2

 

“It wasn’t an accident I picked you up, you know,” Carmen Greer said.

Reacher’s back was pressed against his door. The Cadillac was listing like a sinking ship, canted hard over on the shoulder. The slippery leather seat gave him no leverage to struggle upright. The woman had one hand on the wheel and the other on his seat back, propping herself above him. Her face was a foot away. It was unreadable. She was looking past him, out at the dust of the ditch.

“You going to be able to drive off this slope?” he asked.

She glanced back and up at the blacktop. Its rough surface was shimmering with heat, about level with the base of her window.

“I think so,” she said. “I hope so.”

“I hope so, too,” he said.

She just stared at him.

“So why did you pick me up?” he asked.

“Why do you think?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I thought I just got lucky. I guess I thought you were a kind person doing a stranger a favor.”

She shook her head.

“No, I was looking for a guy like you,” she said.

“Why?”

“I must have picked up a dozen guys,” she said. “And I’ve seen hundreds. That’s about all I’ve been doing, all month long. Cruising around West Texas, looking at who needs a ride.”

“Why?”

She shrugged the question away. A dismissive little gesture.

“The miles I’ve put on this car,” she said. “It’s unbelievable. And the money I’ve spent on gas.”

“Why?” he asked again.

She went quiet. Wouldn’t answer. Just went into a long silence. The armrest on the door was digging into his kidney. He arched his back and pressed with his shoulders and adjusted his position. Found himself wishing somebody else had picked him up. Somebody content just to motor from A to B. He looked up at her.

“Can I call you Carmen?” he asked.

She nodded. “Sure. Please.”

“O.K., Carmen,” he said. “Tell me what’s going on here, will you?”

Her mouth opened, and then it closed again. Opened, and closed.

“I don’t know how to start,” she said. “Now that it’s come to it.”

“Come to what?”

She wouldn’t answer.

“You better tell me exactly what you want,” he said. “Or I’m getting out of the car right here, right now.”

“It’s a hundred and ten degrees out there.”

“I know it is.”

“A person could die in this heat.”

“I’ll take my chances.”

“You can’t get your door open,” she said. “The car is tilted too much.”

“Then I’ll punch out the windshield.”

She paused a beat.

“I need your help,” she said again.

“You never saw me before.”

“Not personally,” she said. “But you fit the bill.”

“What bill?”

She went quiet again. Came up with a brief, ironic smile.

“It’s so difficult,” she said. “I’ve rehearsed this speech a million times, but now I don’t know if it’s going to come out right.”

Reacher said nothing. Just waited.

“You ever had anything to do with lawyers?” she asked. “They don’t do anything for you. They just want a lot of money and a lot of time, and then they tell you there’s nothing much to be done.”

“So get a new lawyer,” he said.

“I’ve had four,” she said. “Four, in a month. They’re all the same. And they’re all too expensive. I don’t have enough money.”

“You’re driving a Cadillac.”

“It’s my mother-in-law’s. I’m only borrowing it.”

“You’re wearing a big diamond ring.”

She went quiet again. Her eyes clouded.

“My husband gave it to me,” she said.

He looked at her. “So can’t he help you?”

“No, he can’t help me,” she said. “Have you ever gone looking for a private detective?”

“Never needed one. I was a detective.”

“They don’t really exist,” she said. “Not like you see in the movies. They just want to sit in their offices and work with the phone. Or on their computers, with their databases. They won’t come out and actually do anything for you. I went all the way to Austin. A guy there said he could help, but he wanted to use six men and charge me nearly ten thousand dollars a week.”

“For what?”

“So I got desperate. I was really panicking. Then I got this idea. I figured if I looked at people hitching rides, I might find somebody. One of them might turn out to be the right type of person, and willing to help me. I tried to choose pretty carefully. I only stopped for rough-looking men.”

“Thanks, Carmen,” Reacher said.

“I don’t mean it badly,” she said. “It’s not uncomplimentary.”

“But it could have been dangerous.”

She nodded. “It nearly was, a couple of times. But I had to take the risk. I had to find somebody. I figured I might get rodeo guys, or men from the oil fields. You know, tough guys, roughnecks, maybe out of work, with a little time on their hands. Maybe a little anxious to earn some money, but I can’t pay much. Is that going to be a problem?”

“So far, Carmen, everything is going to be a problem.”

She went quiet again.

“I talked to them all,” she said. “You know, chatted with them a little, discussed things, like we did. I was trying to make some kind of judgment about what they were like, inside, in terms of their characters. I was trying to assess their qualities. Maybe twelve of them. And none of them were really any good. But I think you are.”

“You think I’m what?”

“I think you’re my best chance so far,” she said. “Really, I do. A former cop, been in the army, no ties anywhere, you couldn’t be better.”

“I’m not looking for a job, Carmen.”

She nodded happily. “I know. I figured that out already. But that’s better still, I think. It keeps it pure, don’t you see that? Help for help’s sake. No mercenary aspect to it. And your background is perfect. It obligates you.”

He stared at her. “No, it doesn’t.”

“You were a soldier,” she said. “And a policeman. It’s perfect. You’re supposed to help people. That’s what cops do.”

“We spent most of our time busting heads. Not a whole lot of helping went on.”

“But it must have. That’s what cops are for. It’s like their fundamental duty. And an army cop is even better. You said it yourself, you do what’s necessary.”

“If you need a cop, go to the county sheriff. Pecos, or wherever it is.”

“Echo,” she said. “I live in Echo. South of Pecos.”

“Wherever,” he said. “Go to the sheriff.”

She was shaking her head. “No, I can’t do that.”

Reacher said nothing more. Just lay half on his back, pressed up against the door by the car’s steep angle. The engine was idling patiently, and the air was still roaring. The woman was still braced above him. She had gone silent. She was staring out past him and blinking, like she was about to cry. Like she was ready for a big flood of tears. Like she was tragically disappointed, maybe with him, maybe with herself.

“You must think I’m crazy,” she said.

He turned his head and looked hard at her, top to toe. Strong slim legs, strong slim arms, the expensive dress. It was riding up on her thighs, and he could see her bra strap at her shoulder. It was snow white against the color of her skin. She had clean combed hair and trimmed painted nails. An elegant, intelligent face, tired eyes.

“I’m not crazy,” she said.

Then she looked straight at him. Something in her face. Maybe an appeal. Or maybe hopelessness, or desperation.

“It’s just that I’ve dreamed about this for a month,” she said. “My last hope. It was a ridiculous plan, I guess, but it’s all I had. And there was always the chance it would work, and with you I think maybe it could, and now I’m screwing it up by coming across like a crazy woman.”

He paused a long time. Minutes. He thought back to a pancake house he’d seen in Lubbock, right across the strip from his motel. It had looked pretty good. He could have crossed the street, gone in there, had a big stack with bacon on the side. Lots of syrup. Maybe an egg. He would have come out a half hour after she blew town. He could be sitting next to some cheerful trucker now, listening to rock and roll on the radio. On the other hand, he could be bruised and bleeding in a police cell, with an arraignment date coming up.

“So start over,” he said. “Just say what you’ve got to say. But first, drive us out of this damn ditch. I’m very uncomfortable. And I could use a cup of coffee. Is there anyplace up ahead where we could get coffee?”

“I think so,” she said. “Yes, there is. About an hour, I think.”

“So let’s go there. Let’s get a cup of coffee.”

“You’re going to dump me and run,” she said.

It was an attractive possibility. She stared at him, maybe five long seconds, and then she nodded, like a decision was made. She put the transmission in D and hit the gas. The car had front-wheel drive, and all the weight was on the back, so the tires just clawed at nothing and spun. Gravel rattled against the underbody and a cloud of hot khaki dust rose up all around them. Then the tires caught and the car heaved itself out of the ditch and bounced up over the edge of the blacktop. She got it straight in the lane, and then she floored it and took off south.

“I don’t know where to begin,” she said.

“At the beginning,” he said. “Always works best that way. Think about it, tell me over coffee. We’ve got the time.”

She shook her head. Stared forward through the windshield, eyes locked on the empty shimmering road ahead. She was quiet for a mile, already doing seventy.

“No, we don’t,” she said. “It’s real urgent.”

 

 

Fifty miles southwest of Abilene, on a silent county road ten miles north of the main east-west highway, the Crown Victoria waited quietly on the shoulder, its engine idling, its hood unlatched and standing an inch open for better cooling. All around it was flatness so extreme the curvature of the earth was revealed, the dusty parched brush falling slowly away to the horizon in every direction. There was no traffic, and therefore no noise beyond the tick and whisper of the idling engine and the heavy buzz of the earth baking and cracking under the unbearable heat of the sun.

The driver had the electric door mirror racked all the way outward so he could see the whole of the road behind him. The Crown Vic’s own dust had settled and the view was clear for about a mile, right back to the point where the blacktop and the sky mixed together and broke and boiled into a silvery shimmering mirage. The driver had his eyes focused on that distant glare, waiting for it to be pierced by the indistinct shape of a car.

He knew what car it would be. The team was well briefed. It would be a white Mercedes Benz, driven by a man on his own toward an appointment he couldn’t miss. The man would be driving fast, because he would be running late, because he was habitually late for everything. They knew the time of his appointment, and they knew his destination was thirty miles farther on up the road, so simple arithmetic gave them a target time they could set their watches by. A target time that was fast approaching.

“So let’s do it,” the driver said.

He stepped out of the car into the heat and clicked the hood down into place. Slid back into the seat and took a ball cap from the woman. It was one of three bought from a souvenir vendor on Hollywood Boulevard, thirteen ninety-five each. It was dark blue, with FBI machine-embroidered in white cotton thread across the front. The driver squared it on his head and pulled the peak low over his eyes. Moved the transmission lever into drive and kept his foot hard on the brake. Leaned forward a fraction and kept his eyes on the mirror.

“Right on time,” he said.

The silver mirage was boiling and wobbling and a white shape pulled free of it and speared out toward them like a fish leaping out of water. The shape settled and steadied on the road, moving fast, crouching low. A white Mercedes sedan, wide tires, dark windows.

The driver eased his foot off the brake and the Crown Vic crawled forward through the dust. He touched the gas when the Mercedes was still a hundred yards behind him. The Mercedes roared past and the Crown Vic pulled out into the hot blast of its slipstream. The driver straightened the wheel and accelerated. Smiled with his lips hard together. The killing crew was going to work again.

 

 

The Mercedes driver saw headlights flashing in his mirror and looked again and saw the sedan behind him. Two peaked caps silhouetted in the front seat. He dropped his eyes automatically to his speedometer, which was showing more than ninety. Felt the cold oh-shit stab in his chest. Eased off the gas while he calculated how late he was already and how far he still had to go and what his best approach to these guys should be. Humility? Or maybe I’m-too-important-to-be-hassled? Or what about a sort of come-on-guys, I’m-working-too camaraderie?

The sedan pulled alongside as he slowed and he saw three people, one of them a woman. Radio antennas all over the car. No lights, no siren. Not regular cops. The driver was waving him to the shoulder. The woman was pressing an ID wallet against her window. It had FBI in two-inch-high letters. Their caps said FBI. Serious-looking people, in some kind of duty fatigues. Serious-looking squad car. He relaxed a little. The FBI didn’t stop you for speeding. Must be something else. Maybe some kind of security check, which made sense considering what lay thirty miles up the road. He nodded to the woman and braked and eased right, onto the shoulder. He feathered the pedal and coasted to a stop in a big cloud of dust. The Bureau car eased up and stopped behind him, the brightness of its headlight beams dimmed by the cloud.

 

 

The way to do it is to keep them quiet and alive as long as possible. Postpone any kind of struggle. Struggling leads to evidence, blood and fibers and body fluids spraying and leaking all over the place. So they all three got out of the car at a medium speed, like they were harassed professionals dealing with something important, but not something right up there at the top of their agenda.

“Mr. Eugene?” the woman called. “Al Eugene, right?”

The Mercedes driver opened his door and slid out of his seat and stood up in the heat and the glare. He was around thirty, not tall, dark and sallow, soft and rounded. He faced the woman, and she saw some kind of innate southern courtesy toward women place him at an immediate disadvantage.

“What can I do for you, ma’am?” he asked.

“Your cellular phone not working, sir?” the woman asked.

Eugene patted at the pocket of his suit coat.

“Should be,” he said.

“May I see it, sir?”

Eugene took it out of his pocket and handed it over. The woman dialed a number and looked surprised.

“Seems O.K.,” she said. “Sir, can you spare us five minutes?”

“Maybe,” Eugene said. “If you tell me what for.”

“We have an FBI assistant director a mile up the road, needs to speak with you. Something urgent, I guess, or we wouldn’t be here, and something pretty important, or we’d have been told what it’s all about.”

Eugene pulled back his cuff and looked at his watch.

“I have an appointment,” he said.

The woman was nodding. “We know about that, sir. We took the liberty of calling ahead and rescheduling for you. Five minutes is all we need.”

Eugene shrugged.

“Can I see some ID?” he asked.

The woman handed over her wallet. It was made of worn black leather and had a milky plastic window on the outside. There was an FBI photo-ID behind it, laminated and embossed and printed with the kind of slightly old-fashioned typeface the federal government might use. Like most people in the United States, Eugene had never seen an FBI ID. He assumed he was looking at his first.

“Up the road a-piece?” he said. “O.K., I’ll follow you, I guess.”

“We’ll drive you,” the woman said. “There’s a checkpoint in place, and civilian cars make them real nervous. We’ll bring you right back. Five minutes, is all.”

Eugene shrugged again.

“O.K.,” he said.

They all walked as a group back toward the Crown Vic. The driver held the front passenger door for Eugene.

“You ride up here, sir,” he said. “They’re listing you as a class-A individual, and if we put a class-A individual in the backseat, then we’ll get our asses kicked but good, that’s for damn sure.”

They saw Eugene swell up a little from his assigned status. He nodded and ducked down and slid into the front seat. Either he hadn’t noticed they still had his phone, or he didn’t care. The driver closed the door on him and ducked around the hood to his own. The tall fair man and the woman climbed into the rear. The Crown Vic eased around the parked Benz and pulled left onto the blacktop. Accelerated up to about fifty-five.

“Ahead,” the woman said.

