6

 

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

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

 

 

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

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

“Get some sleep,” she told her partners. “We’ve still got work to do.”

 

 

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

 

 

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

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

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

 

 

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

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

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

“No, some new people we’re going to be working with.”

The boy said nothing. The first man just shrugged.

“O.K. with me,” he said.

“Plus, we’re going to get paid,” the second man said.

“Even better,” the first man said.

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

 

 

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

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

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

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

“Why?” Reacher asked. “Where are you going?”

“Hunting,” Bobby said. “In the pick-up.”

“You can’t drive?”

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

“You shoot from a truck?”

“I’ll show you,” Bobby said.

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

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

“While we’re moving?”

“That’s the skill of it. It’s fun. Sloop invented it. He was real good.”

“What are you hunting?”

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

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

Reacher said nothing.

“You never ate armadillo?” Bobby asked.

Reacher shook his head.

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

“I don’t think so,” Reacher said. “I don’t like hunting.”

“Why not? It’s a challenge.”

“For you, maybe,” Reacher said. “I already know I’m smarter than an armadillo.”

“You work here, Reacher. You’ll do what you’re told.”

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

“Like what?”

“Like wages.”

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

Reacher said nothing.

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

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

“O.K.,” he said.

“And you’ll do whatever Josh and Billy tell you to.”

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

Bobby was quiet for a long moment. “I’ll find ways to keep you away from her, you know. Every day, I’ll find something.”

“I’ll be in the barn,” Reacher said, and walked away.

 

 

Ellie brought his breakfast to him there. She was wearing a miniature set of blue denim dungarees. Her hair was wet and loose. She was carrying a plate of scrambled eggs. She had silverware in her breast pocket, upright, like pens. She was concentrating on remembering a message.

“My mommy says, don’t forget the riding lesson,” she recited. “She wants you to meet her here in the barn after lunch.”

Then she ran back toward the house without another word. He sat down on a bale and ate the eggs. Took the empty plate back to the kitchen and headed down to the bunkhouse. Josh and Billy weren’t there to tell him to do anything. Suits me, he thought. He didn’t go looking for them. Just lay down and dozed in the heat.

 

 

The Coyanosa Draw was a watercourse with a bed wide enough to carry the runoff from the Davis Mountains to the Pecos River, which took it to the Rio Grande all the way down on the border with Mexico. But runoff was seasonal and unreliable, so the region was sparsely populated. There were abandoned farmsteads built close to the dry riverbed, far from each other, far from anywhere. One of them had an old swaybacked house baked gray by the sun. In front of it was an empty barn. The barn had no doors, just an open wall facing west toward the house. The way the buildings were set in the landscape, the interior of the barn was invisible except from the yard right in front of it.

The Crown Victoria was waiting inside the barn, its engine idling to keep the air going. The barn had an exterior staircase leading up to a hayloft, with a small platform outside the door at the top. The woman was out in the heat, up on the platform, where she could survey the meandering approach road. She saw the watchers’ pick-up two miles away. It was traveling fast and kicking up a plume of dust. She waited until she was sure it was unaccompanied and then she turned and walked down the stairs. Signaled to the others.

They got out of the car and stood waiting in the heat. They heard the pick-up on the road, and then it pulled around the corner of the barn and slowed in the yard. They directed it with hand signals, like traffic cops. They pointed into the barn. One of them led the truck on foot, gesturing like the guy on the airport apron. He brought it tight up to the rear wall, gesturing all the time, and then he gave a thumbs-up to halt it. He stepped alongside the driver’s window and his partner stepped to the passenger door.

The driver shut off the motor and relaxed. Human nature. The end of a fast drive to a secret rendezvous, the intrigue of new instructions, the prospect of a big payday. He wound down his window. On the passenger’s side, the second man did the same thing. Then they both died, shot in the side of the head with nine-millimeter bullets. The boy in the middle lived exactly one second longer, both sides of his face splattered with blood and brain tissue, his notebook clutched in his hands. Then the small dark man leaned in and shot him twice in the chest. The woman pushed him out of the way and adjusted the window winders on both doors to leave the glass cracked open about an inch. An inch would let insects in and keep scavengers out. Insects would help with decomposition, but scavengers could drag body parts away, which would risk visibility.

 

 

Reacher dozed a couple of hours before Josh and Billy got back. They didn’t give him any instructions. They just got cleaned up for lunch. They told him they were invited inside the house to eat. And he wasn’t, because he had refused to drive.

“Bobby told me you ran some guy off,” he said.

Joshua just smiled.

“What guy?” Billy said.

“Some guy came down here with Carmen.”

“The Mexican?”

“Some friend of hers.”

Billy shook his head. “Don’t know anything about it. We never ran any guy off. What are we, cops?”

“You’re the cop,” Joshua said.

“Am I?”

Joshua nodded. “Bobby said so. You were a military cop.”

“You been discussing me?”

Joshua shrugged and went quiet.

“Got to go,” Billy said.

Twenty minutes later Carmen herself brought his armadillo lunch to him. It was in a covered dish and smelled strongly of chili. She left, nervous and in a hurry, without saying a word. He tried the meal. The meat was halfway between sweet and ordinary. It had been shredded and chopped and mixed with beans and two-alarm sauce from a bottle. Then slightly overdone in a warm oven. He had eaten worse, and he was hungry, which helped. He took his time, and then carried the dish back to the kitchen. Bobby was standing out on the porch steps, like a sentry.

“Horses need more feed supplement,” he called. “You’ll go with Josh and Billy to pick it up. After siesta. Get as many bags as fit in the truck.”

Reacher nodded and walked on to the kitchen. Gave the used dish to the maid, and thanked her for the meal. Then he walked down to the barn and went inside and sat on a bale of straw to wait. The horses turned around in their stalls to watch him do it. They were patient and listless in the heat. One of them was chewing slowly. There were hay stalks stuck to its lips.

Carmen came in ten minutes later. She had changed into faded blue jeans and a checked cotton shirt with no sleeves. She was carrying a straw hat and her pocketbook. She looked tiny and afraid.

“Bobby doesn’t know you called the IRS,” he said. “He thinks it was random snooping. So maybe Sloop does, too.”

She shook her head. “Sloop knows.”

“How?”

She shrugged. “Actually, he doesn’t know. But he convinced himself it had to be me. He was looking for somebody to blame, and who else is there? No evidence or anything, but as it happens he’s right. Ironic, isn’t it?”

“But he didn’t tell Bobby.”

“He wouldn’t. He’s too stubborn to agree with them. They hate me, he hates me, he keeps it a secret, they keep it a secret. From him, I mean. They make sure I know it.”

“You should get out. You’ve got forty-eight hours.”

She nodded. “Forty-eight hours exactly, I think. They’ll let him out at seven in the morning. They’ll drive all night to be there for him. It’s about seven hours. So he’ll be back home this time on Monday. Just after lunch.”

“So get out, right now.”

“I can’t.”

“You should,” he said. “This place is impossible. It’s like the outside world doesn’t exist.”

She smiled, bitterly. “Tell me about it. I’ve lived here nearly seven years. My whole adult life, give or take.”

She hung her hat and her pocketbook on a nail in the wall. Did all the saddling work herself, quickly and efficiently. She was lithe and deft. The slim muscles in her arms bunched and relaxed as she lifted the saddles. Her fingers were precise with the buckles. She readied two horses in a quarter of the time he had taken to do one.

“You’re pretty good at this,” he said.

“Gracias, señor,” she said. “I get a lot of practice.”

“So how can they believe you keep falling off, regular as clockwork?”

“They think I’m clumsy.”

He watched her lead his horse out of its stall. It was one of the geldings. She was tiny beside it. In the jeans, he could have spanned her waist with his hand.

“You sure don’t look clumsy,” he said.

She shrugged. “People believe what they need to.”

He took the reins from her. The horse huffed through its nose and shifted its feet. Moved its head up and down, up and down. His hand went with it.

“Walk him out,” she said.

“Shouldn’t we have leather pants? And riding gloves?”

“Are you kidding? We never wear that stuff here. It’s way too hot.”

He waited for her. Her horse was the smaller mare. She wedged her hat on her head and took her pocketbook off the nail and put it in a saddlebag. Then she followed him, leading her mare confidently out into the yard, into the heat and the sun.

“O.K., like this,” she said. She stood on the mare’s left and put her left foot in the stirrup. Gripped the horn with her left hand and bounced twice on her right leg and jacked herself smoothly into the saddle. He tried it the same way. Put his left foot in the stirrup, grasped the horn, put all his weight on the stirrup foot and straightened his leg and pulled with his hand. Leaned his weight forward and right and suddenly he was up there in the seat. The horse felt very wide, and he was very high in the air. About the same as riding on an armored personnel carrier.

“Put your right foot in,” she said.

He jammed his foot into the other stirrup and squirmed around until he was as comfortable as he was ever going to get. The horse waited patiently.

“Now bunch the reins on the horn, in your left hand.”

That part was easy. It was just a question of imitating the movies. He let his right hand swing free, like he was carrying a Winchester repeater or a coil of rope.

“O.K., now just relax. And kick gently with your heels.”

He kicked once and the horse lurched into a walk. He used his left hand on the horn to keep himself steady. After a couple of paces he began to understand the rhythm. The horse was moving him left and right and forward and back with every alternate step. He held tight to the horn and used pressure from his feet to keep his body still.

“Good,” she said. “Now I’ll go in front and he’ll follow. He’s pretty docile.”

I would be, too, he thought, a hundred ten degrees and two hundred fifty pounds on my back. Carmen clicked her tongue and kicked her heels and her horse moved smoothly around his and led the way through the yard and past the house. She swayed easily in the saddle, the muscles in her thighs bunching and flexing as she kept her balance. Her hat was down over her eyes. Her left hand held the reins and her right was hanging loose at her side. He caught the blue flash of the fake diamond in the sun.

She led him out under the gate to the road and straight across without looking or stopping. He glanced left and right, south and north, and saw nothing at all except heat shimmer and distant silver mirages. On the far side of the road was a step about a foot high onto the limestone ledge. He leaned forward and let the horse climb it underneath him. Then the rock rose gently into the middle distance, reaching maybe fifty feet of elevation in the best part of a mile. There were deep fissures running east-west and washed-out holes the size of shell craters. The horses picked their way between them. They seemed pretty sure on their feet. So far, he hadn’t had to do any conscious steering. Which he was happy about, because he wasn’t exactly sure how to.

“Watch for rattlesnakes,” Carmen called.

“Great,” he called back.

“Horses get scared by anything that moves. They’ll spook and run. If that happens, just hang on tight and haul on the reins.”

“Great,” he said again.

There were scrubby plants rooting desperately in cracks in the rock. There were smaller holes, two or three feet across, some of them with undercut sides. Just right for a snake, he thought. He watched them carefully at first. Then he gave it up, because the shadows were too harsh to see anything. And the saddle was starting to wear on him.

“How far are we going?” he called.

She turned, like she had been waiting for the question.

“We need to get over the rise,” she said. “Down into the gulches.”

The limestone smoothed out into broader unbroken shelves and she slowed to let his horse move up alongside hers. But it stayed just short of level, which kept him behind her. Kept him from seeing her face.

“Bobby told me you had a key,” he said.

“Did he?”

“He said you lost it.”

“No, that’s not true. They never gave me one.”

He said nothing.

“They made a big point of not giving me one,” she said. “Like it was a symbol.”

“So he was lying?”

She nodded, away from him. “I told you, don’t believe anything he says.”

“He said the door’s never locked, anyway.”

“Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t.”

“He told me you don’t have to knock, either.”

“That’s a lie, too,” she said. “Since Sloop’s been gone, if I don’t knock, they run and grab a rifle. Then they go, oh sorry, but strangers prowling around the house make us nervous. Like a big pretend show.”

He said nothing.

“Bobby’s a liar, Reacher,” she said. “I told you that.”

“I guess he is. Because he also told me you brought some other guy down here, and he got Josh and Billy to run him off. But Josh and Billy didn’t know anything about any guy.”

She was quiet for a long moment.

“No, that was true,” she said. “I met a man up in Pecos, about a year ago. We had an affair. At first just at his place up there. But he wanted more.”

“So you brought him here?”

“It was his idea. He thought he could get work, and be close to me. I thought it was crazy, but I went along with it. That’s where I got the idea to ask you to come. Because it actually worked for a spell. Two or three weeks. Then Bobby caught us.”

“And what happened?”

“That was the end of it. My friend left.”

“So why would Josh and Billy deny it to me?”

“Maybe it wasn’t Josh and Billy who ran him off. Maybe they didn’t know about it. Maybe Bobby did it himself. My friend wasn’t as big as you. He was a schoolteacher, out of work.”

“And he just disappeared?”

“I saw him again, just once, back in Pecos. He was scared. Wouldn’t talk to me.”

“Did Bobby tell Sloop?”

“He promised he wouldn’t. We had a deal.”

“What kind of a deal?”

She went quiet again. Just rode on, sitting slackly on the swaying horse.

“The usual kind,” she said. “If I’d do something for him, he’d keep quiet.”

“What kind of something?”

She paused again.

“Something I really don’t want to tell you about,” she said.

“I see.”

“Yes, you see.”

“And did he keep quiet?”

“I really have no idea. He made me do it twice. It was disgusting. He’s disgusting. But he promised faithfully. But he’s a liar, so I’m assuming he told Sloop anyway. On one of his brotherly visits. I always knew it was a lose-lose gamble, but what could I do? What choice did I have?”

