Echo Burning

life changed forever. She gripped the wheel and the car drove itself on, a cocoon of cold and quiet in the blazing landscape.
    “Who are they?” he asked.
    “The Greers,” she said. “An old Echo County family. Been there since Texas was first stolen. Maybe they were there to steal some of it themselves.”
    “What are they like?”
    “They’re what you might expect,” she said. “Old white Texans, big money from way back, a lot of it gone now but a lot of it still left, some history with oil and cattle ranching, river-baptized Protestants, not that they ever go to church or think about what the Lord might be saying to them. They hunt animals for pleasure. The father died some time ago, the mother is still alive, there are two sons, and there are cousins all over the county. My husband is the elder boy, Sloop Greer.”
    “Sloop?” Reacher said.
    She smiled for the first time since driving out of the ditch.
    “Sloop,” she said again.
    “What kind of a name is that?”
    “An old family name,” she said. “Some ancestor, I guess. Probably he was at the Alamo, fighting against mine.”
    “Sounds like a boat. What’s the other boy called? Yacht? Tug? Ocean liner? Oil tanker?”
    “Robert,” she said. “People call him Bobby.”
    “Sloop,” Reacher said again. “That’s a new one to me.”
    “New to me, too,” she said. “The whole thing was new to me. But I used to like his name. It marked him out, somehow.”
    “I guess it would.”
    “I met him in California,” Carmen said. “We were in school together, UCLA.”
    “Off of his home turf,” Reacher said.
    She stopped smiling. “Correct. Only way it could have happened, looking back. If I’d have met him out here, youknow, with the whole package out in plain view, it would never have happened. No way. I can promise you that. Always assuming I’d even come out here, in the first place, which I hope I wouldn’t have.”
    She stopped talking and squinted ahead into the glare of the sun. There was a ribbon of black road and a bright shape up ahead on the left, shiny aluminum broken into moving fragments by the haze boiling up off the blacktop.
    “There’s the diner,” she said. “They’ll have coffee, I’m sure.”
    “Strange kind of a diner if it didn’t,” he said.
    “There are lots of strange things here,” she said.
    The diner sat alone on the side of the road, set on a slight rise in the center of an acre of beaten dirt serving as its parking lot. There was a sign on a tall pole and no shade anywhere. There were two pick-up trucks, carelessly parked, far from each other.
    “O.K.,” she said, hesitant, starting to slow the car. “Now you’re going to run. You figure one of those guys with the pick-ups will give you a ride.”
    He said nothing.
    “If you are, do it later, O.K.?” she said. “Please? I don’t want to be left alone in a place like this.”
    She slowed some more and bounced off the road onto the dirt. Parked right next to the sign pole, as if it was a shade tree offering protection from the sun. Its slender shadow fell across the hood like a bar. She pushed the lever into Park and switched off the engine. The air conditioner’s compressor hissed and gurgled in the sudden silence. Reacher opened his door. The heat hit him like a steelyard furnace. It was so intense he could barely catch his breath. He stood dumb for a second and waited for her and then they walked together across the hot dirt. It was baked dry and hard, like concrete. Beyond it was a tangle of mesquite brush and a blinding white-hot sky as far as the eye could see. He let her walk half a pace ahead of him, so he could watch her. She had her eyes half-closed and her head bowed, like she didn’t want to see or be seen. The hem on her dress had fallen to a decorous knee-length. She moved very gracefully, like a dancer, her upperbody erect and perfectly still and her bare legs scissoring elegantly below it.
    The diner had a tiny foyer with a cigarette machine and a rack full of flyers about real estate and oil changes and small-town rodeos and gun shows. Inside the second door it was cold again. They stood together in the delicious chill for a moment. There was a register next to the door and a tired waitress sitting sideways on a counter stool. A cook visible in the kitchen. Two men in separate booths, eating. All four people looked up and paused, like there were things they could say but wouldn’t.
    Reacher looked at each of them for