The driver nodded.

“I see it,” he said. “We’ll make it.”

There was a plume of dust on the road, three or four miles into the distance. It was rising up and dragging left in the faint breeze. The driver slowed, hunting the turn he had scouted thirty minutes before. He spotted it and pulled left and crossed the opposite shoulder and bumped down through a depression where the road was built up like a causeway. Then he slewed to the right, tight in behind a stand of brush tall enough to hide the car. The man and the woman in the rear seat came out with handguns and leaned forward and jammed them into Eugene’s neck, right behind the ears where the structure of the human skull provides two nice muzzle-shaped sockets.

“Sit real still,” the woman said.

Eugene sat real still. Two minutes later, a big dark vehicle blasted by above them. A truck, or a bus. Dust clouded the sky and the brush rustled in the moving air. The driver got out and approached Eugene’s door with a gun in his hand. He opened the door and leaned in and jammed the muzzle into Eugene’s throat, where the ends of the collarbones make another convenient socket.

“Get out,” he said. “Real careful.”

“What?” was all Eugene could say.

“We’ll tell you what,” the woman said. “Now get out.”

Eugene got out, with three guns at his head.

“Step away from the car,” the woman said. “Walk away from the road.”

This was the tricky time. Eugene was glancing around as far and as fast as he dared move his head. His eyes were jumping. His body was twitching. He stepped away from the car. One pace, two, three. Eyes everywhere. The woman nodded.

“Al,” she called loudly.

Her two partners jumped away, long sideways strides. Eugene’s head snapped around to face the woman who had called his name. She shot him through the right eye. The sound of the gun clapped and rolled across the hot landscape like thunder. The back of Eugene’s head came off in a messy cloud and he went straight down and sprawled in a loose tangle of arms and legs. The woman stepped around him and crouched down and took a closer look. Then she stepped away and stood up straight with her legs and arms spread, like she was ready to be searched at the airport.

“Check,” she said.

The two men stepped close and examined every inch of her skin and clothing. They checked her hair and her hands.

“Clear,” the small dark man said.

“Clear,” the tall fair man said.

She nodded. A faint smile. No residue. No evidence. No blood or bone or brains anywhere on her person.

“O.K.,” she said.

The two men stepped back to Eugene and took an arm and a leg each and dragged his body ten feet into the brush. They had found a narrow limestone cleft there, a crack in the rock maybe eight feet deep and a foot and a half across, wide enough to take a man’s corpse sideways, too narrow to admit the six-foot wingspan of a vulture or a buzzard. They maneuvered the body until the trailing hand and the trailing foot fell into the hole. Then they lowered away carefully until they were sure the torso would fit. This guy was fatter than some. But he slid in without snagging on the rock. As soon as they were sure, they dropped him the rest of the way. He wedged tight, about seven feet down.

The bloodstains were already drying and blackening. They kicked desert dust over them and swept the area with a mesquite branch to confuse the mass of footprints. Then they walked over and climbed into the Crown Vic and the driver backed up and swung through the brush. Bounced through the dip and up the slope to the roadway. The big car nosed back the way it had come and accelerated gently to fifty-five miles an hour. Moments later it passed by Eugene’s white Mercedes, parked right where he’d left it, on the other side of the road. It already looked abandoned and filmed with dust.

 

 

“I have a daughter,” Carmen Greer said. “I told you that, right?”

“You told me you were a mother,” Reacher said.

She nodded at the wheel. “Of a daughter. She’s six and a half years old.”

Then she went quiet for a minute.

“They called her Mary Ellen,” she said.

“They?”

“My husband’s family.”

“They named your kid?”

“It just happened, I guess. I wasn’t in a good position to stop it.”

Reacher was quiet for a beat.

“What would you have called her?” he asked.

She shrugged. “Gloria, maybe. I thought she was glorious.”

She went quiet again.

“But she’s Mary Ellen,” he said.

She nodded. “They call her Ellie, for short. Miss Ellie, sometimes.”

“And she’s six and a half?”

“But we’ve been married less than seven years. I told you that, too, right? So you can do the math. Is that a problem?”

“Doing the math?”

“Thinking about the implication.”

He shook his head at the windshield. “Not a problem to me. Why would it be?”

“Not a problem to me, either,” she said. “But it explains why I wasn’t in a good position.”

He made no reply.

“We got off to all kinds of a bad start,” she said. “Me and his family.”

She said it with a dying fall in her voice, the way a person might refer back to a tragedy in the past, a car wreck, a plane crash, a fatal diagnosis. The way a person might refer back to the day her life changed forever. She gripped the wheel and the car drove itself on, a cocoon of cold and quiet in the blazing landscape.

“Who are they?” he asked.

“The Greers,” she said. “An old Echo County family. Been there since Texas was first stolen. Maybe they were there to steal some of it themselves.”

“What are they like?”

“They’re what you might expect,” she said. “Old white Texans, big money from way back, a lot of it gone now but a lot of it still left, some history with oil and cattle ranching, river-baptized Protestants, not that they ever go to church or think about what the Lord might be saying to them. They hunt animals for pleasure. The father died some time ago, the mother is still alive, there are two sons, and there are cousins all over the county. My husband is the elder boy, Sloop Greer.”

“Sloop?” Reacher said.

She smiled for the first time since driving out of the ditch.

“Sloop,” she said again.

“What kind of a name is that?”

“An old family name,” she said. “Some ancestor, I guess. Probably he was at the Alamo, fighting against mine.”

“Sounds like a boat. What’s the other boy called? Yacht? Tug? Ocean liner? Oil tanker?”

“Robert,” she said. “People call him Bobby.”

“Sloop,” Reacher said again. “That’s a new one to me.”

“New to me, too,” she said. “The whole thing was new to me. But I used to like his name. It marked him out, somehow.”

“I guess it would.”

“I met him in California,” Carmen said. “We were in school together, UCLA.”

“Off of his home turf,” Reacher said.

She stopped smiling. “Correct. Only way it could have happened, looking back. If I’d have met him out here, you know, with the whole package out in plain view, it would never have happened. No way. I can promise you that. Always assuming I’d even come out here, in the first place, which I hope I wouldn’t have.”

She stopped talking and squinted ahead into the glare of the sun. There was a ribbon of black road and a bright shape up ahead on the left, shiny aluminum broken into moving fragments by the haze boiling up off the blacktop.

“There’s the diner,” she said. “They’ll have coffee, I’m sure.”

“Strange kind of a diner if it didn’t,” he said.

“There are lots of strange things here,” she said.

The diner sat alone on the side of the road, set on a slight rise in the center of an acre of beaten dirt serving as its parking lot. There was a sign on a tall pole and no shade anywhere. There were two pick-up trucks, carelessly parked, far from each other.

“O.K.,” she said, hesitant, starting to slow the car. “Now you’re going to run. You figure one of those guys with the pick-ups will give you a ride.”

He said nothing.

“If you are, do it later, O.K.?” she said. “Please? I don’t want to be left alone in a place like this.”

She slowed some more and bounced off the road onto the dirt. Parked right next to the sign pole, as if it was a shade tree offering protection from the sun. Its slender shadow fell across the hood like a bar. She pushed the lever into Park and switched off the engine. The air conditioner’s compressor hissed and gurgled in the sudden silence. Reacher opened his door. The heat hit him like a steelyard furnace. It was so intense he could barely catch his breath. He stood dumb for a second and waited for her and then they walked together across the hot dirt. It was baked dry and hard, like concrete. Beyond it was a tangle of mesquite brush and a blinding white-hot sky as far as the eye could see. He let her walk half a pace ahead of him, so he could watch her. She had her eyes half-closed and her head bowed, like she didn’t want to see or be seen. The hem on her dress had fallen to a decorous knee-length. She moved very gracefully, like a dancer, her upper body erect and perfectly still and her bare legs scissoring elegantly below it.

The diner had a tiny foyer with a cigarette machine and a rack full of flyers about real estate and oil changes and small-town rodeos and gun shows. Inside the second door it was cold again. They stood together in the delicious chill for a moment. There was a register next to the door and a tired waitress sitting sideways on a counter stool. A cook visible in the kitchen. Two men in separate booths, eating. All four people looked up and paused, like there were things they could say but wouldn’t.

Reacher looked at each of them for a second and then turned away and led Carmen to a booth at the far end of the room. He slid across sticky vinyl and tilted his head back into a jet of cold air coming down from a vent in the ceiling. Carmen sat opposite and raised her head and he looked at her face-on for the first time.

“My daughter looks nothing at all like me,” she said. “Sometimes I think that’s the cruelest irony in this whole situation. Those big old Greer genes just about steamrollered mine, that’s for sure.”

She had spectacular dark eyes with long lashes and a slight tilt to them, and a straight nose that made an open Y-shape against her brows. High cheekbones framed by thick black hair that shone navy in the light. A rosebud of a mouth with a subtle trace of red lipstick. Her skin was smooth and clear, the color of weak tea or dark honey, and it had a translucent glow behind it. It was actually a whole lot lighter in color than Reacher’s own sunburned forearms, and he was white and she wasn’t.

“So who does Ellie look like?” he asked.

“Them,” she said.

The waitress brought ice water and a pad and a pencil and an upturned chin and no conversation. Carmen ordered iced coffee and Reacher ordered his hot and black.

“She doesn’t look like she’s mine at all,” Carmen said. “Pink skin, yellow hair, a little chubby. But she’s got my eyes.”

“Lucky Ellie,” Reacher said.

She smiled briefly. “Thank you. Plan is she should stay lucky.”

She held the water glass flat against her face. Then she used a napkin to wipe the dew away. The waitress brought their drinks. The iced coffee was in a tall glass, and she spilled some of it as she put it down. Reacher’s was in an insulated plastic carafe, and she shoved an empty china mug across the table next to it. She left the check facedown halfway between the two drinks, and walked away without saying anything at all.

“You need to understand I loved Sloop once,” Carmen said.

Reacher made no reply, and she looked straight at him.

“Does it bother you to hear this kind of stuff?” she asked.

He shook his head, although the truth was it did bother him, a little. Loners aren’t necessarily too comfortable with a stranger’s intimacies.

“You told me to start at the beginning,” she said.

“Yes,” he said. “I did.”

“So I will,” she said. “I loved him once. You need to understand that. And you need to understand that wasn’t hard to do. He was big, and he was handsome, and he smiled a lot, and he was casual, and he was relaxed. And we were in school and we were young, and L.A. is a very special place, where anything seems possible and nothing seems to matter very much.”

She took a drinking straw from the canister on the table and unwrapped it.

“And you need to know where I was coming from,” she said. “Truth is, I had it all completely backward. I wasn’t some Mexican worrying about whether the white family would accept me. I was worrying about my family accepting this gringo boy. That’s how it seemed to me. I come from a thousand acres in Napa, we’ve been there forever, we were always the richest people I knew. And the most cultured. We had the art, and the history, and the music. We gave to museums. We employed white people. So I spent my time worrying about what my folks would say about me marrying out.”

He sipped his coffee. It was stewed and old, but it would do.

“And what did they say?” he asked.

“They went insane. I thought they were being foolish. Now I understand they weren’t.”

“So what happened?”

She sipped her drink through the straw. Took a napkin from a canister and dabbed her lips. It came away marked with her lipstick.

“Well, I was pregnant,” she said. “And that made everything a million times worse, of course. My parents are very devout, and they’re very traditional, and basically they cut me off, I guess. They disowned me. It was like the whole Victorian thing, expelled from the snowy doorstep with a bundle of rags, except it wasn’t snowing, of course, and the bundle of rags was really a Louis Vuitton valise.”

“So what did you do?”

“We got married. Nobody came, just a few friends from school. We lived a few months in L.A., we graduated, we stayed there until the baby was a month away. It was fun, actually. We were young and in love.”

He poured himself a second cup of coffee.

“But?” he asked.

“But Sloop couldn’t find a job. I began to realize he wasn’t trying very hard. Getting a job wasn’t in his plan. College was four years of fun for him, then it was back to the fold, go take over Daddy’s business. His father was ready to retire by then. I didn’t like that idea. I thought we were starting up fresh, on our own, you know, a new generation on both sides. I felt I’d given stuff up, and I thought he should, too. So we argued a lot. I couldn’t work, because of being so pregnant, and I had no money of my own. So in the end we couldn’t make the rent, so in the end he won the argument, and we trailed back here to Texas, and we moved in to the big old house with his folks and his brother and his cousins all around, and I’m still there.”

The dying fall was back in her voice. The day her life changed forever.

“And?” he asked.

She looked straight at him. “And it was like the ground opens up and you fall straight through to hell. It was such a shock, I couldn’t even react at all. They treated me strange, and the second day I suddenly realized what was going on. All my life I’d been like a princess, you know, and then I was just a hip kid among ten thousand others in L.A., but now I was suddenly just a piece of beaner trash. They never said it straight out, but it was so clear. They hated me, because I was the greaseball whore who’d hooked their darling boy. They were painfully polite, because I guess their strategy was to wait for Sloop to come to his senses and dump me. It happens, you know, in Texas. The good old boys, when they’re young and foolish, they like a little dark meat. Sometimes it’s like a rite of passage. Then they wise up and straighten out. I knew that’s what they were thinking. And hoping. And it was a shock, believe me. I had never thought of myself like that. Never. I’d never had to. Never had to confront it. The whole world was turned upside down, in an instant. Like falling in freezing water. Couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think, couldn’t even move.”

“But he didn’t dump you, evidently.”

She looked down at the table.

“No,” she said. “He didn’t dump me. He started hitting me instead. First time, he punched me in the face. Then Ellie was born the next day.”

 

 

The Crown Victoria turned back into a normal Hertz rental behind a stand of trees eight miles off the highway, halfway between Abilene and Big Spring. The Virginia plates came off, and the Texas plates went back on. The plastic wheel covers were kicked back into place. The cellular antennas were peeled off the rear glass and laid back in the valise. The CB whips pulled clear of the sheet metal and joined them. The souvenir ball caps were nested together and packed away with the handguns. Eugene’s mobile phone was smashed against a rock and the pieces hurled deep into the thicket. A little grit from the shoulder of the road was sprinkled onto the front passenger seat, so that the rental people would have to vacuum up any of Eugene’s stray hairs and fibers along with it.

