"Why? She's her granddaughter."
Carmen looked away.
"Her blood is tainted," she said. "Don't ask me to explain it. It's not rational. She hates her, is all I know."
"So why all the fuss if you took her away?"
"Because Sloop wants her here. She's his weapon against me. His instrument of torture. And his mother does what he wants."
"She make you eat in the kitchen, too?"
"No, she makes me eat with her," she said. "Because she knows I'd rather not."
He paused, at the edge of the shadow.
"You should have gotten out of here," he said. "We should be in Vegas by now."
"I was hopeful, for a second," she said. "About Al Eugene. I thought there might be a delay."
He nodded. "So was I. It would have been useful."
She nodded, tears in her eyes.
"I know," she said. "Too good to be true."
"So you should still think about running."
She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. Shook her head.
"I won't run," she said. "I won't be a fugitive."
He said nothing.
"And you should have agreed with her," she said. "About the Mexicans. I'd have understood you were bluffing. I need her to keep you around."
"I couldn't."
"It was a risk."
She led him down the steps into the sun and across the yard. Beyond the motor barn was a horse barn. That structure was red like everything else, big as an aircraft hangar, with clerestory vents in the roof. There was a big door standing a foot open. There was a strong smell coming out of it.
"I'm not much of a country guy," he said.
"You'll get used to it," she said.
Behind the barn were four corrals boxed in with red fences. Two of them were covered in scrubby grass, and two of them had desert sand piled a foot thick. There were striped poles resting on oil drums to make jumping courses. Behind the corrals was another red building, long and low, with small windows high up under the eaves.
"The bunkhouse," she said.
She stood still for a moment, lost in thought. Then she shivered in the heat and came back, all business.
"The door is around the other side," she said. "You'll find two guys in there, Joshua and Billy. Don't trust either one of them. They've been here forever and they belong to the Greers. The maid will bring your meals down to you in about an hour, after Ellie eats, before we do."
"O.K.," he said.
"And Bobby will come down to check you out, sooner or later. Watch him carefully, Reacher, because he's a snake."
"O.K.," he said again.
"I'll see you later," she said.
"You going to be all right?"
She nodded once and walked away. He watched her until she was behind the horse barn, and then he walked around and found the door into the bunkhouse.
Chapter 5
The boy filled a whole new page in his notebook. The men with the telescopes called out descriptions and the exact sequence of events. The arrival of the sheriff, the return of the beaner and the kid with the new guy in tow, the kid running off to the barn, the sheriff leaving, the beaner and the new guy entering the house, a long period of nothing doing, the emergence of the beaner and the new guy onto the porch, their walk together down toward the bunkhouse, her return alone.
"Who is he?" the boy asked.
"Hell should we know?" one of the men replied.
Very tall, heavy, not neatly dressed, shirt and pants, can't tell how old, the boy wrote. Then he added: Not a wrangler, wrong shoes. Trouble?
* * *
The grade fell away behind the bunkhouse and made it a two-story building.
The lower floor had huge sliding doors, frozen open on broken tracks. There was another pick-up in there, and a couple of green tractors. At the far end to the right was a wooden staircase without a handrail leading upward through a rectangular hole in the ceiling. Reacher spent a minute on the ground floor looking at the vehicles. The pick-up had a gun rack in the rear window. The air was hot and heavy and smelled of gasoline and motor oil.
Then he used the staircase and came out on the second level. All the interior carpentry was painted red, walls, floor and roof beams alike. The air was hotter still up there, and stale. No air conditioning, and not much ventilation. There was a closed-off area at the far end, which he guessed was the bathroom. Apart from that the whole of the floor was one big open space, with sixteen beds facing each other eight to a side, with simple iron frames and thin striped mattresses and bedside cabinets and footlockers.
The two beds nearest the bathroom were occupied. Each had a small, wiry man lying half-dressed on top of the sheets. Both men wore blue jeans and fancy tooled boots and no shirts. Both had their hands folded behind their heads. They both turned toward the staircase as Reacher stepped up inside the room. They both unlaced their nearer arms to get a better look at him.
