“The wrong guy.”
“But who was he?”
“Some big guy,” Reacher said. “He smacked them around for a minute or two. I think somebody called the ambulance for them. They’re probably in the hospital now. Maybe they’re dead, for all I know. They lost, and they lost real bad.”
Bobby stared. “Who was the guy?”
“Just some guy, minding his own business.”
“Who?”
“Some stranger, I guess.”
Bobby paused. “Was it you?”
“Me?” Reacher said. “Why would they pick a fight with me?”
Bobby said nothing.
“Why would they pick a fight with me, Bobby?” Reacher asked again. “What possible kind of a reason would they have for that?”
Bobby made no reply. Just stared and then turned and stalked into the house. Slammed the door loudly behind him. The sheriff stayed where he was.
“So they got hurt bad,” he said.
Reacher nodded. “Seems that way. You should make some calls, check it out. Then start spreading the news. Tell people that’s what happens, if they start picking fights with the wrong strangers.”
The sheriff nodded again, still cautious.
“Maybe it’s something you should bear in mind, too,” Reacher said. “Bobby told me down here folks sort out their own differences. He told me they’re reluctant to involve law enforcement people. He implied cops stay out of private disputes. He said it’s some kind of a big old West Texas tradition.”
The sheriff was quiet for a moment.
“I guess it might be,” he said.
“Bobby said it definitely was. A definite tradition.”
The sheriff turned away.
“Well, you could put it that way,” he said. “And I’m a very traditional guy.”
Reacher nodded.
“I’m very glad to hear it,” he said.
The sheriff paused on the porch steps, and then moved on again without looking back. He slid into his car and killed the flashing lights and started the engine. Maneuvered carefully past the lime green Lincoln and headed out down the driveway and under the gate. His engine was running rich. Reacher could smell unburned gasoline in the air, and he could hear the muffler popping with tiny explosions. Then the car accelerated into the distance and he could hear nothing at all except the grasshoppers clicking and chattering.
He came down off the porch and walked around to the kitchen door. It was standing open, either for ventilation or so the maid could eavesdrop on the excitement. She was standing just inside the room, close to an insect screen made of plastic strips hanging down in the doorway.
“Hey,” Reacher said. He had learned long ago to be friendly with the cookhouse detail. That way, you eat better. But she didn’t answer him. She just stood there, warily.
“Let me guess,” he said. “You only made two suppers for the bunkhouse.”
She said nothing, which was as good as a yes.
“You were misinformed,” he said. “Was it Bobby?”
She nodded. “He told me you weren’t coming back.”
“He was mistaken,” he said. “It was Josh and Billy who didn’t come back. So I guess I’ll eat their dinners. Both of them. I’m hungry.”
She paused. Then she shrugged.
“I’ll bring them down,” she said. “In a minute.”
He shook his head.
“I’ll eat them here,” he said. “Save you the walk.”
He parted the plastic strips with the backs of his hands and stepped inside the kitchen. It smelled of chili, left over from lunchtime.
“What did you make?” he asked.
“Steaks,” she said.
“Good,” he said. “I like bovines better than edentates.”
“What?”
“I like beef better than I like armadillo.”
“So do I,” she said.
She used pot holders and took two plates out of a warming oven. Each held a medium-sized rib-eye steak, and a large mound of mashed potato and a smaller mound of fried onions. She put them side by side on the kitchen table, with a fork on the left of the left-hand plate and a knife all the way to the right. It looked like a double-barreled meal.
“Billy was my cousin,” she said.
“He probably still is,” Reacher said. “Josh got it worse.”
“Josh was my cousin, too.”
“Well, I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Different branch of the family,” she said. “More distant. And they were both fools.”
Reacher nodded. “Not the sharpest chisels in the box.”
“But the Greers are sharp,” she said. “Whatever it is you’re doing with the Mexican woman, you should remember that.”
Then she left him alone to eat.
He rinsed both plates when he finished and left them stacked in the sink. Walked down to the horse barn and sat down to wait in the foul heat inside because he wanted to stay close to the house. He sat on a hay bale and kept his back to the horses. They were restless for a spell, and then they got used to his presence. He heard them fall asleep, one by one. The shuffling hooves stopped moving and he heard lazy huffs of breath.
Then he heard feet over on the boards of the porch, and then on the steps, and then the crunch of dry dust under them as they crossed the yard. He heard the Lincoln’s doors open, then shut again. He heard the engine start, and the transmission engage. He stood up and stepped to the barn door and saw the Lincoln turning around in front of the house. It was lit from behind by the porch lights, and he could see Hack Walker silhouetted at the wheel, with Rusty Greer beside him. The porch lights turned her teased-up hair to cotton candy. He could see the shape of her skull underneath it.
The big car drove straight out under the gate and swooped right without pausing and accelerated away down the road. He watched the bright cone of its headlights through the picket fence, bouncing left to right through the darkness. Then it was gone and the sounds of the night insects came back and the big moths around the lights were all that was moving.