“Bobby figures that’s why I’m here. He thinks we’re having an affair, too.”

She nodded. “That would be my guess. He doesn’t know Sloop hits me. Even if he did, he wouldn’t expect me to do anything about it.”

Reacher was quiet for a spell. Another twenty yards, thirty, at the slow patient pace of a walking horse.

“You need to get out,” he said. “How many times do you have to hear it?”

“I won’t run,” she answered.

They reached the top of the rise and she made a small sound and her horse stopped walking. His stopped, too, at her shoulder. They were about fifty feet above the plain. Ahead of them, to the west, the caliche sloped gently down again, pocked by dry gulches the size of ballparks. Behind them, to the east, the red house and the other buildings in the compound were spread out a mile away, flat on the baked land like a model. The road ran like a gray ribbon, north and south. Behind the tiny motor barn the dirt track wandered south and east through the desert, like a scar on burned and pockmarked skin. The air was dry and unnaturally clear all the way to both horizons, where it broke up into haze. The heat was a nightmare. The sun was fearsome. Reacher could feel his face burning.

“Take care as we go down,” Carmen said. “Stay balanced.”

She moved off ahead of him, letting her horse find its own way down the incline. He kicked with his heels and followed her. He lost the rhythm as his horse stepped short and he started bouncing uncomfortably.

“Follow me,” she called.

She was moving to the right, toward a dry gulch with a flat floor, all stone and sand. He started trying to figure which rein he should pull on, but his horse turned anyway. Its feet crunched on gravel and slipped occasionally. Then it stepped right down into the gulch, which jerked him violently backward and forward. Ahead of him Carmen was slipping out of the saddle. Then she was standing on the ground, stretching, waiting for him. His horse stopped next to hers and he shook his right foot free of the stirrup and got off by doing the exact opposite of what had got him on a half hour before.

“So what do you think?” she asked.

“Well, I know why John Wayne walked funny.”

She smiled briefly and led both horses together to the rim of the gulch and heaved a large stone over the free ends of both sets of reins. He could hear absolute silence, nothing at all behind the buzz and shimmer of the heat. She lifted the flap of her saddlebag and took out her pocketbook. Zipped it open and slipped her hand in and came out with a small chromium handgun.

“You promised you’d teach me,” she said.

“Wait,” he said.

“What?”

He said nothing. Stepped left, stepped right, crouched down, stood tall. Stared at the floor of the gulch, moving around, using the shadows from the sun to help him.

“What?” she said again.

“Somebody’s been here,” he said. “There are tracks. Three people, a vehicle driving in from the west.”

“Tracks?” she said. “Where?”

He pointed. “Tire marks. Some kind of a truck. Stopped here. Three people, crawled up to the edge on their knees.”

He put himself where the tracks ended at the rim of the gulch. Lay down on the hot grit and hauled himself forward on his elbows. Raised his head.

“Somebody was watching the house,” he said.

“How do you know?”

“Nothing else to see from here.”

She knelt alongside him, the chromium pistol in her hand.

“It’s too far away,” she said.

“Must have used field glasses. Telescopes, even.”

“Are you sure?”

“You ever see reflections? The sun on glass? In the mornings, when the sun was in the east?”

She shuddered.

“No,” she said. “Never.”

“Tracks are fresh,” he said. “Not more than a day or two old.”

She shuddered again.

“Sloop,” she said. “He thinks I’m going to take Ellie. Now I know he’s getting out. He’s having me watched.”

Reacher stood up and walked back to the center of the bowl.

“Look at the tire tracks,” he said. “They were here four or five times.”

He pointed down. There were several overlapping sets of tracks in a complex network. At least four, maybe five. The tire treads were clearly pressed into the powdered sand. There was a lot of detail. The outside shoulder of the front right tire was nearly bald.

“But they’re not here today,” Carmen said. “Why not?”

“I don’t know,” Reacher said.

Carmen looked away. Held out the gun to him.

“Please show me how to use this,” she said.

He moved his gaze from the tracks in the sand and looked at the gun. It was a Lorcin L-22 automatic, two-and-a-half-inch barrel, chrome frame, with plastic molded grips made to look like pink mother-of-pearl. Made in Mira Loma, California, not too long ago, and probably never used since it left the factory.

“Is it a good one?” she asked.

“How much did you pay for it?”

“Over eighty dollars.”

“Where?”

“In a gun store up in Pecos.”

“Is it legal?”

She nodded. “I did all the proper paperwork. Is it any good?”

“I guess,” he said. “As good as you’ll get for eighty bucks, anyway.”

“The man in the store said it was ideal.”

“For what?”

“For a lady. I didn’t tell him why I needed it.”

He hefted it in his hand. It was tiny, but reasonably solid. Not light, not heavy. Not heavy enough to be loaded, anyway.

“Where are the bullets?” he asked.

She stepped back toward the horses. Took a small box out of her bag. Came back and handed it to him. It was neatly packed with tiny .22 shells. Maybe fifty of them.

“Show me how to load it,” she said.

He shook his head.

“You should leave it out here,” he said. “Just dump it and forget about it.”

“But why?”

“Because this whole thing is crazy. Guns are dangerous, Carmen. You shouldn’t keep one around Ellie. There might be an accident.”

“I’ll be very careful. And the house is full of guns anyway.”

“Rifles are different. She’s too small to reach the trigger and have it pointing at herself simultaneously.”

“I keep it hidden. She hasn’t found it yet.”

“Only a matter of time.”

She shook her head.

“My decision,” she said. “She’s my daughter.”

He said nothing.

“She won’t find it,” she said. “I keep it by the bed, and she doesn’t come in there.”

“What happens to her if you decide to use it?”

She nodded. “I know. I think about that all the time. I just hope she’s too young to really understand. And when she’s old enough, maybe she’ll see it was the lesser of two evils.”

“No, what happens to her? There and then? When you’re in jail?”

“They don’t send you to jail for self-defense.”

“Who says it’s self-defense?”

“You know it would be self-defense.”

“Doesn’t matter what I know. I’m not the sheriff, I’m not the DA, I’m not the judge and jury.”

She went quiet.

“Think about it, Carmen,” he said. “They’ll arrest you, you’ll be charged with first-degree homicide. You’ve got no bail money. You’ve got no money for a lawyer either, so you’ll get a public defender. You’ll be arraigned, and you’ll go to trial. Could be six or nine months down the road. Could be a year. Then let’s say everything goes exactly your way from that point on. The public defender makes out it’s self-defense, the jury buys it, the judge apologizes that a wronged woman has been put through all of that, and you’re back on the street. But that’s a year from now. At least. What’s Ellie been doing all that time?”

She said nothing.

“She’ll have spent a year with Rusty,” he said. “On her own. Because that’s where the court would leave her. The grandmother? Ideal solution.”

“Not when they understood what the Greers are like.”

“O.K., so partway through the year Family Services will arrive and haul her off to some foster home. Is that what you want for her?”

She winced. “Rusty would send her there anyway. She’d refuse to keep her, if Sloop wasn’t around anymore.”

“So leave the gun out here in the desert. It’s not a good idea.”

He handed it back to her. She took it and cradled it in her palms, like it was a precious object. She tumbled it from one hand to another, like a child’s game. The fake pearl grips flashed in the sun.

“No,” she said. “I want to learn to use it. For self-confidence. And that’s a decision that’s mine to make. You can’t decide for me.”

He was quiet for a beat. Then he shrugged.

“O.K.,” he said. “Your life, your kid, your decision. But guns are serious business. So pay attention.”

She passed it back. He laid it flat on his left palm. It reached from the ball of his thumb to the middle knuckle of his middle finger.

“Two warnings,” he said. “This is a very, very short barrel. See that?” He traced his right index finger from the chamber to the muzzle. “Two and a half inches, is all. Did they explain that at the store?”

She nodded. “The guy said it would fit real easy in my bag.”

“It makes it a very inaccurate weapon,” he said. “The longer the barrel, the straighter it shoots. That’s why rifles are three feet long. If you’re going to use this thing, you need to get very, very close, O.K.? Inches away would be best. Right next to the target. Touching the target if you can. You try to use this thing across a room, you’ll miss by miles.”

“O.K.,” she said.

“Second warning.” He dug a bullet out of the box and held it up. “This thing is tiny. And slow. The pointy part is the bullet, and the rest of it is the powder in the shell case. Not a very big bullet, and not very much powder behind it. So it’s not necessarily going to do a lot of damage. Worse than a bee sting, but one shot isn’t going to be enough. So you need to get real close, and you need to keep on pulling the trigger until the gun is empty.”

“O.K.,” she said again.

“Now watch.”

He clicked out the magazine and fed nine bullets into it. Clicked the magazine back in and jacked the first shell into the breech. Took out the magazine again and refilled the empty spot at the bottom. Clicked it back in and cocked the gun and left the safety catch on.

“Cocked and locked,” he said. “You do two things. Push the safety catch, and pull the trigger ten times. It’ll fire ten times before it’s empty, because there’s one already in the mechanism and nine more in the magazine.”

He handed the gun to her.

“Don’t point it at me,” he said. “Never point a loaded gun at anything you don’t definitely want to kill.”

She took it and held it away from him, cautiously.

“Try it,” he told her. “The safety, and the trigger.”

She used her left hand to unlatch the safety. Then she pointed it in her right and closed her eyes and pulled the trigger. The gun twisted in her grip and pointed down. The blast of the shot sounded quiet, out there in the emptiness. A chip of rock and a spurt of dust kicked off the floor ten feet away. There was a metallic ricochet whang and a muted ring as the shell case ejected and the horses shuffled in place and then silence closed in again.

“Well, it works,” she said.

“Put the safety back on,” he said.

She clicked the catch and he turned to look at the horses. He didn’t want them to run. Didn’t want to spend time chasing them in the heat. But they were happy enough, standing quietly, watching warily. He turned back and undid his top button and slipped his shirt off over his head. Walked fifteen feet south and laid the shirt on the rim of the gulch, hanging it down and spreading it out to represent a man’s torso. He walked back and stood behind her.

“Now shoot my shirt,” he said. “You always aim for the body, because it’s the biggest target, and the most vulnerable.”

She raised the gun, and then lowered it again.

“I can’t do this,” she said. “You don’t want holes in your shirt.”

“I figure there isn’t much of a risk,” he said. “Try it.”

She forgot to release the safety catch. Just pulled on the unyielding trigger. Twice, puzzled why it wouldn’t work. Then she remembered and clicked it off. Pointed the gun and closed her eyes and fired. Reacher guessed she missed by twenty feet, high and wide.

“Keep your eyes open,” he said. “Pretend you’re mad at the shirt, you’re standing there pointing your finger right at it, like you’re yelling.”

She kept her eyes open. Squared her shoulders and pointed with her right arm held level. She fired and missed again, maybe six feet to the left, maybe a little low.

“Let me try,” he said.

She passed him the gun. It was tiny in his hand. The trigger guard was almost too small to fit his finger. He closed one eye and sighted in.

“I’m aiming for where the pocket was,” he said.

He fired a double-tap, two shots in quick succession, with his hand rock-steady. The first hit the shirt in the armpit opposite the torn pocket. The second hit centrally but low down. He relaxed his stance and handed the gun back.

“Your turn again,” he said.

She fired three more, all of them hopeless misses. High to the right, wide to the left. The last hit the dirt, maybe seven feet short of the target. She stared at the shirt and lowered the gun, disappointed.

“So what have you learned?” he asked.

“I need to get close,” she said.

“Damn right,” he said. “And it’s not entirely your fault. A short-barrel handgun is a close-up weapon. See what I did? I missed by twelve inches, from fifteen feet. One bullet went left, and the other went down. They didn’t even miss consistently. And I can shoot. I won competitions for pistol shooting in the army. Couple of years, I was the best there was.”

“O.K.,” she said.

He took the gun from her and squatted in the dust and reloaded it. One up the spout and nine in the magazine. He cocked it and locked it and laid it on the ground.

“Leave it there,” he said. “Unless you’re very, very sure. Could you do it?”

“I think so,” she said.

“Thinking so isn’t enough. You’ve got to know so. You’ve got to be prepared to get real close, jam it into his gut, and fire ten times. If you don’t, or if you hesitate, he’ll take it away from you, maybe turn it on you, maybe fire wildly and hit Ellie running in from her room.”

She nodded, quietly. “Last resort.”

“Believe it. You pull the gun, from that point on, it’s all or nothing.”

She nodded again.

“Your decision,” he said. “But I suggest you leave it there.”

She stood still for a long, long time. Then she bent down and picked up the gun. Slipped it back into her bag. He walked over and retrieved his shirt and slipped it over his head. Neither bullet hole showed. One was under his arm, and the other tucked in below the waistband of his pants. Then he tracked around the gulch and picked up all eight spent shell cases. It was an old habit, and good housekeeping. He jingled them together in his hand like small change and put them in his trouser pocket.

 

 

They talked about fear on the ride home. Carmen was quiet on the way back up the rise, and she stopped again at the peak. The Red House compound stretched below them in the distant haze, and she just sat and looked down at it, both hands clasped on the horn of her saddle, saying nothing, a faraway look in her eyes. Reacher’s horse stopped as usual slightly behind hers, so he got the same view, but framed by the curve of her neck and her shoulder.

