Echo Burning

We were walking and running, they had a truck with bright lights. We got split up. Divided, in the dark. Raoul was with his sister. He was protecting her. She was twelve. He sent her one way and walked the other way, into the lights. He knew it was worse, if they captured girls. He gave himself up to save his sister. But they didn’t try to arrest him or anything. Didn’t even ask him any questions. They just shot him down and drove away. They came near where I was hiding. They were laughing. I heard them. Like it was a sport.”
    “I’m very sorry,” Reacher said again.
    The woman shrugged. “It was very common then. It was a bad time, and a bad area. We found that out, later. Either our guide didn’t know, or didn’t care. We found out that there were more than twenty people killed on that route in a year. For fun. Some of them in horrible ways. Raoul was lucky, just to be shot. Some of them, their screams could be heard for miles, across the desert, in the darkness. Some of the girls were carried away and never seen again.”
    Reacher said nothing. The woman gazed at the picture for a moment longer. Then she turned away with an immense physical effort and forced a smile and gestured that Reacher should rejoin the party in the kitchen.
    “We have tequila,” she said quietly. “Saved especially for this day.”
    There were shot glasses on the table, and the daughter was filling them from a bottle. The girl that Raoul had saved, all grown up. The younger son passed the glasses around. Reacher took his and waited. The García father motioned for quiet and raised his drink toward Alice in a toast.
    “To our lawyer,” he said. “For proving the great Frenchman Honoré de Balzac wrong when he wrote, ‘Laws are spider webs through which the big flies pass and the little ones get caught.’”
    Alice blushed a little. García smiled at her and turned to Reacher. “And to you, sir, for your generous assistance in our time of need.”
    “De nada,” Reacher said. “No hay de que.”

    The tequila was rough and Raoul’s memory was everywhere, so they refused a second shot and left the Garcías alone with their celebrations. They had to wait again until the air conditioner made the VW’s interior bearable. Then they headed back to Pecos.
    “I enjoyed that,” Alice said. “Felt like I finally made a difference.”
    “You did make a difference.”
    “Even though it was you made it happen.”
    “You did the skilled labor,” he said.
    “Nevertheless, thanks.”
    “Did the border patrol ever get investigated?” he asked.
    She nodded. “Thoroughly, according to the record. There was enough noise made. Nothing specific, of course, but enough general rumors to make it inevitable.”
    “And?”
    “And nothing. It was a whitewash. Nobody was even indicted.”
    “But did it stop?”
    She nodded again. “As suddenly as it started. So obviously they got the message.”
    “That’s how it works,” he said. “I’ve seen it before, different places, different situations. The investigation isn’t really an investigation, as such. It’s more like a message. Like a coded warning. Like saying, you can’t get away with this anymore, so you better stop doing it, whoever you are.”
    “But justice wasn’t done, Reacher. Twenty-some people died. Some of them gruesomely. It was like a pogrom, a year long. Somebody should have paid.”
    “Did you recognize that Balzac quotation?” he asked.
    “Sure,” she said. “I went to Harvard, after all.”
    “Remember Herbert Marcuse, too?”
    “He was later, right? A philosopher, not a novelist.”
    He nodded. “Born ninety-nine years after Balzac. A social and political philosopher. He said, ‘Law and order are everywhere the law and order which protect the established hierarchy.’”
    “That stinks.”
    “Of course it does,” he said. “But that’s the way it is.”

    They made it back to Pecos inside an hour. She parked on the street right outside the legal mission so they only had to walk ten feet through the heat. But ten feet was enough. It was like walking ten feet through a blast furnace with a hot towel wrapped around your head. They made it inside and found Alice’s desk covered in little handwritten notes stuckrandomly to its surface. She peeled them off and scooped them up and read them through, one by one. Then she dropped them all in a drawer.
    “I’m going to check in with Carmen at the jail,” she said. “But the prints and the