He waited just inside the barn door, trying to guess who would come for him first. Carmen, probably, he thought, but it was Bobby who stepped out on the porch, maybe five minutes after his mother had left to bring his brother home. He came straight down the steps and headed across the yard, down toward the path to the bunkhouse. He had his ball cap on again, reversed on his head. Reacher stepped out of the barn and cut him off.
“Horses need watering,” Bobby said. “And I want their stalls cleaned out.”
“You do it,” Reacher said.
“What?”
“You heard.”
Bobby stood still.
“I’m not doing it,” he said.
“Then I’ll make you do it.”
“What the hell is this?”
“A change, is what,” Reacher said. “Things just changed for you, Bobby, big time, believe me. Soon as you decided to set Josh and Billy on me, you crossed a line. Put yourself in a whole different situation. One where you do exactly what I tell you.”
Bobby said nothing.
Reacher looked straight at him. “I tell you jump, you don’t even ask how high. You just start jumping. That clear? I own you now.”
Bobby stood still. Reacher swung his right hand, aiming a big slow roundhouse slap. Bobby ducked away from it, straight into Reacher’s left, which pulled the ball cap off his head.
“So go look after the horses,” Reacher said. “Then you can sleep in there with them. I see you again before breakfast time, I’ll break your legs.”
Bobby stood still.
“Who are you going to call, little brother?” Reacher asked him. “The maid, or the sheriff?”
Bobby said nothing. The vastness of the night closed in. Echo County, a hundred and fifty souls, most of them at least sixty or a hundred miles beyond the black horizons. The absolute definition of isolation.
“O.K.,” Bobby said quietly.
He walked slowly t
oward the barn. Reacher dropped the ball cap in the dirt and strolled up to the house, with the porch lights shining in his eyes and the big papery moths swarming out to greet him.
Two-thirds of the killing crew saw him stroll. They were doing it better than the watchers had. The woman had checked the map and rejected the tactic of driving in from the west. For one thing, the Crown Vic wouldn’t make it over the desert terrain. For another, to hide a mile away made no sense at all. Especially during the hours of darkness. Far better to drive straight down the road and stop a hundred yards shy of the house, long enough for two of the team to jump out, then turn the car and head back north while the two on foot ducked behind the nearest line of rocks and worked south toward the red gate and holed up in the small craters ten yards from the blacktop.
It was the two men on foot. They had night-vision devices. Nothing fancy, nothing military, just commercial equipment bought from a sporting goods catalog and carried along with everything else in the black nylon valise. They were binoculars, with some kind of electronic enhancement inside. Some kind of infrared capability. It picked up the night heat rising off the ground, and made Reacher look like he was wobbling and shimmering as he walked.
8
Reacher found Carmen in the parlor. The light was dim and the air was hot and thick. She was sitting alone at the red-painted table. Her back was perfectly straight and her forearms were resting lightly on the wooden surface and her gaze was blank and absolutely level, focused on a spot on the wall where there was nothing to see.
“Twice over,” she said. “I feel cheated, twice over. First it was a year, and then it was nothing. Then it was forty-eight hours, but really it was only twenty-four.”
“You can still get out,” he said.
“Now it’s less than twenty-four,” she said. “It’s sixteen hours, maybe. I’ll have breakfast by myself, but he’ll be back for lunch.”
“Sixteen hours is enough,” he said. “Sixteen hours, you could be anywhere.”
“Ellie’s fast asleep,” she said. “I can’t wake her up and bundle her in a car and run away and be chased by the cops forever.”
Reacher said nothing.
“I’m going to try to face it,” she said. “A fresh start. I’m planning to tell him, enough is enough. I’m planning to tell him, he lays a hand on me again, I’ll divorce him. Whatever it takes. However long.”
“Way to go,” he said.
“Do you believe I can?” she asked.
“I believe anybody can do anything,” he said. “If they want it enough.”
“I want it,” she said. “Believe me, I want it.”
She went quiet. Reacher glanced around the silent room.
“Why did they paint everything red?” he asked.
“Because it was cheap,” she said. “During the fifties, nobody down here wanted red anything, because of the Communists. So it was the cheapest color at the paint store.”
“I thought they were rich, back then. With the oil.”
“They were rich. They still are rich. Richer than you could ever imagine. But they’re also mean.”
He looked at the places where the fifty-year-old paint was worn back to the wood.
“Evidently,” he said.
She nodded again. Said nothing.
“Last chance, Carmen,” he said. “We could go, right now. There’s nobody here to call the cops. By the time they get back, we could be anywhere you want.”
“Bobby’s here.”
“He’s going to stay in the barn.”
“He’d hear the car.”
“We could rip out the phones.”
“He’d chase us. He could get to the sheriff inside two hours.”
“We could fix the other cars so they wouldn’t work.”
“He’d hear us doing it.”
“I could tie him up. I could drown him in a horse trough.”
She smiled, bitterly. “But you won’t drown Sloop.”
He nodded. “Figure of speech, I guess.”
She was quiet for a beat. Then she scraped back her chair and stood up.
