Echo Burning by Lee Child

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

  “So will Walker make a difference?” he asked again.

  “He will if he wants to. Simple as that. And right now, he’ll make a difference to Carmen Greer. That’s what we need to focus on.”

  He nodded. She slowed the car, hunting a turn. They were back up in ranch country. Somewhere near the Brewer place, he guessed, although he didn’t recognize any specific features of the landscape. It was laid out in front of him, so dry and so hot it seemed the parched vegetation could burst into flames at any moment.

  “Does it bother you she told all those lies?” Alice asked.

  He shrugged. “Yes and no. Nobody likes to be lied to, I guess. But look at it from her point of view. She reached the conclusion he had to be gotten rid of, so she set about achieving it.”

  “So there was extensive premeditation?”

  “Should I be telling you this?”

  “I’m on her side.”

  He nodded. “She had it all planned. She said she looked at a hundred guys and sounded out a dozen before she picked on me.”

  Alice nodded back. “Actually that makes me feel better somehow, you know? Kind of proves how bad it was. Surely nobody would do that without some kind of really urgent necessity.”

  “Me too,” he said. “I feel the same way.”

  She slowed again and turned the car onto a farm track. After ten yards the track passed under a poor imitation of the older ranch gates he had seen elsewhere. It was just a rectangle of unpainted two-by-fours nailed together, leaning slightly to the left. The crossbar had a name written on it. It was indecipherable, scorched and faded to nothing by the sun. Beyond it were a few acres of cultivated ground. There were straight rows of turned dirt and an irrigation system pieced together from improvised parts. There were piles of fieldstone here and there. Neat wooden frames to carry wires to support the bushes that no longer grew. Everything was dry and crisp and fallow. The whole picture spoke of agonizing months of back-breaking manual labor in the fearsome heat, followed by tragic disappointment.

  There was a house a hundred yards beyond the last row of turned earth. It wasn’t a bad place. It was small and low, wood-framed, painted dull white with a finish that had cracked and crazed in the sun. There was a windmill behind it. There was a barn, with an irrigation pump venting through the roof and a damaged three-quarter-ton truck standing idle. The house had a closed front door. Alice parked the VW right next to it.

  “They’re called García,” she said. “I’m sure they’re home.”

  Twenty thousand dollars in a grocery bag had an effect like he’d never seen before. It was literally a gift of life. There were five Garcías, two generations, two in the older and three in the younger. They were all small and scrappy people. The parents were maybe in their late forties and the eldest child was a girl of maybe twenty-four. The younger offspring were both boys and could have been twenty-two and twenty. They all stood quietly together inside the doorway. Alice said a bright hello and walked straight past them and spilled the money on their kitchen table.

  “He changed his mind,” she said, in Spanish. “He decided to pay up, after all.”

  The Garcías formed a semicircle around the table, silent, looking at the money, like it represented such a stunning reversal of fortune that no reaction was possible. They didn’t ask any questions. Just accepted it had finally happened and then paused a second and burst out with a long list of plans. First, they would get the telephone reconnected so they wouldn’t have to walk eight miles to their neighbor’s place. Then the electricity. Then they would pay back what they had borrowed from friends. Then they would buy diesel fuel, so the irrigation pump could run again. Then they would get their truck fixed and drive it to town for seed and fertilizer. They went quiet again when it dawned on them they could get a whole crop grown and harvested and sold before the winter came.

  Reacher hung back and looked around the room. It was an eat-in, live-in kitchen, opening to a front parlor. The parlor was hot and airless and had a yard-long encyclopedia set and a bunch of religious statuettes on a low shelf. A single picture on the wall. The picture was a photograph of a boy. It was a studio portrait. The boy was maybe fourteen, with a precocious smudge of mustache above his lip. He was wearing a white confirmation robe and smiling shyly. The picture was in a black frame and had a dusty square of black fabric hung around it.

  “My eldest son,” a voice said. “That picture was made just before we left our village in Mexico.”

  Reacher turned and found the mother standing behind him.

  “He was killed, on the journey here,” she said.

  Reacher nodded. “I know. I heard. The border patrol. I’m very sorry.”

  “It was twelve years ago. His name was Raoul García.”

  The way she said his name was like a small act of remembrance.

  “What happened?” Reacher asked.

  The woman was silent for a second.

  “It was awful,” she said. “They hunted us for three hours in the night. We were walking and running, they had a truck with bright lights. We got split up. Divided, in the dark. Raoul was with his sister. He was protecting her. She was twelve. He sent her one way and walked the other way, into the lights. He knew it was worse, if they captured girls. He gave himself up to save his sister. But they didn’t try to arrest him or anything. Didn’t even ask him any questions. They just shot him down and drove away. They came near where I was hiding. They were laughing. I heard them. Like it was a sport.”

  “I’m very sorry,” Reacher said again.

