by Lee Child
4
He was sweating heavily twenty yards after getting out of the car. And already regretting his decision. He was in the middle of nowhere, on foot on a major highway, and the slowest vehicles were doing sixty. Nobody was going to want to stop for him. Even if they did want to, give them a little reaction time, give them a little time to check their mirrors, a little braking time, they’d be more than a mile away before they knew it, and then they’d shrug their shoulders and speed up again and keep on going. Dumb place to hitch a ride, they’d think.
It was worse than dumb. It was suicidal. The sun was fearsome and the temperature was easily a hundred and twelve degrees. The slipstream from the cars was like a hot gale, and the suction from the giant trucks wasn’t far from pulling him off his feet. He had no water. He could barely breathe. There was a constant stream of people five yards away, but he was as alone as if he was stumbling blind through the desert. If a state trooper didn’t come by and arrest him for jaywalking, he could die out there.
He turned and saw the Cadillac, still sitting inert on the shoulder. But he kept on walking away from it. He made it about fifty yards and stopped. Turned to face east and stuck out his thumb. But it was hopeless, like he knew it would be. After five minutes, a hundred vehicles, the nearest thing he’d gotten to a response was some trucker blasting his air horn, a huge bass sound roaring past him with a whine of stressed tires and a hurricane of dust and grit. He was choking and burning up.
He turned again. Saw the Cadillac lurch backward and start up the shoulder toward him. Her steering was imprecise. The rear end was all over the place. It was close to slewing out into the traffic. He started walking back to it. It came on to meet him, fishtailing wildly. He started running. He stopped alongside the car as she braked hard. The suspension bounced. She buzzed the passenger window down.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
He didn’t hear it in the noise, but he caught the shape of the words.
“Get in,” she said.
His shirt was sticking to his back. He had grit in his eyes. The howl of sound from the road was deafening him.
“Get in,” she mouthed. “I’m sorry.”
He got in. It felt exactly the same as the first time. The air roaring, the freezing leather seat. The small cowed woman at the wheel.
“I apologize,” she said. “I’m sorry. I said stupid things.”
He slammed the door. There was sudden silence. He put his hand in the chill stream from the vents.
“I didn’t mean them,” she said.
“Whatever,” he said back.
“Really, I didn’t mean them. I’m just so desperate I can’t tell right from wrong anymore. And I’m very sorry for the thing about the sex. It was a crass thing to say.”
Then her voice went small. “It’s just that some of the guys I’ve picked up, I figured that was what it was going to have to be.”
“You’d have sex with them so they’d kill your husband?”
She nodded. “I told you, I’m trapped and I’m scared and I’m desperate. And I don’t have anything else to offer.”
He said nothing.
“And I’ve seen movies where that happens,” she said.
He nodded back.
“I’ve seen those movies, too,” he said. “They never get away with it.”
She paused a long moment.
“So you’re not going to do it,” she said, like a statement of fact.
“No, I’m not,” he said.
She paused again, longer.
“O.K., I’ll let you out in Pecos,” she said. “You can’t be out there walking. You could die in heat like this.”
He paused too, much longer than she had. Then he shook his head. Because he had to be somewhere. When you live on the road, you learn pretty quick that any one place is about as good as any other place.
“No, I’ll come with you,” he said. “I’ll hang out a couple of days. Because I’m sorry about your situation, Carmen. I really am. Just because I won’t walk in and shoot the guy doesn’t mean I don’t want to help you some other way. If I can. And if you still want me to, that is.”
She paused another beat.
“Yes, I still want you to,” she said.
“And I want to meet Ellie. She looks like a great kid, from her picture.”
“She is a great kid.”
“But I’m not going to murder her father.”
She said nothing.
“Is that completely clear?” he asked.
She nodded.
“I understand,” she said. “I’m sorry I asked.”
“It’s not just me, Carmen,” he said. “Nobody would do it. You were fooling yourself. It wasn’t a good plan.”
