by Lee Child
“The Philippines,” he said.
“Is that in Texas too?” she asked.
“No, it’s a bunch of islands between the Pacific and the South China Sea. Right out in the ocean, a long way from here.”
“The ocean,” she said, like she wasn’t sure. “Is the ocean in America?”
“Is there a map on the wall in your school?”
“Yes, there is. A map of the whole world.”
“O.K., the oceans are all the blue parts.”
“There’s a lot of blue parts.”
He nodded. “That’s for sure.”
“My mom went to school in California.”
“That’ll be on the map, too. Find Texas and look to the left.”
He saw her looking down at her hands, trying to remember which was left and which was right. Then he saw her look up beyond his shoulder, and he turned to see Carmen on her way back, trapped temporarily by the sales people getting up out of their booth. She waited until they had moved to the door and cleared the aisle and then she skipped back and sat down, all in one graceful movement. She pressed close to Ellie and hugged her one-armed and tickled her and got a squeal in exchange. The waitress finished with the sales people at the register and walked over, pad and pencil at the ready.
“Three Coke floats, please,” Ellie said, loud and clear.
The waitress wrote it down.
“Coming right up, honey,” she said, and walked away.
“Is that O.K. for you?” Carmen asked.
Reacher nodded. Like the smell of elementary school, he remembered the taste of a Coke float. He’d had his first ever in a PX canteen in Berlin, in a long low Quonset hut left over from the Four Powers occupation. It had been a warm summer’s day in Europe, no air conditioning, and he remembered the heat on his skin and the bubbles in his nose.
“It’s silly,” Ellie said. “It’s not the Coke that floats. It’s the ice cream that floats in the Coke. They should call them ice cream floats.”
Reacher smiled. He recalled thinking the same sorts of things, when he was her age. Outraged puzzlement at the illogicalities of the world he was being asked to join.
“Like elementary school,” he said. “I found out that elementary means easy. So ‘elementary school’ means ‘easy school.’ I remember thinking, well, it seems pretty hard to me. ‘Hard school’ would be a better name.”
Ellie looked at him, seriously.
“I don’t think it’s hard,” she said. “But maybe it’s harder in the ocean.”
“Or maybe you’re smarter than me.”
She thought about it, earnestly.
“I’m smarter than some people,” she said. “Like Peggy. She’s still on the three-letter words. And she thinks you spell zoo with a Z.”
Reacher had no answer to that. He waited for Carmen to pick it up, but before she could the waitress arrived back with a tin tray with three tall glasses on it. She put them on the table with great ceremony and whispered “Enjoy” to Ellie and backed away. But the glasses were almost a foot tall, and the drinking straws added another six inches, and Ellie’s chin was about level with the table top, so her mouth was a long way from where it needed to be.
“You want me to hold it down?” Carmen asked her. “Or do you want to kneel up?”
Ellie thought about it. Reacher was starting to wonder if this kid ever made a quick, easy decision. He saw a little of himself in her. He had taken things too seriously. The kids in every new school had made fun of him for it. But usually only once.
“I’ll kneel up,” she said.
It was more than kneeling. She stood on the vinyl bench in a kind of crouch, with her hands planted palms-down on the table around the base of the glass, and her head ducked to the straw. As good a method as any, Reacher figured. She started sucking her drink and he turned to look at his own. The ice cream was a round greasy spoonful. He found the cola way too sweet, like it was mixed from syrup in the wrong proportions. The bubbles were huge and artificial. It tasted awful. A long way from a childhood summer’s day in Germany.
“Don’t you like it?” Ellie asked.
Her mouth was full, and she sprayed a little of the mixture onto his sleeve.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You’re making a funny face.”
“Too sweet,” he said. “It’ll rot my teeth. Yours, too.”
She came up with a huge grimace, like she was showing her teeth to a dentist.
“Doesn’t matter,” she said. “They’re all going to fall out anyway. Peggy’s got two out already.”
Then she bent back to her straw and vacuumed up the rest of the drink. She poked at the sludge in the bottom of the glass with her straw until it was liquid enough to suck.
“I’ll finish yours, too, if you want,” she said.
“No,” her mother said back. “You’ll throw up in the car.”
“I won’t. I promise.”
“No,” Carmen said again. “Now go to the bathroom, O.K.? It’s a long way home.”
“I went already,” Ellie said. “We always go at school, last thing. We line up. We have to. The bus driver hates it if we pee on the seats.”
Then she laughed delightedly.
“Ellie,” her mother said.
“Sorry, Mommy. But it’s only the boys who do that. I wouldn’t do it.”
“Go again anyway, O.K.?”
Ellie rolled her eyes theatrically and clambered over her mother’s lap and ran to the back of the diner. Reacher put a five over the check.
“Great kid,” he said.
“I think so,” Carmen said. “Well, most of the time.”
“Smart as anything.”
She nodded. “Smarter than me, that’s for sure.”
He let that one go, too. Just sat in silence and watched her eyes cloud over.
“Thanks for the sodas,” she said.
He shrugged. “My pleasure. And a new experience. I don’t think I’ve ever bought a soda for a kid before.”
