Lee Child - Echo Burning

"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.