Echo Burning by Lee Child

by Echo Burning (com v2. 0) (lit)

  “Problem?” he asked her.

  She shrugged and nodded all at the same time. An all-purpose expression of misery.

  “Winning the case is only half the battle,” she said. “Sometimes, a lot less than half, believe me.”

  “So what happened?”

  She shook her head. “We don’t need to go into it.”

  “Some guy won’t pay up?” Reacher said.

  She shrugged and nodded again.

  “A rancher,” she said. “Crashed his car into my client’s truck. Injured my client and his wife and two of his children. It was early in the morning. He was on his way back from a party, drunk. They were on their way to market. It was harvest time and they couldn’t work the fields and they lost their whole crop.”

  “Cantaloupe?”

  “Bell peppers, actually. Rotted on the vine. We sued and won twenty thousand dollars. But the guy won’t pay. He just refuses. He’s waiting them out. He plans to starve them back to Mexico, and he will, because if we have to go back to court it’ll take at least another year and they can’t live another whole year on fresh air, can they?”

  “They didn’t have insurance?”

  “Premiums are way too expensive. These people are barely scratching a living. All we could do was proceed directly against the rancher. Solid case, well presented, and we won. But the old guy is sitting tight, with a big smirk on his damn face.”

  “Tough break,” Reacher said.

  “Unbelievable,” she said. “The things these people go through, you just wouldn’t believe it. This family I’m telling you about, the border patrol killed their eldest son.”

  “They did?”

  She nodded. “Twelve years ago. They were illegals. Paid their life savings to some guide to get them here, and he just abandoned them in the desert. No food, no water, they’re holing up in the daytime and walking north at night, and a patrol chases them in the dark with rifles and kills their eldest boy. They bury him and walk on.”

  “Anything get done about it?”

  “Are you kidding? They were illegals. They couldn’t do anything. It happened all the time. Everybody’s got a story like that. And now they’re settled and been through the immigration amnesty, we try to get them to trust the law, and then something like this happens. I feel like such a fool.”

  “Not your fault.”

  “It is my fault. I should know better. Trust us, I tell them.”

  She went quiet and Reacher watched her try to recover.

  “Anyway,” she said, and then nothing more. She looked away. She was a good-looking woman. It was very hot. There was a single air conditioner stuck in the fanlight over the door, a big old thing, a long way away. It was doing its best.

  “Anyway,” she said again. Looked at him. “How can I help you?”

  “Not me,” Reacher said. “A woman I know.”

  “She needs a lawyer?”

  “She shot her husband. He was abusing her.”

  “When?”

  “Last night. She’s across the street, in jail.”

  “Is he dead?”

  Reacher nodded. “As a doornail.”

  Her shoulders sagged. She opened a drawer and took out a yellow pad.

  “What’s your name?” she asked.

  “My name?”

  “You’re the one talking to me.”

  “Reacher,” he said. “What’s your name?”

  She wrote “Reacher” on the pad, first line.

  “Alice,” she said. “Alice Amanda Aaron.”

  “You should go into private practice. You’d be first in the Yellow Pages.”

  She smiled, just a little.

  “One day, I will,” she said. “This is a five-year bargain with my conscience.”

  “Paying your dues?”

  “Atoning,” she said. “For my good fortune. For going to Harvard Law. For coming from a family where twenty thousand dollars is a month’s common charge on the Park Avenue co-op instead of life or death during the winter in Texas.”

  “Good for you, Alice,” he said.

  “So tell me about your woman friend.”

  “She’s of Mexican heritage and her husband was white. Her name is Carmen Greer and her husband was Sloop Greer.”

  “Sloop?”

  “Like a boat.”

  “O.K.,” Alice said, and wrote it all down.

  “The abuse stopped for the last year and a half because he was in prison for tax evasion. He got out yesterday and started it up again and she shot him.”

  “O.K.”

  “Evidence and witnesses are going to be hard to find. The abuse was covert.”

