Victoria, with the tall fair man driving to give the small dark man a break. The woman sat in the back. They rolled out of the motel lot and picked up speed on I-20, heading west, toward Fort Worth, away from Dallas. Nobody spoke. Thinking about the vast interior of Texas was oppressing them. The woman had read a guidebook in preparation for the mission that pointed out that the state makes up fully seven percent of America's land mass and is bigger than most European countries. That didn't impress her. Everybody knew all that standard-issue Texas-is-real-big bullshit. Everybody always has. But the guide book also pointed out that side-to-side Texas is wider than the distance between New York and Chicago. That information had some impact. And it underlined why they were facing such a long drive, just to get from one nowhere interior location to another.
But the car was quiet and cool and comfortable, and it was as good a place to relax as any motel room would be. They had a little time to kill, after all.
* * *
The woman slowed and made a shallow right, toward New Mexico, then a mile later a left, straight south, toward old Mexico. Her dress was creased across the middle, like maybe she was wearing it a second day. Her perfume was subtle, mixed into the freezing air from the dashboard vents.
"So is Pecan worth seeing?" Reacher asked, in the silence.
"Pecos," she said.
"Right, Pecos."
She shrugged.
"I like it," she said. "It's mostly Mexican, so I'm comfortable there."
Her right hand tensed on the wheel. He saw tendons shifting under the skin.
"You like Mexican people?" she asked.
He shrugged back. "As much as I like any people, I guess."
"You don't like people?"
"It varies."
"You like cantaloupe?"
"As much as I like any fruit."
"Pecos grows the sweetest cantaloupe in the whole of Texas," she said. "And therefore, in their opinion, in the whole of the world. Also there's a rodeo there in July, but you've missed it for this year. And just north of Pecos is Loving County. You ever heard of Loving County?"
He shook his head. "Never been here before."
"It's the least-populated county in the whole of the United States," she said. "Well, if you leave out some of the places in Alaska, I guess. But also the richest, per capita. Population is a hundred and ten souls, but there are four hundred and twenty oil leases active."
He nodded. "So let me out in Pecos. It sounds like a fun place."
"It was the real Wild West," she said. "A long time ago, of course. The Texas and Pacific Railroad put a stop there. So there were saloons and all. Used to be a bad place. It was a word, too, as well as a town. A verb, and also a place. To pecos somebody meant to shoot them and throw them in the Pecos River."
"They still do that?"
She smiled again. A different smile. This smile traded some elegance for some mischief. It eased her tension. It made her appealing.
"No, they don't do that so much, now," she said.
"Your family from Pecos?"
"No, California," she said. "I came to Texas when I got married."
Keep talking, he thought. She saved your ass.
"Been married long?" he asked.
"Just under seven years."
"Your family been in California long?"
She paused and smiled again.
"Longer than any Californian, that's for sure," she said.
They were in flat empty country and she eased the silent car faster down a dead-straight road. The hot sky was tinted bottle-green by the windshield. The instrumentation on her dashboard showed it was a hundred and ten degrees outside and sixty inside.
"You a lawyer?" he asked.
She was puzzled for a moment, and then she made the connection and craned to glance at her briefcase in the mirror.
"No," she said. "I'm a lawyer's client."
The conversation went dead again. She seemed nervous, and he felt awkward about it.
"And what else are you?" he asked.
She paused a beat.
"Somebody's wife and mother," she said. "And somebody's daughter and sister, I guess. And I keep a few horses. That's all. What are you?"
"Nothing in particular," Reacher said.
"You have to be something," she said.
"Well, I used to be things," he said. "I was somebody's son, and somebody's brother, and somebody's boyfriend."
"Was?"
"My parents died, my brother died, my girlfriend left me."
Not a great line, he thought. She said nothing back.
"And I don't have any horses," he added.
"I'm very sorry," she said.
"That I don't have horses?"
"No, that you're all alone in the world."
"Water under the bridge," he said. "It's not as bad