“Do you ever get afraid?” she asked.

“No,” he said.

She was quiet again for a spell.

“But how is that possible?” she asked.

He looked at the sky. “It’s something I learned, when I was a little boy.”

“How?”

He looked at the ground. “I had a brother, older than me. So he was always ahead. But I wanted to be doing the same stuff as him. He had scary comics, and anywhere we had American television he’d be watching it. So I looked at the same comics and watched the same shows. There was one show about space adventures. I don’t remember what it was called. We watched it in black-and-white somewhere. Maybe in Europe. They had a spaceship that looked like a little submarine with spider legs. They would land it somewhere and get out and go exploring. I remember one night they got chased by this scary creature. It was hairy, like an ape. Like Bigfoot. Long hairy arms and a big snarl. It chased them back to the spaceship, and they jumped in and slammed the hatch shut just as it was climbing in after them.”

“And you were scared?”

He nodded, even though he was behind her. “I was about four, I think. I was terrified. That night I was certain the thing was under my bed. I had this high old bed, and I knew the thing was living under it. It was going to come out and get me. I could just about feel its paw reaching up for me. I couldn’t sleep. If I went to sleep, it would come out and get me for sure. So I stayed awake for hours. I would call for my dad, but when he came in, I was too ashamed to tell him. It went on like that for days and days.”

“And what happened?”

“I got mad. Not at myself for being afraid, because as far as I was concerned the thing was totally real and I should be afraid. I got mad at the thing for making me afraid. For threatening me. One night I just kind of exploded with fury. I yelled O.K., come out and try it! Just damn well try it! I’ll beat the shit right out of you! I faced it down. I turned the fear into aggression.”

“And that worked?”

“I’ve never been scared since. It’s a habit. Those space explorers shouldn’t have turned and run, Carmen. They should have stood there and faced the creature down. They should have stood and fought. You see something scary, you should stand up and step toward it, not away from it. Instinctively, reflexively, in a raging fury.”

“Is that what you do?”

“Always.”

“Is it what I should do? With Sloop?”

“I think it’s what everybody should do.”

She was quiet for a moment. Just staring down at the house, and then lifting her eyes to the horizon beyond it. She clicked her tongue, and both horses moved off together, down the long slow slope toward the road. She shifted in the saddle to keep her balance. Reacher imitated her posture and stayed safely aboard. But not comfortably. He figured horseback riding would be one of the things he tried once and didn’t repeat.

“So what did Bobby say?” she asked. “About us?”

“He said you’ve been away most days for a month, and some nights, and he figured we’ve been up in a motel in Pecos together having an affair. Now he’s all outraged that you’ve brought me down here, so close to Sloop getting back.”

“I wish we had been,” she said. “In a motel, having an affair. I wish that was all it was.”

He said nothing. She paused a beat.

“Do you wish we had been, too?” she asked.

He watched her in the saddle. Lithe, slim, hips swaying gently against the patient gait of the horse. The dark honey skin of her arms was bright in the sun. Her hair hung to the middle of her back.

“I could think of worse things,” he said.

 

 

It was very late in the afternoon when they got back. Josh and Billy were waiting. They were leaning side by side against the wall of the barn, in the harsh shadow below the eaves. Their pick-up was ready for the trip to the feed supplier. It was parked in the yard.

“It takes all three of you?” Carmen whispered.

“It’s Bobby,” Reacher said back. “He’s trying to keep me away from you. Trying to spoil the fun we’re supposed to be having.”

She rolled her eyes.

“I’ll put the horses away,” she said. “I should brush them first.”

They dismounted together in front of the barn door. Josh and Billy peeled off the wall, impatience in their body language.

“You ready?” Billy called.

“He should have been ready a half hour ago,” Josh said.

For that, Reacher made them wait. He walked down to the bunkhouse, very slowly, because he wasn’t going to let them hurry him, and because he was stiff from the saddle. He used the bathroom and rinsed dust off his face. Splashed cold water over his shirt. Walked slowly back. The pick-up had turned to face the gate and the engine was running. Carmen was brushing his horse. Thin clouds of dust were coming off its chestnut fur. Hair? Coat? Josh was sitting sideways in the driver’s seat. Billy was standing next to the passenger door.

“So let’s go,” he called.

He put Reacher in the middle seat. Josh swung his feet in and slammed his door shut. Billy crowded in on the other side and Josh took off toward the gate. Paused at the road and then made a left, at which point Reacher knew the situation was a lot worse than he had guessed.

 

7

 

He had seen the feed bags in the storeroom. There were plenty of them, maybe forty, in head-high stacks. Big waxed-paper bags, probably thirty pounds to a bag. Altogether twelve hundred pounds of feed. About half a ton. How fast were four horses and a pony going to eat their way through all of that?

But he had always understood the trip was Bobby’s idea of a diversion. Buying more feed before it was strictly necessary was as good a way as any of getting him out of Carmen’s life for a spell. But they weren’t buying more feed. Because they had turned left. The bags were all printed with a brand name and nutritional boasts and the name and the address of the feed supplier. The feed supplier was in San Angelo. He had seen it repeated forty times, once on each bag, in big clear letters. San Angelo, San Angelo, San Angelo. And San Angelo was north and east of Echo County. Way north and east. Not south and west. They should have turned right.

So, Bobby was planning to get him out of Carmen’s life permanently. Josh and Billy had been told to get rid of him. And Josh and Billy will do what they’re told, Bobby had said. He smiled at the windshield. Forewarned is forearmed. They didn’t know he’d seen the feed bags, didn’t know he’d read the writing on them, and they didn’t know he’d been looking at maps of Texas for most of the last week. They didn’t know a left turn instead of a right would mean anything to him.

How would they aim to do it? Carmen had implied her out-of-work teacher friend had been scared off. Scared pretty badly, if he wouldn’t even talk to her later, up in the relative safety of Pecos. So were they going to try to scare him? If so, they really had to be kidding. He felt the aggression building inside. He used it and controlled it like he had learned to. He used the adrenaline flow to ease the stiffness in his legs. He let it pump him up. He flexed his shoulders, leaning on Josh on one side, Billy on the other.

“How far is it?” he asked innocently.

“Couple hours,” Billy said.

They were doing about sixty, heading south on the dead-straight road. The landscape was unchanging. Scrubby dry grassland on the left, sullen limestone caliche on the right, broken up into ledges and layers. All of it baking under the relentless sun. There was no traffic. The road looked like it saw one or two vehicles a day. Maybe all they had to do was get far enough away, pull over, throw him out, and he’d die slowly of thirst before anybody got to him. Or of exhaustion, walking back. Or of rattlesnake bites.

“No, less than a couple hours,” Josh said. “Hundred miles is all.”

So maybe they were headed to the bar they had mentioned yesterday. Maybe they had friends there. They better had, Reacher thought. A pair of fifth-rate cowboys ain’t going to do it for me. Then he breathed out again. Relaxed. Struggled with a decision. The problem with the kind of undiluted raging aggression he had described to Carmen was it came out so all-or-nothing. He recalled his first day in high school. The summer after he finished his elementary education, the family moved back stateside for a six-month tour. He was enrolled in a big high school off-base, somewhere in New Jersey, somewhere near Fort Dix. And he was ready for it. In his usual serious earnest fashion he calculated that high school would be bigger and better than elementary school, in every way, including the seriousness of the locker-room scuffling. So he made his usual new-school first-day plan to jump on the very first guy who tried anything. That had always worked well for him. Hit hard, hit early, get your retaliation in first. It made a big impression. But this time, make an even bigger impression, hit harder than ever, because clearly high school was going to be a whole new kind of a deal.

So sure enough some hard kid shoved him the first morning, and ten minutes later the hard kid was on his way to the hospital for a three-week stay. Then Reacher discovered it was really a very genteel school, in a good neighborhood, and that he’d reacted way too drastically, and everybody was looking at him like he was some sort of a barbarian. And he felt like one. He felt a little ashamed. From then on, he’d become calmer. He’d learned to be certain what he was into before he did anything. And he’d learned to offer warnings, sometimes, in certain circumstances.

“We coming straight back?” he asked.

It was a smart tactical question. They couldn’t say no, without alerting him. They couldn’t say yes, if they weren’t going there in the first place.

“We’re going for a couple beers first,” Billy said.

“Where?”

“Where we went yesterday.”

“I’m broke,” Reacher said. “I didn’t get paid yet.”

“We’re buying,” Josh said.

“The feed store open late? On a Saturday?”

“Big order, they’ll accommodate us,” Billy said.

Maybe it was a new supplier. Maybe they changed their source.

“I guess you use them a lot,” he said.

“All the years we’ve been here,” Josh said.

“Then we’re going straight back?”

“Sure we are,” Billy said. “You’ll be back in time for your beauty sleep.”

“That’s good,” Reacher said.

He paused.

“Because that’s the way I like it,” he said.

Mess with me now, you get what you get.

Billy said nothing. Josh just smiled and drove.

 

 

The scenery flattened very gradually as they headed south. From his time with the maps he knew the Rio Grande was curling around toward them from the west. They were entering the river basin, where wide prehistoric waters had scoured the land. Josh kept the speed at a steady sixty. Billy stared idly out of his window. The road remained straight and featureless. Reacher rested his head on the gun rack behind him and waited. Waiting was something he was accustomed to. Many times in his career, frantic action had been preceded by a long drive. It usually happened that way. The patient accumulation of evidence, the arrival at a conclusion, the identification of a suspect, the drive out to deal with him. Waiting was a skill you learned fast, in the military.

The road got rougher the farther south they drove. The truck labored over it. The load bed was empty, so the rear wheels bounced and skipped. There were vultures on some of the telephone poles. The sun was low in the west. There was a sign on the shoulder. It said Echo 5 miles. It was pocked with bullet holes.

“I thought Echo was north,” Reacher said. “Where Ellie goes to school.”

“It’s split,” Billy said. “Half of it up there, half of it down here. Hundred sixty miles of nothing in between.”

“World’s biggest town, end to end,” Josh said. “Bigger than Los Angeles.”

He eased off the gas around a long slow curve and a cluster of small buildings came into view in the distance, all of them built low to the ground, all of them lit from behind by the low sun. There were tin advertisements on the shoulder, three miles out, announcing well in advance what the buildings were going to be. There was going to be another gas station, and a country store. And a bar, called the Longhorn Lounge, owned and operated by somebody named Harley. It had the last sign, but it was the first establishment they came to. It was a hundred feet east of the shoulder of the road, built out of tarred boards under an iron roof, crouched low at an angle in the middle of two acres of parched earth. There were ten or twelve pick-up trucks parked nose-in to the building like airplanes at a terminal. And nearest the door was the sheriff’s secondhand police car, just sitting there like it had been abandoned.

Josh bumped across the parking lot and put the truck in line with the others. The bar had neon beer signs in the windows, trapped between dirty glass and faded gingham drapes. Josh turned the motor off. Put the keys in his pocket. In the sudden quiet Reacher could hear bar noise, the roar of extractor fans and air conditioners, the thump of an overworked jukebox amplifier, the rumble of talking, the chink of bottles and glasses, the click of pool balls. Sounded like a reasonable crowd in there.

Josh and Billy opened their doors together and swung out. Reacher slid out through the passenger door and stood with his back to the sun. It was still hot. He could feel heat all over him, right from the back of his neck to the heels of his shoes.

“O.K.,” Billy said. “We’re buying.”

There was an inside lobby with an old-fashioned pay phone and scrawled numbers and old messages creeping over the boards alongside it. Then there was a second door, with a yellow glass window in it, that led into the bar itself. Billy pushed it open.

For a military cop, walking into a bar is like a batter stepping to the plate. It’s his place of business. Maybe ninety percent of low-grade trouble in the service happens in bars. Put a bunch of young men trained for aggression and reaction alongside a limitless supply of alcohol, add in unit rivalries, add in the presence of civilian women and their civilian husbands and boyfriends, and it becomes inevitable. So just like a batter walks warily from the on-deck circle, watching the infield, surveying the outfield, calculating angles and distances, a military cop is all eyes on the way into a bar. First, he counts the exits. There are usually three. The front door, the back door out beyond the rest rooms, and the private door from the office behind the bar. Reacher saw that the Longhorn Lounge had all three of them. The windows were too small to be useful to anybody.

Then the MP looks at the crowd. He looks for knots of trouble. Who falls silent and stares? Where are the challenges? Nowhere, in the Longhorn. There were maybe twenty or twenty-five people in the long low room, all men, all tanned and lean and dressed in denim, none of them paying any kind of attention beyond casual glances and nods of easy familiarity toward Billy and Josh. The sheriff was nowhere to be seen. But there was an unoccupied stool at the bar with a fresh bottle sitting on a used napkin in front of it. Maybe the place of honor.

Then the MP looks for weapons. There was an antique revolver above the bar, wired onto a wooden plaque with a message branded into it with a hot poker: We don’t call 911. There would be a few modern handguns here and there in the room. There were long-neck bottles all over the place, but Reacher wasn’t worried about them. Bottles are no real use as weapons. Except in the movies, where they make them out of spun sugar and print the labels on tissue paper. A real bottle won’t break against a table top. The glass is too thick. They just make a loud banging noise. They have some marginal use as clubs, but the pool table worried him more. It sat in the middle of the room, all covered in hard celluloid balls, four guys with four cues using it, maybe a dozen more cues vertical in a long rack on the nearest wall. Short of a shotgun, a pool cue is the best barroom weapon ever invented. Short enough to be handy, long enough to be useful, made out of fine hardwood and nicely weighted with lead.

