Echo Burning (26 page)

She ducked past them and into the room directly behind Brewer's chair. It was some kind of a private study, dark and masculine. Reacher heard the sound of a phone being picked up. Then the sound of rapid clicking, as she tried to make it work.

“The phones are out,” she called.

“Go wait downstairs,” Reacher called back.

“What do you want?” Brewer asked.

“I want you to meet your legal obligation.”

“You're not a banker.”

“That's a triumph of deduction.”

“So what are you?”

“A guy who wants a check,” Reacher said. “For twenty thousand dollars.”

“You represent those . . .
people?”

He started to stand up. Reacher put his arm out straight and shoved him back in his chair, hard enough to hurt.

“Sit still,” he said.

“Why are you doing this?”

“Because I'm a compassionate guy,” Reacher said. “That's why. There's a family in trouble here. They're going to be upset and worried all winter long. Disaster staring them in the face. Never knowing which day is going to bring everything
crashing down around them. I don't like to see people living that way, whoever they are.”

“They don't like it, they should get back to Mexico, where they belong.”

Reacher glanced at him, surprised.

“I'm not talking about
them,”
he said. “I'm talking about
you
. Your family.”

“My family?”

Reacher nodded. “I stay mad at you, they'll all suffer. A car wreck here, a mugging there. You might fall down the stairs, break your leg. Or your wife might. The house might catch on fire. Lots of accidents, one after the other. You'll never know when the next one is coming. It'll drive you crazy.”

“You couldn't get away with it.”

“I'm getting away with it right now. I could start today. With you.”

Brewer said nothing.

“Give me that pitcher,” Reacher said.

Brewer hesitated a moment. Then he picked it up and held it out, like an automaton. Reacher took it. It was fancy crystal with a cut pattern, maybe Waterford, maybe imported all the way from Ireland. It held a quart and probably cost a thousand bucks. He balanced it on his palm and sniffed its contents. Lemonade. Then he tossed it over the edge of the balcony. Yellow liquid arced out through the air and a second later there was a loud crash from the patio below.

“Oops,” he said.

“I'll have you arrested,” Brewer said. “That's criminal damage.”

“Maybe I'll start with one of your sons,” Reacher said. “Pick one out at random and throw him off the balcony, just like that.”

“I'll have you arrested,” Brewer said again.

“Why? According to you, what the legal system says doesn't matter. Or does that only apply to you? Maybe you think you're something special.”

Brewer said nothing. Reacher stood up and picked up his chair and threw it over the rail. It crashed and splintered on the stone below.

“Give me the check,” he said. “You can afford it. You're a rich man. You just got through telling me.”

“It's a matter of principle,” Brewer said. “They shouldn't be here.”

“And you should? Why? They were here first.”

“They lost. To us.”

“And now you're losing. To me. What goes around, comes around.”

He bent down and picked up the silver bell from the table. It was probably an antique. Maybe French. The cup part was engraved with filigree patterns. Maybe two and a half inches in diameter. He held it with his thumb on one side and all four fingers on the other. Squeezed hard and crushed it out of shape. Then he transferred it into his palm and squashed the metal flat. Leaned over and shoved it in Brewer's shirt pocket.

“I could do that to your head,” he said.

Brewer made no reply.

“Give me the check,” Reacher said, quietly. “Before I lose my damn temper.”

Brewer paused. Five seconds. Ten. Then he sighed.

“O.K.,” he said. He led the way into the study and over to the desk. Reacher stood behind him. He didn't want any revolvers appearing suddenly out of drawers.

“Make it out to cash,” he said.

Brewer wrote the check. He got the date right, he got the amount right, and he signed it.

“It better not bounce,” Reacher said.

“It won't,” Brewer said.

“It does, you do, too. Off the patio.”

“I hope you rot in hell.”

Reacher folded the check into his pocket and found the way out to the upstairs foyer. Went down the stairs and walked over to the grandfather clock. Tilted it forward until it overbalanced. It fell like a tree and smashed on the floor and stopped ticking.

