Echo Burning by Lee Child Page 6

  “O.K., you got my attention,” he said, looking out at the car.

  “It happened for five whole years,” she said. “Exactly like I told you, I promise. Almost every day. But then it stopped, a year and a half ago. But I had to tell it to you backward, because I needed you to listen to me.”

  He said nothing.

  “This isn’t easy,” she said. “Telling this stuff to a stranger.”

  He turned back to face her. “It isn’t easy listening to it.”

  She took a breath. “You going to run out on me?”

  He shrugged. “I almost did, a minute ago.”

  She was quiet again.

  “Please don’t,” she said. “At least not here. Please. Just listen a little more.”

  He looked straight at her.

  “O.K., I’m listening,” he said.

  “But will you still help me?”

  “With what?”

  She said nothing.

  “What did it feel like?” he asked. “Getting hit?”

  “Feel like?” she repeated.

  “Physically,” he said.

  She looked away. Thought about it.

  “Depends where,” she said.

  He nodded. She knew it felt different in different places.

  “The stomach,” he said.

  “I threw up a lot,” she said. “I was worried, because there was blood.”

  He nodded again. She knew what it felt like to be hit in the stomach.

  “I swear it’s true,” she said. “Five whole years. Why would I make it up?”

  “So what happened?” he said. “Why did he stop?”

  She paused, like she was aware people might be looking at her. Reacher glanced up, and saw heads turn away. The cook, the waitress, the two guys at the distant tables. The cook and the waitress were faster about it than the two guys chose to be. There was hostility in their faces.

  “Can we go now?” she asked. “We need to get back. It’s a long drive.”

  “I’m coming with you?”

  “That’s the whole point,” she said.

  He glanced away again, out of the window.

  “Please, Reacher,” she said. “At least hear the rest of the story, and then decide. I can let you out in Pecos, if you won’t come all the way to Echo. You can see the museum. You can see Clay Allison’s grave.”

  He watched the bar of shadow touch the Cadillac’s windshield. The interior would be like a furnace by now.

  “You should see it anyway,” she said. “If you’re exploring Texas.”

  “O.K.,” he said.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  He made no reply.

  “Wait for me,” she said. “I need to go to the bathroom. It’s a long drive.”

  She slid out of the booth with uninjured grace and walked the length of the room, head down, looking neither left nor right. The two guys at the tables watched her until she was almost past them and then switched their blank gazes straight back to Reacher. He ignored them and turned the check over and dumped small change from his pocket on top of it, exact amount, no tip. He figured a waitress who didn’t talk didn’t want one. He slid out of the booth and walked to the door. The two guys watched him all the way. He stood in front of the glass and looked out beyond the parking lot. Watched the flat land bake under the sun for a minute or two until he heard her footsteps behind him. Her hair was combed and she had done something with her lipstick.

  “I guess I’ll use the bathroom too,” he said.

  She glanced right, halfway between the two guys.

  “Wait until I’m in the car,” she said. “I don’t want to be left alone in here. I shouldn’t have come in here in the first place.”

  She pushed out through the doors and he watched her to the car. She got in and he saw it shudder as she started the engine to run the air. He turned and walked back to the men’s room. It was a fair-sized space, two porcelain urinals and one toilet cubicle. A chipped sink with a cold water faucet. A fat roll of paper towels sitting on top of the machine it should have been installed in. Not the cleanest facility he had ever seen.

  He unzipped and used the left-hand urinal. Heard footsteps outside the door and glanced up at the chromium valve that fed the flush pipes. It was dirty, but it was rounded and it reflected what was behind him like a tiny security mirror. He saw the door open and a man step inside. He saw the door close again and the man settle back against it. He was one of the customers. Presumably one of the pick-up drivers. The chromium valve distorted the view, but the guy’s head was nearly to the top of the door. Not a small person. And he was fiddling blindly behind his back. Reacher heard the click of the door lock. Then the guy shifted again and hung his hands loose by his sides. He was wearing a black T-shirt. There was writing on it, but Reacher couldn’t read it backward. Some kind of an insignia. Maybe an oil company.

  “You new around here?” the guy asked.

  Reacher made no reply. Just watched the reflection.

  “I asked you a question,” the guy said.

  Reacher ignored him.

  “I’m talking to you,” the guy said.

  “Well, that’s a big mistake,” Reacher said. “All you know, I might be a polite type of person. I might feel obligated to turn around and listen, whereupon I’d be pissing all over your shoes.”

  The guy shuffled slightly, caught out. Clearly he had some kind of set speech prepared, which was what Reacher had been counting on. A little improvised interruption might slow him down some. Maybe enough to get zipped up and decent. The guy was still shuffling, deciding whether to react.

  “So I guess it’s down to me to tell you,” he said. “Somebody’s got to.”

  He wasn’t reacting. No talent for repartee.

  “Tell me what?” Reacher asked.

  “How it is around here.”

  Reacher paused a beat. The only problem with coffee was its diuretic effect.

  “And how is it around here?” he asked.

  “Around here, you don’t bring beaners into decent folks’ places.”

  “What?” Reacher said.