The air was unnaturally cold and thick with beer fumes and smoke and noise. The jukebox was near the pool table, and beyond it was an area with small round lounge tables surrounded by stools padded with red vinyl. Billy held up three fingers to the barman and got three cold bottles in exchange. He carried them laced between his fingers and led the way toward the tables. Reacher stepped ahead of him and got there first. He wanted his choice of seats. Back to the wall was his rule. All three exits in view, if possible. He threaded his way in and sat down. Josh sat to his half-right, and Billy sat half-left. Pushed a bottle across the scarred surface of the table. People had stubbed cigarettes on the wood. The sheriff came into the room from the rear, from the direction of the rest rooms, checking that his pants were zipped. He paused a second when he saw Reacher, nothing in his face, and then he moved on and sat down at the bar, on the unoccupied stool, his shoulders hunched, his back to the crowd.

Billy raised his bottle like a toast.

“Good luck,” he said.

You’re going to need it, pal, Reacher thought. He took a long pull from his own bottle. The beer was cold and gassy. It tasted strongly of hops.

“I need to make a phone call,” Billy said.

He pushed back from the table and stood up again. Josh leaned to his right, trying to fill the new vacant space in front of Reacher. Billy made it through the crowd and went outside to the lobby. Reacher took another sip of his beer and estimated the passage of time. And counted the people in the room. There were twenty-three of them, excluding himself, including the barman, who he guessed was Harley. Billy came back inside two minutes and forty seconds. He bent and spoke into the sheriff’s ear. The sheriff nodded. Billy spoke some more. The sheriff nodded again. Drained his bottle and pushed back from the bar and stood up. Turned to face the room. Glanced once in Reacher’s direction and then stepped away and pushed out through the door. Billy stood and watched him go and then threaded his way back to the table.

“Sheriff’s leaving,” he said. “He remembered he had urgent business elsewhere.”

Reacher said nothing.

“Did you make your call?” Josh asked, like it was rehearsed.

“Yes, I made my call,” Billy said.

Then he sat down on his stool and picked up his bottle.

“Don’t you want to know who I called?” he said, looking across at Reacher.

“Why would I give a rat’s ass who you called?” Reacher said.

“I called for the ambulance,” Billy said. “Best to do it ahead of time, because it comes all the way from Presidio. It can take hours to get here.”

“See, we got a confession to make,” Josh said. “We lied to you before. There was a guy we ran off. He was knocking boots with the Mexican woman. Bobby didn’t think that was appropriate behavior, in the circumstances, what with Sloop being in prison and all. So we got asked to take care of it. We brought him down here.”

“Want to know what we did?” Billy asked.

“I thought we were going to the feed store,” Reacher said.

“Feed store’s up in San Angelo.”

“So what are we doing all the way down here?”

“We’re telling you, is what. This is where we brought the other guy.”

“What’s this other guy got to do with me?”

“Bobby figures you’re in the same category, is what.”

“He thinks I’m knocking boots with her too?”

Josh nodded. “He sure does.”

“What do you think?”

“We agree with him. Why else would you come around? You’re no horseman, that’s for damn sure.”

“Suppose I told you we’re just good friends?”

“Bobby says you’re more than that.”

“And you believe him?”

Billy nodded. “Sure we do. She comes on to him. He told us that himself. So why should you be any different? And hey, we don’t blame you. She’s a good-looking piece of ass. I’d go there myself, except she’s Sloop’s. You got to respect family, even with beaners. That’s the rule around here.”

Reacher said nothing.

“Her other guy was a schoolteacher,” Billy said. “Got way out of line. So we brought him down here, and we took him out back, in the yard, and we got us a hog butchering knife, and we got us a couple of guys to hold him, and we pulled his pants down, and we told him we were going to cut it off. He was all crying and whimpering and messing himself. Begging and whining. Promising he’d get himself lost. Pleading with us not to cut. But we cut just a little anyway. For the fun of it. There was blood everywhere. Then we let him go. But we told him if we ever saw his face again, we’d take it all the way off for real. And you know what? We never saw his face again.”

“So it worked,” Josh said. “It worked real good. Only problem was he nearly bled out, from the wound. We should have called ahead for the ambulance. We figured we should remember that, for the next time. Live and learn, that’s what we always say. So this time, we did call ahead. Especially for you. So you should be grateful.”

“You cut the guy?” Reacher asked.

“We sure did.”

“Sounds like you’re real proud of yourselves.”

“We do what it takes. We look after the family.”

“And you’re admitting it to me?”

Josh nodded. “Why shouldn’t we? Like, who the hell are you?”

Reacher shrugged. “Well, I’m not a schoolteacher.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means you aim to cut me, it’ll be you goes in the ambulance.”

“You think?”

Reacher nodded. “That horse I was on shit more trouble than you guys are going to give me.”

He looked at each of them in turn, openly and evenly. Serene self-confidence works wonders, in a situation like that. And he felt confident. It was confidence born of experience. It was a long, long time since he’d lost a two-on-one bar fight.

“Your choice,” he said. “Quit now, or go to the hospital.”

“Well, you know what?” Josh said, smiling. “I think we’ll stay with the program. Because whatever the hell kind of a guy you think you are, we’re the ones got a lot of friends in here. And you don’t.”

“I didn’t inquire about your social situation,” Reacher said.

But it was clearly true. They had friends in there. Some kind of a subliminal vibe was quieting the room, making people restless and watchful. They were glancing over, then glancing at each other. The atmosphere was building. The pool game was slowing down. Reacher could feel tension in the air. The silences were starting. The challenges. Maybe it was going to be worse than two-on-one. Maybe a lot worse.

Billy smiled.

“We don’t scare easy,” he said. “Call it a professional thing.”

They get in the ring with bulls that weigh a ton and a half, Bobby had said. They ain’t going to be too worried about you. Reacher had never been to a rodeo. He knew nothing about them, except for occasional passing impressions from television or the movies. He guessed the riders sat on some kind of a fence, near the pen, and they jumped on just as the bull was released out into the ring. Then they had to stay on. What was it, eight seconds? And if they didn’t, they could get kicked around pretty badly. They could get stomped. Or gored, with the horns. So these guys had some kind of dumb courage. And strength. And resilience. And they were accustomed to pain and injury. But they were also accustomed to some kind of a pattern. Some kind of a structured buildup. Some kind of a measured countdown, before the action suddenly started. He didn’t know for sure how it went. Maybe three, two, one, go. Maybe ten, nine, eight. Whatever, they were accustomed to waiting, counting off the seconds, tensing up, breathing deeply, getting ready for it.

“So let’s do it,” he said. “Right now, in the yard.”

He came out from behind the table and stepped past Josh before he could react. Walked ahead, away from the jukebox, to the right of the pool table, heading for the rest room exit. Knots of people blocked him and then parted to let him through. He heard Josh and Billy following right behind him. He felt them counting down, tensing up, getting ready. Maybe twenty paces to the exit, maybe thirty seconds to the yard. Twenty-nine, twenty-eight. He kept his steps even, building on the rhythm. Twenty-seven, twenty-six. Arms loose by his side. Twenty-five, twenty-four.

He snatched the last pool cue from the rack and reversed it in his hands and scythed a complete hundred-eighty-degree turn and hit Billy as hard as he could in the side of the head, one. There was a loud crunch of bone clearly audible over the jukebox noise and a spray of blood and Billy went down like he had been machine-gunned. He swung again, chopping full-force at Josh like a slugger swinging for the fences, two. Josh’s hand came up to block the blow and his forearm broke clean in half. He screamed and Reacher swung again for the head, three, connecting hard, knocking him sideways. He jabbed for the face and punched out a couple of teeth, four. Backhanded the cue with all his strength against the upper arm and shattered the bone, five. Josh went down head-to-toe with Billy and Reacher stood over them both and swung again four more times, fast and hard, six, seven, eight, nine, against ribs and collarbones and knees and skulls. A total of nine swings, maybe six or seven seconds of furious explosive force. Hit hard, hit early, get your retaliation in first. While they’re still waiting for the bell.

The other men in the bar had spun away from the action and now they were crowding back in again, slowly and warily. Reacher turned a menacing circle with the cue held ready. He bent and took the truck keys from Josh’s pocket. Then he dropped the cue and let it clatter to the floor and barged his way through the crowd to the door, breathing hard, shoving people out of his way. Nobody seriously tried to stop him. Clearly friendship had its limits, down there in Echo County. He made it into the lot, still breathing fast. The heat broke him out in a sweat, instantly. He made it back to the truck. Slid inside and fired it up and backed away from the building and peeled away north. The bar door stayed firmly closed. Nobody came after him.

 

 

The sun set far away in the west an hour into his drive back and it was full dark when he turned in under the ranch gate. But every light in the Red House was burning. And there were two cars parked in the yard. One was the sheriff’s secondhand cruiser. The other was a lime green Lincoln. The sheriff’s car was flashing red and blue. The Lincoln was lit by the spill from the porch and the hot yellow light made it look the color of a dead man’s skin. There were clouds of moths everywhere, big papery insects crowding the bulbs above the porch like tiny individual snowstorms, forming and re-forming as they fluttered from one to the next. Behind them the chant of the night insects was already rhythmic and insistent.

The front door of the house was standing open and there was noise in the foyer. Loud excited conversation, from a small crowd of people. Reacher stepped up and looked into the room and saw the sheriff, and Rusty Greer, and Bobby, and then Carmen standing alone near the rack of rifles. She had changed out of her jeans and shirt. She was wearing a dress. It was red and black and had no sleeves. It finished at the knee. She looked numb. Conflicting emotions in her face made it blank and expressionless. There was a man in a suit at the opposite end of the room, standing near the red-framed mirror so Reacher could see the front and back of him at the same time. The Lincoln driver, obviously. He was sleek and slightly overweight, not short, not tall, dressed in pressed seersucker. Maybe thirty years old, with light-colored hair carefully combed and receding from a domed brow. He had a pale indoor face, red with sunburn on the upward-facing planes like he played golf in the early afternoon. The face was split into a huge politician’s smile. He looked like he had been receiving fulsome accolades and pretending they were completely unnecessary.

Reacher paused on the porch and decided not to enter. But his weight put a loud creak into the boards and Bobby heard it. He glanced out into the night and did a perfect double-take. Stood completely still for a second and then came hurrying through the door. Took Reacher’s elbow and pulled him into the lee of the wall, alongside the entrance, out of sight of the foyer.

“What are you doing here?” he asked.

“I work here,” Reacher said. “Remember?”

“Where are Josh and Billy?”

“They quit.”

Bobby stared at him. “They what?”

“They quit,” Reacher said again.

“What does that mean?”

“It means they decided they didn’t want to work here anymore.”

“Why would they do that?”

Reacher shrugged. “How would I know? Maybe they were just exercising their prerogative inside a free labor market.”

“What?”

Reacher said nothing. Bobby’s absence and the voices on the porch had pulled people to the door. Rusty Greer was first out, followed by the sheriff and the guy in the seersucker suit. Carmen stayed inside, near the rifles, still looking numb. They all fell silent, looking at Reacher, Rusty like she had a social difficulty to deal with, the sheriff puzzled, the new guy in the suit wondering who the hell this stranger was.

“What’s going on?” Rusty asked.

“This guy says Josh and Billy quit on us,” Bobby said.

“They wouldn’t do that,” Rusty said. “Why would they do that?”

The guy in the suit was looming forward, like he expected to be introduced.

“Did they give a reason?” Rusty asked.

The sheriff was looking straight at Reacher, nothing in his face. Reacher made no reply. Just stood there, waiting.

“Well, I’m Hack Walker,” the guy in the suit said, in a big honest voice, holding out his hand. “I’m the DA up in Pecos, and I’m a friend of the family.”

“Sloop’s oldest friend,” Rusty said, absently.

Reacher nodded and took the guy’s hand.

“Jack Reacher,” he said. “I work here.”

The guy held on to his hand in both of his own and beamed a subtle little smile that was partly genuine, partly you-know-how-it-is ironic. A perfect politician’s smile.

“You registered to vote here yet?” he asked. “Because if so, I just want to point out I’m running for judge in November, and I’d surely like to count on your support.”

Then he started up with a self-deprecating chuckle, a man secure among friends, amused about how the demands of democracy can intrude on good manners. You know how it is. Reacher took his hand back and nodded without speaking.

“Hack’s worked so hard for us,” Rusty said. “And now he’s brought us the most delightful news.”

“Al Eugene showed up?” Reacher asked.

“No, not yet,” Rusty said. “Something else entirely.”

“And nothing to do with the election,” Hack said. “You folks all understand that, don’t you? I agree, November time makes us want to do something for everybody, but you know I’d have done this for you anyhow.”

“And you know we’d all vote for you anyhow, Hack,” Rusty said.

Then everybody started beaming at everybody else. Reacher glanced beyond them at Carmen standing alone in the foyer. She wasn’t beaming.

“You’re getting Sloop out early,” he said. “Tomorrow, I guess.”

Hack Walker ducked his head, like Reacher had offered him a compliment.

“That’s for sure,” he said. “All along they claimed they couldn’t do administration on the weekend, but I managed to change their minds. They said it would be the first Sunday release in the history of the system, but I just said hey, there’s a first time for everything.”

