by Lee Child
The bloodstains were already drying and blackening. They kicked desert dust over them and swept the area with a mesquite branch to confuse the mass of footprints. Then they walked over and climbed into the Crown Vic and the driver backed up and swung through the brush. Bounced through the dip and up the slope to the roadway. The big car nosed back the way it had come and accelerated gently to fifty-five miles an hour. Moments later it passed by Eugene’s white Mercedes, parked right where he’d left it, on the other side of the road. It already looked abandoned and filmed with dust.
“I have a daughter,” Carmen Greer said. “I told you that, right?”
“You told me you were a mother,” Reacher said.
She nodded at the wheel. “Of a daughter. She’s six and a half years old.”
Then she went quiet for a minute.
“They called her Mary Ellen,” she said.
“They?”
“My husband’s family.”
“They named your kid?”
“It just happened, I guess. I wasn’t in a good position to stop it.”
Reacher was quiet for a beat.
“What would you have called her?” he asked.
She shrugged. “Gloria, maybe. I thought she was glorious.”
She went quiet again.
“But she’s Mary Ellen,” he said.
She nodded. “They call her Ellie, for short. Miss Ellie, sometimes.”
“And she’s six and a half?”
“But we’ve been married less than seven years. I told you that, too, right? So you can do the math. Is that a problem?”
“Doing the math?”
“Thinking about the implication.”
He shook his head at the windshield. “Not a problem to me. Why would it be?”
“Not a problem to me, either,” she said. “But it explains why I wasn’t in a good position.”
He made no reply.
“We got off to all kinds of a bad start,” she said. “Me and his family.”
She said it with a dying fall in her voice, the way a person might refer back to a tragedy in the past, a car wreck, a plane crash, a fatal diagnosis. The way a person might refer back to the day her life changed forever. She gripped the wheel and the car drove itself on, a cocoon of cold and quiet in the blazing landscape.
“Who are they?” he asked.
“The Greers,” she said. “An old Echo County family. Been there since Texas was first stolen. Maybe they were there to steal some of it themselves.”
“What are they like?”
“They’re what you might expect,” she said. “Old white Texans, big money from way back, a lot of it gone now but a lot of it still left, some history with oil and cattle ranching, river-baptized Protestants, not that they ever go to church or think about what the Lord might be saying to them. They hunt animals for pleasure. The father died some time ago, the mother is still alive, there are two sons, and there are cousins all over the county. My husband is the elder boy, Sloop Greer.”
“Sloop?” Reacher said.
She smiled for the first time since driving out of the ditch.
“Sloop,” she said again.
“What kind of a name is that?”
“An old family name,” she said. “Some ancestor, I guess. Probably he was at the Alamo, fighting against mine.”
“Sounds like a boat. What’s the other boy called? Yacht? Tug? Ocean liner? Oil tanker?”
“Robert,” she said. “People call him Bobby.”
“Sloop,” Reacher said again. “That’s a new one to me.”
“New to me, too,” she said. “The whole thing was new to me. But I used to like his name. It marked him out, somehow.”
“I guess it would.”
“I met him in California,” Carmen said. “We were in school together, UCLA.”
“Off of his home turf,” Reacher said.
She stopped smiling. “Correct. Only way it could have happened, looking back. If I’d have met him out here, you know, with the whole package out in plain view, it would never have happened. No way. I can promise you that. Always assuming I’d even come out here, in the first place, which I hope I wouldn’t have.”
She stopped talking and squinted ahead into the glare of the sun. There was a ribbon of black road and a bright shape up ahead on the left, shiny aluminum broken into moving fragments by the haze boiling up off the blacktop.
“There’s the diner,” she said. “They’ll have coffee, I’m sure.”
“Strange kind of a diner if it didn’t,” he said.
“There are lots of strange things here,” she said.
The diner sat alone on the side of the road, set on a slight rise in the center of an acre of beaten dirt serving as its parking lot. There was a sign on a tall pole and no shade anywhere. There were two pick-up trucks, carelessly parked, far from each other.
“O.K.,” she said, hesitant, starting to slow the car. “Now you’re going to run. You figure one of those guys with the pick-ups will give you a ride.”
He said nothing.
“If you are, do it later, O.K.?” she said. “Please? I don’t want to be left alone in a place like this.”
She slowed some more and bounced off the road onto the dirt. Parked right next to the sign pole, as if it was a shade tree offering protection from the sun. Its slender shadow fell across the hood like a bar. She pushed the lever into Park and switched off the engine. The air conditioner’s compressor hissed and gurgled in the sudden silence. Reacher opened his door. The heat hit him like a steelyard furnace. It was so intense he could barely catch his breath. He stood dumb for a second and waited for her and then they walked together across the hot dirt. It was baked dry and hard, like concrete. Beyond it was a tangle of mesquite brush and a blinding white-hot sky as far as the eye could see. He let her walk half a pace ahead of him, so he could watch her. She had her eyes half-closed and her head bowed, like she didn’t want to see or be seen. The hem on her dress had fallen to a decorous knee-length. She moved very gracefully, like a dancer, her upper body erect and perfectly still and her bare legs scissoring elegantly below it.