She looked small and lost.
“I thought nobody could refuse,” she said. “If they knew.”
She turned and watched the traffic coming up behind her. Waited for a gap. Six cars later, she pulled back onto the highway and gunned the motor. Within a minute she was doing eighty again, passing one car after another. The trucker who had used his air horn as he left Reacher in the dust lasted seven whole minutes, before she reeled him in.
The Crown Victoria made it to the destination the woman had selected within eighty minutes. It was an inch-wide empty brown stain on the map, and it was a forty-mile-wide empty brown stain in reality. One road ran through it, meandering roughly north and east in the lee of distant mountains. Hot, lonely, valueless country. But it had all the features she had predicted. It would serve her purposes. She smiled to herself. She had an instinct for terrain.
“O.K.,” she said. “First thing tomorrow. Right here.”
The big car turned and headed back south. The dust from its tires hung in the air for long minutes and then floated down to the powdery ground.
Carmen came off the highway just short of Pecos and speared south on a small county road that led down into total emptiness. Within five miles, they could have been on the surface of the moon.
“Tell me about Echo,” he said.
She shrugged. “What’s to tell? It’s nothing. When they were first mapping Texas a hundred years ago, the Census Bureau called a place settled if it had more than six people to the square mile, and we still don’t qualify. We’re still the frontier.”
“But it’s very beautiful,” he said.
And it was. The road was snaking and diving through endless contours, with red rock canyons either side of it, tall and noble to the east, fractured and pierced to the west, where ancient streams had sought the banks of the Rio Grande. Tall dry mountains reared beyond, with an immense technicolor sky above, and even in the speeding car he could sense the stunning silence of thousands of square miles of absolute emptiness.
“I hate it,” she said.
“Where will I be?” he asked.
“On the property. In the bunkhouse, I guess. They’ll hire you for the horses. We’re always a man short. You show up with a pulse, they’ll be interested. You can say you’re a wrangler. It’ll be a good disguise. It’ll keep you close by.”
“I don’t know anything about horses.”
She shrugged. “Maybe they won’t notice. They don’t notice much. Like me getting beaten half to death.”
An hour later, they were tight for time. She was driving fast enough that the tire squeal from the curves was more or less continuous. They came up a long steep grade and then turned out between two rock pillars on a peak and suddenly there was flat land below them as far as the eye could see. The road fell away like a twisted tan ribbon and was crossed twenty miles ahead by another, just visible through the haze like a faint line on a map. The distant crossroads was studded with a handful of tiny buildings, and apart from them and the two roads there was no evidence humans had ever lived on the planet.
“Echo County,” she said. “Everything you see, and a lot more besides. A thousand square miles, and a hundred and fifty people. Well, a hundred and forty-eight, because one of them is sitting right h
ere with you, and one of them is still in jail.”
Her mood had improved, because she said it with a wry smile. But she was looking at a tiny plume of dust on the road far below them. It was puffing out like a squirrel’s tail, crawling slowly south, a quarter of the way to the crossroads.
“That must be the school bus,” she said. “We have to beat it to town, or Ellie will get on and we’ll miss her.”
“Town?” Reacher said.
She smiled again, briefly.
“You’re looking at it,” she said. “Uptown Echo.”
She accelerated down the grade and the Cadillac’s own dust swirled and hung behind it. The landscape was so vast that speed seemed slowed to absurdity. Reacher figured the bus might be a half hour from the crossroads, and the Cadillac was traveling twice as fast, so they should catch it inside fifteen minutes, even though the elevation and the clear desert air made it look close enough to reach out and touch, like a child’s toy on the floor of a room.
“It’s good of you to be coming,” she said. “Thank you. I mean it.”
“No hay de que, señorita,” he said.
“So you do know more than a few words.”
He shrugged. “There were a lot of Spanish-speaking people in the army. Most of the new generation, in fact. Some of the best of them.”
