Echo Burning

Reacher. I can promise you that.”
    Something in her voice.
    “Why?”
    She moved her hands on the wheel. Closed her eyes tight, even though she was doing seventy miles an hour.
    “Because it was me who told the IRS about him,” she said.

    The Crown Victoria drove south, and then west, and then looped back north in a giant sweeping curve. It detoured over near the highway so it could fill up with gas at a self-service pump in a busy station. The driver used a stolen Amex card in the slot and then wiped his prints off it and dropped it in the trash next to the pump, with the empty oil bottles and the soda cans and the used paper towels covered with windshield dirt. The woman busied herself with a map and selected their next destination. Kept her finger on the spot until the driver got back in and squirmed around to take a look at it.
    “Now?” he asked.
    “Just to check it out,” she replied. “For later.”

    “It seemed like such a good plan,” Carmen said. “It seemed foolproof. I knew how stubborn he was, and how greedy he was, so I knew he wouldn’t cooperate with them, so I knew he would go to jail, at least for a little while. Even if by somechance he didn’t, I thought it might preoccupy him for a spell. And I thought it might shake some money loose for me, you know, when he was hiding it all. And it worked real well, apart from the money. But that seemed like such a small thing at the time.”
    “How did you do it?”
    “I just called them. They’re in the book. They have a whole section to take information from spouses. It’s one of their big ways to get people. Normally it happens during divorces, when you’re mad at each other. But I was already mad at him.”
    “Why haven’t you gone ahead and got a divorce?” he asked. “Husband in jail is grounds, right? Some kind of desertion?”
    She glanced in the mirror, at the briefcase on the rear seat.
    “It doesn’t solve the problem with Ellie,” she said. “In fact, it makes it much worse. It alerts everybody to the possibility I’ll leave the state. Legally, Sloop could require me to register her whereabouts, and I’m sure he would.”
    “You could stay in Texas,” he said again.
    She nodded.
    “I know, I know,” she said. “But I can’t. I just can’t. I know I’m being irrational, but I can’t stay here, Reacher. It’s a beautiful state, and there are nice people here, and it’s very big, so I could get a long way away, but it’s a symbol . Things have happened to me here that I have to get away from. Not just with Sloop.”
    He shrugged.
    “Your call,” he said.
    She went quiet and concentrated on driving. The road reeled in. It was dropping down off of a wide flat mesa that looked the size of Rhode Island.
    “The caprock,” she said. “It’s limestone, or something. All the water evaporated about a million years ago and left the rock behind. Geological deposits, or something.”
    She sounded vague. Her tour-guide explanation was less definitive than usual.
    “So what do you want me to do?” he asked.
    “I don’t know,” she said, although he was certain that she did.
    “Help you run? I could do that, probably.”
    She said nothing.
    “You picked me out,” he said. “You must have had something in mind.”
    She said nothing. He fell to thinking about the potential target group she had outlined to him. Out-of-work rodeo riders and roughnecks. Men of various talents, but he wasn’t sure if beating a federal manhunt would be among them. So she had chosen well. Or lucked out.
    “You need to move fast,” he said. “Two days, you need to get started right now. We should pick Ellie up and turn the car around and get going. Vegas, maybe, for the first stop.”
    “And do what there?”
    “Pick up some ID,” he said. “Place like Vegas, we could find something, even if it’s only temporary. I’ve got some money. I can get more, if you need it.”
    “I can’t take your money,” she said. “That wouldn’t be fair.”
    “Fair or not, you’re going to need money. You can pay me back later. Then maybe you should go back to L.A. You could start building some new paperwork there.”
    She was quiet again, another mile.
    “No, I can’t run,” she said. “I can’t be a fugitive. I can’t be an illegal . Whatever else I am, I’ve never been an illegal. I’m not going to start being one now. And neither is Ellie. She deserves better than that.”
    “You both deserve better than that,” he said.