  “Injuries?”

  “Fairly severe. But she always passed them off as accidental, to do with horses.”

  “Horses?”

  “Like she fell off of them.”

  “Why?”

  Reacher shrugged. “I don’t know. Family dynamic, coercion, shame, fear, embarrassment, maybe.”

  “But there’s no doubt the abuse happened?”

  “Not in my mind.”

  Alice stopped writing. Stared down at the yellow paper.

  “Well, it’s not going to be easy,” she said. “Texas law isn’t too far behind the times on spousal abuse, but I’d prefer lots of clear evidence. But his spell in prison helps us. Not a model citizen, is he? We could plead it down to involuntary manslaughter. Maybe settle for time served, with probation. If we work hard, we stand a chance.”

  “It was justifiable homicide, not manslaughter.”

  “I’m sure it was, but it’s a question of what will work, and what won’t.”

  “And she needs bail,” Reacher said. “Today.”

  Alice looked up from the paper and stared at him.

  “Bail?” she repeated, like it was a foreign word. “Today? Forget about it.”

  “She’s got a kid. A little girl, six and a half.”

  She wrote it down.

  “Doesn’t help,” she said. “Everybody’s got kids.”

  She ran her fingers up and down the tall stacks of files.

  “They’ve all got kids,” she said again. “Six and a half, one and a half, two kids, six, seven, ten.”

  “She’s called Ellie,” Reacher said. “She needs her mother.”

  Alice wrote “Ellie” on the pad, and connected it with an arrow to “Carmen Greer.”

  “Only two ways to get bail in a case like this,” she said. “First way is we stage essentially the whole trial at the bail hearing. And we’re not ready to do that. It’ll be months before I can even start working on it. My calendar is totally full. And even when I can start, it’ll take months to prepare, in these circumstances.”

  “What circumstances?”

  “Her word against a dead man’s reputation. If we’ve got no eyewitnesses, we’ll have to subpoena her medical records and find experts who can testify her injuries weren’t caused by falling off horses. And clearly she’s got no money, or you wouldn’t be in here on her behalf, so we’re going to have to find some experts who’ll appear for free. Which isn’t impossible, but it can’t be done in a hurry.”

  “So what can be done in a hurry?”

  “I can run over to the jail and say ‘Hi, I’m your lawyer, I’ll see you again in a year.’ That’s about all can be done in a hurry.”

  Reacher glanced around the room. It was teeming with people.

  “Nobody else will be faster,” Alice said. “I’m relatively new here. I’ve got less of a backlog.”

  It seemed to be true. She had just two head-high stacks of files on her desk. The others all had three or four or five.

  “What’s the second way?”

  “Of what?”

  “Getting bail. You said there were two ways.”

  She nodded. “Second way is we convince the DA not to oppose it. If we stand up and ask for bail and he stands up and says he has no objection, then all that matters is whether the judge thinks it’s appropriate. And the judge w
ill be influenced by the DA’s position, probably.”

  “Hack Walker was Sloop Greer’s oldest buddy.”

  Alice’s shoulder’s sagged again.

  “Great,” she said. “He’ll recuse himself, obviously. But his staff will go to bat for him. So forget bail. It isn’t going to happen.”

  “But will you take the case?”

  “Sure I will. That’s what we do here. We take cases. So I’ll call Hack’s office, and I’ll go see Carmen. But that’s all I can do right now. You understand? Apart from that, right now taking the case is the same thing as not taking the case.”

  Reacher sat still for a second. Then he shook his head.

  “Not good enough, Alice,” he said. “I want you to get to work right now. Make something happen.”

  “I can’t,” she said. “Not for months. I told you that.”

  She went quiet and he watched her for a second more.

  “You interested in a deal?” he asked.

  “A deal?”

  “Like I help you, you help me.”

  “How can you help me?”

  “There are things I could do for you. Like, I could recover the twenty grand for your pepper growers. Today. And then you could start work for Carmen Greer. Today.”

