Echo Burning by Lee Child Read online

  “O.K.,” she said. “First thing tomorrow. Right here.”

  The big car turned and headed back south. The dust from its tires hung in the air for long minutes and then floated down to the powdery ground.

  Carmen came off the highway just short of Pecos and speared south on a small county road that led down into total emptiness. Within five miles, they could have been on the surface of the moon.

  “Tell me about Echo,” he said.

  She shrugged. “What’s to tell? It’s nothing. When they were first mapping Texas a hundred years ago, the Census Bureau called a place settled if it had more than six people to the square mile, and we still don’t qualify. We’re still the frontier.”

  “But it’s very beautiful,” he said.

  And it was. The road was snaking and diving through endless contours, with red rock canyons either side of it, tall and noble to the east, fractured and pierced to the west, where ancient streams had sought the banks of the Rio Grande. Tall dry mountains reared beyond, with an immense technicolor sky above, and even in the speeding car he could sense the stunning silence of thousands of square miles of absolute emptiness.

  “I hate it,” she said.

  “Where will I be?” he asked.

  “On the property. In the bunkhouse, I guess. They’ll hire you for the horses. We’re always a man short. You show up with a pulse, they’ll be interested. You can say you’re a wrangler. It’ll be a good disguise. It’ll keep you close by.”

  “I don’t know anything about horses.”

  She shrugged. “Maybe they won’t notice. They don’t notice much. Like me getting beaten half to death.”

  An hour later, they were tight for time. She was driving fast enough that the tire squeal from the curves was more or less continuous. They came up a long steep grade and then turned out between two rock pillars on a peak and suddenly there was flat land below them as far as the eye could see. The road fell away like a twisted tan ribbon and was crossed twenty miles ahead by another, just visible through the haze like a faint line on a map. The distant crossroads was studded with a handful of tiny buildings, and apart from them and the two roads there was no evidence humans had ever lived on the planet.

  “Echo County,” she said. “Everything you see, and a lot more besides. A thousand square miles, and a hundred and fifty people. Well, a hundred and forty-eight, because one of them is sitting right here with you, and one of them is still in jail.”

  Her mood had improved, because she said it with a wry smile. But she was looking at a tiny plume of dust on the road far below them. It was puffing out like a squirrel’s tail, crawling slowly south, a quarter of the way to the crossroads.

  “That must be the school bus,” she said. “We have to beat it to town, or Ellie will get on and we’ll miss her.”

  “Town?” Reacher said.

  She smiled again, briefly.

  “You’re looking at it,” she said. “Uptown Echo.”

  She accelerated down the grade and the Cadillac’s own dust swirled and hung behind it. The landscape was so vast that speed seemed slowed to absurdity. Reacher figured the bus might be a half hour from the crossroads, and the Cadillac was traveling twice as fast, so they should catch it inside fifteen minutes, even though the elevation and the clear desert air made it look close enough to reach out and touch, like a child’s toy on the floor of a room.

  “It’s good of you to be coming,” she said. “Thank you. I mean it.”

  “No hay de que, señorita,” he said.

  “So you do know more than a few words.”

  He shrugged. “There were a lot of Spanish-speaking people in the army. Most of the new generation, in fact. Some of the best of them.”

  “Like baseball,” she said.

  “Yes,” he said. “Like baseball.”

  “But you should call me señora. Señorita makes me too happy.”

  She accelerated again when the road leveled out and about a mile before they caught up with the bus she swung out into the wrong lane, ready to pass it. Safe enough, he figured. The chances of meeting oncoming traffic in that part of the world were worse than winning the lottery. She reeled in the bus and pulled through the cone of dust and blasted past and stayed on the left for another mile. Then she eased back right and five minutes later they were slowing as they approached the crossroads.

  From ground level the hamlet looked ragged and defeated, the way small places do under the heat of the sun. There were lots partially overrun with dry thorny weeds, delineated with raw block walls, commercially zoned but never developed. There was a diner on the right on the northwest corner, nothing more than a long, low shack made of wood with all the color baked right out of it. Diagonally opposite was the school, a one-room building like something out of a history book. The beginnings of rural education. Opposite that on the southwest corner was a gas station with two pumps and a small yard filled with stalled cars behind it. Diagonally opposite the gas station and across the road from the school the northeast corner was an empty lot, with concrete blocks spilled randomly across it, like an optimistic new venture had been planned and then abandoned, maybe while LBJ was still in office. There were four other buildings, all one story, all plain concrete, all set back with thin rough driveways leading to them from the road. Houses, Reacher guessed. Their yards were littered with junk, children’s bikes and tired automobiles on blocks and old living room furniture. The yards were baked dry and hard and had low chicken-wire fences around them, maybe to keep the big snakes out.

  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 movement. 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?�
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  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.”