  “What part don’t you understand?”

  Reacher breathed out. Maybe ten seconds to go.

  “I didn’t understand any of it,” he said.

  “You don’t bring beaners in a place like this.”

  “What’s a beaner?” Reacher asked.

  The guy took a step forward. His reflection grew disproportionately larger.

  “Latinos,” he said. “Eat beans all the time.”

  “Latina,” Reacher said. “With an a. Gender counts with inflected languages. And she had iced coffee. Haven’t seen her eat a bean all day.”

  “You some kind of a smart guy?”

  Reacher finished and zipped up with a sigh. Didn’t flush. A place like that, it didn’t seem like standard practice. He just turned to the sink and operated the faucet.

  “Well, I’m smarter than you,” he said. “That’s for damn sure. But then, that’s not saying much. This roll of paper towels is smarter than you. A lot smarter. Each sheet on its own is practically a genius, compared to you. They could stroll into Harvard, one by one, full scholarships for each of them, while you’re still struggling with your GED.”

  It was like taunting a dinosaur. Some kind of a brontosaurus, where the brain is a very long distance from anyplace else. The sound went in, and some time later it was received and understood. Four or five seconds, until it showed in the guy’s face. Four or five seconds after that, he swung with his right. It was a ponderous slow swing with a big bunched fist on the end of a big heavy arm, aiming wide and high for Reacher’s head. It could have caused some damage, if it had landed. But it didn’t land. Reacher caught the guy’s wrist in his left palm and stopped the swing dead. A loud wet smack echoed off the bathroom tile.

  “The bacteria on this floor are smarter than you,” he said.

  He twisted his hips ninety degrees so his groin was protected and he squeeze
d the guy’s wrist with his hand. There had been a time when he could break bones by squeezing with his hand. It was more about blind determination than sheer strength.

  But right then, he didn’t feel it.

  “This is your lucky day,” he said. “All I know, you could be a cop. So I’m going to let you go.”

  The guy was staring desperately at his wrist, watching it get crushed. The clammy flesh was swelling and going red.

  “After you apologize,” Reacher said.

  The guy stared on, four or five seconds. Like a dinosaur.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I apologize.”

  “Not to me, asshole,” Reacher said. “To the lady.”

  The guy said nothing. Reacher turned up the pressure. Felt his thumb go slick with sweat, sliding up over the tip of his index finger. Felt the bones in the guy’s wrist click and move. The radius and the ulna, getting closer than nature intended.

  “O.K.,” the guy gasped. “Enough.”

  Reacher released the wrist. The guy snatched it back and cradled his hand, panting, looking up, looking down.

  “Give me the keys to your truck,” Reacher said.

  The guy twisted awkwardly to get into his right pocket with his left hand. Held out a large bunch of keys.

  “Now go wait for me in the parking lot,” Reacher said.

  The guy unlocked the door left-handed and shuffled out. Reacher dropped the keys in the unflushed urinal and washed his hands again. Dried them carefully with the paper towels and left the bathroom behind him. He found the guy out in the lot, halfway between the diner door and the Cadillac.

  “Be real nice, now,” Reacher called to him. “Maybe offer to wash her car or something. She’ll say no, but it’s the thought that counts, right? If you’re creative enough, you get your keys back. Otherwise, you’re walking home.”

  He could see through the tinted glass that she was watching them approach, not understanding. He motioned with his hand that she should let her window down. A circular motion, like winding a handle. She buzzed the glass down, maybe two inches, just wide enough to frame her eyes. They were wide and worried.

  “This guy’s got something to say to you,” Reacher said.

  He stepped back. The guy stepped up. Looked down at the ground, and then back at Reacher, like a whipped dog. Reacher nodded, encouragingly. The guy put his hand on his chest, like an operatic tenor or a fancy maître d’. Bent slightly from the waist, to address the two-inch gap in the glass.

  “Ma’am,” he said. “Just wanted to say we’d all be real pleased if y’all would come back real soon, and would you like me to wash your car, seeing as you’re here right now?”

  “What?” she said.

  They both turned separately to Reacher, the guy pleading, Carmen astonished.

  “Beat it,” he said. “I left your keys in the bathroom.”

  Four, five seconds later, the guy was back on his way to the diner. Reacher stepped around the hood to his door. Pulled it open.

  “I thought you were running out on me,” Carmen said. “I thought you’d asked that guy for a ride.”

  “I’d rather ride with you,” he said.

  The Crown Victoria drove south to a lonely crossroads hamlet. There was an old diner on the right and a vacant lot on the left. A melted stop line on the road. Then a decrepit gas station, and opposite it a one-room schoolhouse. Dust and heat shimmer everywhere. The big car slowed and crawled through the junction at walking pace. It rolled past the school gate and then suddenly picked up speed and drove away.

  Little Ellie Greer watched it go. She was in a wooden chair at the schoolroom window, halfway through raising the lid of her big blue lunch box. She heard the brief shriek of rubber as the car accelerated. She turned her head and stared after it. She was a serious, earnest child, much given to silent observation. She kept her big dark eyes on the road until the dust settled. Then she turned back to matters at hand and inspected her lunch, and wished her mom had been home to pack it, instead of the maid, who belonged to the Greers and was mean.

