Lee Child - Echo Burning

"I could do that to your head," he said.

Brewer made no reply.

"Give me the check," Reacher said, quietly. "Before I lose my damn temper."

Brewer paused. Five seconds. Ten. Then he sighed.

"O.K.," he said. He led the way into the study and over to the desk. Reacher stood behind him. He didn't want any revolvers appearing suddenly out of drawers.

"Make it out to cash," he said.

Brewer wrote the check. He got the date right, he got the amount right, and he signed it.

"It better not bounce," Reacher said.

"It won't," Brewer said.

"It does, you do, too. Off the patio."

"I hope you rot in hell."

Reacher folded the check into his pocket and found the way out to the upstairs foyer. Went down the stairs and walked over to the grandfather clock. Tilted it forward until it overbalanced. It fell like a tree and smashed on the floor and stopped ticking.

* * *

The two men exfiltrated after nearly three hours. The heat was too brutal to stay longer. And they didn't really need to. Nobody was going anywhere. That was clear. The old woman and her son stayed mostly in the house. The kid was hanging around in the barn, coming out now and then until the sun drove her back inside, once walking slowly back to the house when the maid called her to come and eat. So they gave it up and crawled north in the lee of the rocks and came out to wait on the dusty shoulder as soon as they were out of sight of the house. The woman in the Crown Vic turned up right on time. She had the air blasting and water in bottles. They drank the water and made their report.

"O.K.," the woman said. "So I guess we're ready to make our move."

"I guess we are," the dark man said.

"Sooner the better," the fair man agreed. "Let's get it done."

* * *

Reacher put the plates back on the old LeBaron as soon as he was out of sight of the Brewer house. Then he drove straight back to Pecos and reclaimed Alice Aaron's VW from the mechanics. He paid them their forty bucks without complaint, but afterward he wasn't really sure they'd done anything to the car. The clutch felt just as sharp as it had before. He stalled out twice on the way back to the legal mission.

He left it in the lot behind the building with the maps and the handgun in the glove compartment where he had found them. Entered the old store from the front and found Alice at her desk in back. She was on the phone and busy with clients. There was a whole family group in front of her. Three generations of quiet, anxious people. She had changed her clothes. Now she was wearing black high-waisted pants made out of some kind of thin cotton or linen, and a black jacket to match. The jacket made the white sports bra look like a shirt. The whole thing looked very formal. Instant attorney.

She saw him and put her hand over the phone and excused herself from her clients. She twisted away from them and he leaned down next to her.

"We've got big problems," she said quietly. "Hack Walker wants to see you."

"Me?" he said. "Why?"

"Better you hear it from him."

"Hear what? Did you meet with him?"

She nodded. "I went right over. We talked for a half hour."

"And? What did he say?"

"Better you hear it from him," she said again. "We can talk about it later, O.K.?"

There was worry in her voice. He looked at her. She turned back to the phone. The family in front of her desk leaned forward to catch her words. He took the twenty-thousand-dollar check out of his pocket and unfolded it and smoothed it on the desktop. She saw it and stopped talking. Put her hand over the phone again. Took a deep breath.

"Thanks," she said.

Now there was embarrassment in her voice. Like maybe she had reconsidered her end of the bargain. He dropped her car keys on the desk and walked back out to the sidewalk. Turned right and headed for the courthouse.

* * *

The Pecos County District Attorney's office occupied the whole of the courthouse's second floor. There was an entry door from the stairwell that led to a narrow passage that passed through a wooden gate into an open area used as a secretarial pen. Beyond that were three doors leading into three offices, one for the DA and one for each of the assistants. All the interior walls separating the offices from the pen and from each other were glass from the waist up. They had old-fashioned Venetian blinds covering the glass, with wide wooden slats and cotton tapes. The whole place looked cramped and out-of-date. There were air conditioners in every external window. They were all set on high and their motors put a deep booming tone into the structure of the walls.

The secretarial pen had two cluttered desks, both of them occupied, the farther one by a middle-aged woman who looked like she belonged there, the nearer one by a young man who could have been an intern working his summer vacation from college. Clearly he doubled as the office receptionist, because he looked up with a bright how may we help you expression on his face.

"Hack Walker wants to see me," Reacher said.

"Mr. Reacher?" the kid asked.

Reacher nodded and the kid pointed to the corner office.

"He's expecting you," he said.

Reacher threaded his way through the cluttered space to the corner office. The door had a window with an acetate plaque below it. The plaque read HENRY F. W. WALKER, DISTRICT ATTORNEY. The window was covered on the inside by a closed blind. Reacher knocked once and went in without waiting for a reply.

The office had a window on each wall and a mess of filing cabinets and a big desk piled with paper and a computer and three telephones. Walker was in his chair behind it, leaning back, holding a photograph frame in both hands. It was a small wooden thing with a fiberboard tongue on the back that would prop it upright on a desk or a shelf. He was staring at the front of it. Some kind of serious distress on his face.

"What can I do for you?" Reacher asked.

Walker transferred his gaze from the photograph.

"Sit down," he said. "Please."

The hearty politician's boom had gone from his voice. He sounded tired and ordinary. There was a client chair in front of the desk. Reacher picked it up and turned it sideways to give himself some legroom.

"What can I do for you?" he asked again.

"You ever had your life turned upside down overnight?"

Reacher nodded. "Now and then."

Walker propped the photograph on the desk, sideways, so it was visible to both of them. It was the same color shot he had seen in Sloop Greer's closet. The three young men leaning on the old pick-up's fender, good friends, intoxicated with youth, on the cusp of infinite possibilities.

"Me and Sloop and Al Eugene," he said. "Now Al's a missing person and Sloop is dead."

"No word on Eugene?"

Walker shook his head. "Not a thing."

Reacher said nothing.

"We were such a threesome," Walker said. "And you know how that goes. Isolated place like this, you get to be more than friends. It was us against the world."

"Was Sloop his real name?"

Walker looked up. "Why do you ask?"

"Because I thought yours was Hack. But I see from the sign on your door it's Henry."

Walker nodded, and smiled a tired smile. "It's Henry on my birth certificate. My folks call me Hank. Always did. But I couldn't say it as a youngster, when I was learning to talk. It came out Hack. It kind of stuck."

"But Sloop was for real?"

Walker nodded again. "It was Sloop Greer, plain and simple."

"So what can I do for you?" Reacher asked for the third time.

"I don't know, really," Walker said. "Maybe just listen awhile, maybe clarify some things for me."

"What kind of things?"

"I don't know, really," Walker said again. "Like, when you look at me, what do you see?"

"A district attorney."