Worth Dying For (26 page)

FORTY-SEVEN

J
ACOB WAS FIRST UP THE CELLAR STAIRS
. H
IS FIRST THOUGHT WAS
that a football player was checking in, but the floors in their houses were typical of old-style construction in rural America, built of boards cut from the hearts of old pines, thick and dense and heavy, capable of transmitting noise but not detail. So it was not possible to say who was in the house by sound alone. He saw no one in the hallway, but when he got to the kitchen he found a man in there, standing still, small and wiry, dark and dead-eyed, rumpled, not very clean, wearing a buttoned shirt without a tie, holding a knife in his left hand and a gun in his right. The knife was held low, but the gun was pointing straight at the centre of Jacob’s chest.

Jacob stood still.

The man put his knife on the kitchen table and raised his forefinger to his lips.

Jacob made no sound.

Behind him his son and his brothers crowded into the kitchen, too soon to be stopped. The man moved the muzzle of his gun, left and right, back and forth. The four Duncans lined up, shoulder to shoulder. The man turned his wrist and moved the muzzle down and up, down and up, patting the air with it. No one moved.

The man said, ‘Get on your knees.’

Jacob asked, ‘Who are you?’

The man said, ‘You killed my friend.’

‘I didn’t.’

‘One of you Duncans did.’

‘We didn’t. We don’t even know who you are.’

‘Get on your knees.’

‘Who are you?’

The little man picked up his knife again and asked, ‘Which one of you is Seth?’

Seth Duncan paused a beat and then raised his good hand, like a kid in class.

The little man said, ‘You killed my friend and you put his body in the trunk of your Cadillac.’

Jacob said, ‘No, Reacher stole that car this afternoon. It was him.’

‘Reacher doesn’t exist.’

‘He does. He broke my son’s nose. And his hand.’

The gun didn’t move, but the little man turned his head and looked at Seth. The aluminium splint, the swollen fingers. Jacob said, ‘We haven’t left here all day. But Reacher was at the Marriott. This afternoon, and this evening. We know that. He left the Cadillac there.’

‘Where is he now?’

‘We’re not sure. Close by, we think.’

‘How did he get back?’

‘Perhaps he took your rental car. Did your friend have the key?’

The little man didn’t answer.

Jacob asked, ‘Who are you?’

‘I represent Mahmeini.’

‘We don’t know who that is.’

‘He buys your merchandise from Safir.’

‘We don’t know anyone of that name either. We sell to an Italian gentleman in Las Vegas, name of Mr Rossi, and after that we have no further interest.’

‘You’re trying to cut everyone out.’

‘We’re not. We’re trying to get our shipment home, that’s all.’

‘Where is it?’

‘On its way. But we can’t bring it in until Reacher is down.’

‘Why not?’

‘You know why not. This kind of business can’t be done in public. You should be helping us, not pointing guns at us.’

The little man didn’t answer.

Jacob said, ‘Put the gun away, and let’s all sit down and talk. We’re all on the same side here.’

The little man kept the gun straight and level and said, ‘Safir’s men are dead too.’

‘Reacher,’ Jacob said. ‘He’s on the loose.’

‘What about Rossi’s boys?’

‘We haven’t seen them recently.’

‘Really?’

‘I swear.’

The little man was quiet for a long moment. Then he said, ‘OK. Things change. Life moves on, for all of us. From now on you will sell direct to Mahmeini.’

Jacob Duncan said, ‘Our arrangement is with Mr Rossi.’

The little man said, ‘Not any more.’

Jacob Duncan didn’t answer.

Cassano and Mancini opted to try Jacob Duncan’s place first. A logical choice, given that Jacob was clearly the head of the family. They backed off the fence a couple of paces and walked parallel with it to a spot opposite Jacob’s kitchen window. The bar of yellow light coming out of it laid a bright rectangle on the gravel, but it fell six feet short of the base of the fence. They climbed the fence and skirted the rectangle, quietly across the gravel, Cassano to the right, Mancini to the left, and then they flattened themselves against the back wall of the house and peered in.

No one there.

Mancini eased open the door and Cassano went in ahead of him. The house was silent. No sound at all. No one awake, no one asleep. Cassano and Mancini had searched plenty of places, plenty of times, and they knew what to listen for.

They slipped back out to the yard and retraced their steps. They climbed back into the field and walked north in the dark and lined up again opposite Jasper’s window. They climbed the fence and skirted the light. They flattened themselves against the wall and peered inside.

Not what they expected.

Not even close.

There was only one Iranian, not two. There was no happy conversation. No smiles. No bourbon toasts. Instead, Mahmeini’s man was standing there with a gun in one hand and a knife in the other, and all four Duncans were cowering away from him. The glass in the window was wavy and thin in places, and Jacob Duncan’s urgent voice was faintly audible.