“So you don’t have any of your own, obviously.”
“Never even got close.”
“No nieces or nephews? No little cousins?”
He shook his head.
“I was a kid myself,” he said. “Once upon a time, and a long time ago. Apart from what I remember about that, I don’t know too much about it.”
“Stick around a day or two and Ellie will teach you more than you ever wanted to know. As you’ve probably guessed.”
Then she looked beyond his shoulder and he heard Ellie’s footsteps behind him. The floor was old and there were obviously air pockets trapped under the buckled linoleum because her shoes made hollow slapping sounds.
“Mom, let’s go,” she said.
“Mr. Reacher is coming, too,” Carmen said. “He’s going to work with the horses.”
He got up out of the booth and saw her watching him.
“O.K.,” she said. “But let’s go.”
They pushed outside into the heat. Past the middle of the afternoon, and it was hotter than ever. The Crown Victoria was gone. They walked around to the Cadillac and Ellie climbed through to the backseat. Carmen sat for a long moment with her hand resting on the key. She closed her eyes. Then she opened them again and started the engine.
She drove back through the crossroads and past the school again and then more than sixty miles straight south. She went pretty slowly. Maybe half the speed she had used before. Ellie didn’t complain. Reacher guessed she thought this was normal. He guessed Carmen never drove very fast on her way home.
They didn’t pass much. There were power lines looping rhythmically between weathered poles on the left shoulder. There were windmills and oil pumps here and there in the distance, some of them working, most of them seized up and still. There were more V-8 irrigation rigs on the western side of the road, on the edges of old fields, but they were silent and rusted because the winds had scoured the earth shallow. Some places, it was cleaned right back to dry caliche l
edges. Nothing much left to irrigate. The eastern side was better. There were whole square miles of mesquite, and sometimes broad patches of decent grassland running in irregular linear shapes, like there must be water underground.
Every ten or twelve miles there would be a ranch gate standing isolated by the side of the road. They were simple right-angle shapes, maybe fifteen feet wide, maybe fifteen feet high, with beaten earth tracks running through them into the distance. Some of them had names on them, made up from strips of wood nailed into the shapes of letters. Some of them had the names formed from iron, worked by hand into fancy script. Some of them had old bleached cattle skulls fixed centrally, with long horns curving outward like vulture’s wings. Some of them were supplemented by old barbed wire strands running aimlessly into the middle distance, sketching the location of ancient boundaries. The wire was on wooden posts, and the posts were weathered and twisted into corkscrew shapes and looked as if they would turn to dust if you touched them.
Some of the ranch houses were visible, depending on the contours of the land. Where it was flat, Reacher could see clusters of buildings in the far distance. The houses were two-story, mostly painted white, crouching among huddles of low barns and sheds. They had windmills out back, and satellite dishes, and they looked quiet and stunned in the heat. The sun was getting low in the west, and the outside temperature was still showing a hundred and ten.
“It’s the road, I think,” Carmen said. “It soaks up the sun all day, and gives it back later.”
Ellie had fallen asleep, sprawled across the rear seat. Her head was pillowed on the briefcase. Her cheek was touching the edges of the papers that outlined how her mother could best escape her father.
“Greer property starts here,” Carmen said. “On the left. Next track is ours, about eight miles.”
It was flat land, rising slightly on the right to a fragmented mesa about a mile away to the west. On the left, the Greers had better barbed wire than most. It looked like it might have been restrung less than fifty years ago. It ran reasonably straight into the east, enclosing patchy grassland that showed about equal parts green and brown. Miles away there was a forest of oil derricks visible against the skyline, all surrounded by tin huts and abandoned equipment.
“Greer Three,” Carmen said. “Big field. It made Sloop’s grandfather a lot of money, way back. Ran dry about forty years ago. But it’s a famous family story, about that gusher coming in. Most exciting thing that ever happened to them.”
She slowed a little more, clearly reluctant to make the final few miles. In the far distance the road rose into the boiling haze and Reacher could see the barbed wire change to an absurd picket fence. It was tight against the shoulder, like something you would see in New England, but it was painted dull red. It ran about half a mile to a ranch gate, which was also painted red, and then ran on again into the distance and out of sight. There were buildings behind the gate, much closer to the road than the ones he had seen before. There was a big old house with a two-story core and a tall chimney and sprawling one-story additions. There were low barns and sheds clustered loosely around it. There was ranch fencing enclosing arbitrary squares of territory. Everything was painted dull red, all the buildings and all the fences alike. The low orange sun blazed against them and made them glow and shimmer and split horizontally into bands of mirage.
She slowed still more where the red fence started. Coasted the last hundred yards with her foot off the gas and then turned in on a beaten dirt track running under the gate. There was a name on the gate, high above their heads, red-painted wood on red-painted wood. It said Red House. She glanced up at it as she passed through.
“Welcome to hell,” she said.
