Echo Burning

believe her,” he said. “There are things she doesn’t tell you, and what she does tell you is mostly lies.”
    “Why doesn’t she have a key to the door?”
    “She had a key to the damn door. She lost it, is all. It’s never locked, anyway. Why the hell would it be locked? We’re sixty miles from the nearest crossroads.”
    “So why does she have to knock?”
    “She doesn’t have to knock. She could walk right in. But she puts on a big thing about how we exclude her. But it’s all bullshit. Like, how do we exclude her? Sloop married her, didn’t he?”
    Reacher said nothing.
    “So you work if you want to,” Bobby said. “But stay away from her and the kid. And I’m saying that for your sake, O.K.?”
    “Can I ask you something?” Reacher said.
    “What?”
    “Did you know your hat is on backward?”
    “My what?”
    “Your cap,” Reacher said. “It’s on backward. I wondered if you knew that. Or if maybe it just kind of slipped around, accidentally.”
    Bobby stared at him.
    “I like it this way,” he said.
    Reacher nodded again.
    “Well, I guess it keeps the sun off of your neck,” he said. “Keeps it from getting any redder.”
    “You watch your mouth,” Bobby said. “You stay away from my brother’s family, and watch your damn mouth.”
    Then he turned in the dark and headed back up to the house. Reacher stood and watched him walk away. Beyond him the lightning still danced on the far southwest horizon. Then he disappeared behind the barn and Reacher listened to the sound his boots made in the dust, until it faded away to nothing.

6
    Reacher went right to bed, even though it was still early. Sleep when you can, so you won’t need to when you can’t . That was his rule. He had never worked regular hours. To him, there was no real difference between a Tuesday and a Sunday, or a Monday and a Friday, or night and day. He was happy to sleep twelve hours, and then work the next thirty-six. And if he didn’t have to work the next thirty-six, then he’d sleep twelve hours again, and again, as often as he could, until something else cropped up.
    The bed was short and the mattress was lumpy. The air in the room had settled like a thick hot soup on the thin sheet covering him. He could hear insects outside, clicking and whining loudly. There might have been a billion of them, separately audible if he concentrated hard enough, merging together into a single scream if he didn’t. The sound of the night, far from anywhere. There were lonely guttural cries from cougars and coyotes way off in the distance. The horses heard them too, and he sensed restless movement over in the barn, quieting after a moment, starting up again after the nextghostly, plaintive yelp. He heard rustling air and imagined he felt changes in pressure as colonies of bats took flight. He imagined he could feel the beat of their leathery wings. He fell asleep watching the stars through a small window high above him.

    The road from Pecos to El Paso is more than two hundred miles long, and is dotted on both sides with occasional clumps of motels and gas stations and fast food outlets. The killing crew drove an hour west, which took them seventy miles, and then stopped at the second place they saw. That was the woman’s habit. Not the first place. Always the second place. And always arrive very late. It was close to a superstition, but she rationalized it as good security.
    The second place had a gas station big enough for eighteen-wheelers to use and a two-story motel and a twenty-four-hour diner. The tall fair man went into the motel office and paid cash for two rooms. They weren’t adjoining. One was on the first floor far from the office and the second was upstairs, halfway down the row. The woman took the upstairs room.
    “Get some sleep,” she told her partners. “We’ve still got work to do.”

    Reacher heard Josh and Billy come back at two in the morning. The air was still hot. The insects were still loud. He heard the pick-up engine a couple of miles south, growing nearer and louder, slowing, turning in at the gate. He heard the squeal of springs as it bounced across the yard. He heard it drive into the shed beneath him, and he heard the motor switch off. Then there was just tinkling and clicking as it cooled, and footsteps on the stairs. They were loud and clumsy. He stayed as deeply asleep as he could and tracked their sounds past him, over to the bathroom, back to their bunks. Their bedsprings creaked