Lee Child - Echo Burning

"So what's next?" he asked.

"After this?" she said. "Back to New York, I guess. Maybe Washington, D.C. I'm getting interested in policy."

"You won't miss this down-and-dirty stuff?"

"I will, probably. And I won't give it up completely. Maybe I'll volunteer a few weeks a year. Certainly I'll try to fund it. That's where all our money comes from, you know. Big firms in the big cities, with a conscience."

"I'm glad to hear it. Somebody needs to do something."

"That's for sure."

"What about Hack Walker?" he asked. "Will he make a difference?"

She shrugged at the wheel. "I don't know him very well. But his reputation is good. And he can't make things any worse, can he? It's a really screwed-up system. I mean, I'm a democrat, big D and little d, so theoretically to elect your judges is perfectly fine with me. Theoretically. But in practice, it's totally out of hand. I mean, what does it cost to run a campaign down here?"

"No idea."

"Well, figure it out. We're talking about Pecos County, basically, because that's where the bulk of the electorate is. A bunch of posters, some newspaper ads, half a dozen homemade commercials on the local TV channels. A market like this, you'd have to work really hard to spend more than five figures. But these guys are all picking up contributions running to hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars. Millions, maybe. And the law says if you don't get around to spending it, you don't have to give it back. You just keep it, for miscellaneous future expenses. So what it amounts to is they're all picking up their bribes in advance. The law firms and the oil people and the special interests are paying now for future help. You can get seriously rich, running for judge in Texas. And if you get elected and do the right things all your years on the bench, you retire straight into some big law partnership and you get asked onto the boards of a half-dozen big companies. So it's not really about trying to get elected a judge. It's about trying to get elected a prince. Like turning into royalty overnight."

"So will Walker make a difference?" he asked again.

"He will if he wants to. Simple as that. And right now, he'll make a difference to Carmen Greer. That's what we need to focus on."

He nodded. She slowed the car, hunting a turn. They were back up in ranch country. Somewhere near the Brewer place, he guessed, although he didn't recognize any specific features of the landscape. It was laid out in front of him, so dry and so hot it seemed the parched vegetation could burst into flames at any moment.

"Does it bother you she told all those lies?" Alice asked.

He shrugged. "Yes and no. Nobody likes to be lied to, I guess. But look at it from her point of view. She reached the conclusion he had to be gotten rid of, so she set about achieving it."

"So there was extensive premeditation?"

"Should I be telling you this?"

"I'm on her side."

He nodded. "She had it all planned. She said she looked at a hundred guys and sounded out a dozen before she picked on me."

Alice nodded back. "Actually that makes me feel better somehow, you know? Kind of proves how bad it was. Surely nobody would do that without some kind of really urgent necessity."

"Me too," he said. "I feel the same way."

She slowed again and turned the car onto a farm track. After ten yards the track passed under a poor imitation of the older ranch gates he had seen elsewhere. It was just a rectangle of unpainted two-by-fours nailed together, leaning slightly to the left. The crossbar had a name written on it. It was indecipherable, scorched and faded to nothing by the sun. Beyond it were a few acres of cultivated ground. There were straight rows of turned dirt and an irrigation system pieced together from improvised parts. There were piles of fieldstone here and there. Neat wooden frames to carry wires to support the bushes that no longer grew. Everything was dry and crisp and fallow. The whole picture spoke of agonizing months of back-breaking manual labor in the fearsome heat, followed by tragic disappointment.

There was a house a hundred yards beyond the last row of turned earth. It wasn't a bad place. It was small and low, wood-framed, painted dull white with a finish that had cracked and crazed in the sun. There was a windmill behind it. There was a barn, with an irrigation pump venting through the roof and a damaged three-quarter-ton truck standing idle. The house had a closed front door. Alice parked the VW right next to it.

"They're called Garcia," she said. "I'm sure they're home."

Twenty thousand dollars in a grocery bag had an effect like he'd never seen before. It was literally a gift of life. There were five Garcias, two generations, two in the older and three in the younger. They were all small and scrappy people. The parents were maybe in their late forties and the eldest child was a girl of maybe twenty-four. The younger offspring were both boys and could have been twenty-two and twenty. They all stood quietly together inside the doorway. Alice said a bright hello and walked straight past them and spilled the money on their kitchen table.

"He changed his mind," she said, in Spanish. "He decided to pay up, after all."

The Garcias formed a semicircle around the table, silent, looking at the money, like it represented such a stunning reversal of fortune that no reaction was possible. They didn't ask any questions. Just accepted it had finally happened and then paused a second and burst out with a long list of plans. First, they would get the telephone reconnected so they wouldn't have to walk eight miles to their neighbor's place. Then the electricity. Then they would pay back what they had borrowed from friends. Then they would buy diesel fuel, so the irrigation pump could run again. Then they would get their truck fixed and drive it to town for seed and fertilizer. They went quiet again when it dawned on them they could get a whole crop grown and harvested and sold before the winter came.

Reacher hung back and looked around the room. It was an eat-in, live-in kitchen, opening to a front parlor. The parlor was hot and airless and had a yard-long encyclopedia set and a bunch of religious statuettes on a low shelf. A single picture on the wall. The picture was a photograph of a boy. It was a studio portrait. The boy was maybe fourteen, with a precocious smudge of mustache above his lip. He was wearing a white confirmation robe and smiling shyly. The picture was in a black frame and had a dusty square of black fabric hung around it.

"My eldest son," a voice said. "That picture was made just before we left our village in Mexico."

Reacher turned and found the mother standing behind him.

"He was killed, on the journey here," she said.

Reacher nodded. "I know. I heard. The border patrol. I'm very sorry."

"It was twelve years ago. His name was Raoul Garcia."

The way she said his name was like a small act of remembrance.

"What happened?" Reacher asked.

The woman was silent for a second.

"It was awful," she said. "They hunted us for three hours in the night. We were walking and running, they had a truck with bright lights. We got split up. Divided, in the dark. Raoul was with his sister. He was protecting her. She was twelve. He sent her one way and walked the other way, into the lights. He knew it was worse, if they captured girls. He gave himself up to save his sister. But they didn't try to arrest him or anything. Didn't even ask him any questions. They just shot him down and drove away. They came near where I was hiding. They were laughing. I heard them. Like it was a sport."

"I'm very sorry," Reacher said again.

The woman shrugged. "It was very common then. It was a bad time, and a bad area. We found that out, later. Either our guide didn't know, or didn't care. We found out that there were more than twenty people killed on that route in a year. For fun. Some of them in horrible ways. Raoul was lucky, just to be shot. Some of them, their screams could be heard for miles, across the desert, in the darkness. Some of the girls were carried away and never seen again."