They talked about fear on the ride home. Carmen was quiet on the way back up the rise, and she stopped again at the peak. The Red House compound stretched below them in the distant haze, and she just sat and looked down at it, both hands clasped on the horn of her saddle, saying nothing, a faraway look in her eyes. Reacher's horse stopped as usual slightly behind hers, so he got the same view, but framed by the curve of her neck and her shoulder.
"Do you ever get afraid?" she asked.
"No," he said.
She was quiet again for a spell.
"But how is that possible?" she asked.
He looked at the sky. "It's something I learned, when I was a little boy."
"How?"
He looked at the ground. "I had a brother, older than me. So he was always ahead. But I wanted to be doing the same stuff as him. He had scary comics, and anywhere we had American television he'd be watching it. So I looked at the same comics and watched the same shows. There was one show about space adventures. I don't remember what it was called. We watched it in black-and-white somewhere. Maybe in Europe. They had a spaceship that looked like a little submarine with spider legs. They would land it somewhere and get out and go exploring. I remember one night they got chased by this scary creature. It was hairy, like an ape. Like Bigfoot. Long hairy arms and a big snarl. It chased them back to the spaceship, and they jumped in and slammed the hatch shut just as it was climbing in after them."
"And you were scared?"
He nodded, even though he was behind her. "I was about four, I think. I was terrified. That night I was certain the thing was under my bed. I had this nigh old bed, and I knew the thing was living under it. It was going to come out and get me. I could just about feel its paw reaching up for me. I couldn't sleep. If I went to sleep, it would come out and get me for sure. So I stayed awake for hours. I would call for my dad, but when he came in, I was too ashamed to tell him. It went on like that for days and days."
"And what happened?"
"I got mad. Not at myself for being afraid, because as far as I was concerned the thing was totally real and I should be afraid. I got mad at the thing for making me afraid. For threatening me. One night I just kind of exploded with fury. I yelled O.K., come out and try it! Just damn well try it! I'll beat the shit right out of you! I raced it down. I turned the fear into aggression."
"And that worked?"
"I've never been scared since. It's a habit. Those space explorers shouldn't have turned and run, Carmen. They should have stood there and faced the creature down. They should have stood and fought. You see something scary, you should stand up and step toward it, not away from it. Instinctively, reflexively, in a raging fury."
"Is that what you do?"
"Always."
"Is it what I should do? With Sloop?"
"I think it's what everybody should do."
She was quiet for a moment. Just staring down at the house, and then lifting her eyes to the horizon beyond it. She clicked her tongue, and both horses moved off together, down the long slow slope toward the road. She shifted in the saddle to keep her balance. Reacher imitated her posture and stayed safely aboard. But not comfortably. He figured horseback riding would be one of the things he tried once and didn't repeat.
"So what did Bobby say?" she asked. "About us?"
"He said you've been away most days for a month, and some nights, and he figured we've been up in a motel in Pecos together having an affair. Now he's all outraged that you've brought me down here, so close to Sloop getting back."
"I wish we had been," she said. "In a motel, having an affair. I wish that was all it was."
He said nothing. She paused a beat.
"Do you wish we had been, too?" she asked.
He watched her in the saddle. Lithe, slim, hips swaying gently against the patient gait of the horse. The dark honey skin of her arms was bright in the sun. Her hair hung to the middle of her back.
"I could think of worse things," he said.
* * *
It was very late in the afternoon when they got back. Josh and Billy were waiting. They were leaning side by side against the wall of the barn, in the harsh shadow below the eaves. Their pick-up was ready for the trip to the feed supplier. It was parked in the yard.
"It takes all three of you?" Carmen whispered.
"It's Bobby," Reacher said back. "He's trying to keep me away from you. Trying to spoil the fun we're supposed to be having."
She rolled her eyes.
"I'll put the horses away," she said. "I should brush them first."
They dismounted together in front of the barn door. Josh and Billy peeled off the wall, impatience in their body language.
"You ready?" Billy called.
"He should have been ready a half hour ago," Josh said.
