Echo Burning

He watched her face, for dawning realization, for guilt or shame or fear or remorse. There was some expression there. He wasn’t exactly sure what it was.

"So we need descriptions," he said. "How many were there?"

She said nothing.

"How many people, Mrs. Greer?"

"Two people. A man and a woman."

"White?"

"Yes."

"What did they look like?"

Rusty shrugged again.

"Ordinary," she said. "Normal. Like you would expect. Like social workers. From a city. They had a big car."

"Hair? Eyes? Clothes?"

"Fair hair, I think. Both of them. Cheap suits. The woman wore a skirt. Blue eyes, I think. The man was tall."

"What about their car?"

"I don’t know about cars. It was a big sedan. But kind of ordinary. Not a Cadillac."

"Color?"

"Gray or blue, maybe. Not dark."

"You got any humble pie in the kitchen?"

"Why?"

"Because I should cram it down your throat until it chokes you. Those fair-haired white people with the blue eyes are the ones who killed Al Eugene. And you gave your own granddaughter to them."

She stared at him. "Killed? Al is dead?"

"Two minutes after they took him out of his car."

She went pale and her mouth started working. She said what about, and then stopped. And again, what about. She couldn’t add the word Elite.

"Not yet," Reacher said. "That’s my guess. And my hope. Ought to be your hope, too, because if they hurt her, you know what I’m going to do?"

She didn’t answer. Just clamped her lips and shook her head from side to side.

"I’m going to come back down here and break your spine. I’m going to stand you up and snap it like a rotten twig."

* * *

They made her take a bath, which was awful, because one of the men watched her do it. He was quite short and had black hair on his head and his arms. He stood inside the bathroom door and watched her all the time she was in the tub. Her mommy had told her, never let anybody see you undressed, especially not a man. And he was right there watching her. And she had no pajamas to put on afterward. She hadn’t brought any. She hadn’t brought anything.

"You don’t need pajamas," the man said. "It’s too hot for pajamas."

He stood there by the door, watching her. She dried herself with a small white towel. She needed to pee, but she wasn’t going to let him watch her do that. She had to squeeze very near him to get out of the room. Then the other two watched her all the way to the bed. The other man, and the woman. They were horrible. They were all horrible. She got into the bed and pulled the covers up over her head and tried hard not to cry.

* * *

"What now?" Alice asked.

"Back to Pecos," Reacher said. "I want to keep on the move. And we’ve got a lot of stuff to do tonight. But go slow, O.K.? I need time to think."

She drove out to the gate and turned north into the darkness. Switched the fan on high to blow the night heat away.

"Think about what?" Alice asked.

"About where Ellie is."

"Why do you think it was the same people as killed Eugene?"

"It’s a deployment issue," he said. "I can’t see anybody using a separate hit team and kidnap team. Not down here in the middle of nowhere. So I think it’s one team. Either a hit team moonlighting on the kidnap, or a kidnap team moonlighting on the hits. Probably the former, because the way they did Eugene was pretty expert. If that was moonlighting, I’d hate to see them do what they’re really good at."

"All they did was shoot him. Anybody could do that."

"No, they couldn’t. They got him to stop the car, they talked him into theirs. They kept him quiet throughout. That’s really good technique, Alice. Harder than you can imagine. Then they shot him through the eye. That means something, too."

"What?"

He shrugged. "It’s a tiny target. And in a situation like that, it’s a snap shot. You raise the gun, you fire. One, two. No rational reason to pick such a tiny target. It’s a kind of exuberance. Not exactly showing off, as such. More like just celebrating your own skill and precision. Like reveling in it. It’s a joy thing."

Silence in the car. Just the hum of the motor and the whine of the tires.

"And now they’ve got the kid," Alice said.

"And they’re uneasy about it, because they’re moonlighting. They’re used to each other alone. They’re accustomed to their normal procedures. Having a live kid around makes them worried about being static and visible."

"They’ll look like a family. A man, a woman, a little girl."

