by Lee Child
“Thanks a million, kid,” he said. “Now go hide again, O.K.?”
She scrambled back up the stack of hay bales and he tugged at a strap coming off a metal ring at the side of the mouth. The mare didn’t move. He clicked his tongue and pulled again. The mare lurched forward. He jumped ahead and she got herself into some kind of a rhythm behind him. Clop, clop, clop. He led her out of the stall and pulled her around the corner and headed for the door. Let her come ahead to his shoulder and stepped with her into the yard. She walked easily. He adjusted to her pace. His arm was neatly bent at the elbow and her head was rocking up and down a little and her shoulder was brushing gently against his. He walked her across the yard like he’d done it every day of his life. Roy Rogers, eat your damn heart out.
Bobby Greer was back on the porch steps, waiting. The mare walked right up to him and stopped. Reacher held the little leather strap while Bobby checked all of the same things Ellie had. He nodded.
“Not bad,” he said.
Reacher said nothing.
“But you took longer than I expected.”
Reacher shrugged. “I’m new to them. I always find it’s better to go slow, the first time. Until they’re familiar with me.”
Bobby nodded again. “You surprise me. I would have bet the farm the nearest you’d ever gotten to a horse was watching the Preakness on cable.”
“The what?”
“The Preakness. It’s a horse race.”
“I know it is. I was kidding.”
“So maybe it’s a double surprise,” Bobby said. “Maybe my sister-in-law was actually telling the truth for once.”
Reacher glanced at him. “Why wouldn’t she be?”
“I don’t know why. But she hardly ever does. You need to bear that in mind.”
Reacher said nothing. Just waited.
“You can go now,” Bobby said. “I’ll put her away when I’m through.”
Reacher nodded and walked away. He heard a crunch of leather behind him, which he assumed was Bobby getting up into the saddle. But he didn’t look back. He just walked through the yard, down past the barn, past the corrals, and around the corner of the bunkhouse to the foot of the stairway. He intended to go straight up and take a long shower to get rid of the terrible animal smell that was clinging to him. But when he got up to the second story, he found Carmen sitting on his bed with a set of folded sheets on her knees. She was still in her cotton dress, and the sheets glowed white against the skin of her bare legs.
“I got you these,” she said. “From the linen closet in the bathroom. You’re going to need them. I didn’t know if you would realize where they were.”
He stopped at the head of the stairs, one foot inside the room, the other foot still on the last tread.
“Carmen, this is crazy,” he said. “You should get out, right now. They’re going to realize I’m a phony. I’m not going to last a day. I might not even be here on Monday.”
“I’ve been thinking,” she said. “All the way through supper.”
“About what?”
“About Al Eugene. Suppose it’s about whoever Sloop is going to rat out? Suppose they woke up and took some action? Suppose they grabbed Al to stop the deal?”
“Can’t be. Why would they wait? They’d have done it a month ago.”
“Yes, but suppose everybody thought it was.”
He stepped all the way into the room.
“I don’t follow,” he said, although he did.
“Suppose you made Sloop disappear,” she said. “The exact same way somebody made Al disappear. They’d think it was all connected somehow. They wouldn’t suspect you. You’d be totally in the clear.”
He shook his head. “We’ve been through this. I’m not an assassin.”
She went quiet. Looked down at the sheets in her lap and began picking at a seam. The sheets were frayed and old. Cast-offs from the big house, Reacher thought. Maybe Rusty and her dead husband had slept under those same sheets. Maybe Bobby had. Maybe Sloop had. Maybe Sloop and Carmen, together.
“You should just get out, right now,” he said again.
“I can’t.”
“You should stay somewhere inside of Texas, just temporarily. Fight it, legally. You’d get custody, in the circumstances.”
“I don’t have any money. It could cost a hundred thousand dollars.”
“Carmen, you have to do something.”
She nodded.
