Echo Burning

literally within sight of the courthouse. It’s a one-minute walk. So how likely is it they would messenger something over? Wouldn’t they just walk it over? For a friend of Al’s? Especially if it was urgent? It would take them ten times as long just to dial the phone for the courier service.”
    The candlelight danced and flickered. The red room glowed.
    “People messenger things all the time,” Walker said. “It’s routine. And it was too hot for walking.”
    Reacher nodded. “Maybe. It didn’t mean much at the time. But then something else didn’t tie up. The collarbone.”
    “What about it?”
    Reacher turned to face Alice. “When you fell off your inline skates, did you break your collarbone?”
    “No,” Alice said.
    “Any injuries at all?”
    “I tore up my hand. A lot of road rash.”
    “You put your hand out to break your fall?”
    “Reflex,” she said. “It’s impossible not to.”
    Reacher nodded. Turned back through the candlelit gloom to Walker.
    “I rode with Carmen on Saturday,” he said. “My first time ever. My ass got sore, but the thing I really remember is how high I was. It’s scary up there. So the thing is, if Carmen fell off, from that height, onto rocky dirt, hard enough to bust her collarbone, how is it that she didn’t get road rash, too? On her hand?”
    “Maybe she did.”
    “The hospital didn’t write it up.”
    “Maybe they forgot.”
    “It was a very detailed report. New staff, working hard. I noticed that, and Cowan Black did, too. He said they were very thorough. They wouldn’t have neglected lacerations to the palm.”
    “She must have worn riding gloves.”
    Reacher shook his head. “She told me nobody wears gloves down here. Too hot. And she definitely wouldn’t have said that if gloves had once saved her from serious road rash. She’d have been a big fan of gloves, in that case. She’d have certainly made me wear them, being new to it.”
    “So?”
    “So I started to wonder if the collarbone thing could have been from Sloop hitting her. I figured it was possible. Maybe she’s on her knees, a big clubbing fist from above, she moves her head. Only she also claimed he had broken her arm and her jaw and knocked her teeth loose, too, and there was nomention of all that stuff, so I stopped wondering. Especially when I found out the ring was real.”
    A candle on the left end of the table died. It burned out and smoke rose from it in a thin plume that ran absolutely straight for a second and then spiraled crazily.
    “She’s a liar,” Walker said. “That’s all.”
    “She sure is,” Bobby said.
    “Sloop never hit her,” Rusty said. “A son of mine would never hit a woman, whoever she was.”
    “One at a time, O.K.?” Reacher said, quietly.
    He could feel the impatience in the room. Elbows shifting on the table, feet moving on the floor. He turned to Bobby first.
    “You claim she’s a liar,” he said. “And I know why. It’s because you don’t like her, because you’re a racist piece of shit, and because she had an affair with the schoolteacher. So among other things you took it on yourself to try and turn me off of her. Some kind of loyalty to your brother.”
    Then he turned to Rusty. “We’ll get to what Sloop did and didn’t do real soon. But right now, you keep quiet, O.K.? Hack and I have business.”
    “What business?” Walker said.
    “This business,” Reacher said, and propped Alice’s gun on the tabletop, the butt resting on the wood and the muzzle pointing straight at Walker’s chest.
    “What the hell are you doing?” Walker said.
    Reacher clicked the safety off with his thumb. The snick sounded loud in the room. Candles flickered and the lantern hissed softly.
    “I figured out the thing with the diamond,” he said. “Then everything else made sense. Especially with you giving us the badges and sending us down here to speak with Rusty.”
    “What are you talking about?”
    “It was like a conjuring trick. The whole thing. You knew Carmen pretty well. So you knew what she must have told me. Which was the absolute truth, always. The truth about herself, and about what Sloop was doing to her. So you just exactly reversed everything. It was simple. A very neat and convincing trick. Like she told me she was from Napa, andyou said, hey, I bet she told you she’s from Napa, but she isn’t, you know . Like she told me she’d called the IRS, and you said, hey, I bet she told you she called the IRS, but she