Echo Burning

the front door open behind him and turned to see Bobby Greer stepping out on the porch. He was wearing the same T-shirt and the same ball cap, but now it was the right way around. The peak was low over his eyes. He was carrying a rifle in his right hand. One of the pieces from the rack in the hallway. A fine .22 bolt-action, modern and in good condition. He put it up on his shoulder and stopped short.
    “I was on my way to get you up,” he said. “I need a driver.”
    “Why?” Reacher asked. “Where are you going?”
    “Hunting,” Bobby said. “In the pick-up.”
    “You can’t drive?”
    “Of course I can drive. But it takes two. You drive while I shoot.”
    “You shoot from a truck?”
    “I’ll show you,” Bobby said.
    He walked across to the motor barn. Stopped next to the newer pick-up. It had a roll bar built into the load bed.
    “You drive,” he said. “Out on the range. I’m here in back, leaning on the bar. Gives me a three-hundred-sixty-degree field of fire.”
    “While we’re moving?”
    “That’s the skill of it. It’s fun. Sloop invented it. He was real good.”
    “What are you hunting?”
    “Armadillo,” Bobby said. He stepped sideways and pointed down the track into the desert. It was a narrow dirt road scuffed into the landscape, meandering left and right to avoid rock formations, taking the path of least resistance.
    “Hunting country,” he said. “It’s pretty good, south of here. And they’re all out there, good fat ones. ’Dillo chili, can’t beat it for lunch.”
    Reacher said nothing.
    “You never ate armadillo?” Bobby asked.
    Reacher shook his head.
    “Good eating,” Bobby said. “Back when my granddaddy was a boy, Depression times, it was about all the eating there was. Texas turkey, they called it. Or Hoover hog. Kept people alive. Now the tree-huggers have got it protected. But if it’s on our land, it’s ours to shoot. That’s the way I see it.”
    “I don’t think so,” Reacher said. “I don’t like hunting.”
    “Why not? It’s a challenge.”
    “For you, maybe,” Reacher said. “I already know I’m smarter than an armadillo.”
    “You work here, Reacher. You’ll do what you’re told.”
    “We need to discuss some formalities, before I work here.”
    “Like what?”
    “Like wages.”
    “Two hundred a week,” Bobby said. “Bed and three squares a day thrown in.”
    Reacher said nothing.
    “O.K.?” Bobby asked. “You wanted work, right? Or is it just Carmen you want?”
    Reacher shrugged. Two hundred a week? It was a long time since he’d worked for two hundred a week. But then, he wasn’t there for the money.
    “O.K.,” he said.
    “And you’ll do whatever Josh and Billy tell you to.”
    “O.K.,” Reacher said again. “But I won’t take you hunting. Not now, not ever. Call it a matter of conscience.”
    Bobby was quiet for a long moment. “I’ll find ways to keep you away from her, you know. Every day, I’ll find something.”
    “I’ll be in the barn,” Reacher said, and walked away.

    Ellie brought his breakfast to him there. She was wearing a miniature set of blue denim dungarees. Her hair was wet and loose. She was carrying a plate of scrambled eggs. She had silverware in her breast pocket, upright, like pens. She was concentrating on remembering a message.
    “My mommy says, don’t forget the riding lesson,” sherecited. “She wants you to meet her here in the barn after lunch.”
    Then she ran back toward the house without another word. He sat down on a bale and ate the eggs. Took the empty plate back to the kitchen and headed down to the bunkhouse. Josh and Billy weren’t there to tell him to do anything. Suits me, he thought. He didn’t go looking for them. Just lay down and dozed in the heat.

    The Coyanosa Draw was a watercourse with a bed wide enough to carry the runoff from the Davis Mountains to the Pecos River, which took it to the Rio Grande all the way down on the border with Mexico. But runoff was seasonal and unreliable, so the region was sparsely populated. There were abandoned farmsteads built close to the dry riverbed, far from each other, far from anywhere. One of them had an old swaybacked house baked gray by the sun. In front of it was an empty barn. The barn had no doors, just an open wall facing west toward the house. The way the buildings were set in the landscape, the interior of the barn was invisible except from the yard right in front of it.
    The Crown Victoria was waiting