The diner had a tiny foyer with a cigarette machine and a rack full of flyers about real estate and oil changes and small-town rodeos and gun shows. Inside the second door it was cold again. They stood together in the delicious chill for a moment. There was a register next to the door and a tired waitress sitting sideways on a counter stool. A cook visible in the kitchen. Two men in separate booths, eating. All four people looked up and paused, like there were things they could say but wouldn’t.
Reacher looked at each of them for a second and then turned away and led Carmen to a booth at the far end of the room. He slid across sticky vinyl and tilted his head back into a jet of cold air coming down from a vent in the ceiling. Carmen sat opposite and raised her head and he looked at her face-on for the first time.
“My daughter looks nothing at all like me,” she said. “Sometimes I think that’s the cruelest irony in this whole situation. Those big old Greer genes just about steamrollered mine, that’s for sure.”
She had spectacular dark eyes with long lashes and a slight tilt to them, and a straight nose that made an open Y-shape against her brows. High cheekbones framed by thick black hair that shone navy in the light. A rosebud of a mouth with a subtle trace of red lipstick. Her skin was smooth and clear, the color of weak tea or dark honey, and it had a translucent glow behind it. It was actually a whole lot lighter in color than Reacher’s own sunburned forearms, and he was white and she wasn’t.
“So who does Ellie look like?” he asked.
“Them,” she said.
The waitress brought ice water and a pad and a pencil and an upturned chin and no conversation. Carmen ordered iced coffee and Reacher ordered his hot and black.
“She doesn’t look like she’s mine at all,” Carmen said. “Pink skin, yellow hair, a little chubby. But she’s got my eyes.”
“Lucky Ellie,” Reache
r said.
She smiled briefly. “Thank you. Plan is she should stay lucky.”
She held the water glass flat against her face. Then she used a napkin to wipe the dew away. The waitress brought their drinks. The iced coffee was in a tall glass, and she spilled some of it as she put it down. Reacher’s was in an insulated plastic carafe, and she shoved an empty china mug across the table next to it. She left the check facedown halfway between the two drinks, and walked away without saying anything at all.
“You need to understand I loved Sloop once,” Carmen said.
Reacher made no reply, and she looked straight at him.
“Does it bother you to hear this kind of stuff?” she asked.
He shook his head, although the truth was it did bother him, a little. Loners aren’t necessarily too comfortable with a stranger’s intimacies.
“You told me to start at the beginning,” she said.
“Yes,” he said. “I did.”
“So I will,” she said. “I loved him once. You need to understand that. And you need to understand that wasn’t hard to do. He was big, and he was handsome, and he smiled a lot, and he was casual, and he was relaxed. And we were in school and we were young, and L.A. is a very special place, where anything seems possible and nothing seems to matter very much.”
She took a drinking straw from the canister on the table and unwrapped it.
“And you need to know where I was coming from,” she said. “Truth is, I had it all completely backward. I wasn’t some Mexican worrying about whether the white family would accept me. I was worrying about my family accepting this gringo boy. That’s how it seemed to me. I come from a thousand acres in Napa, we’ve been there forever, we were always the richest people I knew. And the most cultured. We had the art, and the history, and the music. We gave to museums. We employed white people. So I spent my time worrying about what my folks would say about me marrying out.”
He sipped his coffee. It was stewed and old, but it would do.
“And what did they say?” he asked.
“They went insane. I thought they were being foolish. Now I understand they weren’t.”
“So what happened?”
She sipped her drink through the straw. Took a napkin from a canister and dabbed her lips. It came away marked with her lipstick.
“Well, I was pregnant,” she said. “And that made everything a million times worse, of course. My parents are very devout, and they’re very traditional, and basically they cut me off, I guess. They disowned me. It was like the whole Victorian thing, expelled from the snowy doorstep with a bundle of rags, except it wasn’t snowing, of course, and the bundle of rags was really a Louis Vuitton valise.”
“So what did you do?”
“We got married. Nobody came, just a few friends from school. We lived a few months in L.A., we graduated, we stayed there until the baby was a month away. It was fun, actually. We were young and in love.”
He poured himself a second cup of coffee.
“But?” he asked.
“But Sloop couldn’t find a job. I began to realize he wasn’t trying very hard. Getting a job wasn’t in his plan. College was four years of fun for him, then it was back to the fold, go take over Daddy’s business. His father was ready to retire by then. I didn’t like that idea. I thought we were starting up fresh, on our own, you know, a new generation on both sides. I felt I’d given stuff up, and I thought he should, too. So we argued a lot. I couldn’t work, because of being so pregnant, and I had no money of my own. So in the end we couldn’t make the rent, so in the end he won the argument, and we trailed back here to Texas, and we moved in to the big old house with his folks and his brother and his cousins all around, and I’m still there.”
The dying fall was back in her voice. The day her life changed forever.
“And?” he asked.
