Lee Child - Echo Burning

"Exactly," Alice said.

"You happy about riding that kind of luck?"

"No."

"Neither am I."

"Not morally, not practically," Alice said. "Anything could happen here. Maybe Hack's got a love child somewhere, and it'll come out and he'll have to withdraw anyway. Maybe he likes to have sex with armadillos. It's a long time until November. Counting on him to stay electable no matter what would be foolish. So his tactical problem with Carmen could disappear at any time. So she needs a properly structured defense."

Reacher smiled again. "You're even smarter than I figured."

"I thought you were going to say than I looked."

"I think more lawyers should dress that way."

"You need to stay off the stand," she said. "Much safer for her. No deposition, either. Without you, the gun is the only thing that suggests premeditation. And we should be able to argue that buying the gun and actually using it weren't necessarily closely connected. Maybe she bought it for another reason."

Reacher said nothing.

"They're testing it now," she said. "Over at the lab. Ballistics and fingerprints. Two sets of prints, they say. Hers, I guess, maybe his, too. Maybe they struggled over it. Maybe the whole thing was an accident."

Reacher shook his head. "The second set must be mine. She asked me to teach her how to shoot. We went up on the mesa and practiced."

"When?"

"Saturday. The day before he got home."

She stared at him.

"Christ, Reacher," she said. "You definitely stay off the stand, O.K.?"

"I plan to."

"What about if things change and they subpoena you?"

"Then I'll lie, I guess."

"Can you?"

"I was a cop of sorts for thirteen years. It wouldn't be a totally radical concept."

"What would you say about your prints on the gun?"

"I'd say I found it dumped somewhere. Innocently gave it back to her. Make it look like she had reconsidered after buying it."

"You comfortable with saying stuff like that?"

"If the ends justify the means, I am. And I think they do here. She's given herself a problem proving it, is all. You?"

She nodded. "A case like this, I guess so. I don't care about the lies about her background. People do stuff like that, all the time, all kinds of reasons. So all that's left is the premeditation thing. And most other states, premeditation wouldn't be an issue. They recognize the reality. A battered woman can't necessarily be effective on the spur of the moment. Sometimes she needs to wait until he's drunk, or asleep. You know, bide her time. There are lots of cases like that in other jurisdictions."

"So where do we start?"

"Where we're forced to," Alice said. "Which is a pretty bad place. The circumstantial evidence is overwhelming. Res ipsa loquitur, they call it. The thing speaks for itself. Her bedroom, her gun, her husband lying there dead on the floor. That's murder one. We leave it like that, they'll convict her on the first vote."

"So?"

"So we back-pedal on the premeditation and then we prove the abuse through the medical records. I already started the paperwork. We joined with the DA's office for a common-cause subpoena. All Texas hospitals, and all neighboring states. Domestic violence, that's standard procedure, because people sometimes drive all over to hide it. The hospitals generally react pretty fast, so we should get the records overnight. Then it's res ipsa loquitur again. If the injuries were caused by violence, then the records will at least show they could have been. That's just common sense. Then she takes the stand and she talks about the abuse. She'll have to take it on the chin over the bullshit stories about her past. But if we present it right, she could even look quite good. No shame in being an ex-hooker trying to reform. We could build up some sympathy there."

"You sound like a pretty good lawyer."

She smiled. "For one so young?"

"Well, what are you, two years out of school?"

"Six months," she said. "But you learn fast down here."

"Evidently."

"Whatever, with careful jury selection, we'll get at least half and half don't-knows and not-guiltys. The not-guiltys will wear down the don't-knows within a couple of days. Especially if it's this hot."

Reacher pulled the soaked fabric of his shirt off his skin. "Can't stay this hot much longer, can it?"

"Hey, I'm talking about next summer," Alice said. "That's if she's lucky. Could be the summer after that."

He stared at her. "You're kidding."

She shook her head. "The record around here is four years in jail between arrest and trial."

"What about Ellie?"

She shrugged. "Just pray the medical records look real good. If they do, we've got a shot at getting Hack to drop the charges altogether. He's got a lot of latitude."

"He wouldn't need much pushing," Reacher said. "The mood he's in."

"So look on the bright side. This whole thing could be over in a couple of days."

"When are you going to go see her?"

"Later this afternoon. First I'm going to the bank to cash a twenty-thousand-dollar check. Then I'm going to put the money in a grocery bag and drive out and deliver it to some very happy people."

"O.K.," Reacher said.

"I don't want to know what you did to get it."

"I just asked for it."

"I don't want to know," she said again. "But you should come with me and meet them. And be my bodyguard. Not every day I carry twenty thousand dollars around the Wild West in a grocery bag. And it'll be cool in the car."

"O.K.," Reacher said again.

* * *

The bank showed no particular excitement about forking over twenty grand in mixed bills. The teller treated it like a completely routine part of her day. She just counted the money three times and stacked it carefully in a brown-paper grocery bag Alice provided for the purpose. Reacher carried it back to the parking lot for her. But she didn't need him to. There was no danger of getting mugged. The fearsome heat had just about cleared the streets, and what few people remained were moving slowly and listlessly.

The interior of the VW had heated up to the point where they couldn't get in right away. Alice started the air going and left the doors open until the blowers took thirty degrees off it. It was probably still over a hundred when they slid inside. But it felt cool. All things are relative. Alice drove, heading north and east. She was good. Better than him. She didn't stall out a single time.

"There'll be a storm," she said.

"Everybody tells me that," he said. "But I don't see it coming."

"You ever felt heat like this before?"

"Maybe," he said. "Once or twice. Saudi Arabia, the Pacific. But Saudi is drier and the Pacific is wetter. So, not exactly."

The sky ahead of them was light blue, so hot it looked white. The sun was a diffuse glare, like it was located everywhere. There was no cloud at all. He was squinting so much the muscles in his face were hurting.

"It's new to me," she said. "That's for sure. I figured it would be hot here, but this is completely unbelievable."

Then she asked him when he'd been in the Middle East and the Pacific islands, and he responded with the expanded ten-minute version of his autobiography because he found he was enjoying her company. The first thirty-six years were easy enough, as always. They made a nicely linear tale of childhood and adulthood, accomplishment and progress, punctuated and underlined in the military fashion with promotions and medals. The last few years were harder, as usual. The aimlessness, the drifting. He saw them as a triumph of disengagement, but he knew other people didn't. So as always he just told the story and answered the awkward questions and let her think whatever she wanted.

Then she responded in turn with an autobiography of her own. It was more or less the same as his, in an oblique way. He was the son of a soldier, she was the daughter of a lawyer. She had never really considered straying away from the family trade, just like he hadn't. All her life she had seen people talk the talk and walk the walk and then she had set about following after them, just like he had. She spent seven years at Harvard where he spent four at West Point. Now she was twenty-five and the rough equivalent of an ambitious lieutenant in the law business. He had been an ambitious lieutenant at twenty-five, too, and he could remember exactly how it felt.