Reacher had done four years at West Point, and then thirteen years in the service, so he had a total seventeen years' experience of walking into a new dormitory and being stared at by its occupants. It wasn't a sensation that bothered him. There was a technique involved in handling it. An etiquette. The way to do it was to just walk in, select an unoccupied bed, and say absolutely nothing at all. Make somebody else speak first. That way, you could judge their disposition before you were forced to reveal your own.
He walked to a bed two places away from the head of the staircase, against the north wall, which he judged would be cooler than the south. In the past, in the army, he would have had a heavy canvas kit bag to dump on the bed as a symbol of possession. The kit bag would be stenciled with his name and his rank, and the number of restencilings on it would offer a rough guide to his biography. Kit bags saved a lot of talking time. But the best he could do in this new situation was take his folding toothbrush from his pocket and prop it on the bedside cabinet. As a substitute gesture, it lacked physical impact. But it made the same point. It said I live here now, same as you do. You got any kind of a comment to make about that?
Both men kept on staring at him, saying nothing. Lying down, it was hard to judge their physiques with any degree of certainty, but they were both small. Maybe five-six or -seven each, maybe a hundred and fifty pounds. But they were wiry and muscular, like middleweight boxers. They had farmers' tans, deep brown on their arms and their faces and their necks, and milky white where T-shirts had covered their bodies. They had random knobs and old swellings here and there on their ribs and arms and collarbones. Reacher had seen marks like that before. Carmen had one. He had one or two himself. They were where old fractures had set and healed.
He walked past the two men to the bathroom. It had a door, but it was a communal facility inside, four of everything with no interior partitioning. Four toilets, four sinks, four shower heads in a single elongated stall. It was reasonably clean, and it smelled of warm water and cheap soap, like the two guys had recently showered, maybe ready for Friday evening off. There was a high window with a clogged insect screen and no glass. By standing tall he could see past the corner of the horse barn all the way up to the house. He could see half of the porch and a sliver of the front door.
He came back into the dormitory room. One of the guys had hauled himself upright and was sitting with his head turned, watching the bathroom door. His back was as pale as his front, and it had more healed fractures showing through the skin. The ribs, the right scapula. Either this guy spent a lot of time getting run over by trucks, or else he was a retired rodeo rider who had passed his career a little ways from the top of his trade.
"Storm coming," the guy said.
"What I heard," Reacher said.
"Inevitable, with a temperature like this."
Reacher said nothing.
"You hired on?" the guy asked.
"I guess," Reacher said.
"So you'll be working for us."
Reacher said nothing.
"I'm Billy," the guy said.
The other guy moved up on his elbows.
"Josh," he said.
Reacher nodded to them both.
"I'm Reacher," he said. "Pleased to meet you."
"You'll do the scut work for us," the guy called Billy said. "Shoveling shit and toting bales."
"Whatever"
"Because you sure don't look like much of a horse rider to me."
"I don't?"
Billy shook his head. "Too tall. Too heavy. Center of gravity way up there. No, my guess is you're not much of a horse rider at all."
'The Mexican woman bring you in?" Josh asked.
"Mrs. Greer," Reacher said.
"Mrs. Greer is Rusty," Billy said. "She didn't bring you in."
"Mrs. Carmen Greer," Reacher said.
Billy said nothing. The guy called Josh just smiled.
"We're heading out after supper," Billy said. "Bar, couple hours south of here. You could join us. Call it a get-to-know-you type of thing."
Reacher shook his head. "Maybe some other time, when I've earned something. I like to pay my own way, situation like that."
Billy thought about it and nodded.
"That's a righteous attitude," he said. "Maybe you'll fit right in."
The guy called Josh just smiled.
Reacher walked back to his bed and stretched himself out, keeping still, fighting the heat. He stared up at the red-painted rafters for a minute, and then he closed his eyes.