Echo Burning

embarrassment in her voice. Like maybe she had reconsidered her end of the bargain. He dropped her car keys on the desk and walked back out to the sidewalk. Turned right and headed for the courthouse.

    The Pecos County District Attorney’s office occupied the whole of the courthouse’s second floor. There was an entry door from the stairwell that led to a narrow passage that passed through a wooden gate into an open area used as a secretarial pen. Beyond that were three doors leading into three offices, one for the DA and one for each of the assistants. All the interior walls separating the offices from the pen and from each other were glass from the waist up. They had old-fashioned venetian blinds covering the glass, with wide wooden slats and cotton tapes. The whole place looked cramped and out-of-date. There were air conditioners in every external window. They were all set on high and their motors put a deep booming tone into the structure of the walls.
    The secretarial pen had two cluttered desks, both of them occupied, the farther one by a middle-aged woman who looked like she belonged there, the nearer one by a young man who could have been an intern working his summer vacation from college. Clearly he doubled as the office receptionist, because he looked up with a bright how may we help you expression on his face.
    “Hack Walker wants to see me,” Reacher said.
    “Mr. Reacher?” the kid asked.
    Reacher nodded and the kid pointed to the corner office.
    “He’s expecting you,” he said.
    Reacher threaded his way through the cluttered space to the corner office. The door had a window with an acetate plaque below it. The plaque read Henry F. W. Walker, District Attorney. The window was covered on the inside by a closed blind. Reacher knocked once and went in without waiting for a reply.
    The office had a window on each wall and a mess of filing cabinets and a big desk piled with paper and a computer and three telephones. Walker was in his chair behind it, leaning back, holding a photograph frame in both hands. It was a small wooden thing with a fiberboard tongue on the back that would prop it upright on a desk or a shelf. He was staring at the front of it. Some kind of serious distress on his face.
    “What can I do for you?” Reacher asked.
    Walker transferred his gaze from the photograph.
    “Sit down,” he said. “Please.”
    The hearty politician’s boom had gone from his voice. He sounded tired and ordinary. There was a client chair in front of the desk. Reacher picked it up and turned it sideways to give himself some legroom.
    “What can I do for you?” he asked again.
    “You ever had your life turned upside down overnight?”
    Reacher nodded. “Now and then.”
    Walker propped the photograph on the desk, sideways, so it was visible to both of them. It was the same color shot he had seen in Sloop Greer’s closet. The three young men leaning on the old pick-up’s fender, good friends, intoxicated with youth, on the cusp of infinite possibilities.
    “Me and Sloop and Al Eugene,” he said. “Now Al’s a missing person and Sloop is dead.”
    “No word on Eugene?”
    Walker shook his head. “Not a thing.”
    Reacher said nothing.
    “We were such a threesome,” Walker said. “And you knowhow that goes. Isolated place like this, you get to be more than friends. It was us against the world.”
    “Was Sloop his real name?”
    Walker looked up. “Why do you ask?”
    “Because I thought yours was Hack. But I see from the sign on your door it’s Henry.”
    Walker nodded, and smiled a tired smile. “It’s Henry on my birth certificate. My folks call me Hank. Always did. But I couldn’t say it as a youngster, when I was learning to talk. It came out Hack . It kind of stuck.”
    “But Sloop was for real?”
    Walker nodded again. “It was Sloop Greer, plain and simple.”
    “So what can I do for you?” Reacher asked for the third time.
    “I don’t know, really,” Walker said. “Maybe just listen awhile, maybe clarify some things for me.”
    “What kind of things?”
    “I don’t know, really,” Walker said again. “Like, when you look at me, what do you see?”
    “A district attorney.”
    “And?”
    “I’m not sure.”
    Walker was quiet for a spell.
    “You like what you see?” he asked.
    Reacher shrugged. “Less and less, to be honest.”
    “Why?”
    “Because I come in here and find you getting all misty-eyed over your boyhood friendship with a crooked lawyer and a