Then the big sedan pulled back onto the blacktop and wound its way back to the highway. It cruised comfortably, heading west, a forgettable vehicle filled with three forgettable people. It made one more stop, at a comfort area named for the Colorado River, where sodas were consumed and a call was made from an untraceable payphone. The call was to Las Vegas, from where it was rerouted to Dallas, from where it was rerouted to an office in a small town in the west of Texas. The call reported complete success so far, and it was gratefully received.

 

 

“He split my lip and loosened my teeth,” Carmen Greer said.

Reacher watched her face.

“That was the first time,” she said. “He just lost it. But straight away he was full of remorse. He drove me to the emergency room himself. It’s a long, long drive from the house, hours and hours, and the whole way he was begging me to forgive him. Then he was begging me not to tell the truth about what had happened. He seemed really ashamed, so I agreed. But I never had to say anything anyway, because as soon as we arrived I started into labor and they took me straight upstairs to the delivery unit. Ellie was born the next day.”

“And then what?”

“And then it was O.K.,” she said. “For a week, at least. Then he started hitting me again. I was doing everything wrong. I was paying too much attention to the baby, I didn’t want sex because I was hurting from the stitches. He said I had gotten fat and ugly from the pregnancy.”

Reacher said nothing.

“He got me believing it,” she said. “For a long, long time. That happens, you know. You’ve got to be very self-confident to resist it. And I wasn’t, in that situation. He took away all my self-esteem. Two or three years, I thought it was my fault, and I tried to do better.”

“What did the family do?”

She pushed her glass away. Left the iced coffee half-finished.

“They didn’t know about it,” she said. “And then his father died, which made it worse. He was the only reasonable one. He was O.K. But now it’s just his mother and his brother. He’s awful, and she’s a witch. And they still don’t know. It happens in secret. It’s a big house. It’s like a compound, really. We’re not all on top of each other. And it’s all very complicated. He’s way too stubborn and proud to ever agree with them he’s made a mistake. So the more they’re down on me, the more he pretends he loves me. He misleads them. He buys me things. He bought me this ring.”

She held up her right hand, bent delicately at the wrist, showing off the platinum band with the big diamond. It looked like a hell of a thing. Reacher had never bought a diamond ring. He had no idea what they cost. A lot, he guessed.

“He bought me horses,” she said. “They knew I wanted horses, and he bought them for me, so he could look good in front of them. But really to explain away the bruises. It was his stroke of genius. A permanent excuse. He makes me say I’ve fallen off. They know I’m still just learning to ride. And that explains a lot in rodeo country, bruises and broken bones. They take it for granted.”

“He’s broken your bones?”

She nodded, and started touching parts of her body, twisting and turning in the confines of the tight booth, silently recounting her injuries, hesitating slightly now and then like she couldn’t recall them all.

“My ribs, first of all, I guess,” she said. “He kicks me when I’m on the floor. He does that a lot, when he’s mad. My left arm, by twisting it. My collarbone. My jaw. I’ve had three teeth reimplanted.”

He stared at her.

She shrugged. “The emergency room people think I’m the worst rider in the history of the West.”

“They believe it?”

“Maybe they just choose to.”

“And his mother and brother?”

“Likewise,” she said. “Obviously I’m not going to get the benefit of the doubt.”

“Why the hell did you stick around? Why didn’t you just get out, the very first time?”

She sighed, and she closed her eyes, and she turned her head away. Spread her hands on the table, palms down, and then turned them over, palms up.

“I can’t explain it,” she whispered. “Nobody can ever explain it. You have to know what it’s like. I had no confidence in myself. I had a newborn baby and no money. Not a dime. I had no friends. I was watched all the time. I couldn’t even make a call in private.”

He said nothing. She opened her eyes and looked straight at him.

“And worst of all, I had nowhere to go,” she said.

“Home?” he asked.

She shook her head.

“I never even thought about it,” she said. “Taking the beatings was better than trying to crawl back to my family, with a white blond baby in my arms.”

He said nothing.

“And the first time you pass up the chance, you’ve had it,” she said. “That’s how it is. It just gets worse. Whenever I thought about it, I still had no money, I still had a baby, then she was a one-year-old, then a two-year-old, then a three-year-old. The time is never right. If you stay that first time, you’re trapped forever. And I stayed that first time. I wish I hadn’t, but I did.”

He said nothing. She looked at him, appealing for something.

“You have to take it on faith,” she said. “You don’t know how it is. You’re a man, you’re big and strong, somebody hits you, you hit him back. You’re on your own, you don’t like someplace, you move on. It’s different for me. Even if you can’t understand it, you have to believe it.”

He said nothing.

“I could have gone if I’d left Ellie,” she said. “Sloop told me if I left the baby with him, he’d pay my fare anyplace I wanted to go. First class. He said he’d call a limo all the way from Dallas, right there and then, to take me straight to the airport.”

He said nothing.

“But I wouldn’t do that,” she said quietly. “I mean, how could I? So Sloop makes out this is my choice. Like I’m agreeing to it. Like I want it. So he keeps on hitting me. Punching me, kicking me, slapping me. Humiliating me, sexually. Every day, even if he isn’t mad at me. And if he is mad at me, he just goes crazy.”

There was silence. Just the rush of air from the cooling vents in the diner’s ceiling. Vague noise from the kitchens. Carmen Greer’s low breathing. The clink of fracturing ice in her abandoned glass. He looked across the table at her, tracing his gaze over her hands, her arms, her neck, her face. The neckline of her dress had shifted left, and he could see a thickened knot on her collarbone. A healed break, no doubt about it. But she was sitting absolutely straight, with her head up and her eyes defiant, and her posture was telling him something.

“He hits you every day?” he asked.

She closed her eyes. “Well, almost every day. Not literally, I guess. But three, four times in a week, usually. Sometimes more. It feels like every day.”

He was quiet for a long moment, looking straight at her.

Then he shook his head.

“You’re making it up,” he said.

 

 

The watchers stayed resolutely on station, even though there was nothing much to watch. The red house baked under the sun and stayed quiet. The maid came out and got in a car and drove away in a cloud of dust, presumably to the market. There was some horse activity around the barn. A couple of listless ranch hands walked the animals out and around, brushed them down, put them back inside. There was a bunkhouse way back beyond the barn, same architecture, same blood-red siding. It looked mostly empty, because the barn was mostly empty. Maybe five horses in total, one of them the pony for the kid, mostly just resting in their stalls because of the terrible heat.

The maid came back and carried packages into the kitchen. The boy made a note of it in his book. The dust from her wheels floated slowly back to earth and the men with the telescopes watched it, with their tractor caps reversed to keep the sun off their necks.

 

 

“You’re lying to me,” Reacher said.

Carmen turned away to the window. Red spots the size of quarters crept high into her cheeks. Anger, he thought. Or embarrassment, maybe.

“Why do you say that?” she asked, quietly.

“Physical evidence,” he said. “You’ve got no bruising visible anywhere. Your skin is clear. Light makeup, too light to be hiding anything. It’s certainly not hiding the fact you’re blushing like crazy. You look like you’ve just stepped out of the beauty parlor. And you’re moving easily. You skipped across that parking lot like a ballerina. So you’re not hurting anyplace. You’re not stiff and sore. If he’s hitting you almost every day, he must be doing it with a feather.”

She was quiet for a beat. Then she nodded.

“There’s more to tell you,” she said.

He looked away.

“The crucial part,” she said. “The main point.”

“Why should I listen?”

She took another drinking straw and unwrapped it. Flattened the paper tube that had covered it and began rolling it into a tight spiral, between her finger and thumb.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “But I had to get your attention.”

Reacher turned his head and looked out of the window, too. The sun was moving the bar of shadow across the Cadillac’s hood like the finger on a clock. His attention? He recalled opening his motel room door that morning. A brand-new day, ready and waiting to be filled with whatever came his way. He recalled the reflection of the cop in the mirror and the sticky whisper of the Cadillac’s tires on the hot pavement as they slowed alongside him.

“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 squeezed 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.

“Help me,” she said. “Please. Just theoretically for now, if you want.”

He shrugged. Then he thought about it, from her point of view. From his, it was too easy. Disappearing and living invisibly was second nature to him.

“You need to get away,” he said. “An abusive marriage, that’s all a person can do, I guess. So, a place to live, and an income. That’s what you need.”

“Doesn’t sound much, when you say it.”

“Any big city,” he said. “They have shelters. All kinds of organizations.”

“What about Ellie?”

“The shelters have baby-sitters,” he said. “They’ll look after her while you’re working. There are lots of kids in those places. She’d have friends. And after a little while you could get a place of your own.”

“What job could I get?”

“Anything,” he said. “You can read and write. You went to college.”

“How do I get there?”

“On a plane, on a train, in a bus. Two one-way tickets.”

“I don’t have any money.”

“None at all?”

She shook her head. “What little I had ran out a week ago.”

He looked away.

“What?” she said.

“You dress pretty sharp for a person with no money.”

“Mail order,” she said. “I have to get approval from Sloop’s lawyer. He signs the checks. So I’ve got clothes. But what I haven’t got is cash.”

“You could sell the diamond.”

“I tried to,” she said. “It’s a fake. He told me it was real, but it’s stainless steel and cubic zirconium. The jeweler laughed at me. It’s worth maybe thirty bucks.”

He paused a beat.

“There must be money in the house,” he said. “You could steal some.”

She went quiet again, another fast mile south.

“Then I’m a double fugitive,” she said. “You’re forgetting about Ellie’s legal status. And that’s the whole problem. Always has been. Because she’s Sloop’s child, too. If I transport her across a state line without his consent, then I’m a kidnapper. They’ll put her picture on milk cartons, and they’ll find me, and they’ll take her away from me, and I’ll go to jail. They’re very strict about it. Taking children out of a failed marriage is the number one reason for kidnapping today. The lawyers all warned me. They all say I need Sloop’s agreement. And I’m not going to get it, am I? How can I even go up there and ask him if he’d consent to me disappearing forever with his baby? Someplace he’ll never find either of us?”

“So don’t cross the state line. Stay in Texas. Go to Dallas.”

“I’m not staying in Texas,” she said.

She said it with finality. Reacher said nothing back.

“It’s not easy,” she said. “His mother watches me, on his behalf. That’s why I didn’t go ahead and sell the ring, even though I could have used the thirty bucks. She’d notice, and it would put her on her guard. She’d know what I’m planning. She’s smart. So if one day money is missing and Ellie is missing, I might get a few hours start before she calls the sheriff and the sheriff calls the FBI. But a few hours isn’t too much help, because Texas is real big, and buses are real slow. I wouldn’t make it out.”

“Got to be some way,” he said.

She glanced back at her briefcase on the rear seat. The legal paperwork.

“There are lots of ways,” she said. “Procedures, provisions, wards of the court, all kinds of things. But lawyers are slow, and very expensive, and I don’t have any money. There are pro-bono people who do it for free, but they’re always very busy. It’s a mess. A big, complicated mess.”

“I guess it is,” he said.

“But it should be possible in a year,” she said. “A year’s a long time, right?”

“So?”

“So I need you to forgive me for wasting the first year and a half. I need you to understand why. It was all so daunting, I kept putting it off. I was safe. I said to myself, plenty of time to go. You just agreed, twelve months is plenty of time for anything. So even if I was starting cold, right now, I could be excused for that, right? Nobody could say I’d left it too late, could they?”

There was a polite beep from somewhere deep inside the dashboard. A little orange light started flashing in the stylized shape of a gas pump, right next to the speedometer.

“Low fuel,” she said.

“There’s Exxon up ahead,” he said. “I saw a billboard. Maybe fifteen miles.”

“I need Mobil,” she said. “There’s a card for Mobil in the glove box. I don’t have any way of paying at Exxon.”

“You don’t even have money for gas?”

She shook her head. “I ran out. Now I’m charging it all to my mother-in-law’s Mobil account. She won’t get the bill for a month.”

She steered one-handed and groped behind her for her pocketbook. Dragged it forward and dumped it on his lap.

“Check it out,” she said.

He sat there, with the bag on his knees.

“I can’t be poking through a lady’s pocketbook,” he said.

“I want you to,” she said. “I need you to understand.”

He paused a beat and snapped it open and a soft aroma came up at him. Perfume and makeup. There was a hairbrush, tangled with long black hairs. A nail clipper. And a thin wallet.

“Check it out,” she said again.

There was a worn dollar bill in the money section. That was all. A solitary buck. No credit cards. A Texas driver’s license, with a startled picture of her on it. There was a plastic window with a photograph of a little girl behind it. She was slightly chubby, with perfect pink skin. Shiny blond hair and bright lively eyes. A radiant smile filled with tiny square teeth.

“Ellie,” she said.

“She’s very cute.”

“She is, isn’t she?”

“Where did you sleep last night?”

“In the car,” she said. “Motels are forty bucks.”

“Mine was nearer twenty,” he said.

She shrugged.

“Anything over a dollar, I haven’t got it,” she said. “So it’s the car for me. It’s comfortable enough. Then I wait for the breakfast rush and wash up in some diner’s restroom, when they’re too busy to notice.”

“What about eating?”

“I don’t eat.”

She was slowing down, maybe trying to preserve the rest of her gas.

“I’ll pay for it,” Reacher said. “You’re giving me a ride.”

There was another billboard, on the right shoulder. Exxon, ten miles.

“O.K.,” she said. “I’ll let you pay. But only so I can get back to Ellie.”

She accelerated again, confident the tank would last ten miles. Less than a gallon, Reacher figured, even with a big old engine like that. Even driving fast. He sat back and watched the horizon reel in. Then he suddenly realized what he should do.

“Stop the car,” he said.

“Why?”

“Just do it, O.K.?”

She glanced at him, puzzled, but she pulled over on the ragged shoulder. Left it with two wheels on the blacktop, the engine running, the air blasting.

“Now wait,” he said.

They waited in the cold until the truck she had passed came through.

“Now sit still,” he said.

He unclipped his seat belt and squinted down and tore the pocket off his shirt. Cheap material, weak stitching, it came away with no trouble at all.

“What are you wearing?” he asked.

“What? What are you doing?”

