“Keep your eyes open,” he said. “Pretend you’re mad at the shirt, you’re standing there pointing your finger right at it, like you’re yelling.”
She kept her eyes open. Squared her shoulders and pointed with her right arm held level. She fired and missed again, maybe six feet to the left, maybe a little low.
“Let me try,” he said.
She passed him the gun. It was tiny in his hand. The trigger guard was almost too small to fit his finger. He closed one eye and sighted in.
“I’m aiming for where the pocket was,” he said.
He fired a double-tap, two shots in quick succession, with his hand rock-steady. The first hit the shirt in the armpit opposite the torn pocket. The second hit centrally but low down. He relaxed his stance and handed the gun back.
“Your turn again,” he said.
She fired three more, all of them hopeless misses. High to the right, wide to the left. The last hit the dirt, maybe seven feet short of the target. She stared at the shirt and lowered the gun, disappointed.
“So what have you learned?” he asked.
“I need to get close,” she said.
“Damn right,” he said. “And it’s not entirely your fault. A short-barrel handgun is a close-up weapon. See what I did? I missed by twelve inches, from fifteen feet. One bullet went left, and the other went down. They didn’t even miss consistently. And I can shoot. I won competitions for pistol shooting in the army. Couple of years, I was the best there was.”
“O.K.,” she said.
He took the gun from her and squatted in the dust and reloaded it. One up the spout and nine in the magazine. He cocked it and locked it and laid it on the ground.
“Leave it there,” he said. “Unless you’re very, very sure. Could you do it?”
“I think so,” she said.
“Thinking so isn’t enough. You’ve got to know so. You’ve got to be prepared to get real close, jam it into his gut, and fire ten times. If you don’t, or if you hesitate, he’ll take it away from you, maybe turn it on you, maybe fire wildly and hit Ellie running in from her room.”
She nodded, quietly. “Last resort.”
“Believe it. You pull the gun, from that point on, it’s all or nothing.”
She nodded again.
“Your decision,” he said. “But I suggest you leave it there.”
She stood still for a long, long time. Then she bent down and picked up the gun. Slipped it back into her bag. He walked over and retrieved his shirt and slipped it over his head. Neither bullet hole showed. One was under his arm, and the other tucked in below the waistband of his pants. Then he tracked around the gulch and picked up all eight spent shell cases. It was an old habit, and good housekeeping. He jingled them together in his hand like small change and put them in his trouser pocket.
They talked about fear on the ride home. Carmen was quiet on the way back up the rise, and she stopped again at the peak. The Red House compound stretched below them in the distant haze, and she just sat and looked down at it, both hands clasped on the horn of her saddle, saying nothing, a faraway look in her eyes. Reacher’s horse stopped as usual slightly behind hers, so he got the same view, but framed by the curve of her neck and her shoulder.
“Do you ever get afraid?” she asked.
“No,” he said.
She was quiet again for a spell.
“But how is that possible?” she asked.
He looked at the sky. “It’s something I learned, when I was a little boy.”
“How?”
He looked at the ground. “I had a brother, older than me. So he was always ahead. But I wanted to be doing the same stuff as him. He had scary comics, and anywhere we had American television he’d be watching it. So I looked at the same comics and watched the same shows. There was one show about space adventures. I don’t remember what it was called. We watched it in black-and-white somewhere. Maybe in Europe. They had a spaceship that looked like a little submarine with spider legs. They would land it somewhere and get out and go exploring. I remember one night they got chased by this scary creature. It was hairy, like an ape. Like Bigfoot. Long hairy arms and a big snarl. It chased them back to the spaceship, and they jumped in and slammed the hatch shut just as it was climbing in after them.”
“And you were scared?”
He nodded, even though he was behind her. “I was about four, I think. I was terrified. That night I was certain the thing was under my bed. I had this high old bed, and I knew the thing was living under it. It was going to come out and get me. I could just about feel its paw reaching up for me. I couldn’t sleep. If I went to sleep, it would come out and get me for sure. So I stayed awake for hours. I would call for my dad, but when he came in, I was too ashamed to tell him. It went on like that for days and days.”
