Echo Burning

But look at it from her point of view. She reached the conclusion he had to be gotten rid of, so she set about achieving it.”
    “So there was extensive premeditation?”
    “Should I be telling you this?”
    “I’m on her side.”
    He nodded. “She had it all planned. She said she looked at a hundred guys and sounded out a dozen before she picked on me.”
    Alice nodded back. “Actually that makes me feel better somehow, you know? Kind of proves how bad it was. Surely nobody would do that without some kind of really urgent necessity.”
    “Me too,” he said. “I feel the same way.”
    She slowed again and turned the car onto a farm track. After ten yards the track passed under a poor imitation of the older ranch gates he had seen elsewhere. It was just a rectangle of unpainted two-by-fours nailed together, leaning slightly to the left. The crossbar had a name written on it. Itwas indecipherable, scorched and faded to nothing by the sun. Beyond it were a few acres of cultivated ground. There were straight rows of turned dirt and an irrigation system pieced together from improvised parts. There were piles of fieldstone here and there. Neat wooden frames to carry wires to support the bushes that no longer grew. Everything was dry and crisp and fallow. The whole picture spoke of agonizing months of back-breaking manual labor in the fearsome heat, followed by tragic disappointment.
    There was a house a hundred yards beyond the last row of turned earth. It wasn’t a bad place. It was small and low, wood-framed, painted dull white with a finish that had cracked and crazed in the sun. There was a windmill behind it. There was a barn, with an irrigation pump venting through the roof and a damaged three-quarter-ton truck standing idle. The house had a closed front door. Alice parked the VW right next to it.
    “They’re called García,” she said. “I’m sure they’re home.”

    Twenty thousand dollars in a grocery bag had an effect like he’d never seen before. It was literally a gift of life. There were five Garcías, two generations, two in the older and three in the younger. They were all small and scrappy people. The parents were maybe in their late forties and the eldest child was a girl of maybe twenty-four. The younger offspring were both boys and could have been twenty-two and twenty. They all stood quietly together inside the doorway. Alice said a bright hello and walked straight past them and spilled the money on their kitchen table.
    “He changed his mind,” she said, in Spanish. “He decided to pay up, after all.”
    The Garcías formed a semicircle around the table, silent, looking at the money, like it represented such a stunning reversal of fortune that no reaction was possible. They didn’t ask any questions. Just accepted it had finally happened and then paused a second and burst out with a long list of plans. First, they would get the telephone reconnected so they wouldn’t have to walk eight miles to their neighbor’s place.Then the electricity. Then they would pay back what they had borrowed from friends. Then they would buy diesel fuel, so the irrigation pump could run again. Then they would get their truck fixed and drive it to town for seed and fertilizer. They went quiet again when it dawned on them they could get a whole crop grown and harvested and sold before the winter came.
    Reacher hung back and looked around the room. It was an eat-in, live-in kitchen, opening to a front parlor. The parlor was hot and airless and had a yard-long encyclopedia set and a bunch of religious statuettes on a low shelf. A single picture on the wall. The picture was a photograph of a boy. It was a studio portrait. The boy was maybe fourteen, with a precocious smudge of mustache above his lip. He was wearing a white confirmation robe and smiling shyly. The picture was in a black frame and had a dusty square of black fabric hung around it.
    “My eldest son,” a voice said. “That picture was made just before we left our village in Mexico.”
    Reacher turned and found the mother standing behind him.
    “He was killed, on the journey here,” she said.
    Reacher nodded. “I know. I heard. The border patrol. I’m very sorry.”
    “It was twelve years ago. His name was Raoul García.”
    The way she said his name was like a small act of remembrance.
    “What happened?” Reacher asked.
    The woman was silent for a second.
    “It was awful,” she said. “They hunted us for three hours in the night.