Echo Burning jr-5

by Lee Child

  The crossroads itself had no stop signs, just thick lines on the blacktop, melted in the heat. Carmen drove straight through and past the school and U-turned across the full width of the road, bumping down into shallow drainage ditches on both shoulders. She came back and stopped with the school gate close to Reacher's window. The school yard was ringed by a wire hurricane fence like a dog pound, and the gate was an inexact hinged rectangle made of galvanized tubing and faced with the same wire.

  She stared past him at the school door. The bus came laboring down from the north and stopped on its own side of the road, parallel to the Cadillac, facing the other direction. The schoolhouse door opened and a woman stepped out. She moved slow and looked tired. The teacher, Reacher guessed, ready to end her day. She saw the bus and waved to the children. They spilled out in a long stream. Seventeen of them, nine girls and eight boys, he counted. Ellie Greer was seventh in line. She was wearing a blue dress. She looked damp and hot. He recognized her from her photograph and by the way Carmen moved beside him. He heard her catch her breath and scrabble for the door handle.

  She skipped around the hood and met her daughter outside the car on the beaten earth strip that passed for a sidewalk. She scooped her up in a wild hug. Spun her around and around. Her little feet windmilled outward and her blue lunch box swung and hit her mother on the back. Reacher could see the child laughing and tears in Carmen's eyes. They came back around the rear of the car clutched tight together. Carmen opened the door and Ellie scrambled straight into the driver's seat and stopped dead when she saw him. She went instantly silent and her eyes went wide.

  "This is Mr. Reacher," Carmen said.

  Ellie turned to look at her.

  "He's my friend," Carmen said. "Say hello to him."

  Ellie turned back.

  "Hello," she said.

  "Hey, Ellie," Reacher said. "School O.K.?"

  Ellie paused. "It was O.K."

  "Learn anything?"

  "How to spell some words."

  She paused again, and then tilted her chin upward a fraction.

  "Not easy ones," she said. "Ball and fall."

  Reacher nodded gravely.

  "Four letters," he said. "That's pretty tough."

  "I bet you can spell them."

  "B-A-L-L," Reacher said. "F-A-L-L. Like that, right?"

  "You're grown up," Ellie said, like he had passed a test. "But you know what? The teacher said four letters, but there's only three, because the L comes twice. Right there at the end."

  "You're a smart kid," Reacher said. "Now hop in the back and let your mom in out of the heat."

  She scrambled past his left shoulder and he caught the smell of elementary school. He had attended maybe fifteen different places, most of them in different countries and continents, and they all smelled the same. It was more than thirty years since he had last been in one, but he still remembered it clearly.

  "Mom?" Ellie said.

  Carmen slid in and shut the door. She looked flushed. Heat, sudden exertion, sudden brief happiness, Reacher didn't know.

  "Mom, it's hot," Ellie said. "We should get ice cream sodas. From the diner."

  Reacher saw Carmen about to smile and agree, and then he saw her glance back at her pocketbook and remember the lone dollar stashed inside it.

  "From the diner, mom," Ellie said. "Ice cream sodas. They're best when it's hot. Before we go home."

  Carmen's face fell, and then it fell a little farther when she caught up to the end of Ellie's sentence. Home. Reacher stepped into the silence.

  "Good idea," he said. "Let's get ice cream sodas. My treat."

  Carmen glanced across, dependent on him and unhappy about it. But she put the car in drive anyway and pulled back through the crossroads and turned left into the diner's lot. She came around and parked in the shade tight against its north wall, right next to the only other car in the place, a steel blue Crown Victoria, new and shiny. Must be a state trooper's unmarked, or maybe a rental, Reacher thought.

  The diner was cold inside, chilled by a big old-fashioned air conditioner that vented down through the roof. And it was empty, apart from a group Reacher took to be the Crown Victoria's occupants, a trio of ordinary indoor types at a window, two men and a woman. The woman was medium blond and pleasant looking. One guy was small and dark and the other was taller and fair. So the Crown Vic was a rental, not a cop car, and these guys were maybe some kind of a sales team heading between San Antonio and El Paso. Maybe they had heavy samples in the trunk that prevented them from flying. He glanced away and let Ellie lead him toward a booth at the opposite end of the room.