“And what happened?”
“I got mad. Not at myself for being afraid, because as far as I was concerned the thing was totally real and I should be afraid. I got mad at the thing for making me afraid. For threatening me. One night I just kind of exploded with fury. I yelled O.K., come out and try it! Just damn well try it! I’ll beat the shit right out of you! I faced it down. I turned the fear into aggression.”
“And that worked?”
“I’ve never been scared since. It’s a habit. Those space explorers shouldn’t have turned and run, Carmen. They should have stood there and faced the creature down. They should have stood and fought. You see something scary, you should stand up and step toward it, not away from it. Instinctively, reflexively, in a raging fury.”
“Is that what you do?”
“Always.”
“Is it what I should do? With Sloop?”
“I think it’s what everybody should do.”
She was quiet for a moment. Just staring down at the house, and then lifting her eyes to the horizon beyond it. She clicked her tongue, and both horses moved off together, down the long slow slope toward the road. She shifted in the saddle to keep her balance. Reacher imitated her posture and stayed safely aboard. But not comfortably. He figured horseback riding would be one of the things he tried once and didn’t repeat.
“So what did Bobby say?” she asked. “About us?”
“He said you’ve been away most days for a month, and some nights, and he figured we’ve been up in a motel in Pecos together having an affair. Now he’s all outraged that you’ve brought me down here, so close to Sloop getting back.”
“I wish we had been,” she said. “In a motel, having an affair. I wish that was all it was.”
He said nothing. She paused a beat.
“Do you wish we had been, too?” she asked.
He watched her in the saddle. Lithe, slim, hips swaying gently against the patient gait of the horse. The dark honey skin of her arms was bright in the sun. Her hair hung to the middle of her back.
“I could think of worse things,” he said.
It was very late in the afternoon when they got back. Josh and Billy were waiting. They were leaning side by side against the wall of the barn, in the harsh shadow below the eaves. Their pick-up was ready for the trip to the feed supplier. It was parked in the yard.
“It takes all three of you?” Carmen whispered.
“It’s Bobby,” Reacher said back. “He’s trying to keep me away from you. Trying to spoil the fun we’re supposed to be having.”
She rolled her eyes.
“I’ll put the horses away,” she said. “I should brush them first.”
They dismounted together in front of the barn door. Josh and Billy peeled off the wall, impatience in their body language.
“You ready?” Billy called.
“He should have been ready a half hour ago,” Josh said.
For that, Reacher made them wait. He walked down to the bunkhouse, very slowly, because he wasn’t going to let them hurry him, and because he was stiff from the saddle. He used the bathroom and rinsed dust off his face. Splashed cold water over his shirt. Walked slowly back. The pi
ck-up had turned to face the gate and the engine was running. Carmen was brushing his horse. Thin clouds of dust were coming off its chestnut fur. Hair? Coat? Josh was sitting sideways in the driver’s seat. Billy was standing next to the passenger door.
“So let’s go,” he called.
He put Reacher in the middle seat. Josh swung his feet in and slammed his door shut. Billy crowded in on the other side and Josh took off toward the gate. Paused at the road and then made a left, at which point Reacher knew the situation was a lot worse than he had guessed.
7
He had seen the feed bags in the storeroom. There were plenty of them, maybe forty, in head-high stacks. Big waxed-paper bags, probably thirty pounds to a bag. Altogether twelve hundred pounds of feed. About half a ton. How fast were four horses and a pony going to eat their way through all of that?
But he had always understood the trip was Bobby’s idea of a diversion. Buying more feed before it was strictly necessary was as good a way as any of getting him out of Carmen’s life for a spell. But they weren’t buying more feed. Because they had turned left. The bags were all printed with a brand name and nutritional boasts and the name and the address of the feed supplier. The feed supplier was in San Angelo. He had seen it repeated forty times, once on each bag, in big clear letters. San Angelo, San Angelo, San Angelo. And San Angelo was north and east of Echo County. Way north and east. Not south and west. They should have turned right.
