Echo burning. A Jack Reacher Novel. Lee Child

There was a house a hundred yards beyond the last row of turned earth. It wasn’t a bad place. It was small and low, wood-framed, painted dull white with a finish that had cracked and crazed in the sun. There was a windmill behind it. There was a barn, with an irrigation pump venting through the roof and a damaged three-quarter-ton truck standing idle. The house had a closed front door. Alice parked the VW right next to it.

“They’re called Garcia,” she said. “I’m sure they’re home.”

Twenty thousand dollars in a grocery bag had an effect like he’d never seen before. It was literally a gift of life. There were five Garcias, two generations, two in the older and three in the younger. They were all small and scrappy people. The parents were maybe in their late forties and the eldest child was a girl of maybe twenty-four. The younger offspring were both boys and could have been twenty-two and twenty. They all stood quietly together inside the doorway. Alice said a bright hello and walked straight past them and spilled the money on their kitchen table.

“He changed his mind,” she said, in Spanish. “He decided to pay up, after all.”

The Garcias formed a semicircle around the table, silent, looking at the money, like it represented such a stunning reversal of fortune that no reaction was possible. They didn’t ask any questions. Just accepted it had finally happened and then paused a second and burst out with a long list of plans. First, they would get the telephone reconnected so they wouldn’t have to walk eight miles to their neighbor’s place. Then the electricity. Then they would pay back what they had borrowed from friends. Then they would buy diesel fuel, so the irrigation pump could run again. Then they would get their truck fixed and drive it to town for seed and fertilizer. They went quiet again when it dawned on them they could get a whole crop grown and harvested and sold before the winter came.

Reacher hung back and looked around the room. It was an eat-in, live-in kitchen, opening to a front parlor. The parlor was hot and airless and had a yard-long encyclopedia set and a bunch of religious statuettes on a low shelf. A single picture on the wall. The picture was a photograph of a boy. It was a studio portrait. The boy was maybe fourteen, with a precocious smudge of mustache above his lip. He was wearing a white confirmation robe and smiling shyly. The picture was in a black frame and had a dusty square of black fabric hung around it.

“My eldest son,” a voice said. “That picture was made just before we left our village in Mexico.”

Reacher turned and found the mother standing behind him.

“He was killed, on the journey here,” she said.

Reacher nodded. “I know. I heard. The border patrol. I’m very sorry.”

“It was twelve years ago. His name was Raoul Garcia.”

The way she said his name was like a small act of remembrance.

“What happened?” Reacher asked.

The woman was silent for a second.

“It was awful,” she said. “They hunted us for three hours in the night. We were walking and running, they had a truck with bright lights. We got split up. Divided, in the dark. Raoul was with his sister. He was protecting her. She was twelve. He sent her one way and walked the other way, into the lights. He knew it was worse, if they captured girls. He gave himself up to save his sister. But they didn’t try to arrest him or anything. Didn’t even ask him any questions. They just shot him down and drove away. They came near where I was hiding. They were laughing. I heard them. Like it was a sport.”

“I’m very sorry,” Reacher said again.

The woman shrugged. “It was very common then. It was a bad time, and a bad area. We found that out, later. Either our guide didn’t know, or didn’t care. We found out that there were more than twenty people killed on that route in a year. For fun. Some of them in horrible ways. Raoul was lucky, just to be shot. Some of them, their screams could be heard for miles, across the desert, in the darkness. Some of the girls were carried away and never seen again.”

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