by Lee Child
“O.K.,” Reacher said.
“I don’t want to know what you did to get it.”
“I just asked for it.”
“I don’t want to know,” she said again. “But you should come with me and meet them. And be my bodyguard. Not every day I carry twenty thousand dollars around the Wild West in a grocery bag. And it’ll be cool in the car.”
“O.K.,” Reacher said again.
The bank showed no particular excitement about forking over twenty grand in mixed bills. The teller treated it like a completely routine part of her day. She just counted the money three times and stacked it carefully in a brown-paper grocery bag Alice provided for the purpose. Reacher carried it back to the parking lot for her. But she didn’t need him to. There was no danger of getting mugged. The fearsome heat had just about cleared the streets, and what few people remained were moving slowly and listlessly.
The interior of the VW had heated up to the point where they couldn’t get in right away. Alice started the air going and left the doors open until the blowers took thirty degrees off it. It was probably still over a hundred when they slid inside. But it felt cool. All things are relative. Alice drove, heading north and east. She was good. Better than him. She didn’t stall out a single time.
“There’ll be a storm,” she said.
“Everybody tells me that,” he said. “But I don’t see it coming.”
“You ever felt heat like this before?”
“Maybe,” he said. “Once or twice. Saudi Arabia, the Pacific. But Saudi is drier and the Pacific is wetter. So, not exactly.”
The sky ahead of them was light blue, so hot it looked white. The sun was a diffuse glare, like it was located everywhere. There was no cloud at all. He was squinting so much the muscles in his face were hurting.
“It’s new to me,” she said. “That’s for sure. I figured it would be hot here, but this is completely unbelievable.”
Then she asked him when he’d been in the Middle East and the Pacific islands, and he responded with the expanded ten-minute version of his autobiography because he found he was enjoying her company. The first thirty-six years were easy enough, as always. They made a nicely linear tale of childhood and adulthood, accomplishment and progress, punctuated and underlined in the military fashion with promotions and medals. The last few years were harder, as usual. The aimlessness, the drifting. He saw them as a triumph of disengagement, but he knew other people didn’t. So as always he just told the story and answered the awkward questions and let her think whatever she wanted.
Then she responded in turn with an autobiography of her own. It was more or less the same as his, in an oblique way. He was the son of a soldier, she was the daughter of a lawyer. She had never really considered straying away from the family trade, just like he hadn’t. All her life she had seen people talk the talk and walk the walk and then she had set about following after them, just like he had. She spent seven years at Harvard where he spent four at West Point. Now she was twenty-five and the rough equivalent of an ambitious lieutenant in the law business. He had been an ambitious lieutenant at twenty-five, too, and he could remember exactly how it felt.
“So what’s next?” he asked.
“After this?” she said. “Back to New York, I guess. Maybe Washington, D.C. I’m getting interested in policy.”
“You won’t miss this down-and-dirty stuff?”
“I will, probably. And I won’t give it up completely. Maybe I’ll volunteer a few weeks a year. Certainly I’ll try to fund it. That’s where all our money comes from, you know. Big firms in the big cities, with a conscience.”
“I’m glad to hear it. Somebody needs to do something.”
“That’s for sure.”
“What about Hack Walker?” he asked. “Will he make a difference?”
She shrugged at the wheel. “I don’t know him very well. But his reputation is good. And he can’t make things any worse, can he? It’s a really screwed-up system. I mean, I’m a democrat, big D and little d, so theoretically to elect your judges is perfectly fine with me. Theoretically. But in practice, it’s totally out of hand. I mean, what does it cost to run a campaign down here?”
“No idea.”
“Well, figure it out. We’re talking about Pecos County, basically, because that’s where the bulk of the electorate is. A bunch of posters, some newspaper ads, half a dozen homemade commercials on the local TV channels. A market like this, you’d have to work really hard to spend more than five figures. But these guys are all picking up contributions running to hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars. Millions, maybe. And the law says if you don’t get around to spending it, you don’t have to give it back. You just keep it, for miscellaneous future expenses. So what it amounts to is they’re all picking up their bribes in advance. The law firms and the oil people and the special interests are paying now for future help. You can get seriously rich, running for judge in Texas. And if you get elected and do the right things all your years on the bench, you retire straight into some big law partnership and you get asked onto the boards of a half-dozen big companies. So it’s not really about trying to get elected a judge. It’s about trying to get elected a prince. Like turning into royalty overnight.”
“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 paren
ts 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 seen 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 becau
se 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.”