  3

  “What happened a year and a half ago?” Reacher asked.

  She didn’t answer. They were on a long straight deserted road, with the sun just about dead-center above them. Heading south and near noon, he figured. The road was made of patched blacktop, smooth enough, but the shoulders were ragged. There were lonely billboards at random intervals, advertising gas and accommodations and markets many miles ahead. Either side of the road the landscape was flat and parched and featureless, dotted here and there with still windmills in the middle distance. There were automobile engines mounted on concrete pads, closer to the road. Big V-8s, like you would see under the hood of an ancient Chevrolet or Chrysler, painted yellow and streaked with rust, with stubby black exhaust pipes standing vertically.

  “Water pumps,” Carmen said. “For irrigating the fields. There was agriculture here, in the old days. Back then, gasoline was cheaper than water, so those things ran all day and all night. Now there’s no water left, and gas has gotten too expensive.”

  The land fell away on every side, covered with dry brush. On the far horizon southwest of the endless road, there might have been mountains a hundred miles away. Or it might have been a trick of the heat.

  “Are you hungry?” she asked. “If we don’t stop we could pick Ellie up from school, and I’d really like to do that. I haven’t seen her since yesterday.”

  “Whatever you want,” Reacher said.

  She accelerated until the big Cadillac was doing eighty and wallowing heavily over the undulations in the road. He straightened in his seat and tightened his belt against the reel. She glanced across at him.

  “Do you believe me yet?” she asked.

  He glanced back at her. He had spent thirteen years as an investigator, and his natural instinct was to believe nothing at all.

  “What happened a year and a half ago?” he asked. “Why did he stop?”

  She adjusted her grip on the wheel. Opened her palms, stretched her fingers, closed them tight again on the rim.

  “He went to prison,” she said.

  “For beating up on you?”

  “In Texas?” she said. She laughed, just a yelp, like a short cry of pain. “Now I know you’re new here.”

  He said nothing. Just watched Texas reel in through the windshield ahead of him, hot and brassy and yellow.

  “It just doesn’t happen,” she said. “In Texas a gentleman would never raise his hand to a woman. Everybody knows that. Especially not a white gentleman whose family has been here over a hundred years. So if a greaseball whore wife dared to claim a thing like that, they’d lock her up, probably in a rubber room.”

  The day her life changed forever.

  “So what did he do?”

  “He evaded federal taxes,” she said. “He made a lot of money trading oil leases and selling drilling equipment down in Mexico. He neglected to tell the IRS about it. In fact, he neglected to tell the IRS about anything. One day they caught him.”

  “They put you in jail for that?”

  She made a face. “Actually, they try hard not to. A first-time thing like that, they were willing to let him pay, you know, make proposals and so forth. A clean breast and a pay-back plan is what they’re looking for. But Sloop was way too stubborn for that. He made them dig everything out for themselves. He was hiding things right up to the trial. He refused to pay anything. He even disputed that he owed them anything, which was ridiculous. And all the money was hidden behind family trusts, so they couldn’t just take it. It made them mad, I think.”

  “So they prosecuted?”

  She nodded at the wheel.

  “With a vengeance,” she said. “A federal case. You know that expression? Making a federal case out of something? Now I see why people say that. Biggest fuss you ever saw. A real contest, the local good old boys against the Treasury Department. Sloop’s lawyer is his best friend from high school, and his other best friend from high school
is the DA in Pecos County, and he was advising them on strategy and stuff like that, but the IRS just rolled right over all of them. It was a massacre. He got three-to-five years. The judge set the minimum at thirty months in jail. And cut me a break.”

  Reacher said nothing. She accelerated past a truck, the first vehicle they had seen in more than twenty miles.

  “I was so happy,” she said. “I’ll never forget it. A white-collar thing like that, after the verdict came in they just told him to present himself at the federal prison the next morning. They didn’t drag him away in handcuffs or anything. He came home and packed a little suitcase. We had a big family meal, stayed up kind of late. Went upstairs, and that was the last time he hit me. Next morning, his friends drove him up to the jail, someplace near Abilene. A Club Fed is what they call it. Minimum security. It’s supposed to be comfortable. I heard you can play tennis there.”

  “Do you visit him?”

  She shook her head.

  “I pretend he’s dead,” she said.

  She went quiet, and the car sped on toward the haze on the horizon. There were mountains visible to the southwest, unimaginably distant.

  “The Trans-Pecos,” she said. “Watch for the light to change color. It’s very beautiful.”

  He looked ahead, but the light was so bright it had no color at all.

  “Minimum thirty months is two and a half years,” she said. “I thought it safest to bet on the minimum. He’s probably behaving himself in there.”

  Reacher nodded. “Probably.”

  “So, two and a half years,” she said. “I wasted the first one and a half.”

  “You’ve still got twelve months. That’s plenty of time for anything.”

  She was quiet again.

  “Talk me through it,” she said. “We have to agree on what needs to be done. That’s important. That way, you’re seeing it exactly the same way I am.”

  He said nothing.