“Tell me exactly what you’re wearing.”

She blushed. Fidgeted nervously.

“This dress,” she said. “And underwear. And shoes.”

“Show me your shoes.”

She paused a second, and then leaned down and worked her shoes off. Passed them across to him, one at a time. He checked them carefully. Nothing in them. He passed them back. Then he leaned forward and unbuttoned his shirt. Took it off. Passed it to her.

“I’m getting out now,” he said. “I’m going to turn my back. Take all your clothes off and put the shirt on. Leave your clothes on the seat and then get out, too.”

“Why?”

“You want me to help you, just do it. All of them, O.K.?”

He got out of the car and walked away. Turned around and stared down the road, back the way they had come. It was very hot. He could feel the sun burning the skin on his shoulders. Then he heard the car door open. He turned back and saw her climbing out, barefoot, wearing his shirt. It was huge on her. She was hopping from foot to foot because the road was burning her feet.

“You can keep your shoes,” he called.

She leaned in and picked them up and put them on.

“Now walk away and wait,” he called.

She paused again, and then moved ten feet away. He stepped back to the car. Her clothes were neatly folded on her seat. He ignored them. Reached back and searched her pocketbook again, and then the briefcase. Nothing there. He turned back to the clothes and shook them out. They were warm from her body. The dress, a bra, underpants. Nothing hidden in them. He laid them on the roof of the car and searched the rest of it.

It took him twenty minutes. He covered it completely. Under the hood, the whole of the interior, under the carpets, in the seats, under the seats, in the trunk, under the fenders, everywhere. He found nothing at all, and he was absolutely prepared to bet his life no civilian could conceal anything from him in an automobile.

“O.K.,” he called. “Get dressed now. Same routine.”

He waited with his back turned until he heard her behind him. She was holding his shirt. He took it from her and put it back on.

“What was that about?” she asked.

“Now I’ll help you,” he said. “Because now I believe you.”

“Why?”

“Because you really don’t have any money,” he said. “No credit cards, either. Not in your wallet, and not hidden anyplace else. And nobody travels three hundred miles from home, not overnight, with absolutely no money. Not unless they’ve got some real big problems. And a person with real big problems deserves some kind of help.”

She said nothing. Just ducked her head slightly, like she was accepting a compliment. Or offering one. They climbed back in the car and shut the doors. Sat for a minute in the cool air, and then she maneuvered back onto the road again.

“So, you’ve got a year,” he said. “That’s plenty of time. A year from now, you could be a million miles away. New start, new life. Is that what you want me for? To help you get away?”

She said nothing for a couple of minutes. A couple of miles. The road rolled down a slight hill, and then up again. There were buildings in the far distance, on the next crest. Probably the gas station. Maybe a tow-truck operation next to it.

“Right now just agree with me,” she said. “A year is enough. So it’s O.K. to have waited.”

“Sure,” he said. “A year is enough. It’s O.K. to have waited.”

She said nothing more. Just drove straight ahead for the gas station, like her life depended on it.

 

 

The first establishment was a junkyard. There was a long low shed made out of corrugated tin, with the front wall all covered with old hubcaps. Behind it was an acre of wrecked cars. They were piled five or six deep, with the older models at the bottom, like geological strata. Beyond the low shed was the turn for the gas station. It was old enough to have pumps with pointers instead of figures, and four public rest rooms instead of two. Old enough that a taciturn guy came out into the heat and filled your car for you.

The Cadillac took more than twenty gallons, which cost Reacher the price of a motel room. He passed the bills through his window and waved away a dollar in change. He figured the guy should have it. The outside temperature reading on the dash showed one hundred and eleven degrees. No wonder the guy didn’t talk. Then he found himself wondering whether it was because the guy didn’t like to see a beaner driving a white man around in a Cadillac.

“Gracias, señor,” Carmen said. “Thank you.”

“Pleasure,” he said. “De nada, señorita.”

“You speak Spanish?”

“Not really,” he said. “I served all over, so I can say a few words in a lot of languages. But that’s all. Except French. I speak French pretty well. My mother was French.”

“From Louisiana or Canada?”

“From Paris, France.”

“So you’re half-foreign,” she said.

“Sometimes I feel a lot more than half.”

She smiled like she didn’t believe him and eased back to the road. The gas needle jumped up to F, which seemed to reassure her. She got the car straight in her lane and accelerated back to a cruise.

“But you should call me señora,” she said. “Not señorita. I’m a married woman.”

“Yes,” he said. “I guess you are.”

She went quiet for a mile. Settled back in the seat and rested both hands lightly on the bottom curve of the wheel. Then she took a deep breath.

“O.K., here’s the problem,” she said. “I don’t have a year.”

“Why not?”

“Because a month ago his lawyer friend came out to the house. Told us there was some kind of deal on the table.”

“What deal?”

“I don’t know for sure. Nobody told me exactly. My guess is Sloop’s going to rat out some business associates in exchange for early release. I think his other friend is brokering it through the DA’s office.”

“Shit,” Reacher said.

Carmen nodded. “Yes, shit. They’ve all been working their asses off, getting it going. I’ve had to be all smiles, like oh great, Sloop’s coming home early.”

Reacher said nothing.

“But inside, I’m screaming,” she said. “I left it too late, you see. A year and a half, I did nothing at all. I thought I was safe. I was wrong. I was stupid. I was sitting around in a trap without knowing it, and now it’s sprung shut, and I’m still in it.”

Reacher nodded slowly. Hope for the best, plan for the worst. That was his guiding principle.

“So what’s the progress on the deal?” he asked.

The car sped on south.

“It’s done,” she said, in a small voice.

“So when does he get out?”

“Today’s Friday,” she said. “I don’t think they can do it on the weekend. So it’ll be Monday, I expect. A couple of days, is all.”

“I see,” Reacher said.

“So I’m scared,” she said. “He’s coming home.”

“I see,” Reacher said again.

“Do you?” she asked.

He said nothing.

“Monday night,” she said. “He’s going to start it all up again. It’s going to be worse than ever.”

“Maybe he’s changed,” Reacher said. “Prison can change people.”

It was a useless thing to say. He could see it in her face. And in his experience, prison didn’t change people for the better.

“No, it’s going to be worse than ever,” she said. “I know it. I know it for sure. I’m in big trouble, Reacher. I can promise you that.”

Something in her voice.

“Why?”

She moved her hands on the wheel. Closed her eyes tight, even though she was doing seventy miles an hour.

“Because it was me who told the IRS about him,” she said.

 

 

The Crown Victoria drove south, and then west, and then looped back north in a giant sweeping curve. It detoured over near the highway so it could fill up with gas at a self-service pump in a busy station. The driver used a stolen Amex card in the slot and then wiped his prints off it and dropped it in the trash next to the pump, with the empty oil bottles and the soda cans and the used paper towels covered with windshield dirt. The woman busied herself with a map and selected their next destination. Kept her finger on the spot until the driver got back in and squirmed around to take a look at it.

“Now?” he asked.

“Just to check it out,” she replied. “For later.”

 

 

“It seemed like such a good plan,” Carmen said. “It seemed foolproof. I knew how stubborn he was, and how greedy he was, so I knew he wouldn’t cooperate with them, so I knew he would go to jail, at least for a little while. Even if by some chance he didn’t, I thought it might preoccupy him for a spell. And I thought it might shake some money loose for me, you know, when he was hiding it all. And it worked real well, apart from the money. But that seemed like such a small thing at the time.”

“How did you do it?”

“I just called them. They’re in the book. They have a whole section to take information from spouses. It’s one of their big ways to get people. Normally it happens during divorces, when you’re mad at each other. But I was already mad at him.”

“Why haven’t you gone ahead and got a divorce?” he asked. “Husband in jail is grounds, right? Some kind of desertion?”

She glanced in the mirror, at the briefcase on the rear seat.

“It doesn’t solve the problem with Ellie,” she said. “In fact, it makes it much worse. It alerts everybody to the possibility I’ll leave the state. Legally, Sloop could require me to register her whereabouts, and I’m sure he would.”

“You could stay in Texas,” he said again.

She nodded.

“I know, I know,” she said. “But I can’t. I just can’t. I know I’m being irrational, but I can’t stay here, Reacher. It’s a beautiful state, and there are nice people here, and it’s very big, so I could get a long way away, but it’s a symbol. Things have happened to me here that I have to get away from. Not just with Sloop.”

He shrugged.

“Your call,” he said.

She went quiet and concentrated on driving. The road reeled in. It was dropping down off of a wide flat mesa that looked the size of Rhode Island.

“The caprock,” she said. “It’s limestone, or something. All the water evaporated about a million years ago and left the rock behind. Geological deposits, or something.”

She sounded vague. Her tour-guide explanation was less definitive than usual.

“So what do you want me to do?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she said, although he was certain that she did.

“Help you run? I could do that, probably.”

She said nothing.

“You picked me out,” he said. “You must have had something in mind.”

She said nothing. He fell to thinking about the potential target group she had outlined to him. Out-of-work rodeo riders and roughnecks. Men of various talents, but he wasn’t sure if beating a federal manhunt would be among them. So she had chosen well. Or lucked out.

“You need to move fast,” he said. “Two days, you need to get started right now. We should pick Ellie up and turn the car around and get going. Vegas, maybe, for the first stop.”

“And do what there?”

“Pick up some ID,” he said. “Place like Vegas, we could find something, even if it’s only temporary. I’ve got some money. I can get more, if you need it.”

“I can’t take your money,” she said. “That wouldn’t be fair.”

“Fair or not, you’re going to need money. You can pay me back later. Then maybe you should go back to L.A. You could start building some new paperwork there.”

She was quiet again, another mile.

“No, I can’t run,” she said. “I can’t be a fugitive. I can’t be an illegal. Whatever else I am, I’ve never been an illegal. I’m not going to start being one now. And neither is Ellie. She deserves better than that.”

“You both deserve better than that,” he said. “But you’ve got to do something.”

“I’m a citizen,” she said. “Think about what that means to a person like me. I’m not going to give it up. I’m not going to pretend to be somebody else.”

“So what’s your plan?”

“You’re my plan,” she said.

Bull riders, roughnecks, a six-foot-five two-hundred-fifty-pound ex-military cop.

“You want me to be your bodyguard ?” he asked.

She made no reply.

“Carmen, I’m sorry about your situation,” he said. “Believe me, I really am.”

No response.

“But I can’t be your bodyguard.”

No reply.

“I can’t be,” he said again. “It’s ridiculous. What do you think is going to happen? You think I’m going to be with you twenty-four hours a day? Seven days a week? Making sure he doesn’t hit you?”

No reply. A huge highway interchange sprawled across the empty landscape, miles away in the haze.

“It’s ridiculous,” he said again. “I could warn him off, I guess. I could scare him. I could smack him around a little, to back up the message. But what happens when I’m gone? Because sooner or later, I’m going to be gone, Carmen. I’m not going to stay around. I don’t like to stay anywhere. And it’s not just me. Face it, nobody is going to stay around. Not long enough. Not ten years. Or twenty, or thirty or however long it is until he ups and dies of old age.”

No reply. No effect, either. It wasn’t like what he was saying was a big disappointment to her. She just listened and drove, fast and smooth, and silent, like she was biding her time. The highway cloverleaf grew larger and nearer and she swooped onto it and around it and headed due west, following a big green sign that said: Pecos 75 miles.

“I don’t want a bodyguard,” she said. “I agree, that would be ridiculous.”

“So what am I supposed to be for?”

She settled onto the highway, center lane, driving faster than before. He watched her face. It was completely blank.

“What am I supposed to be for?” he asked again.

She hesitated. “I can’t say it.”

“Say what?”

She opened her mouth. Closed it again. Swallowed hard, and said nothing. He stared at her. Bull riders, roughnecks, an ex-MP. Clay Allison’s grave, the fancy inscription, the obituary in the Kansas City newspaper.

“You are crazy,” he said.

“Am I?” The spots of color came back to her face, the size of quarters, burning red high above her cheekbones.

“Totally crazy,” he said. “And you can forget about it.”

“I can’t forget about it.”

He said nothing.

“I want him dead, Reacher,” she said. “I really do. It’s my only way out, literally. And he deserves it.”

“Tell me you’re kidding.”

“I’m not kidding,” she said. “I want him killed.”

He shook his head. Stared out of the window.

“Just forget all about it,” he said. “It’s absurd. This isn’t the Wild West anymore.”

“Isn’t it? Isn’t it still O.K. to kill a man who needs killing?”

Then she went quiet, just driving, like she was waiting him out. He stared at the speeding landscape in front of him. They were heading for the distant mountains. The blazing afternoon sun made them red and purple. It changed the color of the air. The Trans-Pecos, she had called them.

“Please, Reacher,” she said. “Please. At least think about it.”

He said nothing. Please? Think about it? He was beyond reaction. He dropped his eyes from the mountains and watched the highway. It was busy with traffic. A river of cars and trucks, crawling across the vastness. She was passing them all, one after another. Driving way too fast.

“I’m not crazy,” she said. “Please. I tried to do this right. I really did. Soon as his lawyer told me about the deal, I saw a lawyer of my own, and then three more, and none of them could do anything for me as fast as a month. All they could do was tell me Ellie traps me exactly where I am. So then I looked for protection. I asked private detectives. They wouldn’t do anything for me. I went to a security firm in Austin and they said yes, they could guard me around the clock, but it would be six men and nearly ten thousand dollars a week. Which is the same thing as saying no. So I tried, Reacher. I tried to do it right. But it’s impossible.”

He said nothing.

“So I bought a gun,” she said.

“Wonderful,” he said.

“And bullets,” she said. “It took all the cash I had.”

“You picked the wrong guy,” he said.

“But why? You’ve killed people before. In the army. You told me that.”

“This is different.”

“How?”

“This would be murder. Cold-blooded murder. It would be an assassination.”

“No, it would be just the same. Just like the army.”

He shook his head. “Carmen, it wouldn’t be the same.”

“Don’t you take an oath or something? To protect people?”

“It’s not the same,” he said again.

She passed an eighteen-wheeler bound for the coast, and the Cadillac rocked and shimmied through the superheated turbulent air.

“Slow down,” he said.

