Echo Burning by Lee Child Read online

  Not that they were ever seen together, except by their victims. They traveled separately. One always drove, and the other two flew, always by different routes. The driver was one of the men, because invisibility was their aim, and a woman driving a long distance alone was still slightly more memorable than a man. The car was always rented, always at LAX arrivals, which had the busiest rental counters in the world. It was always a generic family sedan, a mud-colored nothing car. The license and the credit card used to obtain it were always real, properly issued in a distant state to a person who had never existed. The driver would wait on the sidewalk and then line up when a busy flight was spilling out into baggage claim when he would be just one face among a hundred. He was small and dark and had a rolling duffel and a carry-on and a harassed expression, same as everybody else.

  He did the paperwork at the counter and rode the bus to the rental compound and found his allotted car. He dumped his bags in the trunk, waited at the exit check, and drove out into the glare. He spent forty minutes on the freeways, driving a wide aimless circle around the whole of the metropolitan area, making sure he wasn’t followed. Then he ducked off into West Hollywood and stopped at a lock-up garage in an alley behind a lingerie salon. He left the motor running and opened the garage door and opened the trunk and swapped his rolling duffel and his carry-on for two big valises made of thick black nylon. One of them was very heavy. The heavy valise was the reason he was driving, not flying. It contained things best kept away from airport scanners.

  He closed up the garage and rolled east on Santa Monica Boulevard and turned south on 101 and hooked east again on 10. Squirmed in his seat and settled in for the two-day drive all the way out to Texas. He wasn’t a smoker, but he lit numerous cigarettes and held them between his fingers and flicked ash on the carpets, on the dash, on the wheel. He let the cigarettes burn out and crushed the butts in the ashtray. That way, the rental company would have to vacuum the car very thoroughly, and spray it with air freshener, and wipe down the vinyl with detailing fluid. That would eliminate every trace of him later, including his fingerprints.

  The second man was on the move, too. He was taller and heavier and fairer, but there was nothing memorable about him. He joined the end-of-the-workday crush at LAX and bought a ticket to Atlanta. When he got there, he swapped his wallet for one of the five spares in his carry-on and a completely different man bought another ticket for Dallas–Fort Worth.

  The woman traveled a day later. That was her privilege, because she was the team leader. She was closing in on middle age, medium-sized, medium-blond. Nothing at all special about her, except she killed people for a living. She left her car in the LAX long-term parking, which wasn’t dangerous because her car was registered to a Pasadena infant who had died of the measles thirty years previously. She rode the shuttle bus to the terminal and used a forged MasterCard to buy her ticket, and a genuine New York driver’s license for photo ID at the gate. She boarded her plane about the time the driver was starting his second day on the road.

  After his second stop for gas on the first day, he had made a detour into the New Mexico hills and found a quiet dusty shoulder where he squatted in the cool thin air and changed the car’s California plates for Arizona plates, which he took from the heavier valise. He wound his way back to the highway and drove another hour, then pulled off the road and found a motel. He paid cash, used a Tucson address, and let the desk clerk copy the Arizona plate number onto the registration form.

  He slept six hours with the room air on low and was back on the road early. Made it to Dallas–Fort Worth at the end of the second day and parked in the airport long-term lot. Took his valises with him and used the shuttle bus to departures. Took the moving stairs straight down to arrivals and lined up at the Hertz counter. Hertz, because they rent Fords, and he needed a Crown Victoria.

  He did the paperwork, with Illinois ID. Rode the bus to the Hertz lot and found his car. It was the plain-jane Crown Vic, in steel blue metallic, neither light nor dark. He was happy with it. He heaved his bags into the trunk and drove to a motel near the new ballpark on the road from Fort Worth to Dallas. Checked in with the same Illinois ID, ate, and slept a few hours. He woke early and met his two partners in the fierce morning heat outside the motel at exactly the same moment Jack Reacher first stuck out his thumb, more than four hundred miles away in Lubbock.

