Echo Burning

absolutely level, focused on a spot on the wall where there was nothing to see.
    “Twice over,” she said. “I feel cheated, twice over. First it was a year, and then it was nothing. Then it was forty-eight hours, but really it was only twenty-four.”
    “You can still get out,” he said.
    “Now it’s less than twenty-four,” she said. “It’s sixteen hours, maybe. I’ll have breakfast by myself, but he’ll be back for lunch.”
    “Sixteen hours is enough,” he said. “Sixteen hours, you could be anywhere.”
    “Ellie’s fast asleep,” she said. “I can’t wake her up and bundle her in a car and run away and be chased by the cops forever.”
    Reacher said nothing.
    “I’m going to try to face it,” she said. “A fresh start. I’m planning to tell him, enough is enough. I’m planning to tell him, he lays a hand on me again, I’ll divorce him. Whatever it takes. However long.”
    “Way to go,” he said.
    “Do you believe I can?” she asked.
    “I believe anybody can do anything,” he said. “If they want it enough.”
    “I want it,” she said. “Believe me, I want it.”
    She went quiet. Reacher glanced around the silent room.
    “Why did they paint everything red?” he asked.
    “Because it was cheap,” she said. “During the fifties, nobody down here wanted red anything, because of the Communists. So it was the cheapest color at the paint store.”
    “I thought they were rich, back then. With the oil.”
    “They were rich. They still are rich. Richer than you could ever imagine. But they’re also mean.”
    He looked at the places where the fifty-year-old paint was worn back to the wood.
    “Evidently,” he said.
    She nodded again. Said nothing.
    “Last chance, Carmen,” he said. “We could go, right now. There’s nobody here to call the cops. By the time they get back, we could be anywhere you want.”
    “Bobby’s here.”
    “He’s going to stay in the barn.”
    “He’d hear the car.”
    “We could rip out the phones.”
    “He’d chase us. He could get to the sheriff inside two hours.”
    “We could fix the other cars so they wouldn’t work.”
    “He’d hear us doing it.”
    “I could tie him up. I could drown him in a horse trough.”
    She smiled, bitterly. “But you won’t drown Sloop.”
    He nodded. “Figure of speech, I guess.”
    She was quiet for a beat. Then she scraped back her chair and stood up.
    “Come and see Ellie,” she said. “She’s so beautiful when she’s asleep.”
    She passed close to him and took his hand in hers. Led him out through the kitchen and into the rear lobby and up the back stairs, toward the noise of the fan turning slowly. Down the long hot corridor to Ellie’s door. She eased it open with her foot and maneuvered him so he could see inside the room.
    There was a night-light plugged into an outlet low on the wall and its soft orange glow showed the child sprawled on her back, with her arms thrown up around her head. She had kicked off her sheet and the rabbit T-shirt had ridden up and was showing a band of plump pink skin at her waist. Her hair was tumbled over the pillow. Long dark eyelashes rested on her cheeks like fans. Her mouth was open a fraction.
    “She’s six and a half,” Carmen whispered. “She needs this. She needs a bed of her own, in a place of her own. I can’t make her live like a fugitive.”
    He said nothing.
    “Do you see?” she whispered.
    He shrugged. He didn’t, really. At age six and a half, he had lived exactly like a fugitive. He had at every age, right from birth to yesterday. He had moved from one service base to another, all around the world, often with no notice at all. He recalled days when he got up for school and instead was driven to an airstrip and ended up on the other side of the planet thirty hours later. He recalled stumbling tired and bewildered into dank bungalow bedrooms and sleeping on unmade beds. The next morning, his mother would tell him which country they were in. Which continent they were on. If she knew yet. Sometimes she didn’t. It hadn’t done him any harm.
    Or, maybe it had.
    “It’s your call, I guess,” he said.
    She pulled him back into the corridor and eased Ellie’s door shut behind him.
    “Now I’ll show you where I hid the gun,” she said. “You can tell me if you approve.”
    She walked ahead of him down the corridor. The air conditioner was loud. He passed under a vent and a breath of air played over him. It was warm. Carmen’s dress