She shook her head. “I can’t slow down. I want to see Ellie.”

He touched the dashboard in front of him, steadying himself. The freezing air from the vents blasted against his chest.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “I’m not going to crash. Ellie needs me. If it wasn’t for Ellie, I’d have crashed a long time ago, believe me.”

But she eased off a little, anyway. The big rig crept back alongside.

“I know this is a difficult conversation,” she said.

“You think?”

“But you have to look at it from my point of view. Please, Reacher. I’ve been through it a million times. I’ve thought it through. I’ve been from A to B to C to D, all the way to Z. Then again, and again. And again. I’ve examined all the options. So this is all logical to me. And this is the only way. I know that. But it’s hard to talk about, because it’s new to you. You haven’t thought about it before. It comes out of the blue. So I sound crazy and cold-blooded to you. I know that. I appreciate that. But I’m not crazy or cold-blooded. It’s just that I’ve had the time to reach the conclusion, and you haven’t. And this is the only conclusion, I promise you.”

“Whatever, I’m not killing a guy I never saw before.”

“He hits me, Reacher,” she said. “He beats me, badly. Punches me, kicks me, hurts me. He enjoys it. He laughs while he does it. I live in fear, all the time.”

“So go to the cops.”

“The cop. There’s only one. And he wouldn’t believe me. And even if he did, he wouldn’t do anything about it. They’re all big buddies. You don’t know how it is here.”

Reacher said nothing.

“He’s coming home,” she said. “Can you imagine what he’s going to do to me?”

He said nothing.

“I’m trapped, Reacher. I’m boxed in, because of Ellie. Do you see that?”

He said nothing.

“Why won’t you help me? Is it the money? Is it because I can’t pay you?”

He said nothing.

“I’m desperate,” she said. “You’re my only chance. I’m begging you. Why won’t you do it? Is it because I’m Mexican?”

He said nothing.

“It’s because I’m just a greaseball, right? A beaner? You’d do it for a white woman? Like your girlfriend? I bet she’s a white woman. Probably a blonde, right?”

“Yes, she’s a blonde,” he said.

“Some guy was beating up on her, you’d kill him.”

Yes, I would, he thought.

“And she ran off to Europe without you. Didn’t want you to go with her. But you’d do it for her, and you won’t do it for me.”

“It’s not the same,” he said for the third time.

“I know,” she said. “Because I’m just beaner trash. I’m not worth it.”

He said nothing.

“What’s her name?” she asked. “Your girlfriend?”

“Jodie,” he said.

“O.K., imagine Jodie over there in Europe. She’s trapped in some bad situation, getting beat up every day by some maniac sadist. She tells you all about it. Bares her soul. Every horrible humiliating detail. What are you going to do?”

Kill him, he thought.

She nodded like she could read his mind. “But you won’t do that for me. You’d do it for the gringa, but not for me.”

He paused a beat with his mouth halfway open. It was true. He would do it for Jodie Garber, but he wouldn’t do it for Carmen Greer. Why not? Because it comes in a rush. You can’t force it. It’s a hot-blooded thing, like a drug in your veins, and you go with it. If it’s not there, you can’t go with it. Simple as that. He’d gone with it before in his life, many times. People mess with him, they get what they get. They mess with Jodie, that’s the same thing as messing with him. Because Jodie was him. Or at least she used to be. In a way that Carmen wasn’t. And never would be. So it just wasn’t there.

“It’s not about gringas or latinas,” he said quietly.

She said nothing.

“Please, Carmen,” he said. “You need to understand that.”

“So what is it about?”

“It’s about I know her and I don’t know you.”

“And that makes a difference?”

“Of course it does.”

“Then get to know me,” she said. “We’ve got two days. You’re about to meet my daughter. Get to know us.”

He said nothing. She drove on. Pecos 55 miles.

“You were a policeman,” she said. “You should want to help people. Or are you scared? Is that it? Are you a coward?”

He said nothing.

“You could do it,” she said. “You’ve done it before. So you know how. You could do it and get clean away. You could dump his body where nobody would find it. Out in the desert. Nobody would ever know. It wouldn’t come back on you, if you were careful. You’d never get caught. You’re smart enough.”

He said nothing.

“Are you smart enough? Do you know how? Do you?”

“Of course I know how,” he said. “But I won’t do it.”

“Why not?”

“I told you why not. Because I’m not an assassin.”

“But I’m desperate,” she said. “I need you to do this. I’m begging you. I’ll do anything if you’ll help me.”

He said nothing.

“What do you want, Reacher? You want sex? We could do that.”

“Stop the car,” he said.

“Why?”

“Because I’ve had enough of this.”

She jammed her foot down hard on the gas. The car leapt forward. He glanced back at the traffic and leaned over toward her and knocked the transmission into N. The engine unloaded and screamed and the car coasted and slowed. He used his left hand on the wheel and hauled it around against her desperate grip and steered the car to the shoulder. It bounced off the blacktop and the gravel bit against the tires and the speed washed away. He jammed the lever into P and opened his door, all in one movement. The car skidded to a stop with the transmission locked. He slid out and stood up unsteadily. Felt the heat on his body like a blow from a hammer and slammed the door and walked away from her.

 

4

 

He was sweating heavily twenty yards after getting out of the car. And already regretting his decision. He was in the middle of nowhere, on foot on a major highway, and the slowest vehicles were doing sixty. Nobody was going to want to stop for him. Even if they did want to, give them a little reaction time, give them a little time to check their mirrors, a little braking time, they’d be more than a mile away before they knew it, and then they’d shrug their shoulders and speed up again and keep on going. Dumb place to hitch a ride, they’d think.

It was worse than dumb. It was suicidal. The sun was fearsome and the temperature was easily a hundred and twelve degrees. The slipstream from the cars was like a hot gale, and the suction from the giant trucks wasn’t far from pulling him off his feet. He had no water. He could barely breathe. There was a constant stream of people five yards away, but he was as alone as if he was stumbling blind through the desert. If a state trooper didn’t come by and arrest him for jaywalking, he could die out there.

He turned and saw the Cadillac, still sitting inert on the shoulder. But he kept on walking away from it. He made it about fifty yards and stopped. Turned to face east and stuck out his thumb. But it was hopeless, like he knew it would be. After five minutes, a hundred vehicles, the nearest thing he’d gotten to a response was some trucker blasting his air horn, a huge bass sound roaring past him with a whine of stressed tires and a hurricane of dust and grit. He was choking and burning up.

He turned again. Saw the Cadillac lurch backward and start up the shoulder toward him. Her steering was imprecise. The rear end was all over the place. It was close to slewing out into the traffic. He started walking back to it. It came on to meet him, fishtailing wildly. He started running. He stopped alongside the car as she braked hard. The suspension bounced. She buzzed the passenger window down.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

He didn’t hear it in the noise, but he caught the shape of the words.

“Get in,” she said.

His shirt was sticking to his back. He had grit in his eyes. The howl of sound from the road was deafening him.

“Get in,” she mouthed. “I’m sorry.”

He got in. It felt exactly the same as the first time. The air roaring, the freezing leather seat. The small cowed woman at the wheel.

“I apologize,” she said. “I’m sorry. I said stupid things.”

He slammed the door. There was sudden silence. He put his hand in the chill stream from the vents.

“I didn’t mean them,” she said.

“Whatever,” he said back.

“Really, I didn’t mean them. I’m just so desperate I can’t tell right from wrong anymore. And I’m very sorry for the thing about the sex. It was a crass thing to say.”

Then her voice went small. “It’s just that some of the guys I’ve picked up, I figured that was what it was going to have to be.”

“You’d have sex with them so they’d kill your husband?”

She nodded. “I told you, I’m trapped and I’m scared and I’m desperate. And I don’t have anything else to offer.”

He said nothing.

“And I’ve seen movies where that happens,” she said.

He nodded back.

“I’ve seen those movies, too,” he said. “They never get away with it.”

She paused a long moment.

“So you’re not going to do it,” she said, like a statement of fact.

“No, I’m not,” he said.

She paused again, longer.

“O.K., I’ll let you out in Pecos,” she said. “You can’t be out there walking. You could die in heat like this.”

He paused too, much longer than she had. Then he shook his head. Because he had to be somewhere. When you live on the road, you learn pretty quick that any one place is about as good as any other place.

“No, I’ll come with you,” he said. “I’ll hang out a couple of days. Because I’m sorry about your situation, Carmen. I really am. Just because I won’t walk in and shoot the guy doesn’t mean I don’t want to help you some other way. If I can. And if you still want me to, that is.”

She paused another beat.

“Yes, I still want you to,” she said.

“And I want to meet Ellie. She looks like a great kid, from her picture.”

“She is a great kid.”

“But I’m not going to murder her father.”

She said nothing.

“Is that completely clear?” he asked.

She nodded.

“I understand,” she said. “I’m sorry I asked.”

“It’s not just me, Carmen,” he said. “Nobody would do it. You were fooling yourself. It wasn’t a good plan.”

She looked small and lost.

“I thought nobody could refuse,” she said. “If they knew.”

She turned and watched the traffic coming up behind her. Waited for a gap. Six cars later, she pulled back onto the highway and gunned the motor. Within a minute she was doing eighty again, passing one car after another. The trucker who had used his air horn as he left Reacher in the dust lasted seven whole minutes, before she reeled him in.

 

 

The Crown Victoria made it to the destination the woman had selected within eighty minutes. It was an inch-wide empty brown stain on the map, and it was a forty-mile-wide empty brown stain in reality. One road ran through it, meandering roughly north and east in the lee of distant mountains. Hot, lonely, valueless country. But it had all the features she had predicted. It would serve her purposes. She smiled to herself. She had an instinct for terrain.

“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?”

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 backseat. 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 and 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.

“Welcome to hell,” she said.

 

 

The Red House itself was the main building in a compound of four impressive structures. It had a wide planked porch with wooden columns and a swinging seat hung from chains, and beyond it eighty yards farther on was a motor barn, but she couldn’t drive down to it because a police cruiser was parked at an angle on the track, completely blocking her way. It was an old-model Chevy Caprice, painted black and white, with Echo County Sheriff on the door, where it had said something else before. Bought by the county secondhand, Reacher thought, maybe from Dallas or Houston, repainted and refurbished for easy duty out here in the sticks. It was empty and the driver’s door was standing open. The light bar on the roof was flashing red and blue, whipping colors horizontally over the porch and the whole front of the house.

“What’s this about?” Carmen said.

Then her hand went up to her mouth.

“God, he can’t be home already,” she said. “Please, no.”

“Cops wouldn’t bring him home,” Reacher said. “They don’t run a limo service.”

Ellie was waking up behind them. No more hum from the engine, no more rocking from the springs. She struggled upright and gazed out, eyes wide.

“What’s that?” she said.

“It’s the sheriff,” Carmen said.

“Why’s he here?” Ellie asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Why are the lights flashing?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did somebody call 911? Maybe there’s been a burglar. Maybe he wore a mask and stole something.”

She crawled through and knelt on the padded armrest between the front seats. Reacher caught the school smell again and saw delighted curiosity in her face. Then he saw it change to extreme panic.

“Maybe he stole a horse,” she said. “Maybe my pony, Mommy.”

She scrambled across Carmen’s lap and scrabbled at the door handle. Jumped out of the car and ran across the yard, as fast as her legs would carry her, her arms held stiff by her sides and her ponytail bouncing behind her.

“I don’t think anybody stole a horse,” Carmen said. “I think Sloop’s come home.”

“With the lights flashing?” Reacher said.

She unclipped her seat belt and swiveled sideways and placed her feet on the dirt of the yard. Stood up and stared toward the house, with her hands on the top of the door frame, like the door was shielding her from something. Reacher did the same, on his side. The fierce heat wrapped around him. He could hear bursts of radio chatter coming from the sheriff’s car.

“Maybe they’re looking for you,” he said. “You’ve been away overnight. Maybe they reported you missing.”

Across the Cadillac’s roof, she shook her head. “Ellie was here, and as long as they know where she is, they don’t care where I am.”

She stood still for a moment longer, and then she took a sideways step and eased the door shut behind her. Reacher did the same. Twenty feet away, the house door opened and a uniformed man stepped out onto the porch. The sheriff, obviously. He was about sixty and overweight, with dark tanned skin and thin gray hair plastered to his head. He was walking half-backward, taking his leave of the gloom inside. He had black pants and a white uniform shirt with epaulettes and embroidered patches on the shoulders. A wide gun belt with a wooden-handled revolver secured into a holster with a leather strap. The door closed behind him and he turned toward his cruiser and stopped short when he saw Carmen. Touched his forefinger to his brow in a lazy imitation of a salute.

“Mrs. Greer,” he said, like he was suggesting something was her fault.

“What happened?” she asked.

“Folks inside will tell you,” the sheriff said. “Too damn hot for me to be repeating everything twice.”

Then his gaze skipped the roof of the Cadillac and settled on Reacher.

“And who are you?” he asked.

Reacher said nothing.

“Who are you?” the guy said again.

“I’ll tell the folks inside,” Reacher replied. “Too damn hot for me to be repeating everything twice.”

The guy gave him a long calm look, and finished with a slow nod of his head, like he’d seen it all before. He dumped himself inside his secondhand cruiser and fired it up and backed out to the road. Reacher let its dust settle on his shoes and watched Carmen drive the Cadillac down the track to the motor barn. It was a long low farm shed with no front wall, and it was painted red, like everything else. There were two pick-ups and a Jeep Cherokee in it. One of the pick-ups was recent and the other was sitting on flat tires and looked like it hadn’t been moved in a decade. Beyond the building a narrow dirt track looped off into the infinite desert distance. Carmen eased the Cadillac in next to the Jeep and walked back out into the sun. She looked small and out of place in the yard, like an orchid in a trash pile.

“So where’s the bunkhouse?” he asked.

“Stay with me,” she said. “You need to meet them anyway. You need to get hired. You can’t just show up in the bunkhouse.”

“O.K.,” he said.

She led him slowly to the bottom of the porch steps. She took them cautiously, one at a time. She arrived in front of the door and knocked.

“You have to knock?” Reacher asked.

She nodded.

“They never gave me a key,” she said.

