Echo Burning

silence. He put his hand in the chill stream from the vents.
    “I didn’t mean them,” she said.
    “Whatever,” he said back.
    “Really, I didn’t mean them. I’m just so desperate I can’t tell right from wrong anymore. And I’m very sorry for the thing about the sex. It was a crass thing to say.”
    Then her voice went small. “It’s just that some of the guys I’ve picked up, I figured that was what it was going to have to be.”
    “You’d have sex with them so they’d kill your husband?”
    She nodded. “I told you, I’m trapped and I’m scared and I’m desperate. And I don’t have anything else to offer.”
    He said nothing.
    “And I’ve seen movies where that happens,” she said.
    He nodded back.
    “I’ve seen those movies, too,” he said. “They never get away with it.”
    She paused a long moment.
    “So you’re not going to do it,” she said, like a statement of fact.
    “No, I’m not,” he said.
    She paused again, longer.
    “O.K., I’ll let you out in Pecos,” she said. “You can’t be out there walking. You could die in heat like this.”
    He paused too, much longer than she had. Then he shook his head. Because he had to be somewhere . When you live on the road, you learn pretty quick that any one place is about as good as any other place.
    “No, I’ll come with you,” he said. “I’ll hang out a couple of days. Because I’m sorry about your situation, Carmen. I really am. Just because I won’t walk in and shoot the guy doesn’t mean I don’t want to help you some other way. If I can. And if you still want me to, that is.”
    She paused another beat.
    “Yes, I still want you to,” she said.
    “And I want to meet Ellie. She looks like a great kid, from her picture.”
    “She is a great kid.”
    “But I’m not going to murder her father.”
    She said nothing.
    “Is that completely clear?” he asked.
    She nodded.
    “I understand,” she said. “I’m sorry I asked.”
    “It’s not just me, Carmen,” he said. “Nobody would do it. You were fooling yourself. It wasn’t a good plan.”
    She looked small and lost.
    “I thought nobody could refuse,” she said. “If they knew.”
    She turned and watched the traffic coming up behind her. Waited for a gap. Six cars later, she pulled back onto the highway and gunned the motor. Within a minute she was doing eighty again, passing one car after another. The truckerwho had used his air horn as he left Reacher in the dust lasted seven whole minutes, before she reeled him in.

    The Crown Victoria made it to the destination the woman had selected within eighty minutes. It was an inch-wide empty brown stain on the map, and it was a forty-mile-wide empty brown stain in reality. One road ran through it, meandering roughly north and east in the lee of distant mountains. Hot, lonely, valueless country. But it had all the features she had predicted. It would serve her purposes. She smiled to herself. She had an instinct for terrain.
    “O.K.,” she said. “First thing tomorrow. Right here.”
    The big car turned and headed back south. The dust from its tires hung in the air for long minutes and then floated down to the powdery ground.

    Carmen came off the highway just short of Pecos and speared south on a small county road that led down into total emptiness. Within five miles, they could have been on the surface of the moon.
    “Tell me about Echo,” he said.
    She shrugged. “What’s to tell? It’s nothing. When they were first mapping Texas a hundred years ago, the Census Bureau called a place settled if it had more than six people to the square mile, and we still don’t qualify. We’re still the frontier.”
    “But it’s very beautiful,” he said.
    And it was. The road was snaking and diving through endless contours, with red rock canyons either side of it, tall and noble to the east, fractured and pierced to the west, where ancient streams had sought the banks of the Rio Grande. Tall dry mountains reared beyond, with an immense technicolor sky above, and even in the speeding car he could sense the stunning silence of thousands of square miles of absolute emptiness.
    “I hate it,” she said.
    “Where will I be?” he asked.
    “On the property. In the bunkhouse, I guess. They’ll hire you for the horses. We’re always a man short. You show up with a pulse, they’ll be interested. You can say you’re a wrangler. It’ll be a good disguise. It’ll keep you close by.”
    “I don’t know anything