“Hack’s going to drive us up there,” Rusty said. “We’re leaving soon. We’re going to drive all night.”

“We’re going to be waiting on the sidewalk,” Hack said. “Right outside the prison gate, seven o’clock in the morning. Old Sloop’s going to get a big welcome.”

“You all going?” Reacher asked.

“I’m not,” Carmen said.

She had come out onto the porch, quietly, like a wraith. She was standing with her feet together, both hands on the railing, leaning forward from the waist, elbows locked, staring north at the black horizon.

“I have to stay and see to Ellie,” she said.

“Plenty of room in the car,” Hack said. “Ellie can come too.”

Carmen shook her head. “I don’t want her to see her father walking out of a prison door.”

“Well, please yourself,” Rusty said. “He’s only your husband, after all.”

Carmen made no reply. Just shivered slightly, like the night air was thirty degrees instead of ninety.

“Then I guess I’ll stay too,” Bobby said. “Keep an eye on things. Sloop will understand.”

Reacher glanced at him. Carmen turned abruptly and walked back into the house. Rusty and Hack Walker drifted after her. The sheriff and Bobby stayed on the porch, each taking a half-step toward the other, to put a subliminal human barrier between Reacher and the door.

“So why did they quit?” Bobby asked.

Reacher glanced at them both and shrugged.

“Well, they didn’t exactly quit,” he said. “I was trying to sugar the pill, for the family, was all. Truth is we were in a bar, and they picked a fight with some guy. You saw us in the bar, right, Sheriff?”

The sheriff nodded, cautiously.

“It was after you left,” Reacher said. “They picked a fight and lost.”

“Who with?” Bobby asked. “What guy?”

“The wrong guy.”

“But who was he?”

“Some big guy,” Reacher said. “He smacked them around for a minute or two. I think somebody called the ambulance for them. They’re probably in the hospital now. Maybe they’re dead, for all I know. They lost, and they lost real bad.”

Bobby stared. “Who was the guy?”

“Just some guy, minding his own business.”

“Who?”

“Some stranger, I guess.”

Bobby paused. “Was it you?”

“Me?” Reacher said. “Why would they pick a fight with me?”

Bobby said nothing.

“Why would they pick a fight with me, Bobby?” Reacher asked again. “What possible kind of a reason would they have for that?”

Bobby made no reply. Just stared and then turned and stalked into the house. Slammed the door loudly behind him. The sheriff stayed where he was.

“So they got hurt bad,” he said.

Reacher nodded. “Seems that way. You should make some calls, check it out. Then start spreading the news. Tell people that’s what happens, if they start picking fights with the wrong strangers.”

The sheriff nodded again, still cautious.

“Maybe it’s something you should bear in mind, too,” Reacher said. “Bobby told me down here folks sort out their own differences. He told me they’re reluctant to involve law enforcement people. He implied cops stay out of private disputes. He said it’s some kind of a big old West Texas tradition.”

The sheriff was quiet for a moment.

“I guess it might be,” he said.

“Bobby said it definitely was. A definite tradition.”

The sheriff turned away.

“Well, you could put it that way,” he said. “And I’m a very traditional guy.”

Reacher nodded.

“I’m very glad to hear it,” he said.

The sheriff paused on the porch steps, and then moved on again without looking back. He slid into his car and killed the flashing lights and started the engine. Maneuvered carefully past the lime green Lincoln and headed out down the driveway and under the gate. His engine was running rich. Reacher could smell unburned gasoline in the air, and he could hear the muffler popping with tiny explosions. Then the car accelerated into the distance and he could hear nothing at all except the grasshoppers clicking and chattering.

 

 

He came down off the porch and walked around to the kitchen door. It was standing open, either for ventilation or so the maid could eavesdrop on the excitement. She was standing just inside the room, close to an insect screen made of plastic strips hanging down in the doorway.

“Hey,” Reacher said. He had learned long ago to be friendly with the cookhouse detail. That way, you eat better. But she didn’t answer him. She just stood there, warily.

“Let me guess,” he said. “You only made two suppers for the bunkhouse.”

She said nothing, which was as good as a yes.

“You were misinformed,” he said. “Was it Bobby?”

She nodded. “He told me you weren’t coming back.”

“He was mistaken,” he said. “It was Josh and Billy who didn’t come back. So I guess I’ll eat their dinners. Both of them. I’m hungry.”

She paused. Then she shrugged.

“I’ll bring them down,” she said. “In a minute.”

He shook his head.

“I’ll eat them here,” he said. “Save you the walk.”

He parted the plastic strips with the backs of his hands and stepped inside the kitchen. It smelled of chili, left over from lunchtime.

“What did you make?” he asked.

“Steaks,” she said.

“Good,” he said. “I like bovines better than edentates.”

“What?”

“I like beef better than I like armadillo.”

“So do I,” she said.

She used pot holders and took two plates out of a warming oven. Each held a medium-sized rib-eye steak, and a large mound of mashed potato and a smaller mound of fried onions. She put them side by side on the kitchen table, with a fork on the left of the left-hand plate and a knife all the way to the right. It looked like a double-barreled meal.

“Billy was my cousin,” she said.

“He probably still is,” Reacher said. “Josh got it worse.”

“Josh was my cousin, too.”

“Well, I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Different branch of the family,” she said. “More distant. And they were both fools.”

Reacher nodded. “Not the sharpest chisels in the box.”

“But the Greers are sharp,” she said. “Whatever it is you’re doing with the Mexican woman, you should remember that.”

Then she left him alone to eat.

 

 

He rinsed both plates when he finished and left them stacked in the sink. Walked down to the horse barn and sat down to wait in the foul heat inside because he wanted to stay close to the house. He sat on a hay bale and kept his back to the horses. They were restless for a spell, and then they got used to his presence. He heard them fall asleep, one by one. The shuffling hooves stopped moving and he heard lazy huffs of breath.

Then he heard feet over on the boards of the porch, and then on the steps, and then the crunch of dry dust under them as they crossed the yard. He heard the Lincoln’s doors open, then shut again. He heard the engine start, and the transmission engage. He stood up and stepped to the barn door and saw the Lincoln turning around in front of the house. It was lit from behind by the porch lights, and he could see Hack Walker silhouetted at the wheel, with Rusty Greer beside him. The porch lights turned her teased-up hair to cotton candy. He could see the shape of her skull underneath it.

The big car drove straight out under the gate and swooped right without pausing and accelerated away down the road. He watched the bright cone of its headlights through the picket fence, bouncing left to right through the darkness. Then it was gone and the sounds of the night insects came back and the big moths around the lights were all that was moving.

 

 

He waited just inside the barn door, trying to guess who would come for him first. Carmen, probably, he thought, but it was Bobby who stepped out on the porch, maybe five minutes after his mother had left to bring his brother home. He came straight down the steps and headed across the yard, down toward the path to the bunkhouse. He had his ball cap on again, reversed on his head. Reacher stepped out of the barn and cut him off.

“Horses need watering,” Bobby said. “And I want their stalls cleaned out.”

“You do it,” Reacher said.

“What?”

“You heard.”

Bobby stood still.

“I’m not doing it,” he said.

“Then I’ll make you do it.”

“What the hell is this?”

“A change, is what,” Reacher said. “Things just changed for you, Bobby, big time, believe me. Soon as you decided to set Josh and Billy on me, you crossed a line. Put yourself in a whole different situation. One where you do exactly what I tell you.”

Bobby said nothing.

Reacher looked straight at him. “I tell you jump, you don’t even ask how high. You just start jumping. That clear? I own you now.”

Bobby stood still. Reacher swung his right hand, aiming a big slow roundhouse slap. Bobby ducked away from it, straight into Reacher’s left, which pulled the ball cap off his head.

“So go look after the horses,” Reacher said. “Then you can sleep in there with them. I see you again before breakfast time, I’ll break your legs.”

Bobby stood still.

“Who are you going to call, little brother?” Reacher asked him. “The maid, or the sheriff?”

Bobby said nothing. The vastness of the night closed in. Echo County, a hundred and fifty souls, most of them at least sixty or a hundred miles beyond the black horizons. The absolute definition of isolation.

“O.K.,” Bobby said quietly.

He walked slowly toward the barn. Reacher dropped the ball cap in the dirt and strolled up to the house, with the porch lights shining in his eyes and the big papery moths swarming out to greet him.

 

 

Two-thirds of the killing crew saw him stroll. They were doing it better than the watchers had. The woman had checked the map and rejected the tactic of driving in from the west. For one thing, the Crown Vic wouldn’t make it over the desert terrain. For another, to hide a mile away made no sense at all. Especially during the hours of darkness. Far better to drive straight down the road and stop a hundred yards shy of the house, long enough for two of the team to jump out, then turn the car and head back north while the two on foot ducked behind the nearest line of rocks and worked south toward the red gate and holed up in the small craters ten yards from the blacktop.

It was the two men on foot. They had night-vision devices. Nothing fancy, nothing military, just commercial equipment bought from a sporting goods catalog and carried along with everything else in the black nylon valise. They were binoculars, with some kind of electronic enhancement inside. Some kind of infrared capability. It picked up the night heat rising off the ground, and made Reacher look like he was wobbling and shimmering as he walked.

 

8

 

Reacher found Carmen in the parlor. The light was dim and the air was hot and thick. She was sitting alone at the red-painted table. Her back was perfectly straight and her forearms were resting lightly on the wooden surface and her gaze was blank and absolutely level, focused on a spot on the wall where there was nothing to see.

“Twice over,” she said. “I feel cheated, twice over. First it was a year, and then it was nothing. Then it was forty-eight hours, but really it was only twenty-four.”

“You can still get out,” he said.

“Now it’s less than twenty-four,” she said. “It’s sixteen hours, maybe. I’ll have breakfast by myself, but he’ll be back for lunch.”

“Sixteen hours is enough,” he said. “Sixteen hours, you could be anywhere.”

“Ellie’s fast asleep,” she said. “I can’t wake her up and bundle her in a car and run away and be chased by the cops forever.”

Reacher said nothing.

“I’m going to try to face it,” she said. “A fresh start. I’m planning to tell him, enough is enough. I’m planning to tell him, he lays a hand on me again, I’ll divorce him. Whatever it takes. However long.”

“Way to go,” he said.

“Do you believe I can?” she asked.

“I believe anybody can do anything,” he said. “If they want it enough.”

“I want it,” she said. “Believe me, I want it.”

She went quiet. Reacher glanced around the silent room.

“Why did they paint everything red?” he asked.

“Because it was cheap,” she said. “During the fifties, nobody down here wanted red anything, because of the Communists. So it was the cheapest color at the paint store.”

“I thought they were rich, back then. With the oil.”

“They were rich. They still are rich. Richer than you could ever imagine. But they’re also mean.”

He looked at the places where the fifty-year-old paint was worn back to the wood.

“Evidently,” he said.

She nodded again. Said nothing.

“Last chance, Carmen,” he said. “We could go, right now. There’s nobody here to call the cops. By the time they get back, we could be anywhere you want.”

“Bobby’s here.”

“He’s going to stay in the barn.”

“He’d hear the car.”

“We could rip out the phones.”

“He’d chase us. He could get to the sheriff inside two hours.”

“We could fix the other cars so they wouldn’t work.”

“He’d hear us doing it.”

“I could tie him up. I could drown him in a horse trough.”

She smiled, bitterly. “But you won’t drown Sloop.”

He nodded. “Figure of speech, I guess.”

She was quiet for a beat. Then she scraped back her chair and stood up.

“Come and see Ellie,” she said. “She’s so beautiful when she’s asleep.”

She passed close to him and took his hand in hers. Led him out through the kitchen and into the rear lobby and up the back stairs, toward the noise of the fan turning slowly. Down the long hot corridor to Ellie’s door. She eased it open with her foot and maneuvered him so he could see inside the room.

There was a night-light plugged into an outlet low on the wall and its soft orange glow showed the child sprawled on her back, with her arms thrown up around her head. She had kicked off her sheet and the rabbit T-shirt had ridden up and was showing a band of plump pink skin at her waist. Her hair was tumbled over the pillow. Long dark eyelashes rested on her cheeks like fans. Her mouth was open a fraction.

“She’s six and a half,” Carmen whispered. “She needs this. She needs a bed of her own, in a place of her own. I can’t make her live like a fugitive.”

He said nothing.

“Do you see?” she whispered.

He shrugged. He didn’t, really. At age six and a half, he had lived exactly like a fugitive. He had at every age, right from birth to yesterday. He had moved from one service base to another, all around the world, often with no notice at all. He recalled days when he got up for school and instead was driven to an airstrip and ended up on the other side of the planet thirty hours later. He recalled stumbling tired and bewildered into dank bungalow bedrooms and sleeping on unmade beds. The next morning, his mother would tell him which country they were in. Which continent they were on. If she knew yet. Sometimes she didn’t. It hadn’t done him any harm.

Or, maybe it had.

“It’s your call, I guess,” he said.

She pulled him back into the corridor and eased Ellie’s door shut behind him.

“Now I’ll show you where I hid the gun,” she said. “You can tell me if you approve.”

She walked ahead of him down the corridor. The air conditioner was loud. He passed under a vent and a breath of air played over him. It was warm. Carmen’s dress swayed with every step. She was wearing heels and they put tension in the muscles of her legs. He could see tendons in the backs of her knees. Her hair hung down her back and merged with the black pattern on the red fabric of the dress. She turned left and then right and stepped through an archway. There was another staircase, leading down.