“Like baseball,” she said.
“Yes,” he said. “Like baseball.”
“But you should call me señora. Señorita makes me too happy.”
She accelerated again when the road leveled out and about a mile before they caught up with the bus she swung out into the wrong lane, ready to pass it. Safe enough, he figured. The chances of meeting oncoming traffic in that part of the world were worse than winning the lottery. She reeled in the bus and pulled through the cone of dust and blasted past and stayed on the left for another mile. Then she eased back right and five minutes later they were slowing as they approached the crossroads.
From ground level the hamlet looked ragged and defeated, the way small places do under the heat of the sun. There were lots partially overrun with dry thorny weeds, delineated with raw block walls, commercially zoned but never developed. There was a diner on the right on the northwest corner, nothing more than a long, low shack made of wood with all the color baked right out of it. Diagonally opposite was the school, a one-room building like something out of a history book. The beginnings of rural education. Opposite that on the southwest corner was a gas station with two pumps and a small yard filled with stalled cars behind it. Diagonally opposite the gas station and across the road from the school the northeast corner was an empty lot, with concrete blocks spilled randomly across it, like an optimistic new venture had been planned and then abandoned, maybe while LBJ was still in office. There were four other buildings, all one story, all plain concrete, all set back with thin rough driveways leading to them from the road. Houses, Reacher guessed. Their yards were littered with junk, children’s bikes and tired automobiles on blocks and old living room furniture. The yards were baked dry and hard and had low chicken-wire fences around them, maybe to keep the big snakes out.
The crossroads itself had no stop signs, just thick lines on the blacktop, melted in the heat. Carmen drove straight through and past the school and U-turned across the full width of the road, bumping down into shallow drainage ditches on both shoulders. She came back and stopped with the school gate close to Reacher’s window. The school yard was ringed by a wire hurricane fence like a dog pound, and the gate was an inexact hinged rectangle made of galvanized tubing and faced with the same wire.
She stared past him at the school door. The bus came laboring down from the north and stopped on its own side of the road, parallel to the Cadillac, facing the other direction. The schoolhouse door opened and a woman stepped out. She moved slow and looked tired. The teacher, Reacher guessed, ready to end her day. She saw the bus and waved to the children. They spilled out in a long stream. Seventeen of them, nine girls and eight boys, he counted. Ellie Greer was seventh in line. She was wearing a blue dress. She looked damp and hot. He recognized her from her photograph and by the way Carmen moved beside him. He heard her catch her breath and scrabble for the door handle.
She skipped around the hood and met her daughter outside the car on the beaten earth strip that passed for a sidewalk. She scooped her up in a wild hug. Spun her around and around. Her little feet windmilled outward and her blue lunch box swung and hit her mother on the back. Reacher could see the child laughing and tears in Carmen’s eyes. They came back around the rear of the car clutched tight together. Carmen opened the door and Ellie scrambled straight into the driver’s seat and stopped dead when she saw him. She went instantly silent and her eyes went wide.
“This is Mr. Reacher,” Carmen said.
Ellie turned to look at her.
“He’s my friend,” Carmen said. “Say hello to him.”
Ellie turned back.
“Hello,” she said.
“Hey, Ellie,” Reacher said. “School O.K.?”
Ellie paused. “It was O.K.”
“Learn anything?”
“How to spell some words.”
She paused again, and then tilted her chin upward a fraction.
“Not easy ones,” she said. “Ball and fall.”
Reacher nodded gravely.
“Four letters,” he said. “That’s pretty tough.”
“I bet you can spell them.”
“B-A-L-L,” Reacher said. “F-A-L-L. Like that, right?”
“You’re grown up,” Ellie said, like he had passed a test. “But you know what? The teacher said four letters, but there’s only three, because the L comes twice. Right there at the end.”
“You’re a smart kid,” Reacher said. “Now hop in the back and let your mom in out of the heat.”