  The woman shrugged. “It was very common then. It was a bad time, and a bad area. We found that out, later. Either our guide didn’t know, or didn’t care. We found out that there were more than twenty people killed on that route in a year. For fun. Some of them in horrible ways. Raoul was lucky, just to be shot. Some of them, their screams could be heard for miles, across the desert, in the darkness. Some of the girls were carried away and never seen again.”

  Reacher said nothing. The woman gazed at the picture for a moment longer. Then she turned away with an immense physical effort and forced a smile and gestured that Reacher should rejoin the party in the kitchen.

  “We have tequila,” she said quietly. “Saved especially for this day.”

  There were shot glasses on the table, and the daughter was filling them from a bottle. The girl that Raoul had saved, all grown up. The younger son passed the glasses around. Reacher took his and waited. The García father motioned for quiet and raised his drink toward Alice in a toast.

  “To our lawyer,” he said. “For proving the great Frenchman Honoré de Balzac wrong when he wrote, ‘Laws are spider webs through which the big flies pass and the little ones get caught.’”

  Alice blushed a little. García smiled at her and turned to Reacher. “And to you, sir, for your generous assistance in our time of need.”

  “De nada,” Reacher said. “No hay de que.”

  The tequila was rough and Raoul’s memory was everywhere, so they refused a second shot and left the Garcías alone with their celebrations. They had to wait again until the air conditioner made the VW’s interior bearable. Then they headed back to Pecos.

  “I enjoyed that,” Alice said. “Felt like I finally made a difference.”

  “You did make a difference.”

  “Even though it was you made it happen.”

  “You did the skilled labor,” he said.

  “Nevertheless, thanks.”

  “Did the border patrol ever get investigated?” he asked.

  She nodded. “Thoroughly, according to the record. There was enough noise made. Nothing specific, of course, but enough general rumors to make it inevitable.”

  “And?”

  “And nothing. It was a whitewash. Nobody was even indicted.”

  “But did it stop?”

  She nodded again. “As suddenly as it started. So obviously they got the message.”

  “That’s how it works,” he said. “I’ve s
een it before, different places, different situations. The investigation isn’t really an investigation, as such. It’s more like a message. Like a coded warning. Like saying, you can’t get away with this anymore, so you better stop doing it, whoever you are.”

  “But justice wasn’t done, Reacher. Twenty-some people died. Some of them gruesomely. It was like a pogrom, a year long. Somebody should have paid.”

  “Did you recognize that Balzac quotation?” he asked.

  “Sure,” she said. “I went to Harvard, after all.”

  “Remember Herbert Marcuse, too?”

  “He was later, right? A philosopher, not a novelist.”

  He nodded. “Born ninety-nine years after Balzac. A social and political philosopher. He said, ‘Law and order are everywhere the law and order which protect the established hierarchy.’”

  “That stinks.”

  “Of course it does,” he said. “But that’s the way it is.”

  They made it back to Pecos inside an hour. She parked on the street right outside the legal mission so they only had to walk ten feet through the heat. But ten feet was enough. It was like walking ten feet through a blast furnace with a hot towel wrapped around your head. They made it inside and found Alice’s desk covered in little handwritten notes stuck randomly to its surface. She peeled them off and scooped them up and read them through, one by one. Then she dropped them all in a drawer.

  “I’m going to check in with Carmen at the jail,” she said. “But the prints and the ballistics are back from the lab. Hack Walker wants to see you about them. Sounds like he’s got a problem.”

  “I’m sure he has,” Reacher said.

  They walked to the door and paused a second before braving the sidewalk again. Then they split up in front of the courthouse. Alice walked on toward the jailhouse entrance and Reacher went up the front steps and inside. The public areas and the staircase had no air-conditioning. Making it up just one floor soaked him in sweat. The intern at the desk pointed silently to Hack Walker’s door. Reacher went straight in and found Walker studying a technical report. He had the look of a man who thinks if he reads a thing often enough, maybe it will change what it says.

  “She killed him,” he said. “Everything matches. The ballistics are perfect.”

  Reacher sat down in front of the desk.

  “Your prints were on the gun, too,” Walker said.

  Reacher made no reply. If he was going to lie, he was going to save it for when it would count for something.

  “You’re in the national fingerprint database,” Walker said. “You know that?”

  Reacher nodded. “All military personnel are.”

  “So maybe you found the gun discarded,” Walker said. “Maybe you handled it because you were worried about a family with a kid having a stray firearm around. Maybe you picked it up and put it away in a place of safety.”

  “Maybe,” Reacher said.

  Walker turned a page in the file.

  “But it’s worse than that, isn’t it?” he said.

  “Is it?”

  “You a praying man?”

  “No,” Reacher said.

  “You damn well should be. You should get on your knees and thank somebody.”

  “Like who?”

  “Maybe the state cops. Maybe old Sloop himself for calling the sheriff.”

  “Why?”

  “Because they just saved your life.”

  “How?”

  “Because you were on the road in a squad car when this went down. If they’d left you in the bunkhouse, you’d be our number-one suspect.”