“Where are we going?” he asked.

“Separate wing,” she said. “It was added. By Sloop’s grandfather, I think.”

The staircase led to a long narrow ground-floor hallway that led out of the main building to a master suite. It was as big as a small house. There was a dressing area, and a spacious bathroom, and a sitting room with a sofa and two armchairs. Beyond the sitting room was a broad archway. Beyond the archway, there was a bedroom.

“In here,” she said.

She walked straight through the sitting room and led him to the bedroom.

“You see what I mean?” she said. “We’re a long way from anywhere. Nobody hears anything. And I try to be quiet, anyway. If I scream, he hits me harder.”

He nodded and looked around. There was a window, facing east, with insects loud beyond the screen. There was a king-size bed close to it, with side tables by the head, and a chest-high piece of furniture full of drawers opposite the foot. It looked like it had been made a hundred years ago, out of some kind of oak trees.

“Texas ironwood,” she said. “It’s what you get if you let the mesquite grow tall.”

“You should have been a teacher,” he said. “You’re always explaining things.”

She smiled, vaguely. “I thought about it, in college. It was a possibility, back then. In my other life.”

She opened the drawer on the top right.

“I moved the gun,” she said. “I listened to your advice. Bedside cabinet was too low. Ellie could have found it. This is too high for her.”

He nodded again and moved closer. The drawer was a couple of feet wide, maybe eighteen inches deep. It was her underwear drawer. The pistol was lying on top of her things, which were neatly folded, and silky, and insubstantial, and fragrant. The mother-of-pearl plastic on the grips looked right at home there.

“You could have told me where it was,” he said. “You didn’t need to show me.”

She was quiet for a beat.

“He’ll want sex, won’t he?” she said.

Reacher made no reply.

“He’s been locked up a year and a half,” she said. “But I’m going to refuse.”

Reacher said nothing.

“It’s a woman’s right, isn’t it?” she asked. “To say no?”

“Of course it is,” he said.

“Even though the woman is married?”

“Most places,” he said.

She was quiet for a beat.

“And it’s also her right to say yes, isn’t it?” she asked.

“Equally,” he said.

“I’d say yes to you.”

“I’m not asking.”

She paused. “So is it O.K. for me to ask you?”

He looked straight at her. “Depends on why, I guess.”

“Because I want to,” she said. “I want to go to bed with you.”

“Why?”

“Honestly?” she said. “Just because I want to.”

“And?”

She shrugged. “And I want to hurt Sloop a little, I guess, in secret. In my heart.”

He said nothing.

“Before he gets home,” she said.

He said nothing.

“And because Bobby already thinks we’re doing it,” she said. “I figure, why get the blame without getting the fun?”

He said nothing.

“I just want a little fun,” she said. “Before it all starts up again.”

He said nothing.

“No strings attached,” she said. “I’m not looking for it to change anything. About your decision, I mean. About Sloop.”

He nodded.

“It wouldn’t change anything,” he said.

She looked away.

“So what’s your answer?” she asked.

He watched her profile. Her face was blank. It was like all other possibilities were exhausted for her, and all that was left was instinct. Early in his service career, when the threat was still plausible, people talked about what they would do when the enemy missiles were airborne and incoming. This was absolutely the number-one pick, by a huge, huge margin. A universal instinct. And he could see it in her. She had heard the four-minute warning, and the sirens were sounding loud in her mind.

“No,” he said.

She was quiet for a long moment.

“Will you at least stay with me?” she asked.

 

 

The killing crew moved fifty miles closer to Pecos in the middle of the night. They did it secretly, some hours after booking in for a second night at their first location. It was the woman’s preferred method. Six false names, two overlapping sets of motel records, the confusion built fast enough to keep them safe.

They drove east on I-10 until they passed the I-20 interchange. They headed down toward Fort Stockton until they saw signs for the first group of motels serving the Balmorhea state recreation area. Those motels were far enough from the actual tourist attraction to make them cheap and anonymous. There wasn’t going to be a lot of cutesy decor and personal service. But they would be clean and decent. And they would be full of people exactly like themselves. That was what the woman wanted. She was a chameleon. She had an instinct for the right type of place. She chose the second establishment they came to, and sent the small dark man to pay cash for two rooms.

 

 

Reacher woke up on Sloop Greer’s sofa with the Sunday dawn. Beyond him, the bedroom window faced east and the night insects were gone and the sky was bright. The bed sheet looked damp and tangled. Carmen wasn’t under it. He could hear the shower running in the bathroom. And he could smell coffee.

He got off the sofa and stretched. Wandered through the archway to the bedroom. He saw Carmen’s dress on the floor. He went to the window and checked the weather. No change. The sky was hazed with heat. He wandered back to the sitting area. There was a credenza in one corner, set up with a small coffee machine. There were two upturned mugs beside it, with spoons, like a hotel. The bathroom door was closed. The shower sounded loud behind it. He filled a mug with coffee and wandered into the dressing area. There were two large closets there, parallel, one on each side. Not walk-ins, just long deep alcoves screened with sliding doors made out of mirrored glass.

He opened the left-hand closet. It was hers. It was full of dresses and pants on hangers. There were blouses. There was a rack of shoes. He closed it again and turned around and opened the other one. It was Sloop’s. There were a dozen suits, and rows and rows of chinos and blue jeans. Cedar shelves stacked with T-shirts, and dress shirts folded into plastic wraps. A row of neckties. Belts, with fancy buckles. A long row of dusty shoes on the floor. The shoes looked to be about size eleven. He swapped his coffee cup into his other hand and nudged open a suit coat, looking for the label. It was a forty-four long. It would fit a guy about six feet two or three, maybe a hundred and ninety or two hundred pounds. So Sloop was not an especially big guy. Not a giant. But he was a foot taller and twice the weight of his wife. Not the world’s fairest match-up.

There was a photograph frame face-down on top of a stack of shirts. He turned it over. There was a five-by-seven color print under a cream card mat glassed into a lacquered wooden surround. The print showed three guys, young, halfway between boyhood and manhood. Maybe seventeen years old, maybe eighteen. They were standing close together, leaning on the bulging fender of an old-fashioned pick-up truck. They were peering expectantly at the camera, like maybe it was perched close by on a rock and they were waiting for the self-timer to click in. They looked full of youthful energy and excitement. Their whole lives ahead of them, full of infinite possibilities. One of them was Hack Walker, a little slimmer, a little more muscular, a lot more hair. He guessed the other two were Al Eugene and Sloop Greer himself. Teen-aged buddies. Eugene was a head shorter than Sloop, and chubby. Sloop looked like a younger version of Bobby.

He heard the shower shut off and put the photograph back and closed the slider. Moved back to the sitting area. A moment later the bathroom door opened and Carmen came out in a cloud of steam. She was wrapped in two white towels, one around her body, the other bound like a turban around her hair. He looked at her and stayed quiet, unsure of what to say.

“Good morning,” she said in the silence.

“To you, too,” he said.

She unwrapped the turban and shook out her hair. It hung wet and straight.

“It isn’t, though, is it?” she said. “A good morning? It’s a bad morning.”

“I guess,” he said.

“He could be walking out the gate, this exact minute.”

He checked his watch. It was almost seven.

“Any time now,” he said.

“Use the shower if you want,” she said. “I have to go and see to Ellie.”

“O.K.”

He stepped into the bathroom. It was huge, and made out of some kind of reconstituted marble with gold tones in it. It looked like a place he’d once stayed, in Vegas. He used the john and rinsed his mouth at the sink and stripped off his stale clothes and stepped into the shower stall. It was enclosed with bronze-tinted glass and it was enormous. There was a shower head the size of a hubcap above him, and tall pipes in each corner with additional water jets pointing directly at him. He turned the faucet and a huge roaring started up. Then a deluge of warm water hit him from all sides. It was like standing under Niagara Falls. The side jets started pulsing hot and cold and he couldn’t hear himself think. He washed as quickly as he could and soaped his hair and rinsed off and shut it all down.

He took a fresh towel from a stack and dried off as well as he could in the humidity. Wrapped the towel around him and stepped back into the dressing area. Carmen was buttoning her shirt. It was white, and she had white pants on. Gold jewelry. Her skin looked dark against it and her hair was glossy and already curling in the heat.

“That was quick,” she said.

“Hell of a shower,” he said.

“Sloop chose it,” she said. “I hate it. There’s so much water, I can hardly breathe in there.”

She slid her closet shut and twisted left and right to examine her reflection in the mirrored doors.

“You look good,” he said.

“Do I look Mexican enough?” she asked. “With the white clothes?”

He said nothing.

“No jeans today,” she said. “I’m sick of trying to look like I was born a cowgirl in Amarillo.”

“You look good,” he said again.

“Seven hours,” she said. “Six and a half, if Hack drives fast.”

He nodded. “I’m going to find Bobby.”

She stretched tall and kissed him on the cheek.

“Thanks for staying,” she said. “It helped me.”

He said nothing.

“Join us for breakfast,” she said. “Twenty minutes.”

Then she walked slowly out of the room, on her way to wake her daughter.

 

 

Reacher dressed and found a different way back into the house. The whole place was a warren. He came out through a living room he hadn’t seen before and into the foyer with the mirror and the rifles. He opened the front door and stepped out on the porch. It was already hot. The sun was coming from low on his right, and it was casting harsh early shadows. The shadows made the yard look pocked and lumpy.

He walked down to the barn and went in the door. The heat and the smell were as bad as ever, and the horses were awake and restless. But they were clean. They had water. Their feed troughs had been filled. He found Bobby asleep in an unoccupied stall, on a bed of clean straw.

“Rise and shine, little brother,” he called.

Bobby stirred and sat up, confused as to where he was, and why. Then he remembered, and went tense with resentment. His clothes were dirty and hay stalks clung to him all over.

“Sleep well?” Reacher asked.

“They’ll be back soon,” Bobby said. “Then what do you think is going to happen?”

Reacher smiled. “You mean, am I going to tell them I made you clean out the barn and sleep in the straw?”

“You couldn’t tell them.”

“No, I guess I couldn’t,” Reacher said. “So are you going to tell them?”

Bobby said nothing. Reacher smiled again.

“No, I didn’t think you would,” he said. “So stay in here until noontime, then I’ll let you in the house to get cleaned up for the main event.”

“What about breakfast?”

“You don’t get any.”

“But I’m hungry.”

“So eat the horse food. Turns out there’s bags and bags of it, after all.”

 

 

He went back to the kitchen and found the maid brewing coffee and heating a skillet.

“Pancakes,” she said. “And that will have to do. They’ll want a big lunch, so that’s where my morning is going.”

“Pancakes are fine,” he said.

He walked on into the silent parlor and listened for sounds from above. Ellie and Carmen should be moving around somewhere. But he couldn’t hear anything. He tried to map the house in his head, but the layout was too bizarre. Clearly it had started out a substantial ranch house, and then random additions had been made whenever necessary. Overall, there was no coherence to it.

The maid came in with a stack of plates. Four of them, with four sets of silverware and four paper napkins piled on top.

“I assume you’re eating in here,” she said.

Reacher nodded. “But Bobby isn’t. He’s staying in the barn.”

“Why?”

“I think a horse is sick.”

The maid dumped the stack of plates and slid one out, leaving three of everything.

“So I’ll have to carry it down to him, I guess,” she said, irritated.

“I’ll take it,” Reacher said. “You’re very busy.”

He followed her back to the kitchen and she piled the first four pancakes off the skillet onto a plate. Added a little butter and maple syrup. Reacher wrapped a knife and a fork into a napkin and picked up the plate and walked back out into the heat. He found Bobby where he had left him. He was sitting up, doing nothing.

“What’s this?” he said.

“Breakfast,” Reacher said. “I had a change of heart. Because you’re going to do something for me.”

“Yeah, what?”

“There’s going to be some kind of a big lunch, for Sloop getting back.”

Bobby nodded. “I expect so.”

“You’re going to invite me. As your guest. Like I’m you’re big buddy.”

“I am?”

“Sure you are. If you want these pancakes, and if you want to walk without sticks the rest of your life.”

Bobby went quiet.

“Dinner, too,” Reacher said. “You understand?”

“Her husband’s coming home, for God’s sake,” Bobby said. “It’s over, right?”

“You’re jumping to conclusions, Bobby. I’ve got no particular interest in Carmen. I just want to get next to Sloop. I need to talk to him.”

“About what?”

“Just do it, O.K.?”

Bobby shrugged.

“Whatever,” he said.

Reacher handed him the plate of pancakes and headed for the house again.

 

 

Carmen and Ellie were sitting side by side at the table. Ellie’s hair was wet from the shower and she was in a yellow seersucker dress.

“My daddy’s coming home today,” she said. “He’s on his way, right now.”

Reacher nodded. “I heard that.”

“I thought it was going to be tomorrow. But it’s today.”

Carmen was looking at the wall, saying nothing. The maid brought pancakes in on a platter. She served them out, two for the kid, three for Carmen, four for Reacher. Then she took the platter away and went back to the kitchen.

“I was going to stay home from school tomorrow,” Ellie said. “Can I still?”

Carmen said nothing.

“Mom? Can I still?”

