He approached her desk and waited for a sit down gesture. He didn’t get one, but he sat down anyway. She glanced at him and glanced away. Kept on talking into the phone. She had dark eyes and white teeth. She was talking slow Spanish with an East Coast accent, haltingly enough that he could follow most of it. She was saying yes, we won. Then but he won’t pay. He simply won’t. He just refuses. Time to time she would stop and listen to whoever was on the other end. Then she would repeat herself. We won, but he still won’t pay. Then she listened again. The question must have been so what do we do now, because she said we go back to court, to enforce the judgment. Then the question was obviously how long does that take because she went very quiet and said a year. Maybe two. Reacher heard clear silence at the other end and watched the woman’s face. She was upset and embarrassed and humiliated. Blinking back tears of bitter frustration. She said, “Llamarede nuevo mds tarde” and hung up. I’ll call again soon.
Then she faced front and closed her eyes and breathed deeply through her nose, in and out, in and out. She rested her hands palms-down on the desk. Breathed some more. Maybe it was a relaxation technique they taught you in law school. But it didn’t seem to be working. She opened her eyes and dropped a file into a drawer and focused between the piles of paper across the desk at Reacher.
“Problem?” he asked her.
She shrugged and nodded all at the same time. An all-purpose expression of misery.
“Winning the case is only half the battle,” she said. “Sometimes, a lot less than half, believe me.”
“So what happened?”
She shook her head. “We don’t need to go into it.”
“Some guy won’t pay up?” Reacher said.
She shrugged and nodded again.
“A rancher,” she said. “Crashed his car into my client’s truck. Injured my client and his wife and two of his children. It was early in the morning. He was on his way back from a party, drunk. They were on their way to market. It was harvest time and they couldn’t work the fields and they lost their whole crop.”
“Cantaloupe?”
“Bell peppers, actually. Rotted on the vine. We sued and won twenty thousand dollars. But the guy won’t pay. He just refuses. He’s waiting them out. He plans to starve them back to Mexico, and he will, because if we have to go back to court it’ll take at least another year and they can’t live another whole year on fresh air, can they?”
“They didn’t have insurance?”
“Premiums are way too expensive. These people are barely scratching a living. All we could do was proceed directly against the rancher. Solid case, well presented, and we won. But the old guy is sitting tight, with a big smirk on his damn face.”
“Tough break,” Reacher said.
“Unbelievable,” she said. “The things these people go through, you just wouldn’t believe it. This family I’m telling you about, the border patrol killed their eldest son.”
“They did?”
She nodded. “Twelve years ago. They were illegals. Paid their life savings to some guide to get them here, and he just abandoned them in the desert. No food, no water, they’re holing up in the daytime and walking north at night, and a patrol chases them in the dark with rifles and kills their eldest boy. They bury him and walk on.”
“Anything get done about it?”
“Are you kidding? They were illegals. They couldn’t do anything. It happened all the time. Everybody’s got a story like that. And now they’re settled and been through the immigration amnesty, we try to get them to trust the law, and then something like this happens. I feel like such a fool.”
“Not your fault.”
“It is my fault. I should know better. Trust us, I tell them.”
She went quiet and Reacher watched her try to recover.
“Anyway,” she said, and then nothing more. She looked away. She was a good-looking woman. It was very hot. There was a single air conditioner stuck in the fanlight over the door, a big old thing, a long way away. It was doing its best.