“I know what I’m going to do,” she said. “I’m going to take a beating, Monday night. Then Tuesday morning, I’m going to come find you, wherever you are. Then you’ll see, and maybe you’ll change your mind.”
He said nothing. She angled her face up into the fading light from the high windows. Her hair tumbled back on her shoulders.
“Take a good look,” she said. “Come close.”
He stepped nearer.
“I’ll be all bruised,” she said. “Maybe my nose will be broken. Maybe my lips will be split. Maybe I’ll have teeth missing.”
He said nothing.
“Touch my skin,” she said. “Feel it.”
He put the back of his forefinger on her cheek. Her skin was soft and smooth, like warm silk. He traced the wide arch of her cheekbone.
“Remember this,” she said. “Compare it to what you feel Tuesday morning. Maybe it’ll change your mind.”
He took his finger away. Maybe it would change his mind. That was what she was counting on, and that was what he was afraid of. The difference between cold blood and hot blood. It was a big difference. For him, a crucial difference.
“Hold me,” she said. “I can’t remember how it feels to be held.”
He sat down next to her and took her in his arms. She slid hers around his waist and buried her head in his chest.
“I’m scared,” she said.
They sat like that for twenty minutes. Maybe thirty. Reacher lost all track of time. She was warm and fragrant, breathing steadily. Then she pulled away and stood up, with a bleak expression on her face.
“I have to go find Ellie,” she said. “It’s her bedtime.”
“She’s in the barn. She showed me how to put all that crap on the horse.”
She nodded. “She’s a good kid.”
“That’s for sure,” he said. “Saved my bacon.”
She handed the sheets to him.
“You want to come riding tomorrow?” she asked.
“I don’t know how.”
“I’ll teach you.”
“Could be a long process.”
“It can’t be. We have to get up on the mesa.”
“Why?”
She looked away.
“Something you have to teach me,” she said. “In case Tuesday doesn’t change your mind. I need to know how to work my gun properly.”
He said nothing.
“You can’t deny me the right to defend myself,” she said.
He said nothing. She went quietly down the stairs, leaving him sitting on the bed holding the folded sheets on his knees, exactly like he had found her.
He made up his bed. The old sheets were thin and worn, which he figured was O.K., in the circumstances. The temperature was still somewhere in the high nineties. Middle of the night, it might cool off to eighty-five. He wasn’t going to be looking for a lot of warmth.
He went back down the stairs and stepped outside. Looking east, there was a black horizon. He stepped around the bunkhouse corner and faced the sunset in the west. It flamed against the red buildings. He stood still and watched it happen. This far south, the sun would drop away pretty quickly. Like a giant red ball. It flared briefly against the rim of the mesa and then disappeared and the sky lit up red above it.
He heard the sound of footsteps in the dust ahead of him. Squinted into the sunset glare and saw Ellie walking down toward him. Little short steps, stiff arms, the blue halter dress specked with pieces of straw. Her hair was lit from behind and glowed red and gold like an angel.
“I came
to say good night,” she said.
He remembered times in the past, being entertained in family quarters on a base somewhere, the melancholy notes of taps sounding faintly in the distance, polite army kids saying a formal farewell to their fathers’ brother officers. He remembered it well. You shook their little hands, and off they went. He smiled at her.
“O.K., good night, Ellie,” he said.
“I like you,” she said.
“Well, I like you, too,” he said.
“Are you hot?”
“Very.”
“There’ll be a storm soon.”
“Everybody tells me that.”
“I’m glad you’re my mommy’s friend.”
He said nothing. Just put out his hand. She looked at it.
“You’re supposed to give me a good-night kiss,” she said.
“Am I?”
“Of course you are.”
“O.K.,” he said.
Her face was about level with his thigh. He started to bend down.
“No, pick me up,” she said.
She held up her arms, more or less vertical. He paused a beat and then swung her in the air and settled her in the crook of his elbow. Kissed her cheek, gently.