  Second surprise after the cop showing up was he got a ride within three minutes. He wasn’t even sweating yet. His shirt was still dry. Third surprise was the driver who stopped for him was a woman. Fourth and biggest surprise of all was the direction their subsequent conversation took.

  He had been hitching rides for the best part of twenty-five years, in more countries than he could easily recall, and three minutes was about the shortest interval between sticking out his thumb and climbing into a car he could remember. As a mode of transportation, hitching rides was dying out. That was his conclusion, based on a lot of experience. Commercial drivers had insurance problems with it, and private citizens were getting worried about it. Because who knew what kind of a psycho you were? And in Reacher’s case, it was worse than the average, especially right then. He wasn’t some dapper little guy, neat and inoffensive. He was a giant, six-five, heavily built, close to two hundred and fifty pounds. Up close, he was usually scruffy, usually unshaven, and his hair was usually a mess. People worried about him. They stayed away from him. And now he had the fresh new bruise on his forehead. Which was why he was surprised about the three minutes.

  And why he was surprised about the woman driver. There’s usually a pecking order, based on some kind of subconscious assessment of risk. Top of the list, a young girl will get a ride from an older man easiest of all, because where’s the threat in that? Although now, with some of the young girls turning into scam artists wanting a hundred bucks in exchange for dropping fake molestation claims, even that is getting harder. And whatever, right down there at the bottom of the list is a big scruffy guy getting a ride from a neat slender woman in an expensive coupe. But it happened. Within three minutes.

  He was hurrying south and west of the motel strip, stunned by the heat, hard to see in the jagged morning shadows, his left thumb jammed out urgently, when she pulled over at his side with the wet hiss of wide tires on hot pavement. It was a big white car and the sun on the hood dazzled him. He turned blindly and she buzzed her far window down. Seven forty-two, Friday morning.

  “Where to?” she called, like she was a cab driver, not a private citizen.

  “Anywhere,” he said.

  He regretted it, instantly. It was a dumb thing to say, because to have no specific destination usually makes things worse. They think you’re some kind of an aimless drifter, which makes them suspicious, and makes them worried they might never get rid of you. Makes them worried you’ll want to ride all the way home with them. But this woman just nodded.

  “O.K.,” she said. “I’m headed down past Pecos.”

  He paused a beat, surprised. Her head was ducked down, her face tilted up, looking out at him through the window.

  “Great,” he said.

  He stepped off the curb and opened the door and slid inside. The interior was freezing cold. She had the air roaring on maximum and the seat was leather and it felt like a block of ice. She buzzed the window up again with the button on her side as he swung the door shut behind him.

  “Thanks,” he said. “You don’t know how much I appreciate this.”

  She said nothing. Just made some kind of all-purpose dismissive gesture away from him as she craned to look over her shoulder at the traffic stream behind her. People have their reasons for giving rides, all of them different. Maybe they hitched a lot when they were younger and now they’re settled and comfortable they want to put back what they took out. Like a circular thing. Maybe they have charitable natures. Or maybe they’re just lonely and want a little conversation.

  But if this woman wanted conversation she was in no kind of a hurry to get it st
arted. She just waited for a couple of trucks to labor past and pulled out behind them without a word. Reacher glanced around inside the car. It was a Cadillac, two doors, but as long as a boat, and very fancy. Maybe a couple of years old, but as clean as a whistle. The leather was the color of old bones and the glass was tinted like an empty bottle of French wine. There was a pocketbook and a small briefcase thrown on the backseat. The pocketbook was anonymous and black, maybe plastic. The briefcase was made from weathered cowhide, the sort of thing that already looks old when you buy it. It was zipped open and there was a lot of folded paper stuffed in it, the sort of thing you see in a lawyer’s office.

  “Move the seat back, if you want,” the woman said. “Give yourself room.”

  “Thanks,” he said again.

