“It’s not just me, Carmen,” he said. “Nobody would do it. You were fooling yourself. It wasn’t a good plan.”
She looked small and lost.
“I thought nobody could refuse,” she said. “If they knew.”
She turned and watched the traffic coming up behind her. Waited for a gap. Six cars later, she pulled back onto the highway and gunned the motor. Within a minute she was doing eighty again, passing one car after another. The trucker who had used his air horn as he left Reacher in the dust lasted seven whole minutes, before she reeled him in.
The Crown Victoria made it to the destination the woman had selected within eighty minutes. It was an inch-wide empty brown stain on the map, and it was a forty-mile-wide empty brown stain in reality. One road ran through it, meandering roughly north and east in the lee of distant mountains. Hot, lonely, valueless country. But it had all the features she had predicted. It would serve her purposes. She smiled to herself. She had an instinct for terrain. “O.K.,” she said. “First thing tomorrow. Right here.”
The big car turned and headed back south. The dust from its tires hung in the air for long minutes and then floated down to the powdery ground.
Carmen came off the highway just short of Pecos and speared south on a small county road that led down into total emptiness. Within five miles, they could have been on the surface of the moon. “Tell me about Echo,” he said.
She shrugged. “What’s to tell? It’s nothing. When they were first mapping Texas a hundred years ago, the Census Bureau called a place settled if it had more than six people to the square mile, and we still don’t qualify. We’re still the frontier.”
“But it’s very beautiful,” he said.
And it was. The road was snaking and diving through endless contours, with red rock canyons either side of it, tall and noble to the east, fractured and pierced to the west, where ancient streams had sought the banks of the Rio Grande. Tall dry mountains reared beyond, with an immense technicolor sky above, and even in the speeding car he could sense the stunning silence of thousands of square miles of absolute emptiness. “I hate it,” she said. “Where will 1 be?” he asked.
“On the property. In the bunkhouse, I guess. They’ll hire you for the horses. We’re always a man short. You show up with a pulse, they’ll be interested. You can say you’re a wrangler. It’ll be a good disguise. It’ll keep you close by.” “I don’t know anything about horses.” She shrugged. “Maybe they won’t notice. They don’t notice much. Like me getting beaten half to death.”
An hour later, they were tight for time. She was driving fast enough that the tire squeal from the curves was more or less continuous. They came up a long steep grade and then turned out between two rock pillars on a peak and suddenly there was flat land below them as far as the eye could see. The road fell away like a twisted tan ribbon and was crossed twenty miles ahead by another, just visible through the haze like a faint line on a map. The distant crossroads was studded with a handful of tiny buildings, and apart from them and the two roads there was no evidence humans had ever lived on the planet.
“Echo County,” she said. “Everything you see, and a lot more besides. A thousand square miles, and a hundred and fifty people. Well, a hundred and forty-eight, because one of them is sitting right here with you, and one of them is still in jail.”
Her mood had improved, because she said it with a wry smile. But she was looking at a tiny plume of dust on the road far below them. It was puffing out like a squirrel’s tail, crawling slowly south, a quarter of the way to the crossroads. “That must be the school bus,” she said. “We have to beat it to town, or Ellie will get on and we’ll miss her.” “Town?” Reacher said. She smiled again, briefly.
“You’re looking at it,” she said. “Uptown Echo.”