  "This is the best table," she said. "All the others have torn seats, and they've sewed them up, and the thread is kind of thick and it can hurt the back of your leg."

  "I guess you've been in here before," Reacher said.

  "Of course I have," she giggled, like he was crazy. Two rows of tiny square teeth flashed at him. "I've been in here lots of times."

  Then she jumped up and scooted sideways over the vinyl.

  "Mommy, sit next to me," she said.

  Carmen smiled. "I'm going to use the rest room first. I'll be right back. You stay here with Mr. Reacher, O.K.?"

  The kid nodded gravely and Mr. Reacher sat himself down opposite her and they looked at each other quite openly. He wasn't sure what she was seeing, but he was seeing a living version of the photograph from her mother's wallet. Thick corn-colored hair tied back in a ponytail, incongruous dark eyes wide open and staring at him rather than at the camera's lens, a little snub of a nose, a serious mouth closed in a rather earnest way. Her skin was impossibly perfect, like pink damp velvet.

  "Where did you go to school?" she asked. "Did you go here too?"

  "No, I went to lots of different places," he said. "I moved around."

  "You didn't go to the same school all the time?"

  He shook his head. "Every few months, I went to a new one."

  She concentrated hard. Didn't ask why. Just examined the proposition for its benefits and drawbacks.

  "How could you remember where everything was? Like the bathrooms? You might forget who the teacher was. You might call her by the wrong name."

  He shook his head again. "When you're young, you can remember stuff pretty well. It's when you get old that you start to forget things."

  "I forget things," she said. "I forgot what my daddy looks like. He's in prison. But I think he's coming home soon."

  "Yes, I think he is."

  "Where did you go to school when you were six and a half like me?"

  School, the center of her universe. He thought about it. When he was six and a half, the war in Vietnam was still well below its peak, but it was already big enough that his father was there or thereabouts at the time. So he figured that year would have been split between Guam and Manila. Manila, mostly, he thought, judging by his memories of the buildings and the vegetation, the places he hid out in and played around.

  "The Philippines," he said.

  "Is that in Texas too?" she asked.

  "No, it's a bunch of islands between the Pacific and the South China Sea. Right out in the ocean, a long way from here."

  "The ocean," she said, like she wasn't sure. "Is the ocean in America?"

  "Is there a map on the wall in your school?"

  "Yes, there is. A map of the whole world."

  "O.K., the oceans are all the blue parts."

  "There's a lot of blue parts."

  He nodded. "That's for sure."

  "My mom went to school in California."

  "That'll be on the map, too. Find Texas and look to the left."

  He saw her looking down at her hands, trying to remember which was left and which was right. Then he saw her look up beyond his shoulder, and he turned to see Carmen on her way back, trapped temporarily by the sales people getting up out of their booth. She waited until they had moved to the door and cleared the aisle and then she skipped back and sat down, all in one graceful moveme
nt. She pressed close to Ellie and hugged her one-armed and tickled her and got a squeal in exchange. The waitress finished with the sales people at the register and walked over, pad and pencil at the ready.

  "Three Coke floats, please," Ellie said, loud and clear.

  The waitress wrote it down.

  "Coming right up, honey," she said, and walked away.

  "Is that O.K. for you?" Carmen asked.

  Reacher nodded. Like the smell of elementary school, he remembered the taste of a Coke float. He'd had his first ever in a PX canteen in Berlin, in a long low Quonset hut left over from the Four Powers occupation. It had been a warm summer's day in Europe, no air conditioning, and he remembered the heat on his skin and the bubbles in his nose.

  "It's silly," Ellie said. "It's not the Coke that floats. It's the ice cream that floats in the Coke. They should call them ice cream floats."

  Reacher smiled. He recalled thinking the same sorts of things, when he was her age. Outraged puzzlement at the illogicalities of the world he was being asked to join.