“Come and see Ellie,” she said. “She’s so beautiful when she’s asleep.”
She passed close to him and took his hand in hers. Led him out through the kitchen and into the rear lobby and up the back stairs, toward the noise of the fan turning slowly. Down the long hot corridor to Ellie’s door. She eased it open with her foot and maneuvered him so he could see inside the room.
There was a night-light plugged into an outlet low on the wall and its soft orange glow showed the child sprawled on her back, with her arms thrown up around her head. She had kicked off her sheet and the rabbit T-shirt had ridden up and was showing a band of plump pink skin at her waist. Her hair was tumbled over the pillow. Long dark eyelashes rested on her cheeks like fans. Her mouth was open a fraction.
“She’s six and a half,” Carmen whispered. “She needs this. She needs a bed of her own, in a place of her own. I can’t make her live like a fugitive.”
He said nothing.
“Do you see?” she whispered.
He shrugged. He didn’t, really. At age six and a half, he had lived exactly like a fugitive. He had at every age, right from birth to yesterday. He had moved from one service base to another, all around the world, often with no notice at all. He recalled days when he got up for school and instead was driven to an airstrip and ended up on the other side of the planet thirty hours later. He recalled stumbling tired and bewildered into dank bungalow bedrooms and sleeping on unmade beds. The next morning, his mother would tell him which country they were in. Which continent they were on. If she knew yet. Sometimes she didn’t. It hadn’t done him any harm.
Or, maybe it had.
“It’s your call, I guess,” he said.
She pulled him back into the corridor and eased Ellie’s door shut behind him.
“Now I’ll show you where I hid the gun,” she said. “You can tell me if you approve.”
She walked ahead of him down the corridor. The air conditioner was loud. He passed under a vent and a breath of air played over him. It was warm. Carmen’s dress swayed with every step. She was wearing heels and they put tension in the muscles of her legs. He could see tendons in the backs of her knees. Her hair hung down her back and merged with the black pattern on the red fabric of the dress. She turned left and then right and stepped through an archway. There was another staircase, leading down.
“Where are we going?” he asked.
“Separate wing,” she said. “It was added. By Sloop’s grandfather, I think.”
The staircase led to a long narrow ground-floor hallway that led out of the main building to a master suite. It was as big as a small house. There was a dressing area, and a spacious bathroom, and a sitting room with a sofa and two armchairs. Beyond the sitting room was a broad archway. Beyond the archway, there was a bedroom.
“In here,” she said.
She walked straight through the sitting room and led him to the bedroom.
“You see what I mean?” she said. “We’re a long way from anywhere. Nobody hears anything. And I try to be quiet, anyway. If I scream, he hits me harder.”
He nodded and looked around. There was a window, facing east, with insects loud beyond the screen. There was a king-size bed close to it, with side tables by the head, and a chest-high piece of furniture full of drawers opposite the foot. It looked like it had been made a hundred years ago, out of some kind of oak trees.
“Texas ironwood,” she said. “It’s what you get if you let the mesquite grow tall.”
“You should have been a teacher,” he said. “You’re always explaining things.”
She smiled, vaguely. “I thought about it, in college. It was a possibility, back then. In my other life.”
She opened the drawer on the top right.
“I moved the gun,” she said. “I listened to your advice. Bedside cabinet was too low. Ellie could have found it. This is too high for her.”
>
He nodded again and moved closer. The drawer was a couple of feet wide, maybe eighteen inches deep. It was her underwear drawer. The pistol was lying on top of her things, which were neatly folded, and silky, and insubstantial, and fragrant. The mother-of-pearl plastic on the grips looked right at home there.
“You could have told me where it was,” he said. “You didn’t need to show me.”
She was quiet for a beat.
“He’ll want sex, won’t he?” she said.
Reacher made no reply.
“He’s been locked up a year and a half,” she said. “But I’m going to refuse.”
Reacher said nothing.
“It’s a woman’s right, isn’t it?” she asked. “To say no?”
“Of course it is,” he said.
“Even though the woman is married?”
“Most places,” he said.
She was quiet for a beat.
“And it’s also her right to say yes, isn’t it?” she asked.
“Equally,” he said.
“I’d say yes to you.”
“I’m not asking.”
She paused. “So is it O.K. for me to ask you?”
He looked straight at her. “Depends on why, I guess.”
“Because I want to,” she said. “I want to go to bed with you.”
“Why?”
“Honestly?” she said. “Just because I want to.”
“And?”
She shrugged. “And I want to hurt Sloop a little, I guess, in secret. In my heart.”
He said nothing.
“Before he gets home,” she said.
He said nothing.
“And because Bobby already thinks we’re doing it,” she said. “I figure, why get the blame without getting the fun?”
He said nothing.
“I just want a little fun,” she said. “Before it all starts up again.”
He said nothing.
“No strings attached,” she said. “I’m not looking for it to change anything. About your decision, I mean. About Sloop.”
He nodded.
“It wouldn’t change anything,” he said.
She looked away.
“So what’s your answer?” she asked.
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