So, Bobby was planning to get him out of Carmen’s life permanently. Josh and Billy had been told to get rid of him. And Josh and Billy will do what they’re told, Bobby had said. He smiled at the windshield. Forewarned is forearmed. They didn’t know he’d seen the feed bags, didn’t know he’d read the writing on them, and they didn’t know he’d been looking at maps of Texas for most of the last week. They didn’t know a left turn instead of a right would mean anything to him.
How would they aim to do it? Carmen had implied her out-of-work teacher friend had been scared off. Scared pretty badly, if he wouldn’t even talk to her later, up in the relative safety of Pecos. So were they going to try to scare him? If so, they really had to be kidding. He felt the aggression building inside. He used it and controlled it like he had learned to. He used the adrenaline flow to ease the stiffness in his legs. He let it pump him up. He flexed his shoulders, leaning on Josh on one side, Billy on the other.
“How far is it?” he asked innocently.
“Couple hours,” Billy said.
They were doing about sixty, heading south on the dead-straight road. The landscape was unchanging. Scrubby dry grassland on the left, sullen limestone caliche on the right, broken up into ledges and layers. All of it baking under the relentless sun. There was no traffic. The road looked like it saw one or two vehicles a day. Maybe all they had to do was get far enough away, pull over, throw him out, and he’d die slowly of thirst before anybody got to him. Or of exhaustion, walking back. Or of rattlesnake bites.
“No, less than a couple hours,” Josh said. “Hundred miles is all.”
So maybe they were headed to the bar they had mentioned yesterday. Maybe they had friends there. They better had, Reacher thought. A pair of fifth-rate cowboys ain’t going to do it for me. Then he breathed out again. Relaxed. Struggled with a decision. The problem with the kind of undiluted raging aggression he had described to Carmen was it came out so all-or-nothing. He recalled his first day in high school. The summer after he finished his elementary education, the family moved back stateside for a six-month tour. He was enrolled in a big high school off-base, somewhere in New Jersey, somewhere near Fort Dix. And he was ready for it. In his usual serious earnest fashion he calculated that high school would be bigger and better than elementary school, in every way, including the seriousness of the locker-room scuffling. So he made his usual new-school first-day plan to jump on the very first guy who tried anything. That had always worked well for him. Hit hard, hit early, get your retaliation in first. It made a big impression. But this time, make an even bigger impression, hit harder than ever, because clearly high school was going to be a whole new kind of a deal.
So sure enough some hard kid shoved him the first morning, and ten minutes later the hard kid was on his way to the hospital for a three-week stay. Then Reacher discovered it was really a very genteel school, in a good neighborhood, and that he’d reacted way too drastically, and everybody was looking at him like he was some sort of a barbarian. And he felt like one. He felt a little ashamed. From then on, he’d become calmer. He’d learned to be certain what he was into before he did anything. And he’d learned to offer warnings, sometimes, in certain circumstances.
“We coming straight back?” he asked.
It was a smart tactical question. They couldn’t say no, without alerting him. They couldn’t say yes, if they weren’t going there in the first place.
“We’re going for a couple beers first,” Billy said.
“Where?”
“Where we went yesterday.”
“I’m broke,” Reacher said. “I didn’t get paid yet.”
“We’re buying,” Josh said.
“The feed store open late? On a Saturday?”
“Big order, they’ll accommodate us,” Billy said.
Maybe it was a new supplier. Maybe they changed their source.
“I guess you use them a lot,” he said.
“All the years we’ve been here,” Josh said.
“Then we’re going straight back?”
“Sure we are,” Billy said. “You’ll be back in time for your beauty sleep.”
“That’s good,” Reacher said.
He paused.
“Because that’s the way I like it,” he said.
Mess with me now, you get what you get.
Billy said nothing. Josh just smiled and drove.
