"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.
"Anyway," she said again. Looked at him. "How can I help you?"
"Not me," Reacher said. "A woman I know."
"She needs a lawyer?"
"She shot her husband. He was abusing her."
"When?"
"Last night. She's across the street, in jail."
"Is he dead?"
Reacher nodded. "As a doornail."
Her shoulders sagged. She opened a drawer and took out a yellow pad.
"What's your name?" she asked.
"My name?"
"You're the one talking to me."
"Reacher," he said. "What's your name?"
She wrote "Reacher" on the pad, first line.
"Alice," she said. "Alice Amanda Aaron."
"You should go into private practice. You'd be first in the Yellow Pages."
She smiled, just a little.
"One day, I will," she said. "This is a five-year bargain with my conscience."
"Paying your dues?"
"Atoning," she said. "For my good fortune. For going to Harvard Law. For coming from a family where twenty thousand dollars is a month's common charge on the Park Avenue co-op instead of life or death during the winter in Texas."
"Good for you, Alice," he said.
"So tell me about your woman friend."
"She's of Mexican heritage and her husband was white. Her name is Carmen Greer and her husband was Sloop Greer."
"Sloop?"
"Like a boat."
"O.K.," Alice said, and wrote it all down.
"The abuse stopped for the last year and a half because he was in prison for tax evasion. He got out yesterday and started it up again and she shot him."
"O.K."
"Evidence and witnesses are going to be hard to find. The abuse was covert."
"Injuries?"
"Fairly severe. But she always passed them off as accidental, to do with horses."
"Horses?"
"Like she fell off of them."
"Why?"
Reacher shrugged. "I don't know. Family dynamic, coercion, shame, fear, embarrassment, maybe."
"But there's no doubt the abuse happened?"
"Not in my mind."
Alice stopped writing. Stared down at the yellow paper.
"Well, it's not going to be easy," she said. "Texas law isn't too far behind the times on spousal abuse, but I'd prefer lots of clear evidence. But his spell in prison helps us. Not a model citizen, is he? We could plead it down to involuntary manslaughter. Maybe settle for time served, with probation. If we work hard, we stand a chance."
"It was justifiable homicide, not manslaughter."
"I'm sure it was, but it's a question of what will work, and what won't."
"And she needs bail," Reacher said. "Today."
Alice looked up from the paper and stared at him.
"Bail?" she repeated, like it was a foreign word. "Today? Forget about it."
"She's got a kid. A little girl, six and a half."
She wrote it down.
"Doesn't help," she said. "Everybody's got kids."
She ran her fingers up and down the tall stacks of files.
"They've all got kids," she said again. "Six and a half, one and a half, two kids, six, seven, ten."
"She's called Ellie," Reacher said. "She needs her mother."
Alice wrote "Ellie" on the pad, and connected it with an arrow to "Carmen Greer."
"Only two ways to get bail in a case like this," she said. "First way is we stage essentially the whole trial at the bail hearing. And we're not ready to do that. It'll be months before I can even start working on it. My calendar is totally full. And even when I can start, it'll take months to prepare, in these circumstances."
"What circumstances?"
"Her word against a dead man's reputation. If we've got no eyewitnesses, we'll have to subpoena her medical records and find experts who can testify her injuries weren't caused by falling off horses. And clearly she's got no money, or you wouldn't be in here on her behalf, so we're going to have to find some experts who'll appear for free. Which isn't impossible, but it can't be done in a hurry."
"So what can be done in a hurry?"
"I can run over to the jail and say 'Hi, I'm your lawyer, I'll see you again in a year.' That's about all can be done in a hurry."
Reacher glanced around the room. It was teeming with people.
"Nobody else will be faster," Alice said. "I'm relatively new here. I've got less of a backlog."
It seemed to be true. She had just two head-high stacks of files on her desk. The others all had three or four or five.
"What's the second way?"
"Of what?"
"Getting bail. You said there were two ways."
She nodded. "Second way is we convince the DA not to oppose it. If we stand up and ask for bail and he stands up and says he has no objection, then all that matters is whether the judge thinks it's appropriate. And the judge will be influenced by the DA's position, probably."
"Hack Walker was Sloop Greer's oldest buddy."
Alice's shoulder's sagged again.
"Great," she said. "He'll recuse himself, obviously. But his staff will go to bat for him. So forget bail. It isn't going to happen."
"But will you take the case?"
"Sure I will. That's what we do here. We take cases. So I'll call Hack's office, and I'll go see Carmen. But that's all I can do right now. You understand? Apart from that, right now taking the case is the same thing as not taking the case."
Reacher sat still for a second. Then he shook his head. "Not good enough, Alice," he said. "I want you to get to work right now. Make something happen."
"I can't," she said. "Not for months. I told you that." She went quiet and he watched her for a second more.
"You interested in a deal?" he asked.
"A deal?"
"Like I help you, you help me."
"How can you help me?"
"There are things I could do for you. Like, I could recover the twenty grand for your pepper growers. Today. And then you could start work for Carmen Greer. Today."
"What are you, a debt collector?"
"No, but I'm a quick learner. It's probably not rocket science."
"I can't let you do that. It's probably illegal. Unless you're registered somewhere."
"Just suppose the next time you saw me I was walking back in here with a check for twenty grand in my pocket?"
"How would you do that?"
He shrugged. "I'd just go ask the guy for it."
"And that would work?"
"It might," he said.
She shook her head. "It would be unethical."
"As opposed to what?"
She didn't answer for a long time. Just stared off somewhere behind his head. But then he saw her glance down at the phone. He saw her rehearsing the good news call in her mind.
"Who's the rancher?" he asked.
She glanced at the drawer. Shook her head again. "I can't tell you," she said. "I'm worried about the ethics."
"I'm offering," he said. "You're not asking."
She sat still.
"I'm volunteering," he said. "Like a paralegal assistant."
She looked straight at him. "I have to go to the bathroom," she said.
She stood up suddenly and walked away. She was wearing denim shorts, and she was taller than he had guessed. Short shorts, long legs. A fine tan. Walking, she looked pretty good from the back. She went through a door in the rear wall of the old store. He stood up and leaned over the desk and pulled open the drawer. Lifted the top file out and reversed it so he could read it. It was full of legal paper. He shuffled through to some kind of a deposition printed on a single sheet. There was a name and address typed neatly in a box labeled "Defendant." He folded the paper into quarters and put it in his shirt pocket. Closed the file and dropped it back in the drawer. Hooked the drawer shut and sat down again. A moment later Alice Amanda Aaron came out through the rear door and walked back to the desk. She looked pretty good from the front, too.