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