  He found switches on the door shaped like seat cushions. He fiddled with them and quiet motors eased him rearward and reclined his backrest. Then he lowered the seat, to make himself inconspicuous from outside. The motors whirred. It was like being in a dentist’s chair.

  “That looks better,” she said. “More comfortable for you.”

  Her own chair was tight up to the wheel, because she was small. He twisted in his seat so he could look her over without staring straight at her. She was short and slim, dark-skinned, fine-boned. Altogether a small person. Maybe a hundred pounds, maybe thirty years old. Long black wavy hair, dark eyes, small white teeth visible behind a tense half-smile. Mexican, he guessed, but not the type of Mexican who swims the Rio Grande looking for a better life. This woman’s ancestors had enjoyed a better life for hundreds of years. That was pretty clear. It was in her genes. She looked like some kind of Aztec royalty. She was wearing a simple cotton dress, printed with a pale pattern. Not much to it, but it looked expensive. It was sleeveless and finished above her knees. Her arms and legs were dark and smooth, like they had been polished.

  “So, where are you headed?” she asked.

  Then she paused and smiled wider. “No, I already asked you that. You didn’t seem very clear about where you want to go.”

  Her accent was pure American, maybe more western than southern. She was steering two-handed, and he could see rings on her fingers. There was a slim wedding band, and a platinum thing with a big diamond.

  “Anywhere,” Reacher said. “Anywhere I end up, that’s where I want to go.”

  She paused and smiled again. “Are you running away from something? Have I picked up a dangerous fugitive?”

  Her smile meant it wasn’t a serious question, but he found himself thinking maybe it ought to have been. It wasn’t too far-fetched, in the circumstances. She was taking a risk. The sort of risk that was killing the art of hitching rides, as a mode of transportation.

  “I’m exploring,” he said.

  “Exploring Texas? They already discovered it.”

  “Like a tourist,” he said.

  “But you don’t look like a tourist. The tourists we get wear polyester leisure suits and come in a bus.”

  She smiled again as she said it. She looked good when she smiled. She looked assured and self-possessed, and refined to the point of elegance. An elegant Mexican woman, wearing an expensive dress, clearly comfortable with talking. Driving a Cadillac. He was suddenly aware of his short answers, and his hair and his stubble and his stained shirt and his creased khaki pants. And the big bruise on his forehead.

  “You live around here?” he asked, because she’d said the tourists we get, and he felt he needed something to say.

  “I live south of Pecos,” she said. “More than three hundred miles from here. I told you, that’s where I’m headed.”

  “Never been there,” he said.

  She went quiet and waited at a light. Took off again through a wide junction and hugged the right lane. He watched her thigh move as she pressed on the gas pedal. Her bottom lip was caught between her teeth. Her eyes were narrowed. She was tense about something, but she had it under control.

  “So, did you explore Lubbock?” she asked.

  “I saw the Buddy Holly statue.”

  He saw her glance down at the radio, like she was thinking this guy likes music, maybe I should put some on.

  “You like Buddy Holly?” she asked.

  “Not really,” Reacher said. “Too tame for me.”

  She nodded at the wheel. “I agree. I think Ritchie Valens was better. He was from Lubbock, too.”

  He nodded back. “I saw him in the Walk of Fame.”

  “How long were you in Lubbock?”

  “A day.”

  “And now you’re moving on.”

  “That’s the plan.”

  “To wherever,” she said.

  “That’s the plan,” he said again.

  They passed the city limit. There was a small metal sign on a pole on the sidewalk. He smiled to himself. City Police, the shield on the cop car had said. He turned his head and watched danger disappear behind him.