  "Like elementary school," he said. "I found out that elementary means easy. So 'elementary school' means 'easy school.' I remember thinking, well, it seems pretty hard to me. 'Hard school' would be a better name."

  Ellie looked at him, seriously.

  "I don't think it's hard," she said. "But maybe it's harder in the ocean."

  "Or maybe you're smarter than me."

  She thought about it, earnestly.

  "I'm smarter than some people," she said. "Like Peggy. She's still on the three-letter words. And she thinks you spell zoo with a Z."

  Reacher had no answer to that. He waited for Carmen to pick it up, but before she could the waitress arrived back with a tin tray with three tall glasses on it. She put them on the table with great ceremony and whispered "Enjoy''' to Ellie and backed away. But the glasses were almost a foot tall, and the drinking straws added another six inches, and Ellie's chin was about level with the table top, so her mouth was a long way from where it needed to be.

  "You want me to hold it down?" Carmen asked her. "Or do you want to kneel up?"

  Ellie thought about it. Reacher was starting to wonder if this kid ever made a quick, easy decision. He saw a little of himself in her. He had taken things too seriously. The kids in every new school had made fun of him for it. But usually only once.

  "I'll kneel up," she said.

  It was more than kneeling. She stood on the vinyl bench in a kind of crouch, with her hands planted palms-down on the table around the base of the glass, and her head ducked to the straw. As good a method as any, Reacher figured. She started sucking her drink and he turned to look at his own. The ice cream was a round greasy spoonful. He found the cola way too sweet, like it was mixed from syrup in the wrong proportions. The bubbles were huge and artificial. It tasted awful. A long way from a childhood summer's day in Germany.

  "Don't you like it?" Ellie asked. Her mouth was full, and she sprayed a little of the mixture onto his sleeve.

  "I didn't say anything."

  "You're making a funny face."

  "Too sweet," he said. "It'll rot my teeth. Yours, too."

  She came up with a huge grimace, like she was showing her teeth to a dentist.

  "Doesn't matter," she said. "They're all going to fall out anyway. Peggy's got two out already."

  Then she bent back to her straw and vacuumed up the rest of the drink. She poked at the sludge in the bottom of the glass with her straw until it was liquid enough to suck.

  "I'll finish yours, too, if you want," she said.

  "No," her mother said back. "You'll throw up in the car."

  "I won't. I promise."

  "No," Carmen said again. "Now go to the bathroom, O.K.? It's a long way home."

  "I went already," Ellie said. "We always go at school, last thing. We line up. We have to. The bus driver hates it if we pee on the seats." Then she laughed delightedly.

  "Ellie," her mother said.

  "Sorry, Mommy. But it's only the boys who do that. I wouldn't do it."

  "Go again anyway, O.K.?"

  Ellie rolled her eyes theatrically and clambered over her mother's lap and ran to the back of the diner.

  Reacher put a five over the check. "Great kid," he said.

  "I think so," Carmen said. "Well, most of the time."

  "Smart as anything."

  She nodded. "Smarter than me, that's for sure."

  He let that one go, too. Just sat in silence and watched her eyes cloud over.

  "Thanks for the sodas," she said.

  He shrugged. "My pleasure. And a new experience. I don't think I've ever bought a soda for a kid before."

  "So you don't have any of your own, obviously."

  "Never even got close."

  "No nieces or nephews? No little cousins?"

  He shook his head.

  "I was a kid myself," he said. "Once upon a time, and a long time ago. Apart from what I remember about that, I don't know too much about it."

  "Stick around a day or two and Ellie will teach you more than you ever wanted to know. As you've probably guessed."

  Then she looked beyond his shoulder and he heard Ellie's footsteps behind him. The floor was old and there were obviously air pockets trapped under the buckled linoleum because her shoes made hollow slapping sounds.

  "Mom, let's go, "she said.

  "Mr. Reacher is coming, too," Carmen said. "He's going to work with the horses."

  He got up out of the booth and saw her watching him.

  "O.K.," she said. "But let's go."