They waited, with Reacher a step behind her, appropriate for the hired help. He could hear footsteps inside. Then the door swung open. A guy was standing there, holding the inside handle. He looked to be in his middle twenties. He had a big square face, with the skin blotched red and white. He was bulky with frat-boy muscle turning to fat. He was wearing denim jeans and a dirty white T-shirt with the sleeves rolled tight over what was left of his biceps. He smelled of sweat and beer. He was wearing a red baseball cap backward on his head. A semicircle of forehead showed above the plastic strap. At the back, a shock of hair spilled out under the peak, exactly the same color and texture as Ellie’s.

“It’s you,” he said, glancing at Carmen, glancing away.

“Bobby,” she said.

Then his glance settled on Reacher.

“Who’s your friend?”

“His name is Reacher. He’s looking for work.”

The guy paused.

“Well, come on in, I guess,” he said. “Both of you. And close the door. It’s hot.”

He turned back into the gloom and Reacher saw the letter T on the ball cap. Texas Rangers, he thought. Good ball club, but not good enough. Carmen followed the guy three steps behind, entering her home of nearly seven years like an invited guest. Reacher stayed close to her shoulder.

“Sloop’s brother,” she whispered to him.

He nodded. The hallway was dark inside. He could see the red paint continued everywhere, over the wooden walls, the floors, the ceilings. Most places it was worn thin or worn away completely, just leaving traces of pigment behind like a stain. There was an ancient air conditioner running somewhere in the house, forcing the temperature down maybe a couple of degrees. It ran slowly, with a patient drone and rattle. It sounded peaceful, like the slow tick of a clock. The hallway was the size of a motel suite, filled with expensive stuff, but it was all old, like they’d run out of money decades ago. Or else they’d always had so much that the thrill of spending it had worn off a generation ago. There was a huge mirror on one wall, with the ornate frame painted red. Opposite to it was a rack filled with six bolt-action hunting rifles. The mirror reflected the rack and made the hallway seem full of guns.

“What did the sheriff want?” Carmen called.

“Come inside,” Bobby called back.

We are inside, Reacher thought. But then he saw he meant “Come into the parlor.” It was a big red room at the back of the house. It had been remodeled. It must have been a kitchen once. It opened out through the original wall of the house to a replacement kitchen easily fifty years old. The parlor had the same worn paint everywhere, including all over the furniture. There was a big farmhouse table and eight wheelback chairs, all made out of pine, all painted red, all worn back to shiny wood where human contact had been made.

One of the chairs was occupied by a woman. She looked to be somewhere in her middle fifties. She was the sort of person who still dresses the same way she always did despite her advancing age. She was wearing tight jeans with a belt and a blouse with a Western fringe. She had a young woman’s hairstyle, colored a bright shade of orange and teased up off her scalp above a thin face. She looked like a twenty-year-old prematurely aged by some rare medical condition. Or by a shock. Maybe the sheriff had sat her down and given her some awkward news. She looked preoccupied and a little confused. But she showed a measure of vitality, too. A measure of authority. There was still vigor there. She looked like the part of Texas she owned, rangy and powerful, but temporarily laid low, with most of her good days behind her.

“What did the sheriff want?” Carmen asked again.

“Something happened,” the woman said, and her tone meant it wasn’t something good. Reacher saw a flicker of hope behind Carmen’s eyes. Then the room went quiet and the woman turned to look in his direction.

“His name is Reacher,” Carmen said. “He’s looking for work.”

“Where’s he from?”

Her voice was like rawhide. I’m the boss here, it said.

“I found him on the road,” Carmen answered.

“What can he do?”

“He’s worked with horses before. He can do blacksmithing.”

Reacher looked out of the window while she lied about his skills. He had never been closer to a horse than walking past the ceremonial stables on the older army bases that still had them. He knew in principle that a blacksmith made horseshoes, which were iron things horses had nailed to their feet. Or their hoofs. Hooves? He knew there was a charcoal brazier involved, and a bellows, and a great deal of rhythmic hammering. An anvil was required, and a trough of water. But he had never actually touched a horseshoe. He had seen them occasionally, nailed up over doors as a superstition. He knew some cultures nailed them upward, and some downward, all to achieve the same good luck. But that was all he knew about them.

“We’ll talk about him later,” the woman said. “Other things to talk about first.”

Then she remembered her manners and sketched a wave across the table.

“I’m Rusty Greer,” she said.

“Like the ballplayer?” Reacher asked.

“I was Rusty Greer before he was born,” the woman said. Then she pointed at Bobby. “You already met my boy Robert Greer. Welcome to the Red House Ranch, Mr. Reacher. Maybe we can find you work. If you’re willing and honest.”

“What did the sheriff want?” Carmen asked for the third time.

Rusty Greer turned and looked straight at her.

“Sloop’s lawyer’s gone missing,” she said.

“What?”

“He was on his way to the federal jail to see Sloop. He never got there. State police found his car abandoned on the road, south of Abilene. Just sitting there empty, miles from anywhere, keys still in it. Situation doesn’t look good.”

“Al Eugene?”

“How many lawyers you think Sloop had?”

Her tone added: you idiot. The room went totally silent and Carmen went pale and her hand jumped to her mouth, fingers rigid and extended, covering her lips.

“Maybe the car broke down,” she said.

“Cops tried it,” Rusty said. “It worked just fine.”

“So where is he?”

“He’s gone missing. I just told you that.”

“Have they looked for him?”

“Of course they have. But they can’t find him.”

Carmen took a deep breath. Then another.

“Does it change anything?” she asked.

“You mean, is Sloop still coming home?”

Carmen nodded weakly, like she was terribly afraid of the answer.

“Don’t you worry none,” Rusty said. She was smiling. “Sloop will be back here Monday, just like he always was going to be. Al being missing doesn’t change a thing. The sheriff made that clear. It was a done deal.”

Carmen paused a long moment, with her eyes closed, and her hand on her lips. Then she forced the hand down and forced the lips into a trembling smile.

“Well, good,” she said.

“Yes, good,” her mother-in-law said.

Carmen nodded, vaguely. Reacher thought she was about to faint.

“What do you suppose happened to him?” she asked.

“How would I know? Some sort of trouble, I expect.”

“But who would make trouble for Al?”

Rusty’s smile thinned to a sneer.

“Well, take your best guess, dear,” she said.

Carmen opened her eyes. “What does that mean?”

“It means, who would want to make trouble for their lawyer?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, I do,” Rusty said. “Somebody who buys them a big old Mercedes Benz and gets sent to jail anyhow, that’s who.”

“Well, who did that?”

“Anybody could have. Al Eugene takes anybody for a client. He has no standards. He’s halfway to being plain crooked. Maybe all the way crooked, for all I know. Three-quarters of his clients are the wrong sort.”

Carmen was still pale. “The wrong sort?”

“You know what I mean.”

“You mean Mexican? Why don’t you just come right out and say it?”

Rusty was still smiling.

“Well, tell me different,” she said. “Some Mexican boy gets sent to jail, he doesn’t just stand up and accept his punishment like we do. No, he blames his lawyer, and he gets all his brothers and his cousins all riled up about it, and of course he’s got plenty of those come up here after him, all illegals, all cholos, all of them in gangs, and now you see exactly how that turns out. Just like it is down there in Mexico itself. You of all people should know what it’s like.”

“Why should I of all people? I’ve never even been to Mexico.”

Nobody replied to that. Reacher watched her, standing up shaken and proud and alone like a prisoner in the enemy camp. The room was quiet. Just the thump and click of the old air conditioner running somewhere else.

“You got an opinion here, Mr. Reacher?” Rusty Greer asked.

It felt like a left-field question in a job interview. He wished he could think of something smart to say. Some diversion. But it wouldn’t help any to start some big clumsy fight and get himself thrown off the property inside the first ten minutes.

“I’m just here to work, ma’am,” he said.

“I’d like to know your opinion, all the same.”

Just like a job interview. A character reference. Clearly she wanted exactly the right sort of person shoveling horseshit for her.

“Mr. Reacher was a cop himself,” Carmen said. “In the army.”

Rusty nodded. “So what’s your thinking, ex–army cop?”

Reacher shrugged. “Maybe there’s an innocent explanation. Maybe he had a nervous breakdown and wandered off.”

“Doesn’t sound very likely. Now I see why they made you an ex-cop.”

Silence for a long moment.

“Well, if there was trouble, maybe white folks made it,” Reacher said.

“That’s not going to be a popular view around here, son.”

“It’s not looking to be popular. It’s looking to be right or wrong. And the population of Texas is three-quarters white, therefore I figure there’s a three-in-four chance white folks were involved, assuming people are all the same as each other.”

“That’s a big assumption.”

“Not in my experience.”

Rusty bounced her gaze off the tabletop, back to Carmen.

“Well, no doubt you agree,” she said. “With your new friend here.”

Carmen took a breath.

“I never claim to be better than anyone else,” she said. “So I don’t see why I should agree I’m worse.”

The room stayed quiet.

“Well, time will tell, I guess,” Rusty said. “One or other of us is going to be eating humble pie.”

She said it paah. The long syllable trailed into silence.

“Now, where’s Sloop’s little girl?” she asked, with an artificial brightness in her voice, like the conversation had never happened. “You bring her back from school?”

Carmen swallowed and turned to face her. “She’s in the barn, I think. She saw the sheriff and got worried her pony had been stolen.”

“That’s ridiculous. Who would steal her damn pony?”

“She’s only a child,” Carmen said.

“Well, the maid is ready to give the child its supper, so take it to the kitchen, and show Mr. Reacher to the bunkhouse on your way.”

Carmen just nodded, like a servant with new instructions. Reacher followed her out of the parlor, back to the hallway. They went outside into the heat again and paused in the shadows on the porch.

“Ellie eats in the kitchen?” Reacher asked.

Carmen nodded.

“Rusty hates her,” she said.

“Why? She’s her granddaughter.”

Carmen looked away.

“Her blood is tainted,” she said. “Don’t ask me to explain it. It’s not rational. She hates her, is all I know.”

“So why all the fuss if you took her away?”

“Because Sloop wants her here. She’s his weapon against me. His instrument of torture. And his mother does what he wants.”

“She make you eat in the kitchen, too?”

“No, she makes me eat with her,” she said. “Because she knows I’d rather not.”

He paused, at the edge of the shadow.

“You should have gotten out of here,” he said. “We should be in Vegas by now.”

“I was hopeful, for a second,” she said. “About Al Eugene. I thought there might be a delay.”

He nodded. “So was I. It would have been useful.”

She nodded, tears in her eyes.

“I know,” she said. “Too good to be true.”

“So you should still think about running.”

She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. Shook her head.

“I won’t run,” she said. “I won’t be a fugitive.”

He said nothing.

“And you should have agreed with her,” she said. “About the Mexicans. I’d have understood you were bluffing. I need her to keep you around.”

“I couldn’t.”

“It was a risk.”

She led him down the steps into the sun and across the yard. Beyond the motor barn was a horse barn. That structure was red like everything else, big as an aircraft hangar, with clerestory vents in the roof. There was a big door standing a foot open. There was a strong smell coming out of it.

“I’m not much of a country guy,” he said.

“You’ll get used to it,” she said.

Behind the barn were four corrals boxed in with red fences. Two of them were covered in scrubby grass, and two of them had desert sand piled a foot thick. There were striped poles resting on oil drums to make jumping courses. Behind the corrals was another red building, long and low, with small windows high up under the eaves.

“The bunkhouse,” she said.

She stood still for a moment, lost in thought. Then she shivered in the heat and came back, all business.

“The door is around the other side,” she said. “You’ll find two guys in there, Joshua and Billy. Don’t trust either one of them. They’ve been here forever and they belong to the Greers. The maid will bring your meals down to you in about an hour, after Ellie eats, before we do.”

“O.K.,” he said.

“And Bobby will come down to check you out, sooner or later. Watch him carefully, Reacher, because he’s a snake.”

“O.K.,” he said again.

“I’ll see you later,” she said.

“You going to be all right?”

She nodded once and walked away. He watched her until she was behind the horse barn, and then he walked around and found the door into the bunkhouse.

 

5

 

The boy filled a whole new page in his notebook. The men with the telescopes called out descriptions and the exact sequence of events. The arrival of the sheriff, the return of the beaner and the kid with the new guy in tow, the kid running off to the barn, the sheriff leaving, the beaner and the new guy entering the house, a long period of nothing doing, the emergence of the beaner and the new guy onto the porch, their walk together down toward the bunkhouse, her return alone.

“Who is he?” the boy asked.

“Hell should we know?” one of the men replied.

Very tall, heavy, not neatly dressed, shirt and pants, can’t tell how old, the boy wrote. Then he added: Not a wrangler, wrong shoes. Trouble?

The grade fell away behind the bunkhouse and made it a two-story building. The lower floor had huge sliding doors, frozen open on broken tracks. There was another pick-up in there, and a couple of green tractors. At the far end to the right was a wooden staircase without a handrail leading upward through a rectangular hole in the ceiling. Reacher spent a minute on the ground floor looking at the vehicles. The pick-up had a gun rack in the rear window. The air was hot and heavy and smelled of gasoline and motor oil.

Then he used the staircase and came out on the second level. All the interior carpentry was painted red, walls, floor and roof beams alike. The air was hotter still up there, and stale. No air conditioning, and not much ventilation. There was a closed-off area at the far end, which he guessed was the bathroom. Apart from that the whole of the floor was one big open space, with sixteen beds facing each other eight to a side, with simple iron frames and thin striped mattresses and bedside cabinets and footlockers.

The two beds nearest the bathroom were occupied. Each had a small, wiry man lying half-dressed on top of the sheets. Both men wore blue jeans and fancy tooled boots and no shirts. Both had their hands folded behind their heads. They both turned toward the staircase as Reacher stepped up inside the room. They both unlaced their nearer arms to get a better look at him.

Reacher had done four years at West Point, and then thirteen years in the service, so he had a total seventeen years’ experience of walking into a new dormitory and being stared at by its occupants. It wasn’t a sensation that bothered him. There was a technique involved in handling it. An etiquette. The way to do it was to just walk in, select an unoccupied bed, and say absolutely nothing at all. Make somebody else speak first. That way, you could judge their disposition before you were forced to reveal your own.

