Echo Burning jr-5

by Lee Child

  "O.K., good night, kid," he said. "Sleep well."

  "Kiss me," she said.

  He paused a second, and then he bent down and kissed her forehead. It was warm and damp and smelled of soap. She curled up more and snuggled down into the pillow.

  "Thank you for being our friend," she said.

  He stood up and stepped toward the door. Glanced at Carmen. Did you tell her to say that? Or is it for real?

  "Can you find your way back down?" Carmen asked him.

  He nodded.

  "I'll see you tomorrow," she said.

  She stayed in Ellie's bedroom and he found the closet with the back stairs in it. He went down to the inside hallway and through the kitchen. The maid was gone. The old dishwasher was humming away to itself. He stepped out into the night and paused in the darkness and silence of the yard. It was hotter than ever. He stepped toward the gate. Ahead of him the sunset had gone. The horizon was black. There was pressure in the air. A hundred miles away to the southwest he could see heat lightning flickering. Faint sheets and bolts of dry electricity discharging randomly, like a gigantic celestial camera taking pictures. He looked straight up. No rain. No clouds. He turned around and caught gleams of white in the darkness off to his right. A T-shirt. A face. A semicircle of forehead showing through the back of a ball cap. Bobby Greer, again.

  "Bobby," he said. "Enjoy your ride?"

  Bobby ignored the inquiry. "I was waiting for you."

  "Why?"

  "Just making sure you came back out again."

  "Why wouldn't I?"

  "You tell me. Why would you go in there at all? In the first place? All three of you, like a little family."

  "You saw us?"

  Bobby nodded. "I see everything."

  "Everything?" Reacher repeated.

  "Everything I need to."

  Reacher shrugged.

  "I kissed the kid good night," he said. "You got a problem with that?"

  Bobby was quiet for a beat.

  "Let me walk you back to the bunkhouse," he said. "I need to talk to you."

  He didn't talk any on the way down through the yard. He just walked. Reacher kept pace and looked ahead at the night sky in the east. It was vast and black and filled with stars. Apart from dim windows in some of the Greer buildings there was absolute pitch darkness everywhere. It threw the stars into vivid relief, impossibly tiny and numerous points of light dusting backward through billions of cubic miles of space. Reacher liked peering out into the universe. He liked thinking about it. He used it for perspective. He was just a tiny insignificant speck briefly sparked to life in the middle of nowhere. So what really mattered? Maybe nothing at all. So maybe he should just go ahead and bust Sloop Greer's head and have done with it. Why not? In the context of the whole universe, how was that so very different from not busting it at all?

  "My brother had a problem," Bobby said, awkwardly. "I guess you know that."

  "I heard he cheated on his taxes," Reacher said.

  Bobby nodded in the dark. "IRS snoops are everywhere."

  "Is that how they found him? Snooping?"

  "Well, how else would they?" Bobby asked.

  He went quiet. Walked ahead a couple of paces.

  "Anyway, Sloop went to jail," he said.

  Reacher nodded. "Getting out Monday, I heard."

  "That's right. So he's not going to be too happy finding you here, kissing his kid, getting friendly with his wife."

  Reacher shrugged as he walked. "I'm just here to work."

  "Right, as a wrangler. Not as a nursemaid."

  "I get time off, right?"

  "But you need to be careful how you spend it."

  Reacher smiled. "You mean I need to know my place?"

  "Right," Bobby said. "And your place ain't alongside my brother's wife, or getting cozy with his kid."

  "A man can't choose his friends?"

  "Sloop ain't going to be happy, he gets home and finds some outsider has chosen his wife and kid for his friends."

  Reacher stopped walking. Stood still in the dark. "Thing is, Bobby, why would I give a rat's ass what makes your brother happy?"

  Bobby stopped, too. "Because we're a family. Things get talked about. You need to get that through your head. Or you won't work here too long. You could get run right out of here."

  "You think?"

  "Yeah, I think."