For that, Reacher made them wait. He walked down to the bunkhouse, very slowly, because he wasn't going to let them hurry him, and because he was stiff from the saddle. He used the bathroom and rinsed dust off his face. Splashed cold water over his shirt. Walked slowly back. The pick-up had turned to face the gate and the engine was running. Carmen was brushing his horse. Thin clouds of dust were coming off its chestnut fur. Hair? Coat?
Josh was sitting sideways in the driver's seat. Billy was standing next to the passenger door.
"So let's go," he called.
He put Reacher in the middle seat. Josh swung his feet in and slammed his door shut. Billy crowded in on the other side and Josh took off toward the gate. Paused at the road and then made a left, at which point Reacher knew the situation was a lot worse than he had guessed.
Chapter 7
He had seen the feed bags in the storeroom. There were plenty of them, maybe forty, in head-high stacks. Big waxed-paper bags, probably thirty pounds to a bag. Altogether twelve hundred pounds of feed. About half a ton. How fast were four horses and a pony going to eat their way through all of that?
But he had always understood the trip was Bobby's idea of a diversion. Buying more feed before it was strictly necessary was as good a way as any of getting him out of Carmen's life for a spell. But they weren't buying more feed. Because they had turned left. The bags were all printed with a brand name and nutritional boasts and the name and the address of the feed supplier. The feed supplier was in San Angelo. He had seen it repeated forty times, once on each bag, in big clear letters. San Angelo, San Angelo, San Angelo. And San Angelo was north and east of Echo County. Way north and east. Not south and west. They should have turned right.
So, Bobby was planning to get him out of Carmen's life permanently. Josh and Billy had been told to get rid of him. And Josh and Billy will do what they're told, Bobby had said. He smiled at the windshield. Forewarned is forearmed. They didn't know he'd seen the feed bags, didn't know he'd read the writing on them, and they didn't know he'd been looking at maps of Texas for most of the last week. They didn't know a left turn instead of a right would mean anything to him.
How would they aim to do it? Carmen had implied her out-of-work teacher friend had been scared off. Scared pretty badly, if he wouldn't even talk to her later, up in the relative safety of Pecos. So were they going to try to scare him? If so, they really had to be kidding. He felt the aggression building inside. He used it and controlled it like he had learned to. He used the adrenaline flow to ease the stiffness in his legs. He let it pump him up. He flexed his shoulders, leaning on Josh on one side, Billy on the other. "How far is it?" he asked innocently.
"Couple hours," Billy said.
They were doing about sixty, heading south on the dead-straight road. The landscape was unchanging. Scrubby dry grassland on the left, sullen limestone caliche on the right, broken up into ledges and layers. All of it baking under the relentless sun. There was no traffic. The road looked like it saw one or two vehicles a day. Maybe all they had to do was get far enough away, pull over, throw him out, and he'd die slowly of thirst before anybody got to him. Or of exhaustion, walking back. Or of rattlesnake bites.
"No, less than a couple hours," Josh said. "Hundred miles is all."
So maybe they were headed to the bar they had mentioned yesterday. Maybe they had friends there. They better had, Reacher thought. A pair of fifth-rate cowboys ain't going to do it for me. Then he breathed out again. Relaxed. Struggled with a decision. The problem with the kind of undiluted raging aggression he had described to Carmen was it came out so all-or-nothing. He recalled his first day in high school. The summer after he finished his elementary education, the family moved back stateside for a six-month tour. He was enrolled in a big high school off-base, somewhere in New Jersey, somewhere near Fort Dix. And he was ready for it. In his usual serious earnest fashion he calculated that high school would be bigger and better than elementary school, in every way, including the seriousness of the locker-room scuffling. So he made his usual new-school first-day plan to jump on the very first guy who tried anything. That had always worked well for him. Hit hard, hit early, get your retaliation in first. It made a big impression. But this time, make an even bigger impression, hit harder than ever, because clearly high school was going to be a whole new kind of a deal.
So sure enough some hard kid shoved him the first morning, and ten minutes later the hard kid was on his way to the hospital for a three-week stay. Then Reacher discovered it was really a very genteel school, in a good neighborhood, and that he'd reacted way too drastically, and everybody was looking at him like he was some sort of a barbarian. And he felt like one. He felt a little ashamed. From then on, he'd become calmer. He'd learned to be certain what he was into before he did anything. And he'd learned to offer warnings, sometimes, in certain circumstances.