She scrambled past his left shoulder and he caught the smell of elementary school. He had attended maybe fifteen different places, most of them in different countries and continents, and they all smelled the same. It was more than thirty years since he had last been in one, but he still remembered it clearly.
“Mom?” Ellie said.
Carmen slid in and shut the door. She looked flushed. Heat, sudden exertion, sudden brief happiness, Reacher didn’t know.
“Mom, it’s hot,” Ellie said. “We should get ice cream sodas. From the diner.”
Reacher saw Carmen about to smile and agree, and then he saw her glance back at her pocketbook and remember the lone dollar stashed inside it.
“From the diner, Mom,” Ellie said. “Ice cream sodas. They’re best when it’s hot. Before we go home.”
Carmen’s face fell, and then it fell a little farther when she caught up to the end of Ellie’s sentence. Home. Reacher stepped into the silence.
“Good idea,” he said. “Let’s get ice cream sodas. My treat.”
Carmen glanced across, dependent on him and unhappy about it. But she put the car in drive anyway and pulled back through the crossroads and turned left into the diner’s lot. She came around and parked in the shade tight against its north wall, right next to the only other car in the place, a steel blue Crown Victoria, new and shiny. Must be a state trooper’s unmarked, or maybe a rental, Reacher thought.
The diner was cold inside, chilled by a big old-fashioned air conditioner that vented down through the roof. And it was empty, apart from a group Reacher took to be the Crown Victoria’s occupants, a trio of ordinary indoor types at a window, two men and a woman. The woman was medium blond and pleasant looking. One guy was small and dark and the other was taller and fair. So the Crown Vic was a rental, not a cop car, and these guys were maybe some kind of a sales team heading between San Antonio and El Paso. Maybe they had heavy samples in the trunk that prevented them from flying. He glanced away and let Ellie lead him toward a booth at the opposite end of the room.
“This is the best table,” she said. “All the others have torn seats, and they’ve sewed them up, and the thread is kind of thic
k and it can hurt the back of your leg.”
“I guess you’ve been in here before,” Reacher said.
“Of course I have.” She giggled, like he was crazy. Two rows of tiny square teeth flashed at him. “I’ve been in here lots of times.”
Then she jumped up and scooted sideways over the vinyl.
“Mommy, sit next to me,” she said.
Carmen smiled. “I’m going to use the rest room first. I’ll be right back. You stay here with Mr. Reacher, O.K.?”
The kid nodded gravely and Mr. Reacher sat himself down opposite her and they looked at each other quite openly. He wasn’t sure what she was seeing, but he was seeing a living version of the photograph from her mother’s wallet. Thick corn-colored hair tied back in a ponytail, incongruous dark eyes wide open and staring at him rather than at the camera’s lens, a little snub of a nose, a serious mouth closed in a rather earnest way. Her skin was impossibly perfect, like pink damp velvet.
“Where did you go to school?” she asked. “Did you go here too?”
“No, I went to lots of different places,” he said. “I moved around.”
“You didn’t go to the same school all the time?”
He shook his head. “Every few months, I went to a new one.”
She concentrated hard. Didn’t ask why. Just examined the proposition for its benefits and drawbacks.
“How could you remember where everything was? Like the bathrooms? You might forget who the teacher was. You might call her by the wrong name.”
He shook his head again. “When you’re young, you can remember stuff pretty well. It’s when you get old that you start to forget things.”
“I forget things,” she said. “I forgot what my daddy looks like. He’s in prison. But I think he’s coming home soon.”
“Yes, I think he is.”
“Where did you go to school when you were six and a half like me?”
School, the center of her universe. He thought about it. When he was six and a half, the war in Vietnam was still well below its peak, but it was already big enough that his father was there or thereabouts at the time. So he figured that year would have been split between Guam and Manila. Manila, mostly, he thought, judging by his memories of the buildings and the vegetation, the places he hid out in and played around.