  Reacher smiled again. "Who you going to call? The sheriff with the secondhand car? Guy like that could get a heart attack, just thinking about it."

  Bobby shook his head. "West Texas, we look after things personally. It's a tradition. Never had too big of a law enforcement thing around here, so we kind of accustomed ourselves."

  Reacher took a step closer.

  "So you going to do it?" he said. "You want to do it now?"

  Bobby said nothing. Reacher nodded.

  "Maybe you'd prefer to set the maid on me," he said. "Maybe she'll come after me with a skillet."

  "Josh and Billy will do what they're told."

  "The little guys? The maid might be better. Or you, even."

  "Josh and Billy get in the ring with bulls that weigh a ton and a half. They ain't going to be too worried about you."

  Reacher started walking again. "Whatever, Bobby. I only said good night to the kid. No reason to start World War Three over it. She's starved for company. So is her mother. What can I do about it?"

  "You can get smart about it, is what," Bobby said. "I told you before, she lies about everything. So whatever big story she's been telling you, chances are it's bullshit. So don't go making a fool out of yourself, falling for it. You wouldn't be the first."

  They turned the corner beyond the corrals and headed for the bunkhouse door.

  "What does that mean?" Reacher asked.

  "How dumb do you think I am? She's gone all day every day for the best part of a month, gone all night as often as she can get away with it, leaving the kid here for us to tend to. And she's gone where? Some motel up in Pecos, is where, screwing the brains out of whatever new guy she can get to believe her bullshit stories about how her husband doesn't understand her. Which is entirely her business, but it's my business if she thinks she can go ahead and bring the guy back here. Two days before her husband gets home? Passing you off as some stranger looking for ranch work? What kind of crap is that?"

  "What did you mean, I wouldn't be the first?"

  "Exactly what I said. Talk to Josh and Billy about it. They ran him off."

  Reacher said nothing. Bobby smiled at him.

  "Don't believe her," he said. "There are things she doesn't tell you, and what she does tell you is mostly lies."

  "Why doesn't she have a key to the door?"

  "She had a key to the damn door. She lost it, is all. It's never locked, anyway. Why the hell would it be locked? We're sixty miles from the nearest crossroads."

  "So why does she have to knock?"

  "She doesn't have to knock. She could walk right in. But she puts on a big thing about how we exclude her. But it's all bullshit. Like, how do we exclude her? Sloop married her, didn't he?"

  Reacher said nothing.

  "So you work if you want to," Bobby said. "But stay away from her and the kid. And I'm saying that for your sake, O.K.?"

  "Can I ask you something?" Reacher said.

  "What?"

  "Did you know your hat is on backward?"

  "My what?"

  "Your cap," Reacher said. "It's on backward. I wondered if you knew that. Or if maybe it just kind of slipped around, accidentally."

  Bobby stared at him.

  "I like it this way," he said.

  Reacher nodded again.

  "Well, I guess it keeps the sun off of your neck," he said. "Keeps it from getting any redder."

  "You watch your mouth," Bobby said. "You stay away from my brother's family, and watch your damn mouth."

  Then he turned in the dark and headed back up to the house. Reacher stood and watched him walk away. B
eyond him the lightning still danced on the far southwest horizon. Then he disappeared behind the barn and Reacher listened to the sound his boots made in the dust, until it faded away to nothing.

  Chapter 6

  Reacher went right to bed, even though it was still early. Sleep when you can, so you won't need to when you can't. That was his rule. He had never worked regular hours. To him, there was no real difference between a Tuesday and a Sunday, or a Monday and a Friday, or night and day. He was happy to sleep twelve hours, and then work the next thirty-six. And if he didn't have to work the next thirty-six, then he'd sleep twelve hours again, and again, as often as he could, until something else cropped up.