  “What are you, a debt collector?”

  “No, but I’m a quick learner. It’s probably not rocket science.”

  “I can’t let you do that. It’s probably illegal. Unless you’re registered somewhere.”

  “Just suppose the next time you saw me I was walking back in here with a check for twenty grand in my pocket?”

  “How would you do that?”

  He shrugged. “I’d just go ask the guy for it.”

  “And that would work?”

  “It might,” he said.

  She shook her head. “It would be unethical.”

  “As opposed to what?”

  She didn’t answer for a long time. Just stared off somewhere behind his head. But then he saw her glance down at the phone. He saw her rehearsing the good news call in her mind.

  “Who’s the rancher?” he asked.

  She glanced at the drawer. Shook her head again.

  “I can’t tell you,” she said. “I’m worried about the ethics.”

  “I’m offering,” he said. “You’re not asking.”

  She sat still.

  “I’m volunteering,” he said. “Like a paralegal assistant.”

  She looked straight at him.

  “I have to go to the bathroom,” she said.

  She stood up suddenly and walked away. She was wearing denim shorts, and she was taller than he had guessed. Short shorts, long legs. A fine tan. Walking, she looked pretty good from the back. She went through a door in the rear wall of the old store. He stood up and leaned over the desk and pulled open the drawer. Lifted the top file out and reversed it so he could read it. It was full of legal paper. He shuffled through to some kind of a deposition printed on a single sheet. There was a name and address typed neatly in a box labeled “Defendant.” He folded the paper into quarters and put it in his shirt pocket. Closed the file and dropped it back in the drawer. Hooked the drawer shut and sat down again. A moment later Alice Amanda Aaron came out through the rear door and walked back to the desk. She looked pretty good from the front, too.

  “Any place around here I can borrow a car?” he asked her.

  “You don’t have one?”

  He shook his head.

  “Well, you can borrow mine, I guess,” she said. “It’s in the lot, behind the building.”

  She fiddled in her jacket pocket, behind her. Came out with a set of keys.

  “It’s a VW,” she said.

  He took the keys from her.

  “There are maps in the glove compartment,” she said. “You know, in case a person isn’t familiar with the area.”

  He pushed back from the desk.

  “Maybe I’ll catch you later,” he said.

  She said nothing. He stood up and walked through the quiet crowd of people and out into the sun.

  11

  Alice’s car was the only VW in the lot behind the building. It was baking in the sun right in the center, a new-shape Beetle, bright yellow in color, New York plates, about a year and a half old, and there was more than a bunch of maps in the glove compartment. There was a handgun in there, too.

  It was a beautiful nickel-finished Heckler & Koch P7M10, four-inch barrel, ten .40 caliber shells. In Reacher’s day the army had wanted the same thing in the 9mm blued-steel version, but the defense department had balked at the cost, which must have been about sixteen times the price of Carmen Greer’s eighty-dollar Lorcin. It was a fine, fine piece. One of the best available. Maybe it was a gift from the family back on Park Avenue. Maybe the car was, too. He could just imagine it. The VW was an easy choice. The perfect graduation present. But the gun might have caused some consternation. The parents would have been sitting up there on their high floor in New York, worrying about it. She’s going to work where? With poor people? She’ll need protection, surely. So they would have researched the whole matter thoroughly and gone out and bought her the best on the market, like they would have bought her a Rolex if she had needed a watch.

  Out of habit he took it apart and checked the action and reassembled it. It was new, but it had been fired and cleaned maybe four or five times. It spoke of conscientious hours put in at the practice range. Maybe some exclusive Manhattan basement. He smiled. Slotted it back in the glove compartment under the maps. Then he racked the seat all the way back and fiddled with the key and fired the engine up and started the air running. He took the maps out of the glove compartment and spread them on the empty seat beside him. Took the folded paper from his shirt pocket and checked the maps for the rancher’s address. It seemed to be somewhere north and east of town, maybe an hour away if he hustled hard.

