Echo Burning

as they threw themselves down. Then there was nothing but the insects and the wet rhythmic breathing of men who had worked hard all day anddrunk hard all night. It was a sound he was familiar with. He had spent seventeen years in dormitories, off and on.

    The insect noise was completely gone when he woke. So were the stars. The high window showed luminous streaks of dawn in their place. Maybe six in the morning, he thought, summer, this far south. It was already hot. He lifted his arm and checked his watch. Ten past six, Saturday morning. He thought about Jodie, in London. It was ten past twelve in London. Six hours ahead. She would have been up for ages. Probably at a museum, looking at pictures. Maybe thinking about lunch, in some English tearoom. Then he thought about Carmen Greer, over in the main house, forty-eight hours away from waking up on the day Sloop came home. And then Ellie, maybe hot and restless on her tiny cot, innocently barreling on toward the day her little life would change again.
    He threw back the crumpled sheet and walked naked to the bathroom, carrying his clothes balled in his hand. Josh and Billy were still deep asleep. They were both still dressed. Josh still had his boots on. They were snoring half-heartedly, sprawled out and inert. There was a vague smell of old beer in the air. The smell of hangovers.
    He set the shower going warm until he had soaped the sweat off his body and then turned it to cold to wake himself up. The cold water was nearly as warm as the hot. He imagined it pumping out of the baked ground, picking up heat all the way. He filled a sink with water and soaked his clothes. It was a trick he’d picked up as a kid, long ago, somewhere out in the Pacific, from sentries on the midday watch. If you dress in wet clothes, you’ve got a built-in air conditioner that keeps you cool until they dry out. An evaporative principle, like a swamp cooler. He dressed with the clammy cotton snagging against his skin and headed down the stairs and outside into the dawn. The sun was over the horizon ahead of him. The sky was arching purple overhead. No trace of cloud. The dust under his feet was still hot from yesterday.

    * * *

    The watchers assembled piecemeal, like they had five times before. It was a familiar routine by then. One of the men drove the pick-up to the boy’s place and found him outside and waiting. Then they drove together to the second man’s place, where they found that the routine had changed.
    “He just called me,” the second man explained. “Some different plan. We got to go to someplace up on the Coyanosa Draw for new instructions, face to face.”
    “Face to face with who?” the first man said. “Not him, right?”
    “No, some new people we’re going to be working with.”
    The boy said nothing. The first man just shrugged.
    “O.K. with me,” he said.
    “Plus, we’re going to get paid,” the second man said.
    “Even better,” the first man said.
    The second man squeezed onto the bench seat and closed his door and the pick-up turned and headed north.

    Reacher walked around the corner of the bunkhouse and past the corrals to the barn. He could hear no sound at all. The whole place felt stunned by the heat. He was suddenly curious about the horses. Did they lie down to sleep? He ducked in the big door and found the answer was no, they didn’t. They were sleeping standing up, heads bowed, knees locked against their weight. The big old mare he’d tussled with the night before smelled him and opened an eye. Looked at him blankly and moved a front foot listlessly and closed her eye again.
    He glanced around the barn, rehearsing the work he might be expected to perform. The horses would need feeding, presumably. So there must be a food store someplace. What did they eat? Hay, he guessed. There were bales of it all over the place. Or was that straw, for the floor? He found a separate corner room stacked with sacks of some kind of food supplement. Big waxed-paper bags, from some specialist feed supplier up in San Angelo. So probably the horses got mostlyhay, with some of the supplement to make up the vitamins. They’d need water, too. There was a faucet in one corner, with a long hose attached to it. A trough in each stall.
    He came out of the barn and walked up the track to the house. Peered in through the kitchen window. Nobody in there. No activity. It looked the same as it had when he left the night before. He walked on toward the road. Heard