Echo Burning

the edge of the shadow.
    “You should have gotten out of here,” he said. “We should be in Vegas by now.”
    “I was hopeful, for a second,” she said. “About Al Eugene. I thought there might be a delay.”
    He nodded. “So was I. It would have been useful.”
    She nodded, tears in her eyes.
    “I know,” she said. “Too good to be true.”
    “So you should still think about running.”
    She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. Shook her head.
    “I won’t run,” she said. “I won’t be a fugitive.”
    He said nothing.
    “And you should have agreed with her,” she said. “About the Mexicans. I’d have understood you were bluffing. I need her to keep you around.”
    “I couldn’t.”
    “It was a risk.”
    She led him down the steps into the sun and across the yard. Beyond the motor barn was a horse barn. That structure was red like everything else, big as an aircraft hangar, with clerestory vents in the roof. There was a big door standing a foot open. There was a strong smell coming out of it.
    “I’m not much of a country guy,” he said.
    “You’ll get used to it,” she said.
    Behind the barn were four corrals boxed in with red fences. Two of them were covered in scrubby grass, and two of them had desert sand piled a foot thick. There were striped poles resting on oil drums to make jumping courses. Behind the corrals was another red building, long and low, with small windows high up under the eaves.
    “The bunkhouse,” she said.
    She stood still for a moment, lost in thought. Then she shivered in the heat and came back, all business.
    “The door is around the other side,” she said. “You’ll find two guys in there, Joshua and Billy. Don’t trust either one of them. They’ve been here forever and they belong to the Greers. The maid will bring your meals down to you in about an hour, after Ellie eats, before we do.”
    “O.K.,” he said.
    “And Bobby will come down to check you out, sooner or later. Watch him carefully, Reacher, because he’s a snake.”
    “O.K.,” he said again.
    “I’ll see you later,” she said.
    “You going to be all right?”
    She nodded once and walked away. He watched her until she was behind the horse barn, and then he walked around and found the door into the bunkhouse.

5
    The boy filled a whole new page in his notebook. The men with the telescopes called out descriptions and the exact sequence of events. The arrival of the sheriff, the return of the beaner and the kid with the new guy in tow, the kid running off to the barn, the sheriff leaving, the beaner and the new guy entering the house, a long period of nothing doing, the emergence of the beaner and the new guy onto the porch, their walk together down toward the bunkhouse, her return alone.
    “Who is he?” the boy asked.
    “Hell should we know?” one of the men replied.
    Very tall, heavy, not neatly dressed, shirt and pants, can’t tell how old, the boy wrote. Then he added: Not a wrangler, wrong shoes. Trouble?
    The grade fell away behind the bunkhouse and made it a two-story building. The lower floor had huge sliding doors, frozen open on broken tracks. There was another pick-up inthere, and a couple of green tractors. At the far end to the right was a wooden staircase without a handrail leading upward through a rectangular hole in the ceiling. Reacher spent a minute on the ground floor looking at the vehicles. The pick-up had a gun rack in the rear window. The air was hot and heavy and smelled of gasoline and motor oil.
    Then he used the staircase and came out on the second level. All the interior carpentry was painted red, walls, floor and roof beams alike. The air was hotter still up there, and stale. No air conditioning, and not much ventilation. There was a closed-off area at the far end, which he guessed was the bathroom. Apart from that the whole of the floor was one big open space, with sixteen beds facing each other eight to a side, with simple iron frames and thin striped mattresses and bedside cabinets and footlockers.
    The two beds nearest the bathroom were occupied. Each had a small, wiry man lying half-dressed on top of the sheets. Both men wore blue jeans and fancy tooled boots and no shirts. Both had their hands folded behind their heads. They both turned toward the staircase as Reacher stepped up inside the room. They both unlaced their nearer arms to get a better look at him.
    Reacher had done four years at West Point, and then thirteen years in the service,