He walked to a bed two places away from the head of the staircase, against the north wall, which he judged would be cooler than the south. In the past, in the army, he would have had a heavy canvas kit bag to dump on the bed as a symbol of possession. The kit bag would be stenciled with his name and his rank, and the number of restencilings on it would offer a rough guide to his biography. Kit bags saved a lot of talking time. But the best he could do in this new situation was take his folding toothbrush from his pocket and prop it on the bedside cabinet. As a substitute gesture, it lacked physical impact. But it made the same point. It said I live here now, same as you do. You got any kind of a comment to make about that?

Both men kept on staring at him, saying nothing. Lying down, it was hard to judge their physiques with any degree of certainty, but they were both small. Maybe five-six or -seven each, maybe a hundred and fifty pounds. But they were wiry and muscular, like middleweight boxers. They had farmers’ tans, deep brown on their arms and their faces and their necks, and milky white where T-shirts had covered their bodies. They had random knobs and old swellings here and there on their ribs and arms and collarbones. Reacher had seen marks like that before. Carmen had one. He had one or two himself. They were where old fractures had set and healed.

He walked past the two men to the bathroom. It had a door, but it was a communal facility inside, four of everything with no interior partitioning. Four toilets, four sinks, four shower heads in a single elongated stall. It was reasonably clean, and it smelled of warm water and cheap soap, like the two guys had recently showered, maybe ready for Friday evening off. There was a high window with a clogged insect screen and no glass. By standing tall he could see past the corner of the horse barn all the way up to the house. He could see half of the porch and a sliver of the front door.

He came back into the dormitory room. One of the guys had hauled himself upright and was sitting with his head turned, watching the bathroom door. His back was as pale as his front, and it had more healed fractures showing through the skin. The ribs, the right scapula. Either this guy spent a lot of time getting run over by trucks, or else he was a retired rodeo rider who had passed his career a little ways from the top of his trade.

“Storm coming,” the guy said.

“What I heard,” Reacher said.

“Inevitable, with a temperature like this.”

Reacher said nothing.

“You hired on?” the guy asked.

“I guess,” Reacher said.

“So you’ll be working for us.”

Reacher said nothing.

“I’m Billy,” the guy said.

The other guy moved up on his elbows.

“Josh,” he said.

Reacher nodded to them both.

“I’m Reacher,” he said. “Pleased to meet you.”

“You’ll do the scut work for us,” the guy called Billy said. “Shoveling shit and toting bales.”

“Whatever.”

“Because you sure don’t look like much of a horse rider to me.”

“I don’t?”

Billy shook his head. “Too tall. Too heavy. Center of gravity way up there. No, my guess is you’re not much of a horse rider at all.”

“The Mexican woman bring you in?” Josh asked.

“Mrs. Greer,” Reacher said.

“Mrs. Greer is Rusty,” Billy said. “She didn’t bring you in.”

“Mrs. Carmen Greer,” Reacher said.

Billy said nothing. The guy called Josh just smiled.

“We’re heading out after supper,” Billy said. “Bar, couple hours south of here. You could join us. Call it a get-to-know-you type of thing.”

Reacher shook his head. “Maybe some other time, when I’ve earned something. I like to pay my own way, situation like that.”

Billy thought about it and nodded.

“That’s a righteous attitude,” he said. “Maybe you’ll fit right in.”

The guy called Josh just smiled.

Reacher walked back to his bed and stretched himself out, keeping still, fighting the heat. He stared up at the red-painted rafters for a minute, and then he closed his eyes.

 

 

The maid brought supper forty minutes later. She was a middle-aged white woman who could have been a relative of Billy’s. She greeted him with familiarity. Maybe a cousin. Certainly she looked a little like him. Sounded like him. The same genes in there somewhere. She greeted Josh with ease and Reacher himself with coolness. Supper was a pail of pork and beans, which she served into metal bowls with a ladle taken from her apron pocket. She handed out forks and spoons, and empty metal cups.

“Water in the bathroom faucet,” she said, for Reacher’s benefit.

Then she went back down the stairs and Reacher turned his attention to the food. It was the first he had seen all day. He sat on his bed with the bowl on his knees and ate with the spoon. The beans were dark and soupy and mixed with a generous spoonful of molasses. The pork was tender and the fat was crisp. It must have been fried separately and mixed with the beans afterward.

“Hey, Reacher,” Billy called over. “So what do you think?”

“Good enough for me,” he said.

“Bullshit,” Josh said. “More than a hundred degrees all day, and she brings us hot food? I showered already and now I’m sweating like a pig again.”

“It’s free,” Billy said.

“Bullshit, it’s free,” Josh said back. “It’s a part of our wages.”

Reacher ignored them. Bitching about the food was a staple of dormitory life. And this food wasn’t bad. Better than some he’d eaten. Better than what came out of most barracks cookhouses. He dumped his empty bowl on the cabinet next to his toothbrush and lay back down and felt his stomach go to work on the sugars and the fats. Across the room Billy and Josh finished up and wiped their mouths with their forearms and took clean shirts out of their footlockers. Shrugged them on and buttoned them on the run and combed through their hair with their fingertips.

“See you later,” Billy called.

They clattered down the stairs and a moment later Reacher heard the sound of a gasoline engine starting up directly below. The pick-up, he guessed. He heard it back out through the doors and drive away. He stepped into the bathroom and saw it come around the corner and wind around the horse barn and bounce across the yard past the house.

He walked back through the dormitory and piled the three used bowls on top of each other, with the silverware in the topmost. Threaded the three cup handles onto his forefinger and walked down the stairs and outside. The sun was nearly below the horizon but the heat hadn’t backed off at all. The air was impossibly hot. Almost suffocating. And it was getting humid. A warm damp breeze was coming in from somewhere. He walked up past the corrals, past the barn, through the yard. He skirted around the porch and looked for the kitchen door. Found it and knocked. The maid opened up.

“I brought these back,” he said.

He held up the bowls and the cups.

“Well, that’s kind of you,” she said. “But I’d have come for them.”

“Long walk,” he said. “Hot night.”

She nodded.

“I appreciate it,” she said. “You had enough?”

“Plenty,” he said. “It was very good.”

She shrugged, a little bashful. “Just cowboy food.”

She took the used dishes from him and carried them inside.

“Thanks again,” she called.

It sounded like a dismissal. So he turned away and walked out to the road, with the low sun full on his face. He stopped under the wooden arch. Ahead of him to the west was nothing at all, just the empty eroded mesa he had seen on the way in. On the right, to the north, was a road sixty miles long with a few buildings at the end of it. A neighbor fifteen miles away. On the left, to the south, he had no idea. A bar two hours away, Billy had said. Could be a hundred miles. He turned around. To the east, Greer land for a stretch, and then somebody else’s, and then somebody else’s again, he guessed. Dry holes and dusty caliche and nothing much more all the way back to Austin, four hundred miles away.

 

 

New guy comes to gate and stares right at us, the boy wrote. Then looks all around. Knows we’re here? Trouble?

He closed his book again and pressed himself tighter to the ground.

 

 

“Reacher,” a voice called.

Reacher squinted right and saw Bobby Greer in the shadows on the porch. He was sitting in the swing set. Same denims, same dirty T-shirt. Same backward ball cap.

“Come here,” he called.

Reacher paused a beat. Then he walked back past the kitchen and stopped at the bottom of the porch steps.

“I want a horse,” Bobby said. “The big mare. Saddle her up and bring her out.”

Reacher paused again. “You want that now?”

“When do you think? I want an evening ride.”

Reacher said nothing.

“And we need a demonstration,” Bobby said.

“Of what?”

“You want to hire on, you need to show us you know what you’re doing.”

Reacher paused again, longer.

“O.K.,” he said.

“Five minutes,” Bobby said.

He stood up and headed back inside the house. Closed the door. Reacher stood for a moment with the heat on his back and then headed down to the barn. Headed for the big door. The one with the bad smell coming out of it. A demonstration? You’re in deep shit now, he thought. More ways than one.

There was a light switch inside the door, in a metal box screwed to the siding. He flicked it on and weak yellow bulbs lit the enormous space. The floor was beaten earth, and there was dirty straw everywhere. The center of the barn was divided into horse stalls, back to back, with a perimeter track lined with floor-to-ceiling hay bales inside the outer walls. He circled around the stalls. A total of five were occupied. Five horses. They were all tethered to the walls of their stalls with complicated rope constructions that fitted neatly over their heads.

He took a closer look at each of them. One of them was very small. A pony. Ellie’s, presumably. O.K., strike that. Four to go. Two were slightly bigger than the other two. He bent down low and peered upward at them, one at a time. In principle he knew what a mare should look like, underneath. It should be easy enough to spot one. But in practice, it wasn’t easy. The stalls were dark and the tails obscured the details. In the end he decided the first one he looked at wasn’t a mare. Wasn’t a stallion, either. Some parts were missing. A gelding. Try the next. He shuffled along and looked at the next. O.K., that’s a mare. Good. The next one was a mare, too. The last one, another gelding.

He stepped back to where he could see both of the mares at once. They were huge shiny brown animals, huffing through their noses, moving slightly, making dull clop sounds with their feet on the straw. No, their hoofs. Hooves? Their necks were turned so they could watch him with one eye each. Which one was bigger? The one on the left, he decided. A little taller, a little heavier, a little wider in the shoulders. O.K., that’s the big mare. So far, so good.

Now, the saddle. Each stall had a kind of a thick post coming horizontally out of the outside wall, right next to the gate, with a whole bunch of equipment piled on it. A saddle for sure, but also a lot of complicated straps and blankets and metal items. The straps are the reins, he guessed. The metal thing must be the bit. It goes in the horse’s mouth. The bit between her teeth, right? He lifted the saddle off the post. It was very heavy. He carried it balanced on his left forearm. Felt good. Just like a regular cowboy. Roy Rogers, eat your heart out.

He stood in front of the stall gate. The big mare watched him with one eye. Her lips folded back like thick rolls of rubber, showing big square teeth underneath. They were yellow. O.K., think. First principles. Teeth like that, this thing is not a carnivore. It’s not a biting animal. Well, it might try to nick you a little, but it’s not a lion or a tiger. It eats grass. It’s an herbivore. Herbivores are generally timid. Like antelope or wildebeests out there on the sweeping plains of Africa. So this thing’s defense mechanism is to run away, not to attack. It gets scared, and it runs. But it’s a herd animal, too. So it’s looking for a leader. It will submit to a show of authority. So be firm, but don’t scare it.

He opened the gate. The horse moved. Its ears went back and its head went up. Then down. Up and down, against the rope. It moved its back feet and swung its huge rear end toward him.

“Hey,” he said, loud and clear and firm.

It kept on coming. He touched it on the side. It kept on coming. Don’t get behind it. Don’t let it kick you. That much, he knew. What was the phrase? Like being kicked by a horse? Had to mean something.

“Stand still,” he said.

It was swinging sideways toward him. He met its flank with his right shoulder. Gave it a good solid shove, like he was aiming to bust down a door. The horse quieted. Stood still, huffing gently. He smiled. I’m the boss, O.K.? He put the back of his right hand up near its nose. It was something he had seen at the movies. You rub the back of your hand on its nose, and it gets to know you. Some smell thing. The skin on its nose felt soft and dry. Its breath was strong and hot. Its lips peeled back again and its tongue came out. It was huge and wet.

“O.K., good girl,” he whispered.

He lifted the saddle two-handed and dumped it down on her back. Pushed and pulled at it until it felt solid. It wasn’t easy. Was it the right way around? Had to be. It was shaped a little like a chair. There was a definite front and a back. There were broad straps hanging down on either side. Two long, two short. Two had buckles, two had holes. What were they for? To hold the saddle on, presumably. You bring the far ones around and buckle them at the side, up underneath where the rider’s thigh would be. He ducked down and tried to grab the far straps, underneath the horse’s belly. He could barely reach them. This was one wide animal, that was for damn sure. He stretched and caught the end of one strap in his fingertips and the saddle slipped sideways.

“Shit,” he breathed.

He straightened up and leveled the saddle again. Ducked down and grabbed for the far straps. The horse moved and put them way out of his reach.

“Shit,” he said again.

He stepped closer, crowding the horse against the wall. It didn’t like that, and it leaned on him. He weighed two hundred and fifty pounds. The horse weighed half a ton. He staggered backward. The saddle slipped. The horse stopped moving. He straightened the saddle again and kept his right hand on it while he groped for the straps with his left.

“Not like that,” a voice called from way above him.

He spun around and looked up. Ellie was lying on top of the stack of hay bales, up near the roof, her chin on her hands, looking down at him.

“You need the blanket first,” she said.

“What blanket?”

“The saddle cloth,” she said.

The horse moved again, crowding hard against him. He shoved it back. Its head came around and it looked at him. He looked back at it. It had huge dark eyes. Long eyelashes. He glared at it. I’m not afraid of you, pal. Stand still or I’ll shove you again.

“Ellie, does anybody know you’re in here?” he called.

She shook her head, solemnly.

“I’m hiding,” she said. “I’m good at hiding.”

“But does anybody know you hide in here?”

“I think my mommy knows I do sometimes, but the Greers don’t.”

“You know how to do this horse stuff?”

“Of course I do. I can do my pony all by myself.”

“So help me out here, will you? Come and do this one for me.”

“It’s easy,” she said.

“Just show me, O.K.?”

She stayed still for a second, making her usual lengthy decision, and then she scrambled down the pile of bales and jumped to the ground and joined him in the stall.

“Take the saddle off again,” she said.

She took a cloth off of the equipment post and shook it out and threw it up over the mare’s back. She was too short and Reacher had to straighten it one-handed.

“Now put the saddle on it,” she said.

He dropped the saddle on top of it. Ellie ducked underneath the horse’s belly and caught the straps. She barely needed to stoop. She threaded the ends together and pulled.

“You do it,” she said. “They’re stiff.”

He lined the buckles up and pulled hard.

“Not too tight,” Ellie said. “Not yet. Wait for her to swell up.”

“She’s going to swell up?”

Ellie nodded, gravely. “They don’t like it. They swell their stomachs up to try to stop you. But they can’t hold it, so they come down again.”