Carmen turned and looked at Reacher, like he had spoken. Her face was blank. It reminded him of a guy he had known who had gone to the eye doctor. He had been having trouble reading fine print. The eye doctor spotted a tumor in the retina. Made arrangements there and then for him to have the eye removed the next day. Then the guy had sat around knowing that tomorrow he was going into the hospital with two eyes and coming back out with one. The certainty had burned him up. The anticipation. The dread. Much worse than a split-second accident with the same result.

“Mommy? Can I?” Ellie asked again.

“I guess,” Carmen said. “What?”

“Mommy, you’re not listening. Are you excited too?”

“Yes,” Carmen said.

“So can I?”

“Yes,” Carmen said again.

Ellie turned to her food and ate it like she was starving. Reacher picked at his, watching Carmen. She ate nothing.

“I’m going to see my pony now,” Ellie said.

She scrambled off her chair and ran out of the room like a miniature whirlwind. Reacher heard the front door open and close and the thump of her shoes on the porch steps. He finished his breakfast while Carmen held her fork in midair, like she was uncertain what to do with it, like she had never seen one before.

“Will you talk to him?” she asked.

“Sure,” he said.

“I think he needs to know it’s not a secret anymore.”

“I agree.”

“Will you look at him? When you’re talking to him?”

“I guess so,” he said.

“Good. You should. Because you’ve got gunfighter’s eyes. Maybe like Clay Allison had. You should let him see them. Let him see what’s coming.”

“We’ve been through all of that,” he said.

“I know,” she answered.

 

 

Then she went off alone and Reacher set about killing time. It felt like waiting for an air raid. He walked out onto the porch and looked across the yard at the road where it came in from the north. He followed it with his eyes to where the red picket fence finished, and beyond that to where it disappeared over the curve of the earth. The air was still clear with morning and there was no mirage over the blacktop. It was just a dusty ribbon framed by the limestone ledge to the west and the power lines to the east.

He turned back and sat down on the porch swing. The chains creaked under his weight. He settled sideways, facing the ranch gate, one leg up and the other on the floor. Then he did what most soldiers do when they’re waiting for action. He went to sleep.

 

 

Carmen woke him maybe an hour later. She touched him on the shoulder and he opened his eyes and saw her standing over him. She had changed her clothes. Now she was in pressed blue jeans and a checked shirt. She was wearing boots made out of lizard skin. A belt to match. Her hair was tied back and she had made up her face with pale powder and blue eye shadow.

“I changed my mind,” she said. “I don’t want you to talk to him. Not yet.”

“Why not?”

“It might set him off. If he knows somebody else knows.”

“You didn’t think that before.”

“I thought it over again. I think it might be worse, if we start out like that. It’s better coming from me. At least at first.”

“You sure?”

She nodded. “Let me talk to him, the first time.”

“When?”

“Tonight,” she said. “I’ll tell you tomorrow how it went.”

He sat up, with both feet on the ground.

“You were pretty sure you’d have a busted nose tomorrow,” he said.

“I think this is best,” she said.

“Why did you change your clothes?”

“These are better,” she said. “I don’t want to provoke him.”

“You look like a cowgirl, born in Amarillo.”

“He likes me like this.”

“And dressing like who you are would provoke him?”

She made a face. A defeated face, he thought.

“Don’t chicken out, Carmen,” he said. “Stand and fight instead.”

“I will,” she said. “Tonight. I’ll tell him I’m not going to take it anymore.”

He said nothing.

“So don’t talk to him today, O.K.?” she said.

He looked away.

“It’s your call,” he said.

“It’s better this way.”

She went back into the house. Reacher stared north at the road. Sitting down, he could see a mile less of it. The heat was up, and the shimmer was starting.

 

 

She woke him again after another hour. The clothes were the same, but she had removed the makeup.

“You think I’m doing this wrong,” she said.

He sat up and rubbed both hands over his face, like he was washing.

“I think it would be better out in the open,” he said. “He should know somebody else knows. If not me, then his family, maybe.”

“I can’t tell them.”

“No, I guess you can’t.”

“So what should I do?”

“You should let me talk to him.”

“Not right away. It would be worse. Promise me you won’t.”

He nodded.

“It’s your call,” he said. “But you promise me something, O.K.? Talk to him yourself, tonight. For sure. And if he starts anything, get out of the room and just scream your head off until we all come running. Scream the place down. Demand the cops. Shout for help. It’ll embarrass him. It’ll change the dynamic.”

“You think?”

“He can’t pretend it isn’t happening, not if everybody hears you.”

“He’ll deny it. He’ll say I was just having a nightmare.”

“But deep inside, he’ll know we know.”

She said nothing.

“Promise me, Carmen,” he said. “Or I’ll talk to him first.”

She was quiet for a moment.

“O.K., I promise you,” she said.

 

 

He settled back on the swing and tried to doze another hour. But his internal clock was telling him the time was getting near. The way he remembered the maps of Texas, Abilene was probably less than seven hours from Echo County. Probably nearer six, for a driver who was a DA and therefore a part of the law enforcement community and therefore relatively unconcerned about speeding tickets. So assuming Sloop got out at seven without any delay, they could be home by one o’clock. And he probably would get out without any delay, because a minimum-security federal facility wouldn’t have a whole lot of complicated procedures. They’d just make a check mark on a clipboard and cut him loose.

He guessed it was nearly twelve and looked at his watch to confirm it. It was one minute past. He saw Bobby come out of the horse barn and start up the track past the car barn. He was carrying his breakfast plate, blinking in the sun, walking like his limbs were stiff. He crossed the yard and stepped up on the porch. Said nothing. Just walked on into the house and closed the door behind him.

 

 

About twelve-thirty, Ellie came wandering up from the direction of the corrals. Her yellow dress was all covered in dirt and sand. Her hair was matted with it and her skin was flushed from the heat.

“I’ve been jumping,” she said. “I pretend I’m a horse and I go around and around the jumps as fast as I can.”

“Come here,” Reacher said.

She stood close and he dusted her down, brushing the sand and the dirt to the floor with his palm.

“Maybe you should go shower again,” he said. “Get your hair clean.”

“Why?”

“So you look nice, for your daddy getting home.”

She thought about it, with intense concentration.

“O.K.,” she said.

“Be quick.”

She looked at him for a moment, and then she turned and ran into the house.

 

 

At a quarter to one, Bobby came outside. He was clean and dressed in fresh jeans and a new T-shirt. He had alligator boots on his feet. They had silver accents at the toe. He was wearing another red ball cap. It was backward on his head, and it had a flash on the side reading Division Series 1999.

“They lost, right?” Reacher said.

“Who?”

“The Texas Rangers. In the 1999 Division Series. To the Yankees.”

“So?”

“So nothing, Bobby.”

Then the door opened again and Carmen and Ellie came out together. Carmen was still in the cowgirl outfit. She had the makeup on again. Ellie was still in the yellow seersucker. Her hair was wet and tied back into a ponytail with a ribbon. Carmen was holding her hand and staggering slightly, like her knees were weak.

Reacher stood up and gestured that she should sit down. Ellie climbed up and sat next to her. Nobody spoke. Reacher stepped to the porch rail and watched the road. He could see all the way to where the power lines disappeared in the haze. Maybe five miles north. Maybe ten. It was hard to be certain.

He was deep in the shadow of the porch, and the world was hot and white in front of him. He saw the dust cloud right at the extremity of his vision. It smudged in the haze and hung and drifted east, like a faint desert breeze was catching it and pushing it over toward Greer land. It grew until he could make out its shape. It was a long yellow teardrop of dust, rising and falling, dodging left and right with the curves of the road. It grew to a mile long, and many generations of it bloomed and dissipated before it came close enough for him to see the lime green Lincoln at its head. It came up over a contour in the road and shimmered through the haze and slowed where the barbed wire gave way to the red picket fence. It looked dusty and tired and travel-stained. It braked hard close to the gate and the front end squatted as the suspension compressed. It turned in sharply. The cone of dust behind it drifted straight on south, like it had been outwitted by the abrupt change of direction.

There was a crunch of dirt and gravel and the sun flashed once in the windshield as the car came through its turn, and then three figures were clearly visible inside. Hack Walker was at the wheel. Rusty Greer was in the backseat. And there was a large pale man in the front. He had short fair hair and a plain blue shirt. He was craning his neck, looking around, smiling broadly. Sloop Greer, arriving home.

 

9

 

The Lincoln stopped next to the porch and the suspension settled and the engine died. Nobody inside the car moved for a moment. Then three doors opened up and all three people spilled out and Bobby and Ellie clattered down the porch steps toward them. Reacher moved back from the rail. Carmen stood up slowly and stepped forward and took his place there.

Sloop Greer left his door open and stretched in the sun like anyone would after a year and a half in a cell and six hours on the road. His face and hands were white with prison pallor and he was overweight from the starchy food, but he was Bobby’s brother. There was no doubt about that. He had the same hair, the same face, the same bones, the same posture. Bobby stepped straight in front of him and held his arms wide and hugged him hard. Sloop hugged back and they staggered around and whooped and clapped each other on the back like they were on a lawn in front of a frat house and somebody had done something big in a game of college football.

Ellie froze and hung back, like she was suddenly confused by the noise and the commotion. Sloop let Bobby go and squatted down and held his arms out to her. Reacher turned and watched Carmen’s face. It was locked up tight. Ellie stood in the dirt, shy and motionless, knuckles in her mouth, and then she made some kind of a mental connection and launched herself into Sloop’s embrace. He whirled her up into the air and hugged her. Kissed her cheek. Danced her around and around in a circle. Carmen made a small sound in her throat and looked away.

Sloop set Ellie down on the ground and looked up into the porch and smiled triumphantly. Behind him Bobby was talking to his mother and Hack Walker. They were huddled together behind the car. Sloop was holding out his hand, beckoning to his wife. She backed away from the porch rail, deep into the shadow.

“Maybe you should talk to him after all,” she whispered.

“Make your mind up,” Reacher whispered back.

“Let me see how it goes,” she said.

She took a deep breath and forced a smile and skipped down the steps. Took Sloop’s hands and folded herself into his arms. They kissed, long enough that nobody would think they were brother and sister, but not long enough that anybody would think there was real passion there. Behind the car Bobby and his mother had detached themselves from Hack and were walking around the hood and heading for the porch. Bobby had a worried look on his face and Rusty was fanning herself with her hand and looking hard in Reacher’s direction, all the way up the steps.

“I hear Bobby invited you to lunch,” she said quietly, at the top.

“Very gracious of him,” Reacher said.

“Yes, it was. Very gracious. But it’s going to be a purely family thing today.”

“Is it?” Reacher said.

“Not even Hack is staying,” she added, like it was final proof of something.

Reacher said nothing.

“So I’m sorry,” she said. “But the maid will bring your meals down to the bunkhouse, in the usual way. You boys can get together again tomorrow.”

Reacher was silent for a long moment. Then he nodded.

“O.K.,” he said. “I wouldn’t want to intrude.”

Rusty smiled and Bobby avoided his eye. They walked into the house and Reacher went down the steps into the yard, out into the midday heat. It was like a furnace. Hack Walker was on his own next to the Lincoln, getting ready to leave.

“Hot enough for you?” he asked, with his politician’s smile.

“I’ll survive,” Reacher said.

“Going to be a storm.”

“So people say.”

Walker nodded. “Reacher, right?”

Reacher nodded. “So everything went O.K. in Abilene, I guess.”

“Like clockwork,” Hack said. “But I’m tired, believe me. Texas is a big, big place. You can forget that, sometimes. You can drive forever. So I’m leaving these folks to their celebrations and hitting the rack. Gratefully, let me tell you.”

Reacher nodded again. “So I’ll see you around, maybe.”

“Don’t forget to vote in November,” Hack replied. “For me, preferably.”

He used the same bashful expression he had used the night before. Then he paused at the car door and waved across the roof to Sloop. Sloop made a gun with his fingers and leveled it at Hack and pursed his lips like he was supplying the sound of the shot. Hack slid into the car and fired it up and backed into a turn and headed for the gate. He paused a second and made a right and accelerated away and a moment later Reacher was watching a new cone of dust drifting north along the road.

Then he turned back and saw Sloop strolling up across the yard, holding Ellie’s hand in his right and Carmen’s in his left. His eyes were screwed tight against the sun. Carmen was saying nothing and Ellie was saying a lot. They all walked straight past him and up the steps, three abreast. They paused at the door and Sloop turned his right shoulder to allow Ellie in ahead of him. He followed her across the threshold and then turned his shoulder the other way to pull Carmen in after him. The door closed on them hard enough to raise a puff of hot dust off the porch floorboards.

 

 

Reacher saw nobody except the maid for nearly three hours. He stayed inside the bunkhouse and she brought him lunch and then came back to collect the plate an hour later. Time to time he would watch the house from the high bathroom window, but it was closed up tight and he saw nothing at all. Then late in the afternoon he heard voices behind the horse barn and walked up there and found Sloop and Carmen and Ellie out and about, taking the air. It was still very hot. Maybe hotter than ever. Sloop looked restless. He was sweating. He was scuffing his shoes through the dirt. Carmen looked very nervous. Her face was slightly red. Maybe tension, maybe strain. Maybe the fearsome heat. But it wasn’t impossible she’d been slapped a couple of times, either.

“Ellie, come with me to see your pony,” she said.

“I saw him this morning, Mommy,” Ellie said.

Carmen held out her hand. “But I didn’t. So let’s go see him again.”