"No, I think there’s more than two of them."

"Why?"

"Because if it was me, I’d want three. In the service, we used three. Basically a driver, a shooter and a back-watcher."

"You shot people? The military police?"

He shrugged. "Sometimes. You know, things better not brought to trial."

She was quiet for a long moment. He saw her debating whether to hitch an inch farther away from him. Then he saw her decide to stay where she was.

"So why didn’t you do it for Carmen?" she asked. "If you’ve done it before?"

"She asked me the same question. My answer is, I really don’t know."

She was quiet again, another mile.

"Why are they holding Ellie?" she said. "I mean, still holding her? They already coerced the confession. So what’s still to gain?"

"You’re the lawyer," he said. "You have to figure that one out. When does it become set in stone? You know, irrevocable?"

"Never, really. A confession can be retracted anytime. But in practice, I guess if she answered nolo contendere to the grand jury indictment, that would be regarded as a milestone."

"And how soon could that happen?"

"Tomorrow, easily. Grand jury sits more or less permanently. It would take ten minutes, maybe a quarter of an hour."

"I thought justice ground real slow in Texas."

"Only if you plead not guilty."

Silence again, for many miles. They passed through the crossroads hamlet with the school and the gas station and the diner. It whipped backward through the headlight beams, three short seconds end to end. The sky up ahead was still clear. The stars were still visible. But the clouds were building fast behind them, in the south.

"So maybe tomorrow they’ll let her go," Alice said.

"And maybe tomorrow they won’t. They’ll be worried she could make the ID. She’s a smart kid. She sits quiet, watching and thinking all the time."

"So what do we do?"

"We try to figure out where she is."

He opened the glove compartment and took out the maps again. Found a large-scale plan of Pecos County and spread it on his knee. Reached up and clicked on the dome light.

"How?" Alice asked. "I mean, where do you start?"

"I’ve done this before," Reacher said. "Years and years, I hunted deserters and AWOLs. You train yourself to think like them, and you usually find them."

"That easy?"

"Sometimes," he said.

Silence in the speeding car.

"But they could be anywhere," Alice said. "I mean, there must be a million hide-outs. Abandoned farmsteads, ruined buildings."

"No, I think they’re using motels," Reacher said.

"Why?"

"Because appearances are very important to them. Part of their technique. They suckered Al Eugene somehow, and they looked plausible to Rusty Greer, not that she cared too much. So they need running water and showers and closets and working electricity for hairdryers and shavers."

"There are hundreds of motels here," she said. "Thousands, probably."

He nodded. "And they’re moving around, almost certainly. A different place every day. Basic security."

"So how do we find the right one tonight?"

He held the map where it caught the light.

"We find it in our heads. Think like them, figure out what we’d do. Then that should be the same thing as what they’d do."

"Hell of a gamble."

"Maybe, maybe not."

"So are we going to start now?"

"No, we’re going back to your office now."

"Why?"

"Because I don’t like frontal assaults. Not against people this good, not with a kid in the crossfire."

"So what do we do?"

"We divide and rule. We lure two of them out. Maybe we capture a tongue."

"A tongue? What’s that?"

"An enemy prisoner who’ll talk."

"How do we do that?"

"We decoy them. They’re already aware we know about them. So they’ll come for us, try a little damage control."

"They know we know? But how?"

"Somebody just told them."

"Who?"

Reacher didn’t reply. Just stared down at the map. Looked at the faint red lines that represented roads meandering across thousands of empty miles. Closed his eyes and tried hard to imagine what they looked like in reality.

* * *

Alice parked in the lot behind the law offices. She had a key to the rear door. There were a lot of shadows, and Reacher was very vigilant as they walked. But they made it inside O.K. The old store was deserted and dusty and silent and hot. The air conditioner had been turned off at the end of the day. Reacher stood still and listened for the inaudible quiver of people waiting. It’s a primeval sensation, received and understood far back in the brain. It wasn’t there.