  “Why?”

  Walker turned another page.

  “Your prints were on the gun,” he said again. “And on every one of the shell cases. And on the magazine. And on the ammunition box. You loaded that gun, Reacher. Probably test-fired it too, they think, then reloaded it ready for action. She bought it, so it was technically her possession, but it looks from the fingerprint evidence that it was effectively your weapon.”

  Reacher said nothing.

  “So you see?” Walker asked. “You should set up a little shrine to the state police and give thanks every morning you wake up alive and free. Because the obvious thing for me to do would be come right after you. You could have crept up from the bunkhouse to the bedroom, easy as anything. Because you knew where the bedroom was, didn’t you? I talked to Bobby. He told me you spent the previous night in there. Did you really think he’d just sit quiet in the barn? He probably watched you two going at it, through the window.”

  “I didn’t sleep with her,” Reacher said. “I was on the sofa.”

  Walker smiled. “Think a jury would believe you? Or an ex-whore? I don’t. So we could easily prove some kind of a sexual jealousy motive. The next night you could have crept up there and got the gun out of the drawer and shot Sloop dead, and then crept back again. Only you couldn’t have, because you were in the back of a police car at the time. So you’re a lucky man, Reacher. Because right now a white male shooter would be worth his weight in gold to me. You could go integrate death row single-handed. A big WASP like you, in among all the blacks and the Hispanics, I’d look like the fairest prosecutor in Texas. The election would be over before it started.”

  Reacher said nothing. Walker sighed.

  “But you didn’t do it, unfortunately,” he said. “She did it. So now what have I got? The premeditation thing is going from bad to worse. It’s just about shot to hell now. Clearly she thought, and she thought, even to the extent of hooking up with some ex-army guy to give her weapons training. We got your record, after we got your prints. You were a pistol-shooting champ two straight years. You did a spell as an instructor, for Christ’s sake. You loaded her gun for her. What the hell am I going to do?”

  “What you planned,” Reacher said. “Wait for the medical reports.”

  Walker went quiet. Then he sighed again. Then he nodded.

  “We’ll have them tomorrow,” he said. “And you know what I did? I hired a defense expert to take a look at them. You know there are experts who only appear for the defense? Normally we wouldn’t go near them. Normally we want to know how much we can get out of a thing, not how little. But I hired a defense guy, the exact same guy Alice Aaron would hire if she could afford him. Because I want somebody who can persuade me there’s a faint possibility Carmen’s telling the truth, so I can let her go without looking like I’m crazy.”

  “So relax,” Reacher said. “It’ll be over tomorrow.”

  “I hope so,” Walker said. “And it might be. Al Eugene’s office is sending over some financial stuff. Al did all that kind of work for Sloop. So if there’s no financial motive, and the medical reports are good, maybe I can relax.”

  “She had no money at all,” Reacher said. “It was one of her big problems.”

  Walker nodded. “Good,” he said. “Because her big problems solve my big problems.”

  The office went quiet underneath the drone of the air conditioners. The back of Reacher’s neck felt cold and wet.

  “You should be more proactive,” he said. “With the election.”

  “Yeah, how?”

  “Do something popular.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like reopen something about the border patrol. People would like that. I just met a family whose son was murdered by them.”

  Walker went quiet again for a second, then just shook his head.

  “Ancient history,” he said.

  “Not to those families,” Reacher said. “There were twenty-some homicides in a year. Most of the survivors live around here, probably. And most of them will be voters by now.”

  “The border patrol was investigated,” Walker said. “Before my time, but it was pretty damn thorough. I went through the files years ago.”

  “You have the files?”

  “Sure. Mostly happened down in Echo, and all that stuff comes here. It was clearly a bunch of rogue officers on a jag of their own, and the investigation most
likely served to warn them off. They probably quit. Border patrol has a pretty good turnover of staff. The bad guys could be anywhere by now, literally. Probably left the state altogether. It’s not just the immigrants who flow north.”

  “It would make you look good.”

  Walker shrugged. “I’m sure it would. A lot of things would make me look good. But I do have some standards, Reacher. It would be a total waste of public money. Grandstanding, pure and simple. It wouldn’t get anywhere. Nowhere at all. They’re long gone. It’s ancient history.”

  “Twelve years ago isn’t ancient history.”

  “It is around here. Things change fast. Right now I’m concentrating on what happened in Echo last night, not twelve years ago.”

  “O.K.,” Reacher said. “Your decision.”

  “I’ll call Alice in the morning. When we get the material we need. Could be all over by lunchtime.”

  “Let’s hope so.”

  “Yeah, let’s,” Walker said.

  Reacher went out through the hot trapped air in the stairwell and stepped outside. It was hotter still on the sidewalk. So hot, it was difficult to breathe properly. It felt like all the oxygen molecules had been burned out of the air. He made it across the street and down to the mission with sweat running into his eyes. He pushed in through the door and found Alice sitting alone at her desk.