  The bed was short and the mattress was lumpy. The air in the room had settled like a thick hot soup on the thin sheet covering him. He could hear insects outside, clicking and whining loudly. There might have been a billion of them, separately audible if he concentrated hard enough, merging together into a single scream if he didn't. The sound of the night, far from anywhere. There were lonely guttural cries from cougars and coyotes way off in the distance. The horses heard them too, and he sensed restless movement over in the barn, quieting after a moment, starting up again after the next ghostly, plaintive yelp. He heard rustling air and imagined he felt changes in pressure as colonies of bats took flight. He imagined he could feel the beat of their leathery wings. He fell asleep watching the stars through a small window high above him.

  * * *

  The road from Pecos to El Paso is more than two hundred miles long, and is dotted on both sides with occasional clumps of motels and gas stations and fast food outlets. The killing crew drove an hour west, which took them seventy miles, and then stopped at the second place they saw. That was the woman's habit. Not the first place. Always the second place. And always arrive very late. It was close to a superstition, but she rationalized it as good security.

  The second place had a gas station big enough for eighteen-wheelers to use and a two-story motel and a twenty-four-hour diner. The tall fair man went into the motel office and paid cash for two rooms. They weren't adjoining. One was on the first floor far from the office and the second was upstairs, halfway down the row. The woman took the upstairs room.

  "Get some sleep," she told her partners. "We've still got work to do."

  * * *

  Reacher heard Josh and Billy come back at two in the morning. The air was still hot. The insects were still loud. He heard the pick-up engine a couple of miles south, growing nearer and louder, slowing, turning in at the gate. He heard the squeal of springs as it bounced across the yard. He heard it drive into the shed beneath him, and he heard the motor switch off. Then there was just tinkling and clicking as it cooled, and footsteps on the stairs. They were loud and clumsy. He stayed as deeply asleep as he could and tracked their sounds past him, over to the bathroom, back to their bunks. Their bedsprings creaked as they threw themselves down. Then there was nothing but the insects and the wet rhythmic breathing of men who had worked hard all day and drunk hard all night. It was a sound he was familiar with. He had spent seventeen years in dormitories, off and on.

  The insect noise was completely gone when he woke. So were the stars. The high window showed luminous streaks of dawn in their place. Maybe six in the morning, he thought, summer, this far south. It was already hot. He lifted his arm and checked his watch. Ten past six, Saturday morning. He thought about Jodie, in London. It was ten past twelve in London. Six hours ahead. She would have been up for ages. Probably at a museum, looking at pictures. Maybe thinking about lunch, in some English tearoom. Then he thought about Carmen Greer, over in the main house, forty-eight hours away from waking up on the day Sloop came home. And then Ellie, maybe hot and restless on her tiny cot, innocently barreling on toward the day her little life would change again.

  He threw back the crumpled sheet and walked naked to the bathroom, carrying his clothes balled in his hand. Josh and Billy were still deep asleep. They were both still dressed. Josh still had his boots on. They were snoring halfheartedly, sprawled out and inert. There was a vague smell of old beer in the air. The smell of hangovers.

  He set the shower going warm until he had soaped the sweat off his body and then turned it to cold to wake himself up. The cold water was nearly as warm as the hot. He imagined it pumping out of the baked ground, picking up heat all the way. He filled a sink with water and soaked his clothes. It was a trick he'd picked up as a kid, long ago, somewhere out in the Pacific, from sentries on the midday watch. If you dress in wet clothes, you've got a built-in air conditioner that keeps you cool until they dry out. An evaporative principle, like a swamp cooler. He dressed with the clammy cotton snagging against his skin and headed down the stairs and outside into the dawn. The sun was over the horizon ahead of him. The sky was arching purple overhead. No trace of cloud. The dust under his feet was still hot from yesterday.

  * * *

  The watchers assembled piecemeal, like they had five times before. It was a familiar routine by then. One of the men drove the pick-up to the boy's place and found him outside and waiting. Then they drove together to the second man's place, where they found that the routine had changed.

  "He just called me," the second man explained. "Some different plan. We got to go to someplace up on the Coyanosa Draw for new instructions, face to face."

  "Face to face with who?" the first man said. "Not him, right?"

  "No, some new people we're going to be working with."