 

The two men
exfiltrated after nearly three hours. The heat was too brutal to stay longer. And they didn't really need to.
Nobody was going anywhere. That was clear. The old woman and her son stayed mostly in the house. The kid was hanging around in the barn, coming out now and then until the sun drove her back inside, once walking slowly back to the house when the maid called her to come and eat. So they gave it up and crawled north in the lee of the rocks and came out to wait on the dusty shoulder as soon as they were out of sight of the house. The woman in the Crown Vic turned up right on time. She had the air blasting and water in bottles. They drank the water and made their report.

“O.K.,” the woman said. “So I guess we're ready to make our move.”

“I guess we are,” the dark man said.

“Sooner the better,” the fair man agreed. “Let's get it done.”

 

Reacher put the
plates back on the old LeBaron as soon as he was out of sight of the Brewer house. Then he drove straight back to Pecos and reclaimed Alice Aaron's VW from the mechanics. He paid them their forty bucks without complaint, but afterward he wasn't really sure they'd done anything to the car. The clutch felt just as sharp as it had before. He stalled out twice on the way back to the legal mission.

He left it in the lot behind the building with the maps and the handgun in the glove compartment where he had found them. Entered the old store from the front and found Alice at her desk in back. She was on the phone and busy with clients. There was a whole family group in front of her. Three generations of quiet, anxious people. She had changed her clothes. Now she was wearing black high-waisted pants made out of some kind of thin cotton or linen, and a black jacket to match. The jacket made the white sports bra look like a shirt. The whole thing looked very formal. Instant attorney.

She saw him and put her hand over the phone and excused herself from her clients. She twisted away from them and he leaned down next to her.

“We've got big problems,” she said quietly. “Hack Walker wants to see you.”

“Me?” he said. “Why?”

“Better you hear it from him.”

“Hear what? Did you meet with him?”

She nodded. “I went right over. We talked for a half hour.”

“And? What did he say?”

“Better you hear it from him,” she said again. “We can talk about it later, O.K.?”

There was worry in her voice. He looked at her. She turned back to the phone. The family in front of her desk leaned forward to catch her words. He took the twenty-thousand-dollar check out of his pocket and unfolded it and smoothed it on the desktop. She saw it and stopped talking. Put her hand over the phone again. Took a deep breath.

“Thanks,” she said.

Now there was 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 know
how 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 wife-beater.”

Walker looked away. “You certainly come straight to the point.”

“Life's too short not to.”

There was silence for a second. Just the dull roar of all the air conditioner motors, rising and falling as they slipped in and out of phase with each other.

“Actually I'm three things,” Walker said. “I'm a man, I'm a DA, and I'm running for judge.”

“So?”

“Al Eugene isn't a crooked lawyer. Far from it. He's a good man. He's a campaigner. And he needs to be. Fact is, structurally, the state of Texas is not big on protecting the rights of the accused. The
indigent
accused, even worse. You know that, because you had to find a lawyer for Carmen yourself, and that can only be because you were told she wouldn't get a court appointment for months. And the lawyer you found must have told you she's still looking at months and months of delay. It's a bad system, and I'm aware of it, and Al is aware of it. The Constitution guarantees access to counsel, and Al takes that promise very seriously. He makes himself available to anybody who can find his door. He gives them fair representation, whoever they are. Inevitably some of them are bad guys, but don't forget the Constitution applies to bad guys too. But most of his clients are O.K. Most of them are just poor, is all, black or white or Hispanic.”

Reacher said nothing.

“So let me take a guess,” Walker said. “I don't know where you heard Al called crooked, but a buck gets ten it was from an older white person with money or position.”

It was Rusty Greer,
Reacher thought.

“Don't tell me who,” Walker said. “But ten gets a hundred I'm right. A person like that sees a lawyer sticking up for poor people or colored people, and they regard it as a nuisance, or as an unpleasantness, and then as some kind of treachery against their race or their class, and from there on it's a pretty easy jump to calling it crooked.”