The Red House itself was the main building in a compound of four impressive structures. It had a wide planked porch with wooden columns and a swinging seat hung from chains, and beyond it eighty yards farther on was a motor barn, but she couldn’t drive down to it because a police cruiser was parked at an angle on the track, completely blocking her way. It was an old-model Chevy Caprice, painted black and white, with Echo County Sheriff on the door, where it had said something else before. Bought by the county secondhand, Reacher thought, maybe from Dallas or Houston, repainted and refurbished for easy duty out here in the sticks. It was empty and the driver’s door was standing open. The light bar on the roof was flashing red and blue, whipping colors horizontally over the porch and the whole front of the house.
“What’s this about?” Carmen said.
Then her hand went up to her mouth.
“God, he can’t be home already,” she said. “Please, no.”
“Cops wouldn’t bring him home,” Reacher said. “They don’t run a limo service.”
Ellie was waking up behind them. No more hum from the engine, no more rocking from the springs. She struggled upright and gazed out, eyes wide.
“What’s that?” she said.
“It’s the sheriff,” Carmen said.
“Why’s he here?” Ellie asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Why are the lights flashing?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did somebody call 911? Maybe there’s been a burglar. Maybe he wore a mask and stole something.”
She crawled through and knelt on the padded armrest between the front seats. Reacher caught the school smell again and saw delighted curiosity in her face. Then he saw it change to extreme panic.
“Maybe he stole a horse,” she said. “Maybe my pony, Mommy.”
She scrambled across Carmen’s lap and scrabbled at the door handle. Jumped out of the car and ran across the yard, as fast as her legs would carry her, her arms held stiff by her sides and her ponytail bouncing behind her.
“I don’t think anybody stole a horse,” Carmen said. “I think Sloop’s come home.”
“With the lights flashing?” Reacher said.
She unclipped her seat belt and swiveled sideways and placed her feet on the dirt of the yard. Stood up and stared toward the house, with her hands on the top of the door frame, like the door was shielding her from something. Reacher did the same, on his side. The fierce heat wrapped around him. He could hear bursts of radio chatter coming from the sheriff’s car.
“Maybe they’re looking for you,” he said. “You’ve been away overnight. Maybe they reported you missing.”
Across the Cadillac’s roof, she shook her head. “Ellie was here, and as long as they know where she is, they don’t care where I am.”
She stood still for a moment longer, and then she took a sideways step and eased the door shut behind her. Reacher did the same. Twenty feet away, the house door opened and a uniformed man stepped out onto the porch. The sheriff, obviously. He was about sixty and overweight, with dark tanned skin and thin gray hair plastered to his head. He was walking half-backward, taking his leave of the gloom inside. He had black pants and a white uniform shirt with epaulettes and embroidered patches on the shoulders. A wide gun belt with a wooden-handled revolver secured into a holster with a leather strap. The door closed behind him and he turned toward his cruiser and stopped short when he saw Carmen. Touched his forefinger to his brow in a lazy imitation of a salute.
“Mrs. Greer,” he said, like he was suggesting something was her fault.
“What happened?” she asked.
“Folks inside will tell you,” the sheriff said. “Too damn hot for me to be repeating everything twice.”
Then his gaze skipped the roof of the Cadillac and settled on Reacher.
“And who are you?” he asked.
Reacher said nothing.
“Who are you?” the guy said again.
“I’ll tell the folks inside,” Reacher replied. “Too damn hot for me to be repeating everything twice.”
The guy gave him a long calm look, and finished with a slow nod of his head, like he’d seen it all before. He dumped himself inside his secondhand cruiser and fired it up and backed out to the road. Reacher let its dust settle on h
is shoes and watched Carmen drive the Cadillac down the track to the motor barn. It was a long low farm shed with no front wall, and it was painted red, like everything else. There were two pick-ups and a Jeep Cherokee in it. One of the pick-ups was recent and the other was sitting on flat tires and looked like it hadn’t been moved in a decade. Beyond the building a narrow dirt track looped off into the infinite desert distance. Carmen eased the Cadillac in next to the Jeep and walked back out into the sun. She looked small and out of place in the yard, like an orchid in a trash pile.
“So where’s the bunkhouse?” he asked.
“Stay with me,” she said. “You need to meet them anyway. You need to get hired. You can’t just show up in the bunkhouse.”
“O.K.,” he said.
She led him slowly to the bottom of the porch steps. She took them cautiously, one at a time. She arrived in front of the door and knocked.
“You have to knock?” Reacher asked.
She nodded.
“They never gave me a key,” she said.
They waited, with Reacher a step behind her, appropriate for the hired help. He could hear footsteps inside. Then the door swung open. A guy was standing there, holding the inside handle. He looked to be in his middle twenties. He had a big square face, with the skin blotched red and white. He was bulky with frat-boy muscle turning to fat. He was wearing denim jeans and a dirty white T-shirt with the sleeves rolled tight over what was left of his biceps. He smelled of sweat and beer. He was wearing a red baseball cap backward on his head. A semicircle of forehead showed above the plastic strap. At the back, a shock of hair spilled out under the peak, exactly the same color and texture as Ellie’s.
“It’s you,” he said, glancing at Carmen, glancing away.
“Bobby,” she said.
Then his glance settled on Reacher.
“Who’s your friend?”
“His name is Reacher. He’s looking for work.”