“Good night,” he said again.
“Carry me,” she said. “I’m tired.”
He carried her past the corrals, past the horse barn, across the yard to the house. Carmen was waiting on the porch, leaning on a column, watching them approach.
“There you are,” she said.
“Mommy, I want Mr. Reacher to come in and say good night,” Ellie said.
“Well, I don’t know if he can.”
“I only work here,” Reacher said. “I don’t live here.”
“Nobody will know,” Ellie said. “Come in through the kitchen. There’s only the maid in there. She works here, too. And she’s allowed in the house.”
Carmen stood there, unsure.
“Mommy, please,” Ellie said.
“Maybe if we all go in together,” Carmen said.
“Through the kitchen,” Ellie said. Then she changed her voice to a fierce whisper that was probably louder than talking. “We don’t want the Greers to see us.”
Then she giggled, and rocked in Reacher’s arms, and ducked her face down into his neck. Carmen glanced at him, a question in her face. He shrugged back. What’s the worst thing can happen? He lowered Ellie to the ground and she took her mother’s hand. They walked together to the kitchen door and Carmen pushed it open.
Sunset, the boy wrote, and noted the time. The two men crawled backward from the lip of the gulch and raised themselves up on their knees and stretched. Off duty, the boy wrote, and noted the time. Then they all three scrabbled around on their knees and pulled the rocks off the corners of the tarp hiding their pick-up. Folded it as neatly as they could without standing up and stowed it in the load bed. Repacked the cooler and collapsed the telescopes and climbed three-in-a-row into the cab. Drove out of the far side of the gulch and headed due west across the hardpan toward the red horizon.
Inside the kitchen the maid was loading a huge dishwashing machine. It was made of green enamel and had probably been the very latest thing around the time man first walked on the moon. She looked up and said nothing. Just kept on stacking plates. Reacher saw the three bowls he had brought her. They were rinsed and ready.
“This way,” Ellie whispered.
She led them through a door that led to a back hallway. There was no window, and the air was suffocating. There were plain wooden stairs on one side, painted red, worn back to the wood in crescent shapes on each tread. She led them upward. The stairs creaked under Reacher’s weight.
They finished inside a kind of closet on the second floor. Ellie pushed the door open and crossed a hallway and made a right into a narrow corridor. Everything was wooden, the walls, the floor, the ceiling. Everything was painted red. Ellie’s room was at the end of the corridor. It was maybe twelve feet square, and red. And very hot. It faced south and must have been baking in the sun all afternoon. The drapes were closed, and had been all day, Reacher guessed, offering some meager protection from the heat.
“We’ll go get washed up,” Carmen said. “Mr. Reacher will wait here, O.K.?”
Ellie watched until she was sure he was staying. He sat down on the end of the bed to confirm it. To help her reach her conclusion. She turned slowly and followed her mother out to the bathroom.
The bed was narrow, maybe thirty inches wide. And short, appropriate for a kid. It had cotton sheets printed with small colored animals of uncertain genus. There was a night table, and a bookcase, and a small armoire. This furniture looked reasonably new. It was made of blond wood, first bleached and then hand-painted with cheerful designs. It looked nice. Probably bought in a cute little boutique and hauled over from Austin, he thought. Or maybe all the way from Santa Fe. Some of the bookshelves held books, and the others held stuffed animals all jumbled together and crammed into the spaces.
He could hear the old air conditioner running. It thumped and rattled, patiently. It was louder here. Must be mounted in the attic, he thought. It made a soothing sound. But it didn’t do much about cooling the house. Up there in the trapped air of the second floor, it felt like a hundred and twenty degrees.
Ellie and Carmen came back into the room. Ellie was suddenly quiet and bashful, maybe because she was in her pajamas. They looked like regular cotton shorts and a T-shirt, but they were printed with little things that might have been rabbits. Her hair was damp and her skin was pink. The back of one hand was wedged in her mouth. She climbed onto the bed and curled up near the pillow, using about half the available length of the mattress, close to him but careful not to touch him.
