” she said. “You don’t want holes in your shirt.”

  “I figure there isn’t much of a risk,” he said. “Try it.”

  She forgot to release the safety catch. Just pulled on the unyielding trigger. Twice, puzzled why it wouldn’t work. Then she remembered and clicked it off. Pointed the gun and closed her eyes and fired. Reacher guessed she missed by twenty feet, high and wide.