Echo Burning

so he had a total seventeen years’ experience of walking into a new dormitory and being stared at by its occupants. It wasn’t a sensation that bothered him. There was a technique involved in handling it. An etiquette. The way to do it was to just walk in, select an unoccupied bed, and say absolutely nothing at all. Make somebody else speak first. That way, you could judge their disposition before you were forced to reveal your own.
    He walked to a bed two places away from the head of the staircase, against the north wall, which he judged would be cooler than the south. In the past, in the army, he would have had a heavy canvas kit bag to dump on the bed as a symbol of possession. The kit bag would be stenciled with his name and his rank, and the number of restencilings on it would offer a rough guide to his biography. Kit bags saved a lot of talking time. But the best he could do in this new situation was takehis folding toothbrush from his pocket and prop it on the bedside cabinet. As a substitute gesture, it lacked physical impact. But it made the same point. It said I live here now, same as you do. You got any kind of a comment to make about that?
    Both men kept on staring at him, saying nothing. Lying down, it was hard to judge their physiques with any degree of certainty, but they were both small. Maybe five-six or -seven each, maybe a hundred and fifty pounds. But they were wiry and muscular, like middleweight boxers. They had farmers’ tans, deep brown on their arms and their faces and their necks, and milky white where T-shirts had covered their bodies. They had random knobs and old swellings here and there on their ribs and arms and collarbones. Reacher had seen marks like that before. Carmen had one. He had one or two himself. They were where old fractures had set and healed.
    He walked past the two men to the bathroom. It had a door, but it was a communal facility inside, four of everything with no interior partitioning. Four toilets, four sinks, four shower heads in a single elongated stall. It was reasonably clean, and it smelled of warm water and cheap soap, like the two guys had recently showered, maybe ready for Friday evening off. There was a high window with a clogged insect screen and no glass. By standing tall he could see past the corner of the horse barn all the way up to the house. He could see half of the porch and a sliver of the front door.
    He came back into the dormitory room. One of the guys had hauled himself upright and was sitting with his head turned, watching the bathroom door. His back was as pale as his front, and it had more healed fractures showing through the skin. The ribs, the right scapula. Either this guy spent a lot of time getting run over by trucks, or else he was a retired rodeo rider who had passed his career a little ways from the top of his trade.
    “Storm coming,” the guy said.
    “What I heard,” Reacher said.
    “Inevitable, with a temperature like this.”
    Reacher said nothing.
    “You hired on?” the guy asked.
    “I guess,” Reacher said.
    “So you’ll be working for us.”
    Reacher said nothing.
    “I’m Billy,” the guy said.
    The other guy moved up on his elbows.
    “Josh,” he said.
    Reacher nodded to them both.
    “I’m Reacher,” he said. “Pleased to meet you.”
    “You’ll do the scut work for us,” the guy called Billy said. “Shoveling shit and toting bales.”
    “Whatever.”
    “Because you sure don’t look like much of a horse rider to me.”
    “I don’t?”
    Billy shook his head. “Too tall. Too heavy. Center of gravity way up there. No, my guess is you’re not much of a horse rider at all.”
    “The Mexican woman bring you in?” Josh asked.
    “Mrs. Greer,” Reacher said.
    “Mrs. Greer is Rusty,” Billy said. “She didn’t bring you in.”
    “Mrs. Carmen Greer,” Reacher said.
    Billy said nothing. The guy called Josh just smiled.
    “We’re heading out after supper,” Billy said. “Bar, couple hours south of here. You could join us. Call it a get-to-know-you type of thing.”
    Reacher shook his head. “Maybe some other time, when I’ve earned something. I like to pay my own way, situation like that.”
    Billy thought about it and nodded.
    “That’s a righteous attitude,” he said. “Maybe you’ll fit right in.”
    The guy called Josh just smiled.
    Reacher walked back to his bed and stretched himself out, keeping still, fighting the heat. He stared up at the red-painted rafters for a minute, and then