“O.K., good night, kid,” he said. “Sleep well.”
“Kiss me,” she said.
He paused a second, and then he bent down and kissed her forehead. It was warm and damp and smelled of soap. She curled up more and snuggled down into the pillow.
“Thank you for being our friend,” she said.
He stood up and stepped toward the door. Glanced at Carmen. Did you tell her to say that? Or is it for real?
“Can you find your way back down?” Carmen asked him.
He nodded.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” she said.
She stayed in Ellie’s bedroom and he found the closet with the back stairs in it. He went down to the inside hallway and through the kitchen. The maid was gone. The old dishwasher was humming away to itself. He stepped out into the night and paused in the darkness and silence of the yard. It was hotter than ever. He stepped toward the gate. Ahead of him the sunset had gone. The horizon was black. There was pressure in the air. A hundred miles away to the southwest he could see heat lightning flickering. Faint sheets and bolts of dry electricity discharging randomly, like a gigantic celestial camera taking pictures. He looked straight up. No rain. No clouds. He turned around and caught gleams of white in the darkness off to his right. A T-shirt. A face. A semicircle of forehead showing through the back of a ball cap. Bobby Greer, again.
“Bobby,” he said. “Enjoy your ride?”
Bobby ignored the inquiry. “I was waiting for you.”
“Why?”
“Just making sure you came back out again.”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
“You tell me. Why would you go in there at all? In the first place? All three of you, like a little family.”
“You saw us?”
Bobby nodded. “I see everything.”
“Everything?” Reacher repeated.
“Everything I need to.”
Reacher shrugged.
“I kissed the kid good night,” he said. “You got a problem with that?”
Bobby was quiet for a beat.
“Let me walk you back to the bunkhouse,” he said. “I need to talk to you.”
He didn’t talk any on the way down through the yard. He just walked. Reacher kept pace and looked ahead at t
he night sky in the east. It was vast and black and filled with stars. Apart from dim windows in some of the Greer buildings there was absolute pitch darkness everywhere. It threw the stars into vivid relief, impossibly tiny and numerous points of light dusting backward through billions of cubic miles of space. Reacher liked peering out into the universe. He liked thinking about it. He used it for perspective. He was just a tiny insignificant speck briefly sparked to life in the middle of nowhere. So what really mattered? Maybe nothing at all. So maybe he should just go ahead and bust Sloop Greer’s head and have done with it. Why not? In the context of the whole universe, how was that so very different from not busting it at all?
“My brother had a problem,” Bobby said, awkwardly. “I guess you know that.”
“I heard he cheated on his taxes,” Reacher said.
Bobby nodded in the dark. “IRS snoops are everywhere.”
“Is that how they found him? Snooping?”
“Well, how else would they?” Bobby asked.
He went quiet. Walked ahead a couple of paces.
“Anyway, Sloop went to jail,” he said.
Reacher nodded. “Getting out Monday, I heard.”
“That’s right. So he’s not going to be too happy finding you here, kissing his kid, getting friendly with his wife.”
Reacher shrugged as he walked. “I’m just here to work.”
“Right, as a wrangler. Not as a nursemaid.”
“I get time off, right?”
“But you need to be careful how you spend it.”
Reacher smiled. “You mean I need to know my place?”
“Right,” Bobby said. “And your place ain’t alongside my brother’s wife, or getting cozy with his kid.”
“A man can’t choose his friends?”
“Sloop ain’t going to be happy, he gets home and finds some outsider has chosen his wife and kid for his friends.”
Reacher stopped walking. Stood still in the dark. “Thing is, Bobby, why would I give a rat’s ass what makes your brother happy?”
Bobby stopped, too. “Because we’re a family. Things get talked about. You need to get that through your head. Or you won’t work here too long. You could get run right out of here.”