The scenery flattened very gradually as they headed south. From his time with the maps he knew the Rio Grande was curling around toward them from the west. They were entering the river basin, where wide prehistoric waters had scoured the land. Josh kept the speed at a steady sixty. Billy stared idly out of his window. The road remained straight and featureless. Reacher rested his head on the gun rack behind him and waited. Waiting was something he was accustomed to. Many times in his career, frantic action had been preceded by a long drive. It usually happened that way. The patient accumulation of evidence, the arrival at a conclusion, the identification of a suspect, the drive out to deal with him. Waiting was a skill you learned fast, in the military.
The road got rougher the farther south they drove. The truck labored over it. The load bed was empty, so the rear wheels bounced and skipped. There were vultures on some of the telephone poles. The sun was low in the west. There was a sign on the shoulder. It said Echo 5 miles. It was pocked with bullet holes.
“I thought Echo was north,” Reacher said. “Where Ellie goes to school.”
“It’s split,” Billy said. “Half of it up there, half of it down here. Hundred sixty miles of nothing in between.”
“World’s biggest town, end to end,” Josh said. “Bigger than Los Angeles.”
He eased off the gas around a long slow curve and a cluster of small buildings came into view in the distance, all of them built low to the ground, all of them lit from behind by the low sun. There were tin advertisements on the shoulder, three miles out, announcing well in advance what the buildings were going to be. There was going to be another gas station, and a country store. And a bar, called the Longhorn Lounge, owned and operated by somebody named Harley. It had the last sign, but it was the first establishment they came to. It was a hundred feet east of the shoulder of the road, built out of tarred boards under an iron roof, crouched low at an angle in the middle of two acres of parched earth. There were ten or twelve pick-up trucks parked nose-in to the building like airplanes at a terminal. And nearest the door was the sheriff’s secondhand police car, just sitting there like it had been abandoned.
Josh bumped across the parkin
g lot and put the truck in line with the others. The bar had neon beer signs in the windows, trapped between dirty glass and faded gingham drapes. Josh turned the motor off. Put the keys in his pocket. In the sudden quiet Reacher could hear bar noise, the roar of extractor fans and air conditioners, the thump of an overworked jukebox amplifier, the rumble of talking, the chink of bottles and glasses, the click of pool balls. Sounded like a reasonable crowd in there.
Josh and Billy opened their doors together and swung out. Reacher slid out through the passenger door and stood with his back to the sun. It was still hot. He could feel heat all over him, right from the back of his neck to the heels of his shoes.
“O.K.,” Billy said. “We’re buying.”
There was an inside lobby with an old-fashioned pay phone and scrawled numbers and old messages creeping over the boards alongside it. Then there was a second door, with a yellow glass window in it, that led into the bar itself. Billy pushed it open.
For a military cop, walking into a bar is like a batter stepping to the plate. It’s his place of business. Maybe ninety percent of low-grade trouble in the service happens in bars. Put a bunch of young men trained for aggression and reaction alongside a limitless supply of alcohol, add in unit rivalries, add in the presence of civilian women and their civilian husbands and boyfriends, and it becomes inevitable. So just like a batter walks warily from the on-deck circle, watching the infield, surveying the outfield, calculating angles and distances, a military cop is all eyes on the way into a bar. First, he counts the exits. There are usually three. The front door, the back door out beyond the rest rooms, and the private door from the office behind the bar. Reacher saw that the Longhorn Lounge had all three of them. The windows were too small to be useful to anybody.
Then the MP looks at the crowd. He looks for knots of trouble. Who falls silent and stares? Where are the challenges? Nowhere, in the Longhorn. There were maybe twenty or twenty-five people in the long low room, all men, all tanned and lean and dressed in denim, none of them paying any kind of attention beyond casual glances and nods of easy familiarity toward Billy and Josh. The sheriff was nowhere to be seen. But there was an unoccupied stool at the bar with a fresh bottle sitting on a used napkin in front of it. Maybe the place of honor.
Echo Burning by Lee Child Page 16
