Echo Burning

trying very hard. Getting a job wasn’t in his plan. College was four years of fun for him, then it was back to the fold, go take over Daddy’s business. His father was ready to retire by then. I didn’t like that idea. I thought we were starting up fresh, on our own, you know, a new generation on both sides. I felt I’d given stuff up, and I thought he should, too. So we argued a lot. I couldn’t work, because of being so pregnant, and I had no money of my own. So in the end we couldn’t make the rent, so in the end he won the argument, and we trailed back here to Texas, and we moved in to the big old house with his folks and his brother and his cousins all around, and I’m still there.”
    The dying fall was back in her voice. The day her life changed forever.
    “And?” he asked.
    She looked straight at him. “And it was like the ground opens up and you fall straight through to hell. It was such ashock, I couldn’t even react at all. They treated me strange, and the second day I suddenly realized what was going on. All my life I’d been like a princess, you know, and then I was just a hip kid among ten thousand others in L.A., but now I was suddenly just a piece of beaner trash. They never said it straight out, but it was so clear. They hated me, because I was the greaseball whore who’d hooked their darling boy. They were painfully polite, because I guess their strategy was to wait for Sloop to come to his senses and dump me. It happens, you know, in Texas. The good old boys, when they’re young and foolish, they like a little dark meat. Sometimes it’s like a rite of passage. Then they wise up and straighten out. I knew that’s what they were thinking. And hoping. And it was a shock, believe me. I had never thought of myself like that. Never. I’d never had to. Never had to confront it. The whole world was turned upside down, in an instant. Like falling in freezing water. Couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think, couldn’t even move.”
    “But he didn’t dump you, evidently.”
    She looked down at the table.
    “No,” she said. “He didn’t dump me. He started hitting me instead. First time, he punched me in the face. Then Ellie was born the next day.”

    The Crown Victoria turned back into a normal Hertz rental behind a stand of trees eight miles off the highway, halfway between Abilene and Big Spring. The Virginia plates came off, and the Texas plates went back on. The plastic wheel covers were kicked back into place. The cellular antennas were peeled off the rear glass and laid back in the valise. The CB whips pulled clear of the sheet metal and joined them. The souvenir ball caps were nested together and packed away with the handguns. Eugene’s mobile phone was smashed against a rock and the pieces hurled deep into the thicket. A little grit from the shoulder of the road was sprinkled onto the front passenger seat, so that the rental people would have to vacuum up any of Eugene’s stray hairs and fibers along with it.
    Then the big sedan pulled back onto the blacktop and wound its way back to the highway. It cruised comfortably, heading west, a forgettable vehicle filled with three forgettable people. It made one more stop, at a comfort area named for the Colorado River, where sodas were consumed and a call was made from an untraceable payphone. The call was to Las Vegas, from where it was rerouted to Dallas, from where it was rerouted to an office in a small town in the west of Texas. The call reported complete success so far, and it was gratefully received.

    “He split my lip and loosened my teeth,” Carmen Greer said.
    Reacher watched her face.
    “That was the first time,” she said. “He just lost it. But straight away he was full of remorse. He drove me to the emergency room himself. It’s a long, long drive from the house, hours and hours, and the whole way he was begging me to forgive him. Then he was begging me not to tell the truth about what had happened. He seemed really ashamed, so I agreed. But I never had to say anything anyway, because as soon as we arrived I started into labor and they took me straight upstairs to the delivery unit. Ellie was born the next day.”
    “And then what?”
    “And then it was O.K.,” she said. “For a week, at least. Then he started hitting me again. I was doing everything wrong. I was paying too much attention to the baby, I didn’t want sex because I was hurting from the stitches. He said I had gotten fat and ugly from the