Echo Burning

big dark vehicle blasted by above them. A truck, or a bus. Dust clouded the sky and the brush rustled in the moving air. The driver got out and approached Eugene’s door with a gun in his hand. He opened the door and leaned in and jammed the muzzle into Eugene’s throat, where the ends of the collarbones make another convenient socket.
    “Get out,” he said. “Real careful.”
    “What?” was all Eugene could say.
    “We’ll tell you what,” the woman said. “Now get out.”
    Eugene got out, with three guns at his head.
    “Step away from the car,” the woman said. “Walk away from the road.”
    This was the tricky time. Eugene was glancing around as far and as fast as he dared move his head. His eyes were jumping. His body was twitching. He stepped away from thecar. One pace, two, three. Eyes everywhere. The woman nodded.
    “Al,” she called loudly.
    Her two partners jumped away, long sideways strides. Eugene’s head snapped around to face the woman who had called his name. She shot him through the right eye. The sound of the gun clapped and rolled across the hot landscape like thunder. The back of Eugene’s head came off in a messy cloud and he went straight down and sprawled in a loose tangle of arms and legs. The woman stepped around him and crouched down and took a closer look. Then she stepped away and stood up straight with her legs and arms spread, like she was ready to be searched at the airport.
    “Check,” she said.
    The two men stepped close and examined every inch of her skin and clothing. They checked her hair and her hands.
    “Clear,” the small dark man said.
    “Clear,” the tall fair man said.
    She nodded. A faint smile. No residue. No evidence. No blood or bone or brains anywhere on her person.
    “O.K.,” she said.
    The two men stepped back to Eugene and took an arm and a leg each and dragged his body ten feet into the brush. They had found a narrow limestone cleft there, a crack in the rock maybe eight feet deep and a foot and a half across, wide enough to take a man’s corpse sideways, too narrow to admit the six-foot wingspan of a vulture or a buzzard. They maneuvered the body until the trailing hand and the trailing foot fell into the hole. Then they lowered away carefully until they were sure the torso would fit. This guy was fatter than some. But he slid in without snagging on the rock. As soon as they were sure, they dropped him the rest of the way. He wedged tight, about seven feet down.
    The bloodstains were already drying and blackening. They kicked desert dust over them and swept the area with a mesquite branch to confuse the mass of footprints. Then they walked over and climbed into the Crown Vic and the driver backed up and swung through the brush. Bounced throughthe dip and up the slope to the roadway. The big car nosed back the way it had come and accelerated gently to fifty-five miles an hour. Moments later it passed by Eugene’s white Mercedes, parked right where he’d left it, on the other side of the road. It already looked abandoned and filmed with dust.

    “I have a daughter,” Carmen Greer said. “I told you that, right?”
    “You told me you were a mother,” Reacher said.
    She nodded at the wheel. “Of a daughter. She’s six and a half years old.”
    Then she went quiet for a minute.
    “They called her Mary Ellen,” she said.
    “They?”
    “My husband’s family.”
    “They named your kid?”
    “It just happened, I guess. I wasn’t in a good position to stop it.”
    Reacher was quiet for a beat.
    “What would you have called her?” he asked.
    She shrugged. “Gloria, maybe. I thought she was glorious.”
    She went quiet again.
    “But she’s Mary Ellen,” he said.
    She nodded. “They call her Ellie, for short. Miss Ellie, sometimes.”
    “And she’s six and a half?”
    “But we’ve been married less than seven years. I told you that, too, right? So you can do the math. Is that a problem?”
    “Doing the math?”
    “Thinking about the implication.”
    He shook his head at the windshield. “Not a problem to me. Why would it be?”
    “Not a problem to me, either,” she said. “But it explains why I wasn’t in a good position.”
    He made no reply.
    “We got off to all kinds of a bad start,” she said. “Me and his family.”
    She said it with a dying fall in her voice, the way a person might refer back to a tragedy in the past, a car wreck, a plane crash, a fatal diagnosis. The way a person might refer back to the day her