  The VW had a manual transmission with a sharp clutch and he stalled out twice before he got the hang of driving it. He felt awkward and conspicuous. The ride was firm and there was some kind of a bud vase attached to the dash, loaded with a little pink bloom that was reviving steadily as the car got colder. There was subtle perfume in the air. He had learned to drive nearly twenty-five years before, underage and illegally, in a Marine Corps deuce-and-a-half with the driving seat six feet off the ground, and he felt about as far away from that experience as it was possible to get.

  The map showed seven ways out of Pecos. He had come in on the southernmost, and it didn’t have what he was looking for. So he had six to cover. His instinct led him west. The town’s center of gravity seemed to be lumped to the east of the crossroads, therefore east would be definitely wrong. So he drove away from the lawyers and the bondsmen in the direction of El Paso and followed a slight right-hand curve and found exactly what he wanted, all spread out in front of him and receding into the distance. Every town of any size has a strip of auto dealers clustered together on one of the approaches, and Pecos was no different.

  He cruised up the strip and turned around and cruised back, looking for the right kind of place. There were two possibilities. Both of them had gaudy signs offering Foreign Car Service. Both of them offered Free Loaners. He chose the place farther out of town. It had a used car business in front with a dozen clunkers decked with flags and low prices on their windshields. An office in a trailer. Behind the sales lot was a long low shed with hydraulic hoists. The floor of the shed was oil-stained earth. There were four mechanics visible. One of them was halfway underneath a British sports car. The other three were unoccupied. A slow start to a hot Monday morning.

  He drove the yellow VW right into the shed. The three unoccupied mechanics drifted over to it. One of them looked like a foreman. Reacher asked him to adjust the VW’s clutch so its action would be softer. The guy looked happy to be offered the work. He said it would cost forty bucks. Reacher agreed to the price and asked for a loaner. The guy led him behind the shed and pointed to an ancient Chrysler LeBar
on convertible. It had been white once, but now it was khaki with age and sunlight. Reacher took Alice’s gun with him, wrapped up in her maps like a store-bought package. He placed it on the Chrysler’s passenger seat. Then he asked the mechanic for a tow rope.

  “What you want to tow?” the guy asked.

  “Nothing,” Reacher said. “I just want the rope, is all.”

  “You want a rope, but you don’t want to tow anything?”

  “You got it,” Reacher said.

  The guy shrugged and walked away. Came back with a coil of rope. Reacher put it in the passenger footwell. Then he drove the LeBaron back into town and out again heading north and east, feeling a whole lot better about the day. Only a fool would try unlicensed debt-collecting in the wilds of Texas in a bright yellow car with New York plates and a bud vase on the dash.

  He stopped once in empty country, to unscrew the Chrysler’s plates with a penny from his pocket. He stored them on the floor on the passenger’s side, next to the coil of rope. Put the bolts in the glove compartment. Then he drove on, looking for his destination. He was maybe three hours north of the Greer place, and the land looked pretty much the same, except it was better irrigated. Grass was growing. The mesquite had been burned back. There were cultivated acres, with green bushes all over them. Peppers, maybe. Or cantaloupe. He had no idea. There was wild indigo on the shoulders of the road. An occasional prickly pear. No people. The sun was high and the horizons were shimmering.

  The rancher’s name was listed on the legal paper as Lyndon J. Brewer. His address was just a route number, which Alice’s map showed was a stretch of road that ran about forty miles before it disappeared into New Mexico. It was the same sort of road as the drag heading south out of Echo down to the Greer place, a dusty blacktop ribbon and a string of drooping power lines punctuated by big ranch gates about every fifteen miles. The ranches had names, which weren’t necessarily going to be the names of the owners, like the Red House had nowhere been labeled Greer. So finding Lyndon J. Brewer in person wasn’t necessarily going to be easy.