Jacob Duncan was saying, ‘We have been in business a long time, sir, based on trust and loyalty, and we can’t change things now. Our arrangement is with Mr Rossi, and Mr Rossi alone. Perhaps he can sell direct to you, in the future, now that Mr Safir seems to be out of the picture. Perhaps that might be of advantage. But that’s all we can offer, not that such a thing is even ours to offer.’

The little man said, ‘Mahmeini won’t take half a pie when the whole thing is on the table.’

‘But it isn’t on the table. I repeat, we deal with Mr Rossi only.’

‘Do you really?’ the little man asked. He changed his position and stood sideways, and raised his arm level with his shoulder, and closed one eye, and tracked the gun slowly and mechanically back and forth, left and right along the line of men, like a great battleship turret traversing, pausing first on Seth, then on Jasper, then on Jonas, then on Jacob, and then back again, to Jonas, to Jasper, to Seth, and then back again once more. Finally the gun came to rest aimed square at Jonas. Right between his eyes. The little man’s finger whitened on the trigger.

Then simultaneously the window and the little man’s head exploded, and the crowded room filled with powdered glass and smoke and the massive barking roar of a .45 gunshot, and blood and bone and brain slapped and spattered against the far wall, and the little man fell to the floor, and first Mancini and then Cassano stepped in from the yard.

After less than an hour the two football players were thoroughly bored with sitting in the dark. And not just bored, either, but unsettled and a little anxious, too, and irritated, and exasperated, and humiliated, because they were very aware that they were being beaten on a minute-to-minute basis, and being beaten on any basis did not come easy to them. They were not submissive people. They never came second. They were the big dogs, and being denied heat and light and NFL highlights was both insulting and totally inappropriate.

One said, ‘We have a shotgun, damn it.’

The other said, ‘It’s a big basement. He could be anywhere.’

‘We have a flashlight.’

‘Pretty weak.’

‘Maybe he’s still unconscious. It could be an actual fault, and we’re sitting here like idiots.’

‘He has to be awake by now.’

‘So what if he is? He’s one guy, and we have a shotgun and a flashlight.’

‘He was a soldier.’

‘That doesn’t give him magic powers.’

‘How would we do it?’

‘We could tape the flashlight to the shotgun barrel. Go down, single file, like they do in the movies. We’d see him before he sees us.’

‘We’re not supposed to kill him. Seth wants to do that himself, later.’

‘We could aim low. Wound him in the legs.’

‘Or make him surrender. That would be better. And he’d have to, wouldn’t he? With the shotgun and all? We could tape him up, with the tape we use for the flashlight. Then he couldn’t mess with the power again. We should have done that in the first place.’

‘We don’t have any tape, for either thing.’

‘Let’s look in the garage. If we find some tape, we’ll think about doing it.’

They found some tape. They followed the flashlight beam through the hallway, through the kitchen, through the mud room, all the way to the garage, and right there on the workbench was a fat new roll of silver duct tape, still wrapped up, fresh from the store. They carried it back with them, not really sure if they were pleased or not. But they had promised themselves in a way, so they pulled off the plastic wrap and picked at the end of the tape and unwound a short length. They tried the flashlight against the shotgun barrel, working in the dim light of reflections off the walls. The flashlight fit pretty well, ahead of the forestock, and underslung because of the front sight above the muzzle, and jutting out a little because of its length. The plastic lens was about an inch in front of the gun. Satisfactory. But to get it secure they were going to have to wrap tape right over the thumb switch, which was a point of no return, of sorts. If they were going to do that, then they were going to have to act. No point in leaving the light burning and running the battery down all for nothing.

One asked, ‘Well?’

Three hours before daylight. Boredom, irritation, exasperation, humiliation.

The other said, ‘Let’s do it.’

He propped the gun across his knees and held the flashlight in place. The first guy juggled the roll of tape, making sticky tearing noises, winding it around and around, like he was binding broken ribs with a bandage, until the whole assembly was fat and mummified. He ducked his head and bit off a nine-inch tail and pressed it down securely, and then he squeezed everything hard between his palms, and smoothed the edges of the tape with his fingers. The other guy lifted the gun off his knees and swung it left and right and up and down. The flashlight stayed solidly in place, its beam moving faithfully with the muzzle.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘Cool. We’re good to go. The light is like a laser sight. Can’t miss.’

The first guy said, ‘Remember, aim low. If you see him, jerk the barrel down and fire at his feet.’

‘If he doesn’t surrender first.’

‘Exactly. First choice is to immobilize him. But if he moves, shoot him.’

‘Where will he be?’

‘Could be anywhere. Probably out of sight at the bottom of the stairs. Or hiding behind the water heater. It’s big enough.’

They followed the light out to the hallway and stopped near the basement door. The guy with the gun said, ‘You open it and step back and then get behind me. I’ll go down slowly and I’ll move the light around as much as I can. Tell me if you see him. We need to talk each other through this.’

