Echo burning. A Jack Reacher Novel. Lee Child

“Good,” she said. “Now I’ll go in front and he’ll follow. He’s pretty docile.”

I would be, too, he thought, a hundred ten degrees and two hundred fifty pounds on my back. Carmen clicked her tongue and kicked her heels and her horse moved smoothly around his and led the way through the yard and past the house. She swayed easily in the saddle, the muscles in her thighs bunching and flexing as she kept her balance. Her hat was down over her eyes. Her left hand held the reins and her right was hanging loose at her side. He caught the blue flash of the fake diamond in the sun.

She led him out under the gate to the road and straight across without looking or stopping. He glanced left and right, south and north, and saw nothing at all except heat shimmer and distant silver mirages. On the far side of the road was a step about a foot high onto the limestone ledge. He leaned forward and let the horse climb it underneath him. Then the rock rose gently into the middle distance, reaching maybe fifty feet of elevation in the best part of a mile. There were deep fissures running east-west and washed-out holes the size of shell craters. The horses picked their way between them. They seemed pretty sure on their feet. So far, he hadn’t had to do any conscious steering. Which he was happy about, because he wasn’t exactly sure how to. “Watch for rattlesnakes,” Carmen called. “Great,” he called back.

“Horses get scared by anything that moves. They’ll spook and run. If that happens, just hang on tight and haul on the reins.” “Great,” he said again.

There were scrubby plants rooting desperately in cracks in the rock. There were smaller holes, two or three feet across, some of them with undercut sides. Just right for a snake, he thought. He watched them carefully at first. Then he gave it up, because the shadows were too harsh to see anything. And the saddle was starting to wear on him.

“How far are we going?” he called. She turned, like she had been waiting for the question. “We need to get over the rise,” she said. “Down into the gulches.” The limestone smoothed out into broader unbroken shelves and she slowed to let his horse move up alongside hers. But it stayed just short of level, which kept him behind her. Kept him from seeing her face. “Bobby told me you had a key,” he said.

“Did he?”

“He said you lost it.”

“No, that’s not true. They never gave me one.”

He said nothing.

“They made a big point of not giving me one,” she said. “Like it was a symbol.”

“So he was lying?”

She nodded, away from him. “I told you, don’t believe anything he says.”

“He said the door’s never locked, anyway.”

“Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t.”

“He told me you don’t have to knock, either.”

“That’s a lie, too,” she said. “Since Sloop’s been gone, if I don’t knock, they run and grab a rifle. Then they go, oh sorry, but strangers prowling around the house make us nervous. Like a big pretend show.”

He said nothing.

“Bobby’s a liar, Reacher,” she said. “I told you that.”

“I guess he is. Because he also told me you brought some other guy down here, and he got Josh and Billy to run him off. But Josh and Billy didn’t know anything about any guy.”

She was quiet for a long moment.

“No, that was true,” she said. “I met a man up in Pecos, about a year ago. We had an affair. At first just at his place up there. But he wanted more.”

“So you brought him here?”

“It was his idea. He thought he could get work, and be close to me. I thought it was crazy, but I went along with it. That’s where I got the idea to ask you to come. Because it actually worked for a spell. Two or three weeks. Then Bobby caught us.”

“And what happened?”

“That was the end of it. My friend left.”

“So why would Josh and Billy deny it to me?”