  They pushed outside into the heat. Past the middle of the afternoon, and it was hotter than ever. The Crown Victoria was gone. They walked around to the Cadillac and Ellie climbed through to the back seat. Carmen sat for a long moment with her hand resting on the key. She closed her eyes. Then she opened them again and started the engine.

  She drove back through the crossroads and past the school again and then more than sixty miles straight south. She went pretty slowly. Maybe half the speed she had used before. Ellie didn't complain. Reacher guessed she thought this was normal. He guessed Carmen never drove very fast on her way home.

  They didn't pass much. There were power lines looping rhythmically between weathered poles on the left shoulder. There were windmills and oil pumps here and there in the distance, some of them working, most of them seized up and still. There were more V-8 irrigation rigs on the western side of the road, on the edges of old fields, but they were silent and rusted because the winds had scoured the earth shallow. Some places, it was cleaned right back to dry caliche ledges. Nothing much left to irrigate. The eastern side was better. There were whole square miles of mesquite, and sometimes broad patches of decent grassland running in irregular linear shapes, like there must be water underground.

  Every ten or twelve miles there would be a ranch gate standing isolated by the side of the road. They were simple right-angle shapes, maybe fifteen feet wide, maybe fifteen feet high, with beaten earth tracks running through them into the distance. Some of them had names on them, made up from strips of wood nailed into the shapes of letters. Some of them had the names formed from iron, worked by hand into fancy script. Some of them had old bleached cattle skulls fixed centrally, with long horns curving outward like vulture's wings. Some of them were supplemented by old barbed wire strands running aimlessly into the middle distance, sketching the location of ancient boundaries. The wire was on wooden posts, and the posts were weathered and twisted into corkscrew shapes and looked as if they would turn to dust if you touched them.

  Some of the ranch houses were visible, depending on the contours of the land. Where it was flat, Reacher could see clusters of buildings in the far distance. The houses were two-story, mostly painted white, crouching among huddles of low barns and sheds. They had windmills out back, and satellite dishes, and they looked quiet and stunned in the heat. The sun was getting low in the west, and the outside temperature was still showing a hundred a
nd ten.

  "It's the road, I think," Carmen said. "It soaks up the sun all day, and gives it back later."

  Ellie had fallen asleep, sprawled across the rear seat. Her head was pillowed on the briefcase. Her cheek was touching the edges of the papers that outlined how her mother could best escape her father.

  "Greer property starts here," Carmen said. "On the left. Next track is ours, about eight miles."

  It was flat land, rising slightly on the right to a fragmented mesa about a mile away to the west. On the left, the Greers had better barbed wire than most. It looked like it might have been restrung less than fifty years ago. It ran reasonably straight into the east, enclosing patchy grassland that showed about equal parts green and brown. Miles away there was a forest of oil derricks visible against the skyline, all surrounded by tin huts and abandoned equipment.

  "Greer Three," Carmen said. "Big field. It made Sloop's grandfather a lot of money, way back. Ran dry about forty years ago. But it's a famous family story, about that gusher coming in. Most exciting thing that ever happened to them."

  She slowed a little more, clearly reluctant to make the final few miles. In the far distance the road rose into the boiling haze and Reacher could see the barbed wire change to an absurd picket fence. It was tight against the shoulder, like something you would see in New England, but it was painted dull red. It ran about half a mile to a ranch gate, which was also painted red, and then ran on again into the distance and out of sight. There were buildings behind the gate, much closer to the road than the ones he had seen before. There was a big old house with a two-story core and a tall chimney and sprawling one-story additions. There were low barns and sheds clustered loosely around it. There was ranch fencing enclosing arbitrary squares of territory. Everything was painted dull red, all the buildings and all the fences alike. The low orange sun blazed against them and made them glow and shimmer and split horizontally into bands of mirage.

  She slowed still more where the red fence started. Coasted the last hundred yards with her foot off the gas and then turned in on a beaten dirt track running under the gate. There was a name on the gate, high above their heads, red-painted wood on red-painted wood. It said RED HOUSE. She glanced up at it as she passed through.