Lee Child - Echo Burning

"Well, who did that?"

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

Carmen was still pale. "The wrong sort?"

"You know what I mean."

"You mean Mexican? Why don't you just come right out and say it?"

Rusty was still smiling.

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

"Why should I of all people? I've never even been to Mexico."

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

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

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

"I'm just here to work, ma'am," he said.

"I'd like to know your opinion, all the same."

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

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

Rusty nodded. "So what's your thinking, ex-army cop?"

Reacher shrugged. "Maybe there's an innocent explanation. Maybe he had a nervous breakdown and wandered off."

"Doesn't sound very likely. Now I see why they made you an ex-cop."

Silence for a long moment.

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

"That's not going to be a popular view around here, son."

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

"That's a big assumption."

"Not in my experience."

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

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

Carmen took a breath.

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

The room stayed quiet.

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

She said paah. The long syllable trailed into silence.

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

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

"That's ridiculous. Who would steal her damn pony?"

"She's only a child," Carmen said.

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

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

"Ellie eats in the kitchen?" Reacher asked.

Carmen nodded.

"Rusty hates her," she said.

"Why? She's her granddaughter."

Carmen looked away.

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

"So why all the fuss if you took her away?"

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

"She make you eat in the kitchen, too?"

"No, she makes me eat with her," she said. "Because she knows I'd rather not."

He paused, at the edge of the shadow.

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

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

He nodded. "So was I. It would have been useful."

She nodded, tears in her eyes.

"I know," she said. "Too good to be true."

"So you should still think about running."

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

"I won't run," she said. "I won't be a fugitive."

He said nothing.

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

"I couldn't."

"It was a risk."

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

"I'm not much of a country guy," he said.

"You'll get used to it," she said.

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

"The bunkhouse," she said.

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

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

"O.K.," he said.

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

"O.K.," he said again.

"I'll see you later," she said.

"You going to be all right?"

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

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

"Who is he?" the boy asked.

"Hell should we know?" one of the men replied.

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

* * *

The grade fell away behind the bunkhouse and made it a two-story building.

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