Echo Burning

you,” Reacher said.
    He stepped back. The guy stepped up. Looked down at the ground, and then back at Reacher, like a whipped dog. Reacher nodded, encouragingly. The guy put his hand on his chest, like an operatic tenor or a fancy maître d’. Bentslightly from the waist, to address the two-inch gap in the glass.
    “Ma’am,” he said. “Just wanted to say we’d all be real pleased if y’all would come back real soon, and would you like me to wash your car, seeing as you’re here right now?”
    “What?” she said.
    They both turned separately to Reacher, the guy pleading, Carmen astonished.
    “Beat it,” he said. “I left your keys in the bathroom.”
    Four, five seconds later, the guy was back on his way to the diner. Reacher stepped around the hood to his door. Pulled it open.
    “I thought you were running out on me,” Carmen said. “I thought you’d asked that guy for a ride.”
    “I’d rather ride with you,” he said.

    The Crown Victoria drove south to a lonely crossroads hamlet. There was an old diner on the right and a vacant lot on the left. A melted stop line on the road. Then a decrepit gas station, and opposite it a one-room schoolhouse. Dust and heat shimmer everywhere. The big car slowed and crawled through the junction at walking pace. It rolled past the school gate and then suddenly picked up speed and drove away.

    Little Ellie Greer watched it go. She was in a wooden chair at the schoolroom window, halfway through raising the lid of her big blue lunch box. She heard the brief shriek of rubber as the car accelerated. She turned her head and stared after it. She was a serious, earnest child, much given to silent observation. She kept her big dark eyes on the road until the dust settled. Then she turned back to matters at hand and inspected her lunch, and wished her mom had been home to pack it, instead of the maid, who belonged to the Greers and was mean.

3
    “What happened a year and a half ago?” Reacher asked.
    She didn’t answer. They were on a long straight deserted road, with the sun just about dead-center above them. Heading south and near noon, he figured. The road was made of patched blacktop, smooth enough, but the shoulders were ragged. There were lonely billboards at random intervals, advertising gas and accommodations and markets many miles ahead. Either side of the road the landscape was flat and parched and featureless, dotted here and there with still windmills in the middle distance. There were automobile engines mounted on concrete pads, closer to the road. Big V-8s, like you would see under the hood of an ancient Chevrolet or Chrysler, painted yellow and streaked with rust, with stubby black exhaust pipes standing vertically.
    “Water pumps,” Carmen said. “For irrigating the fields. There was agriculture here, in the old days. Back then, gasoline was cheaper than water, so those things ran all day and all night. Now there’s no water left, and gas has gotten too expensive.”
    The land fell away on every side, covered with dry brush. On the far horizon southwest of the endless road, there might have been mountains a hundred miles away. Or it might have been a trick of the heat.
    “Are you hungry?” she asked. “If we don’t stop we could pick Ellie up from school, and I’d really like to do that. I haven’t seen her since yesterday.”
    “Whatever you want,” Reacher said.
    She accelerated until the big Cadillac was doing eighty and wallowing heavily over the undulations in the road. He straightened in his seat and tightened his belt against the reel. She glanced across at him.
    “Do you believe me yet?” she asked.
    He glanced back at her. He had spent thirteen years as an investigator, and his natural instinct was to believe nothing at all.
    “What happened a year and a half ago?” he asked. “Why did he stop?”
    She adjusted her grip on the wheel. Opened her palms, stretched her fingers, closed them tight again on the rim.
    “He went to prison,” she said.
    “For beating up on you?”
    “In Texas?” she said. She laughed, just a yelp, like a short cry of pain. “Now I know you’re new here.”
    He said nothing. Just watched Texas reel in through the windshield ahead of him, hot and brassy and yellow.
    “It just doesn’t happen,” she said. “In Texas a gentleman would never raise his hand to a woman. Everybody knows that. Especially not a white gentleman whose family has been here over a hundred years. So if a greaseball