Ellie looked mystified for a second, and then she took Carmen’s hand. They stepped behind Sloop and set off slowly for the front of the barn. Carmen turned her head and mouthed talk to him as she walked. Sloop turned around and watched them go. Turned back and looked at Reacher, like he was seeing him for the first time.

“Sloop Greer,” he said, and held out his hand.

Up close, he was an older, wiser version of Bobby. A little older, maybe a lot wiser. There was intelligence in his eyes. Not necessarily a pleasant sort of intelligence. It wasn’t hard to imagine some cruelty there. Reacher shook his hand. It was big-boned, but soft. It was a bully’s hand, not a fighter’s.

“Jack Reacher,” he said. “How was prison?”

There was a split-second flash of surprise in the eyes. Then it was replaced by instant calm. Good self-control, Reacher thought.

“It was pretty awful,” Sloop said. “You been in yourself?”

Quick, too.

“On the other side of the bars from you,” Reacher said.

Sloop nodded. “Bobby told me you were a cop. Now you’re an itinerant worker.”

“I have to be. I didn’t have a rich daddy.”

Sloop paused a beat. “You were military, right? In the army?”

“Right, the army.”

“I never cared much for the military, myself.”

“So I gathered.”

“Yeah, how?”

“Well, I hear you opted out of paying for it.”

Another flash in the eyes, quickly gone. Not easy to rile, Reacher thought. But a spell in prison teaches anybody to keep things well below the surface.

“Shame you spoiled it by crying uncle and getting out early.”

“You think?”

Reacher nodded. “If you can’t do the time, then don’t do the crime.”

“You got out of the army. So maybe you couldn’t do the time either.”

Reacher smiled. Thanks for the opening, he thought.

“I had no choice,” he said. “Fact is, they threw me out.”

“Yeah, why?”

“I broke the law, too.”

“Yeah, how?”

“Some scumbag of a colonel was beating up on his wife. Nice young woman. He was a furtive type of a guy, did it all in secret. So I couldn’t prove it. But I wasn’t about to let him get away with it. That wouldn’t have been right. Because I don’t like men who hit women. So one night, I caught him on his own. No witnesses. He’s in a wheelchair now. Drinks through a straw. Wears a bib, because he drools all the time.”

Sloop said nothing. He was so silent, the skin at the inside corners of his eyes turned dark purple. Walk away now, Reacher thought, and you’re confessing it to me. But Sloop stayed exactly where he was, very still, staring into space, seeing nothing. Then he recovered. The eyes came back into focus. Not quickly, but not too slowly, either. A smart guy.

“Well, that makes me feel better,” he said. “About withholding my taxes. They might have ended up in your pocket.”

“You don’t approve?”

“No, I don’t,” Sloop said.

“Of who?”

“Either of you,” Sloop said. “You, or the other guy.”

Then he turned and walked away.

 

 

Reacher went back to the bunkhouse. The maid brought him dinner and came back for the plate. Full darkness fell outside and the night insects started up with their crazy chant. He lay down on his bed and sweated. The temperature stayed rock-steady around a hundred degrees. He heard isolated coyote howls again, and cougar screams, and the invisible beating of bats’ wings.

Then he heard a light tread on the bunkhouse stair. He sat up in time to see Carmen come up into the room. She had one hand pressed flat on her chest, like she was out of breath, or panicking, or both.

“Sloop talked to Bobby,” she said. “For ages.”

“Did he hit you?” Reacher asked.

Her hand went up to her cheek.

“No,” she said.

“Did he?”

She looked away.

“Well, just once,” she said. “Not hard.”

“I should go break his arms.”

“He called the sheriff.”

“Who did?”

“Sloop.”

“When?”

“Just now. He talked to Bobby, and then he called.”

“About me?”

She nodded. “He wants you out of here.”

“It’s O.K.,” Reacher said. “The sheriff won’t do anything.”

“You think?”

Reacher nodded. “I squared him away, before.”

She paused a beat. “I’ve got to get back now. He thinks I’m with Ellie.”

“You want me to come with you?”

“Not yet. Let me talk to him first.”

“Don’t let him hit you again, Carmen. Come get me, soon as you need me. Or make noise, O.K.? Scream and shout.”

She started back down the stairs.

“I will,” she said. “I promise. You sure about the sheriff?”

“Don’t worry,” he said. “The sheriff won’t do a thing.”

 

 

But the sheriff did one thing. He passed the problem to the state police. Reacher found that out ninety minutes later, when a Texas Ranger cruiser turned in under the gate, looking for him. Somebody directed it all the way down past the barns and in behind the bunkhouse. He heard its motor and the sound of its tires crushing the dust on the track. He got off of his bed and went down the stairs and when he got to the bottom he was lit up by the spotlight mounted in front of its windshield. It shone in past the parked farm tractors and picked him out in a bright cone of light. The car doors opened and two Rangers got out.

They were not similar to the sheriff. Not in any way. They were in a different class altogether. They were young and fit and professional. Both of them were medium height, both of them were halfway between lean and muscled. Both had military-style buzz cuts. Both had immaculate uniforms. One was a sergeant and the other was a trooper. The trooper was Hispanic. He was holding a shotgun.

“What?” Reacher called.

“Step to the hood of the car,” the sergeant called back.

Reacher kept his hands clear of his body and walked to the car.

“Assume the position,” the sergeant said.

Reacher put his palms on the fender and leaned down. The sheet metal was hot from the engine. The trooper covered him with the shotgun and the sergeant patted him down.

“O.K., get in the car,” he said.

Reacher didn’t move.

“What’s this about?” he asked.

“A request from a property owner to remove a trespasser.”

“I’m not a trespasser. I work here.”

“Well, I guess they just terminated you. So now you’re a trespasser. And we’re going to remove you.”

“That’s a state police job?”

“Small community like this, we’re on call to help the local guys, their days off, or serious crimes.”

“Trespassing is a serious crime?”

“No, Sunday is the Echo sheriff’s day off.”

The moths had found the spotlight. They fluttered in and crowded the lens, landing and taking off again when the heat of the bulb got to them. They batted against Reacher’s right arm. They felt dry and papery and surprisingly heavy.

“O.K., I’ll leave,” he said. “I’ll walk out to the road.”

“Then you’ll be a vagrant on a county highway. That’s against the law, too, around here, especially during the hours of darkness.”

“So where are we going?”

“You have to leave the county. We’ll let you out in Pecos.”

“They owe me money. I never got paid.”

“So get in the car. We’ll stop at the house.”

Reacher glanced left at the trooper, and the shotgun. Both of them looked businesslike. He glanced right, at the sergeant. He had his hand on the butt of his gun. He saw in his mind the two Greer boys, two versions of the same face, both of them grinning, smug and triumphant. But it was Rusty he saw mouthing checkmate at him.

“There’s a problem here,” he said. “The daughter-in-law is getting smacked around by her husband. It’s an ongoing situation. He just got out of prison today.”

“She made a complaint?”

“She’s scared to. The sheriff’s a good old boy and she’s a Hispanic woman from California.”

“Nothing we can do without a complaint.”

Reacher glanced the other way at the trooper, who just shrugged.

“Like the man told you,” he said. “Nothing we can do without we hear about it.”

“You’re hearing about it now,” Reacher said. “I’m telling you.”

The trooper shook his head. “Needs to come from the victim.”

“Get in the car,” the sergeant said.

“You don’t have to do this.”

“Yes, we do.”

“I need to be here. For the woman’s sake.”

“Listen, pal, we were informed you’re trespassing. So all we got is a question of whether you’re wanted here, or whether you’re not. And apparently, you’re not.”

“The woman wants me here. Like her bodyguard.”

“Is she the property owner?”

“No, she isn’t.”

“Are you employed by her? Like officially?”

Reacher shrugged. “More or less.”

“She paying you? You got a contract we can see?”

Reacher said nothing.

“So get in the car.”

“She’s in danger.”

“We get a call, we’ll come running.”

“She can’t call. Or if she does, the sheriff won’t pass it on.”

“Then there’s nothing we can do. Now get in the car.”

Reacher said nothing. The sergeant opened the rear door. Then he paused.

“You could come back tomorrow,” he said, quietly. “No law says a man can’t try to get himself rehired.”

Reacher took a second look at the shotgun. It was a big handsome Ithaca with a muzzle wide enough to stick his thumb in. He took a second look at the sergeant’s handgun. It was a Glock, secured into an oiled leather holster by a strap that would take about half a second to unfasten.

“But right now, get in the car.”

Checkmate.

“O.K.,” Reacher said. “But I’m not happy.”

“Very few of our passengers are,” the sergeant said back.

He used his hand on the top of Reacher’s head and folded him into the back seat. It was cold in there. There was a heavy wire barrier in front of him. Either side, the door handles and the window winders had been removed. Small squares of aluminum had been riveted over the holes in the trim. The seat was vinyl. There was a smell of disinfectant and a heavy stink from an air freshener shaped like a pine tree hanging from the mirror in front. There was a radar device built up on top of the dash and quiet radio chatter coming from a unit underneath it.

The sergeant and the trooper swung in together in front and drove him up to the house. All the Greers except Ellie were on the porch to see him go. They were standing in a line at the rail, first Rusty, then Bobby, then Sloop and Carmen. They were all smiling. All except Carmen. The sergeant stopped the car at the foot of the steps and buzzed his window down.

“This guy says you owe him wages,” he called.

There was silence for a second. Just the sound of the insects.

“So tell him to sue us,” Bobby called back.

Reacher leaned forward to the metal grille.

“¡Carmen!” he shouted. “¡Si hay un problema, llama directamente a estos hombres!”

The sergeant turned his head. “What?”

“Nothing.”

“So what do you want to do?” the sergeant asked. “About your money?”

“Forget about it,” Reacher said.

The sergeant buzzed his window up again and pulled out toward the gate. Reacher craned his neck and saw them all turn to watch him go, all except for Carmen, who stood absolutely still and stared rigidly ahead at the spot where the car had just been. The sergeant made a right onto the road and Reacher turned his head the other way and saw them all filing back into the house. Then the sergeant accelerated hard and they were lost to sight.

“What was that you called out to them?” he asked.

Reacher said nothing. The trooper answered for him.

“It was Spanish,” he said. “For the woman. It meant ‘Carmen, if there’s trouble, call these guys direct.’ Terrible accent.”

Reacher said nothing.

 

 

They drove the same sixty miles he had covered the other way in the white Cadillac, back to the crossroads hamlet with Ellie’s school and the gas station and the old diner. The sergeant stuck to a lazy fifty-five all the way, and it took an hour and five minutes. When they got there, everything was closed up tight. There were lights burning in two of the houses, and nothing else. Then they drove the stretch where Carmen had chased the school bus. Nobody talked. Reacher sprawled sideways on the vinyl bench and watched the darkness. Another twenty minutes north he saw the turn where Carmen had come down out of the hills. They didn’t take it. They just kept on going, heading for the main highway, and then Pecos beyond it.

They never got there. The radio call came in a mile short of the county line. An hour and thirty-five minutes into the ride. The call was bored and laconic and loud with static. A woman dispatcher’s voice.

“Blue Five, Blue Five,” it said.

The trooper unhooked the microphone and stretched the cord and clicked the switch.

“Blue Five, copy, over,” he said.

“Required at the Red House Ranch immediately, sixty miles south of north Echo crossroads, domestic disturbance reported, over.”

“Copy, nature of incident, over?”

“Unclear at this time, believed violent, over.”

“Well, shit,” the sergeant said.

“Copy, on our way, out,” the trooper said. He replaced the microphone. Turned around. “So she understood your Spanish. I guess your accent wasn’t too far off, after all.”

Reacher said nothing. The sergeant turned his head.

“Look on the bright side, pal,” he said. “Now we can do something about it.”

“I warned you,” Reacher said. “And you should have damn well listened to me. So if she’s hurt bad, it’s on you. Pal.”

The sergeant said nothing to that. Just jammed on the brakes and pulled a wide slow turn across the whole of the road, shoulder to shoulder. Got it pointing straight south again and hustled. He got it up to a hundred on the straightaways, kept it at ninety on the curves. He didn’t use the lights or the siren. Didn’t even slow at the crossroads. He didn’t need to. The chances of meeting traffic on that road were worse than winning the lottery.

 

 

They were back again exactly two hours and thirty minutes after they left. Ninety-five minutes north, fifty-five minutes south. First thing they saw was the sheriff’s secondhand cruiser, dumped at an angle in the yard, door open, light bar flashing. The sergeant slewed through the dirt and jammed to a stop right behind it.

“Hell’s he doing here?” he said. “It’s his day off.”

There was nobody in sight. The trooper opened his door. The sergeant shut down the motor and did the same.

“Let me out,” Reacher said.

“No dice, pal,” the sergeant said back. “You stay right there.”

They got out and walked together to the porch steps. They went up. Across the boards. They pushed the door. It was open. They went inside. The door swung shut behind them. Reacher waited. Five minutes. Seven. Ten. The car grew warm. Then hot. There was silence. No sound at all beyond random static from the radio and the ticking of the insects.

The trooper came out alone after about twelve minutes. Walked slowly back to his side of the car and opened his door and leaned in for the microphone.

“Is she O.K.?” Reacher asked.

The guy nodded, sourly.

“She’s fine,” he said. “At least physically. But she’s in a shitload of trouble.”

“Why?”

“Because the call wasn’t about him attacking her. It was the other way around. She shot him. He’s dead. So we just arrested her.”