She looked straight at him. “And it was like the ground opens up and you fall straight through to hell. It was such a shock, I couldn’t even react at all. They treated me strange, and the second day I suddenly realized what was going on. All my life I’d been like a princess, you know, and then I was just a hip kid among ten thousand others in L.A., but now I was suddenly just a piece of beaner trash. They never said it straight out, but it was so clear. They hated me, because I was the greaseball whore who’d hooked their darling boy. They were painfully polite, because I guess their strategy was to wait for Sloop to come to his senses and dump me. It happens, you know, in Texas. The good old boys, when they’re young and foolish, they like a little dark meat. Sometimes it’s like a rite of passage. Then they wise up and straighten out. I knew that’s what they were thinking. And hoping. And it was a shock, believe me. I had never thought of myself like that. Never. I’d never had to. Never had to confront it. The whole world was turned upside down, in an instant. Like falling in freezing water. Couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think, couldn’t even move.”
“But he didn’t dump you, evidently.”
She looked down at the table.
“No,” she said. “He didn’t dump me. He started hitting me instead. First time, he punched me in the face. Then Ellie was born the next day.”
The Crown Victoria turned back into a normal Hertz rental behind a stand of trees eight miles off the highway, halfway between Abilene and Big Spring. The Virginia plates came off, and the Texas plates went back on. The plastic wheel covers were kicked back into place. The cellular antennas were peeled off the rear glass and laid back in the valise. The CB whips pulled clear of the sheet metal and joined them. The souvenir ball caps were nested together and packed away with the handguns. Eugene’s mobile phone was smashed against a rock and the pieces hurled deep into the thicket. A little grit from the shoulder of the road was sprinkled onto the front passenger seat, so that the rental people would have to vacuum up any of Eugene’s stray hairs and fibers along with it.
Then the big sedan pulled back onto the blacktop and wound its way back to the highway. It cruised comfortably, heading west, a forgettable vehicle filled with three forgettable people. It made one more stop, at a comfort area named for the Colorado River, where sodas were consumed and a call was made from an untraceable payphone. The call was to Las Vegas, from where it was rerouted to Dallas, from where it was rerouted to an office in a small town in the west of Texas. The call reported complete success so far, and it was gratefully received.
“He split my lip and loosened my teeth,” Carmen Greer said.
Reacher watched her face.
“That was the first time,” she said. “He just lost it. But straight away he was full of remorse. He drove me to the emergency room himself. It’s a long, long drive from the house, hours and hours, and the whole way he was begging me to forgive him. Then he was begging me not to tell the truth about what had happened. He seemed really ashamed, so I agreed. But I never had to say anything anyway, because as soon as we arrived I started into labor and they took me straight upstairs to the delivery unit. Ellie was born the next day.”
“And then what?”
“And then it was O.K.,” she said. “For a week, at least. Then he started hitting me again. I was doing everything wrong. I was paying too much attention to the baby, I didn’t want sex because I was hurting from the stitches. He said I had gotten fat and ugly from the pregnancy.”
Reacher said nothing.
“He got me believing it,” she said. “For a long, long time. That happens, you know. You’ve got to be very self-confident to resist it. And I wasn’t, in that situation. He took away all my self-esteem. Two or three years, I thought it was my fault, and I tried to do better.”
“What did the family do?”
She pushed her glass away. Left the iced coffee half-finished.
“They didn’t know about it,” she said. “And then his father died, which made it worse. He was the only reasonable one. He was O.K. But now it’s just his mother and his brother. He’s awful, and she’s a witch. And they still don’t know. It happens in
secret. It’s a big house. It’s like a compound, really. We’re not all on top of each other. And it’s all very complicated. He’s way too stubborn and proud to ever agree with them he’s made a mistake. So the more they’re down on me, the more he pretends he loves me. He misleads them. He buys me things. He bought me this ring.”
She held up her right hand, bent delicately at the wrist, showing off the platinum band with the big diamond. It looked like a hell of a thing. Reacher had never bought a diamond ring. He had no idea what they cost. A lot, he guessed.
“He bought me horses,” she said. “They knew I wanted horses, and he bought them for me, so he could look good in front of them. But really to explain away the bruises. It was his stroke of genius. A permanent excuse. He makes me say I’ve fallen off. They know I’m still just learning to ride. And that explains a lot in rodeo country, bruises and broken bones. They take it for granted.”
“He’s broken your bones?”
She nodded, and started touching parts of her body, twisting and turning in the confines of the tight booth, silently recounting her injuries, hesitating slightly now and then like she couldn’t recall them all.
“My ribs, first of all, I guess,” she said. “He kicks me when I’m on the floor. He does that a lot, when he’s mad. My left arm, by twisting it. My collarbone. My jaw. I’ve had three teeth reimplanted.”
He stared at her.
She shrugged. “The emergency room people think I’m the worst rider in the history of the West.”
“They believe it?”
“Maybe they just choose to.”
“And his mother and brother?”
“Likewise,” she said. “Obviously I’m not going to get the benefit of the doubt.”