  The boy said nothing. The first man just shrugged. "O.K. with me," he said.

  "Plus, we're going to get paid," the second man said.

  "Even better," the first man said.

  The second man squeezed onto the bench seat and closed his door and the pick-up turned and headed north.

  * * *

  Reacher walked around the corner of the bunkhouse and past the corrals to the barn. He could hear no sound at all. The whole place felt stunned by the heat. He was suddenly curious about the horses. Did they lie down to sleep? He ducked in the big door and found the answer was no, they didn't. They were sleeping standing up, heads bowed, knees locked against their weight. The big old mare he'd tussled with the night before smelled him and opened an eye. Looked at him blankly and moved a front foot listlessly and closed her eye again.

  He glanced around the barn, rehearsing the work he might be expected to perform. The horses would need feeding, presumably. So there must be a food store someplace. What did they eat? Hay, he guessed. There were bales of it all over the place. Or was that straw, for the floor? He found a separate corner room stacked with sacks of some kind of food supplement. Big waxed-paper bags, from some specialist feed supplier up in San Angelo. So probably the horses got mostly hay, with some of the supplement to make up the vitamins. They'd need water, too. There was a faucet in one corner, with a long hose attached to it. A trough in each stall.

  He came out of the barn and walked up the track to the house. Peered in through the kitchen window. Nobody in there. No activity. It looked the same as it had when he left the night before. He walked on toward the road. Heard the front door open behind him and turned to see Bobby Greer stepping out on the porch. He was wearing the same T-shirt and the same ball cap, but now it was the right way around. The peak was low over his eyes. He was carrying a rifle in his right hand. One of the pieces from the rack in the hallway. A fine .22 bolt-action, modern and in good condition. He put it up on his shoulder and stopped short.

  "I was on my way to get you up," he said. "I need a driver."

  "Why?" Reacher asked. "Where are you going?"

  "Hunting," Bobby said. "In the pick-up."

  "You can't drive?"

  "Of course I can drive. But it takes two. You drive while I shoot."

  "You shoot from a truck?"

  "I'll show you," Bobby said.

  He walked across to the motor barn. Stopped next to the newer pick-up. It had a roll bar built into the load bed.

  "You drive," he said.
"Out on the range. I'm here in back, leaning on the bar. Gives me a three-hundred-sixty-degree field of fire."

  "While we're moving?"

  "That's the skill of it. It's fun. Sloop invented it. He was real good."

  "What are you hunting?"

  "Armadillo," Bobby said. He stepped sideways and pointed down the track into the desert. It was a narrow dirt road scuffed into the landscape, meandering left and right to avoid rock formations, taking the path of least resistance.

  "Hunting country," he said. "It's pretty good, south of here. And they're all out there, good fat ones. 'Dillo chili, can't beat it for lunch."

  Reacher said nothing.

  "You never ate armadillo?" Bobby asked.

  Reacher shook his head.

  "Good eating," Bobby said. "Back when my granddaddy was a boy, depression times, it was about all the eating there was. Texas turkey, they called it. Or Hoover hog. Kept people alive. Now the tree-huggers have got it protected. But if it's on our land, it's ours to shoot. That's the way I see it."

  "I don't think so," Reacher said. "I don't like hunting."

  "Why not? It's a challenge."

  "For you, maybe," Reacher said. "I already know I'm smarter than an armadillo."

  "You work here, Reacher. You'll do what you're told."

  "We need to discuss some formalities, before I work here."

  "Like what?"

  "Like wages."

  "Two hundred a week," Bobby said. "Bed and three squares a day thrown in."

  Reacher said nothing.

  "O.K.?" Bobby asked. "You wanted work, right? Or is it just Carmen you want?"

  Reacher shrugged. Two hundred a week? It was a long time since he'd worked for two hundred a week. But then, he wasn't there for the money.

  "O.K.," he said.

  "And you'll do whatever Josh and Billy tell you to."

  "O.K.," Reacher said again. "But I won't take you hunting. Not now, not ever. Call it a matter of conscience."