He watched the horse’s stomach. It was already the size of an oil drum. Then it blew out, bigger and bigger, fighting the straps. Then it subsided again. There was a long sigh of air through its nose. It shuffled around and gave up.

“Now do them tight,” Ellie said.

He pulled them as tight as he could. The mare shuffled in place. Ellie had the reins in her hands, shaking them into some kind of coherent shape.

“Take the rope off of her,” she said. “Just pull it down.”

He pulled the rope down. The mare’s ears folded forward and it slid down over them, over her nose, and off.

“Now hold this up.” She handed him a tangle of straps. “It’s called the bridle.”

He turned it in his hands, until the shape made sense. He held it against the horse’s head until it was in the right position. He tapped the metal part against the mare’s lips. The bit. She kept her mouth firmly closed. He tried again. No result.

“How, Ellie?” he asked.

“Put your thumb in.”

“My thumb? Where?”

“Where her teeth stop. At the side. There’s a hole.”

He traced the ball of his thumb sideways along the length of the mare’s lips. He could feel the teeth passing underneath, one by one, like he was counting them. Then they stopped, and there was just gum.

“Poke it in,” Ellie said.

“My thumb?”

She nodded. He pushed, and the lips parted, and his thumb slipped into a warm, gluey, greasy socket. And sure enough, the mare opened her mouth.

“Quick, put the bit in,” Ellie said.

He pushed the metal into the mouth. The mare used her massive tongue to get it comfortable, like she was helping him, too.

“Now pull the bridle up and buckle it.”

He eased the leather straps up over the ears and found the buckles. There were three of them. One fastened flat against the slab of cheekbone. One went over her nose. The third was hanging down under her neck.

“Not too tight,” Ellie said. “She’s got to breathe.”

He saw a worn mark on the strap, which he guessed indicated the usual length.

“Now loop the reins up over the horn.”

There was a long strap coming off of the ends of the bit in a loop. He guessed that was the rein. And he guessed the horn was the upright thing at the front end of the saddle. Like a handle, for holding on with. Ellie was busy pulling the stirrups down into place, walking right under the mare’s belly from one side to the other.

“Now lift me up,” she said. “I need to check everything.”

He held her under the arms and lifted her into the saddle. She felt tiny and weighed nothing at all. The horse was way too wide for her, and her legs came out more or less straight on each side. She lay down forward and stretched her arms out and checked all the buckles. Redid some of them. Tucked the loose ends away. Pulled the mane hair out neatly from under the straps. Gripped the saddle between her legs and jerked herself from side to side, checking for loose movement.

“It’s O.K.,” she said. “You did very good.”

She put her arms out to him and he lifted her down. She was hot and damp.

“Now just lead her out,” she said. “Hold her at the side of her mouth. If she won’t come, give her a yank.”

“Thanks a million, kid,” he said. “Now go hide again, O.K.?”

She scrambled back up the stack of hay bales and he tugged at a strap coming off a metal ring at the side of the mouth. The mare didn’t move. He clicked his tongue and pulled again. The mare lurched forward. He jumped ahead and she got herself into some kind of a rhythm behind him. Clop, clop, clop. He led her out of the stall and pulled her around the corner and headed for the door. Let her come ahead to his shoulder and stepped with her into the yard. She walked easily. He adjusted to her pace. His arm was neatly bent at the elbow and her head was rocking up and down a little and her shoulder was brushing gently against his. He walked her across the yard like he’d done it every day of his life. Roy Rogers, eat your damn heart out.

Bobby Greer was back on the porch steps, waiting. The mare walked right up to him and stopped. Reacher held the little leather strap while Bobby checked all of the same things Ellie had. He nodded.

“Not bad,” he said.

Reacher said nothing.

“But you took longer than I expected.”

Reacher shrugged. “I’m new to them. I always find it’s better to go slow, the first time. Until they’re familiar with me.”

Bobby nodded again. “You surprise me. I would have bet the farm the nearest you’d ever gotten to a horse was watching the Preakness on cable.”

“The what?”

“The Preakness. It’s a horse race.”

“I know it is. I was kidding.”

“So maybe it’s a double surprise,” Bobby said. “Maybe my sister-in-law was actually telling the truth for once.”

Reacher glanced at him. “Why wouldn’t she be?”

“I don’t know why. But she hardly ever does. You need to bear that in mind.”

Reacher said nothing. Just waited.

“You can go now,” Bobby said. “I’ll put her away when I’m through.”

Reacher nodded and walked away. He heard a crunch of leather behind him, which he assumed was Bobby getting up into the saddle. But he didn’t look back. He just walked through the yard, down past the barn, past the corrals, and around the corner of the bunkhouse to the foot of the stairway. He intended to go straight up and take a long shower to get rid of the terrible animal smell that was clinging to him. But when he got up to the second story, he found Carmen sitting on his bed with a set of folded sheets on her knees. She was still in her cotton dress, and the sheets glowed white against the skin of her bare legs.

“I got you these,” she said. “From the linen closet in the bathroom. You’re going to need them. I didn’t know if you would realize where they were.”

He stopped at the head of the stairs, one foot inside the room, the other foot still on the last tread.

“Carmen, this is crazy,” he said. “You should get out, right now. They’re going to realize I’m a phony. I’m not going to last a day. I might not even be here on Monday.”

“I’ve been thinking,” she said. “All the way through supper.”

“About what?”

“About Al Eugene. Suppose it’s about whoever Sloop is going to rat out? Suppose they woke up and took some action? Suppose they grabbed Al to stop the deal?”

“Can’t be. Why would they wait? They’d have done it a month ago.”

“Yes, but suppose everybody thought it was.”

He stepped all the way into the room.

“I don’t follow,” he said, although he did.

“Suppose you made Sloop disappear,” she said. “The exact same way somebody made Al disappear. They’d think it was all connected somehow. They wouldn’t suspect you. You’d be totally in the clear.”

He shook his head. “We’ve been through this. I’m not an assassin.”

She went quiet. Looked down at the sheets in her lap and began picking at a seam. The sheets were frayed and old. Cast-offs from the big house, Reacher thought. Maybe Rusty and her dead husband had slept under those same sheets. Maybe Bobby had. Maybe Sloop had. Maybe Sloop and Carmen, together.

“You should just get out, right now,” he said again.

“I can’t.”

“You should stay somewhere inside of Texas, just temporarily. Fight it, legally. You’d get custody, in the circumstances.”

“I don’t have any money. It could cost a hundred thousand dollars.”

“Carmen, you have to do something.”

She nodded.

“I know what I’m going to do,” she said. “I’m going to take a beating, Monday night. Then Tuesday morning, I’m going to come find you, wherever you are. Then you’ll see, and maybe you’ll change your mind.”

He said nothing. She angled her face up into the fading light from the high windows. Her hair tumbled back on her shoulders.

“Take a good look,” she said. “Come close.”

He stepped nearer.

“I’ll be all bruised,” she said. “Maybe my nose will be broken. Maybe my lips will be split. Maybe I’ll have teeth missing.”

He said nothing.

“Touch my skin,” she said. “Feel it.”

He put the back of his forefinger on her cheek. Her skin was soft and smooth, like warm silk. He traced the wide arch of her cheekbone.

“Remember this,” she said. “Compare it to what you feel Tuesday morning. Maybe it’ll change your mind.”

He took his finger away. Maybe it would change his mind. That was what she was counting on, and that was what he was afraid of. The difference between cold blood and hot blood. It was a big difference. For him, a crucial difference.

“Hold me,” she said. “I can’t remember how it feels to be held.”

He sat down next to her and took her in his arms. She slid hers around his waist and buried her head in his chest.

“I’m scared,” she said.

 

 

They sat like that for twenty minutes. Maybe thirty. Reacher lost all track of time. She was warm and fragrant, breathing steadily. Then she pulled away and stood up, with a bleak expression on her face.

“I have to go find Ellie,” she said. “It’s her bedtime.”

“She’s in the barn. She showed me how to put all that crap on the horse.”

She nodded. “She’s a good kid.”

“That’s for sure,” he said. “Saved my bacon.”

She handed the sheets to him.

“You want to come riding tomorrow?” she asked.

“I don’t know how.”

“I’ll teach you.”

“Could be a long process.”

“It can’t be. We have to get up on the mesa.”

“Why?”

She looked away.

“Something you have to teach me,” she said. “In case Tuesday doesn’t change your mind. I need to know how to work my gun properly.”

He said nothing.

“You can’t deny me the right to defend myself,” she said.

He said nothing. She went quietly down the stairs, leaving him sitting on the bed holding the folded sheets on his knees, exactly like he had found her.

 

 

He made up his bed. The old sheets were thin and worn, which he figured was O.K., in the circumstances. The temperature was still somewhere in the high nineties. Middle of the night, it might cool off to eighty-five. He wasn’t going to be looking for a lot of warmth.

He went back down the stairs and stepped outside. Looking east, there was a black horizon. He stepped around the bunkhouse corner and faced the sunset in the west. It flamed against the red buildings. He stood still and watched it happen. This far south, the sun would drop away pretty quickly. Like a giant red ball. It flared briefly against the rim of the mesa and then disappeared and the sky lit up red above it.

He heard the sound of footsteps in the dust ahead of him. Squinted into the sunset glare and saw Ellie walking down toward him. Little short steps, stiff arms, the blue halter dress specked with pieces of straw. Her hair was lit from behind and glowed red and gold like an angel.

“I came to say good night,” she said.

He remembered times in the past, being entertained in family quarters on a base somewhere, the melancholy notes of taps sounding faintly in the distance, polite army kids saying a formal farewell to their fathers’ brother officers. He remembered it well. You shook their little hands, and off they went. He smiled at her.

“O.K., good night, Ellie,” he said.

“I like you,” she said.

“Well, I like you, too,” he said.

“Are you hot?”

“Very.”

“There’ll be a storm soon.”

“Everybody tells me that.”

“I’m glad you’re my mommy’s friend.”

He said nothing. Just put out his hand. She looked at it.

“You’re supposed to give me a good-night kiss,” she said.

“Am I?”

“Of course you are.”

“O.K.,” he said.

Her face was about level with his thigh. He started to bend down.

“No, pick me up,” she said.

She held up her arms, more or less vertical. He paused a beat and then swung her in the air and settled her in the crook of his elbow. Kissed her cheek, gently.

“Good night,” he said again.

“Carry me,” she said. “I’m tired.”

He carried her past the corrals, past the horse barn, across the yard to the house. Carmen was waiting on the porch, leaning on a column, watching them approach.

“There you are,” she said.

“Mommy, I want Mr. Reacher to come in and say good night,” Ellie said.

“Well, I don’t know if he can.”

“I only work here,” Reacher said. “I don’t live here.”

“Nobody will know,” Ellie said. “Come in through the kitchen. There’s only the maid in there. She works here, too. And she’s allowed in the house.”

Carmen stood there, unsure.

“Mommy, please,” Ellie said.

“Maybe if we all go in together,” Carmen said.

“Through the kitchen,” Ellie said. Then she changed her voice to a fierce whisper that was probably louder than talking. “We don’t want the Greers to see us.”

Then she giggled, and rocked in Reacher’s arms, and ducked her face down into his neck. Carmen glanced at him, a question in her face. He shrugged back. What’s the worst thing can happen? He lowered Ellie to the ground and she took her mother’s hand. They walked together to the kitchen door and Carmen pushed it open.

 

 

Sunset, the boy wrote, and noted the time. The two men crawled backward from the lip of the gulch and raised themselves up on their knees and stretched. Off duty, the boy wrote, and noted the time. Then they all three scrabbled around on their knees and pulled the rocks off the corners of the tarp hiding their pick-up. Folded it as neatly as they could without standing up and stowed it in the load bed. Repacked the cooler and collapsed the telescopes and climbed three-in-a-row into the cab. Drove out of the far side of the gulch and headed due west across the hardpan toward the red horizon.

 

 

Inside the kitchen the maid was loading a huge dishwashing machine. It was made of green enamel and had probably been the very latest thing around the time man first walked on the moon. She looked up and said nothing. Just kept on stacking plates. Reacher saw the three bowls he had brought her. They were rinsed and ready.

“This way,” Ellie whispered.

She led them through a door that led to a back hallway. There was no window, and the air was suffocating. There were plain wooden stairs on one side, painted red, worn back to the wood in crescent shapes on each tread. She led them upward. The stairs creaked under Reacher’s weight.

They finished inside a kind of closet on the second floor. Ellie pushed the door open and crossed a hallway and made a right into a narrow corridor. Everything was wooden, the walls, the floor, the ceiling. Everything was painted red. Ellie’s room was at the end of the corridor. It was maybe twelve feet square, and red. And very hot. It faced south and must have been baking in the sun all afternoon. The drapes were closed, and had been all day, Reacher guessed, offering some meager protection from the heat.

“We’ll go get washed up,” Carmen said. “Mr. Reacher will wait here, O.K.?”

Ellie watched until she was sure he was staying. He sat down on the end of the bed to confirm it. To help her reach her conclusion. She turned slowly and followed her mother out to the bathroom.

The bed was narrow, maybe thirty inches wide. And short, appropriate for a kid. It had cotton sheets printed with small colored animals of uncertain genus. There was a night table, and a bookcase, and a small armoire. This furniture looked reasonably new. It was made of blond wood, first bleached and then hand-painted with cheerful designs. It looked nice. Probably bought in a cute little boutique and hauled over from Austin, he thought. Or maybe all the way from Santa Fe. Some of the bookshelves held books, and the others held stuffed animals all jumbled together and crammed into the spaces.

He could hear the old air conditioner running. It thumped and rattled, patiently. It was louder here. Must be mounted in the attic, he thought. It made a soothing sound. But it didn’t do much about cooling the house. Up there in the trapped air of the second floor, it felt like a hundred and twenty degrees.

Ellie and Carmen came back into the room. Ellie was suddenly quiet and bashful, maybe because she was in her pajamas. They looked like regular cotton shorts and a T-shirt, but they were printed with little things that might have been rabbits. Her hair was damp and her skin was pink. The back of one hand was wedged in her mouth. She climbed onto the bed and curled up near the pillow, using about half the available length of the mattress, close to him but careful not to touch him.

“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. Beyond 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.