  The two men sat in the front of the Crown Victoria, with the tall fair man driving to give the small dark man a break. The woman sat in the back. They rolled out of the motel lot and picked up speed on I-20, heading west, toward Fort Worth, away from Dallas. Nobody spoke. Thinking about the vast interior of Texas was oppressing them. The woman had read a guidebook in preparation for the mission that pointed out that the state makes up fully seven percent of America’s land mass and is bigger than most European countries. That didn’t impress her. Everybody knew all that standard-issue Texas-is-real-big bullshit. Everybody always has. But the guide book also pointed out that side-to-side Texas is wider than the distance between New York and Chicago. That information had some impact. And it underlined why they were facing such a long drive, just to get from one nowhere interior location to another.

  But the car was quiet and cool and comfortable, and it was as good a place to relax as any motel room would be. They had a little time to kill, after all.

  The woman slowed and made a shallow right, toward New Mexico, then a mile later a left, straight south, toward old Mexico. Her dress was creased across the middle, like maybe she was wearing it a second day. Her perfume was subtle, mixed into the freezing air from the dashboard vents.

  “So is Pecan worth seeing?” Reacher asked, in the silence.

  “Pecos,” she said.

  “Right, Pecos.”

  She shrugged.

  “I like it,” she said. “It’s mostly Mexican, so I’m comfortable there.”

  Her right hand tensed on the wheel. He saw tendons shifting under the skin.

  “You like Mexican people?” she asked.

  He shrugged back. “As much as I like any people, I guess.”

  “You don’t like people?”

  “It varies.”

  “You like cantaloupe?”

  “As much as I like any fruit.”

  “Pecos grows the sweetest cantaloupe in the whole of Texas,” she said. “And therefore, in their opinion, in the whole of the world. Also there’s a rodeo there in July, but you’ve missed it for this year. And just north of Pecos is Loving County. You ever heard of Loving County?”

  He shook his head. “Never been here before.”

  “It’s the least-populated county in the whole of the United States,” she said. “Well, if you leave out some of the places in Alaska, I guess. But also the richest, per capita. Population is a hundred and ten souls, but there are four hundred and twenty oil leases active.”

  He nodded. “So let me out in Pecos. It sounds like a fun place.”

  “It was the real Wild West,” she said. “A long time ago, of course. The Texas and Pacific Railroad put a stop there. So there were saloons and all. Used to be a bad place. It was a word, too, as well as a town. A verb, and also a place. To pecos somebody meant to shoot them and throw them in the Pecos River.”

  “They still do that?”

  She smiled again. A different smile. This smile traded some elegance for some mischief. It eased her tension. It made her appealing.

  “No
, they don’t do that so much, now,” she said.

  “Your family from Pecos?”

  “No, California,” she said. “I came to Texas when I got married.”

  Keep talking, he thought. She saved your ass.

  “Been married long?” he asked.

  “Just under seven years.”

  “Your family been in California long?”

  She paused and smiled again.

  “Longer than any Californian, that’s for sure,” she said.

  They were in flat empty country and she eased the silent car faster down a dead-straight road. The hot sky was tinted bottle-green by the windshield. The instrumentation on her dashboard showed it was a hundred and ten degrees outside and sixty inside.

  “You a lawyer?” he asked.

  She was puzzled for a moment, and then she made the connection and craned to glance at her briefcase in the mirror.

  “No,” she said. “I’m a lawyer’s client.”

  The conversation went dead again. She seemed nervous, and he felt awkward about it.

  “And what else are you?” he asked.

  She paused a beat.

  “Somebody’s wife and mother,” she said. “And somebody’s daughter and sister, I guess. And I keep a few horses. That’s all. What are you?”

  “Nothing in particular,” Reacher said.

  “You have to be something,” she said.

  “Well, I used to be things,” he said. “I was somebody’s son, and somebody’s brother, and somebody’s boyfriend.”

  “Was?”

  “My parents died, my brother died, my girlfriend left me.”

  Not a great line, he thought. She said nothing back.

  “And I don’t have any horses,” he added.

  “I’m very sorry,” she said.

  “That I don’t have horses?”

  “No, that you’re all alone in the world.”

  “Water under the bridge,” he said. “It’s not as bad as it sounds.”

  “You’re not lonely?”