him like a steelyard furnace. It was so intense he could barely catch his breath. He stood dumb for a second and waited for her and then they walked together across the hot dirt. It was baked dry and hard, like concrete. Beyond it was a tangle of mesquite brush and a blinding white-hot sky as far as the eye could see. He let her walk half a pace ahead of him, so he could watch her. She had her eyes half-closed and her head bowed, like she didn't want to see or be seen. The hem on her dress had fallen to a decorous knee-length. She moved very gracefully, like a dancer, her upper body erect and perfectly still and her bare legs scissoring elegantly below it.
The diner had a tiny foyer with a cigarette machine and a rack full of flyers about real estate and oil changes and small-town rodeos and gun shows. Inside the second door it was cold again. They stood together in the delicious chill for a moment. There was a register next to the door and a tired waitress sitting sideways on a counter stool. A cook visible in the kitchen. Two men in separate booths, eating. All four people looked up and paused, like there were things they could say but wouldn't.
Reacher looked at each of them for a second and then turned away and led Carmen to a booth at the far end of the room. He slid across sticky vinyl and tilted his head back into a jet of cold air coming down from a vent in the ceiling. Carmen sat opposite and raised her head and he looked at her face-on for the first time.
"My daughter looks nothing at all like me," she said. "Sometimes I think that's the cruelest irony in this whole situation. Those big old Greer genes just about steamrollered mine, that's for sure."
She had spectacular dark eyes with long lashes and a slight tilt to them, and a straight nose that made an open Y-shape against her brows. High cheekbones framed by thick black hair that shone navy in the light. A rosebud of a mouth with a subtle trace of red lipstick. Her skin was smooth and clear, the color of weak tea or dark honey, and it had a translucent glow behind it. It was actually a whole lot lighter in color than Reacher's own sunburned forearms, and he was white and she wasn't.
"So who does Ellie look like?" he asked.
"Them," she said.
The waitress brought ice water and a pad and a pencil and an upturned chin and no conversation. Carmen ordered iced coffee and Reacher ordered his hot and black.
"She doesn't look like she's mine at all," Carmen said. "Pink skin, yellow hair, a little chubby. But she's got my eyes."
"Lucky Ellie," Reacher said.
She smiled briefly. "Thank you. Plan is she should stay lucky."
She held the water glass flat against her face. Then she used a napkin to wipe the dew away. The waitress brought their drinks. The iced coffee was in a tall glass, and she spilled some of it as she put it down. Reacher's was in an insulated plastic carafe, and she shoved an empty china mug across the table next to it. She left the check face down halfway between the two drinks, and walked away without saying anything at all.
"You need to understand I loved Sloop once," Carmen said.
Reacher made no reply, and she looked straight at him.
"Does it bother you to hear this kind of stuff?" she asked.
He shook his head, although the truth was it did bother him, a little. Loners aren't necessarily too comfortable with a stranger's intimacies.
"You told me to start at the beginning," she said.
"Yes," he said. "I did."
"So I will," she said. "I loved him once. You need to understand that. And you need to understand that wasn't hard to do. He was big, and he was handsome, and he smiled a lot, and he was casual, and he was relaxed. And we were in school and we were young, and L.A. is a very special place, where anything seems possible and nothing seems to matter very much."
She took a drinking straw from the canister on the table and unwrapped it.
"And you need to know where I was coming from," she said. "Truth is, I had it all completely backward. I wasn't some Mexican worrying about whether the white family would accept me. I was worrying about my family accepting this gringo