‘OK,’ the first guy said. He put his hand on the knob. ‘We sure about this?’

‘I’m ready.’

‘OK, on three. Your count.’

The guy with the gun said, ‘One.’

Then, ‘Two.’

The first guy said, ‘Wait. He could be right behind the door.’

‘At the top of the stairs?’

‘Just waiting to jump out at us before we’re ready.’

‘You think? That would mean he’s been waiting there a whole hour.’

‘Sometimes they wait all day.’

‘Snipers do. This guy wasn’t a sniper.’

‘But it’s possible.’

‘He’s probably behind the water heater.’

‘But he might not be.’

‘I could fire through the door.’

‘If he isn’t there, that would alert him.’

‘He’ll be alerted anyway, as soon as he sees the flashlight beam coming down.’

‘The door has a steel core. You heard what Seth said.’

The guy with the gun asked, ‘So what do we do?’

The first guy said, ‘We could wait for daylight.’

Boredom, irritation, exasperation, humiliation.

The guy with the gun said, ‘No.’

‘OK, so I’ll open up real fast, and you fire one round immediately, right where his feet are. Or where they would be. Just in case. Don’t wait and see. Just pull the trigger, whatever, right away.’

‘OK. But then we’ll have to go down real fast.’

‘We will. He’ll be in shock. I bet that gun is pretty loud. Ready?’

‘I’m ready.’ The guy with the gun estimated the arc of the swinging door and shuffled a foot closer and braced himself, the stock to his shoulder, one eye closed, his finger tight on the trigger.

The first guy said, ‘Aim low.’

The oval of light settled on the bottom quarter of the door.

‘On three. Your count.’

‘One.’

‘Two.’

‘Three.’

The first guy turned the knob and flung the door wide open and the second guy fired instantly, with a long tongue of flame and a huge roaring twelve-gauge boom.

FORTY-EIGHT

R
EACHER HAD STUDIED THE ELECTRICAL PANEL AND HAD DECIDED
to cut all the circuits at once, because of human nature. He was pretty sure that the football players would turn out to be less than perfect sentries. Practically all sentries were less than perfect. It was any army’s most persistent problem. Boredom set in, and attention wandered, and discipline eroded. Military history was littered with catastrophes caused by poor sentry performance. And football players weren’t even military. Reacher figured the two in the house above him would stay on the ball for about ten or fifteen minutes, and then they would get lazy. Maybe they would make coffee or turn on the television, and relax, and get comfortable. So he gave them half an hour to settle in, and then he cut all the power at once, to be sure of killing whatever form of entertainment they had chosen.

Whereupon human nature would take over once again. The two in the house above him were used to dominance, used to getting their own way, used to having what they wanted, and accustomed to winning. Being denied television or warmth or coffee wasn’t a major defeat or the end of the world, but for guys like that it was a proxy version of a poke in the chest on a sidewalk outside a bar. It was a provocation. It would eat away at them, and it would not be ignored for ever. Ultimately they would respond, because of ego. The response would start with anger, and then threats, and then intervention, which would be inexpert and badly thought out.

Human nature.

Reacher hit the circuit breakers and found the stairs in the dark and crept up to the top step and listened. The door was thick and tight in its frame, so he didn’t hear much, except the bouts of hammering an inch from his ear, and then the scream from the doctor’s wife, which he discounted immediately, because it was clearly staged. He had heard people scream before, and he knew the difference between real and fake.

Then he waited in the dark. All went quiet for the best part of an hour, which was longer than he expected. All bullies are cowards, but these two had a little more pussy in them than he had guessed. They had a shotgun, for God’s sake, and he assumed they had found a flashlight. What the hell were they waiting for? Permission? Their mommies?

He waited.

Then eventually he sensed movement and deliberation on the other side of the door. He imagined that one guy would be holding the shotgun, and the other would be holding the flashlight. He guessed they would plan to shuffle down slowly behind the gun, like they had seen in the movies. He figured their primary intention would be to capture him and restrain him, not to kill him, partly because there was a large conceptual gap between sacking a quarterback and murdering a fellow human being, and partly because Seth Duncan would want him alive for later entertainment. So if they were going to shoot, they were going to aim low. And if they were smart, they were going to shoot immediately, because sooner or later they would have to realize that his own best move would be to be waiting right there at the top of the stairs, for the sake of surprise.

He felt the doorknob move, and then there was a pause. He put his back flat on the wall, on the hinge side of the door, and he put one foot on the opposite wall, at waist height, and he straightened his leg a little, and he clamped himself tight, and then he lifted his other foot into place, and he walked himself upward, palms and soles, until his head was bent against the stairwell ceiling and his butt was jammed four feet off the ground.

He waited.

Then the door flung open away from him and he got a split-second glimpse of a flashlight taped to a shotgun barrel, and then the shotgun fired instantly, at point-blank range and a downward angle, right under his bent knees, and the stairwell was instantly full of deafening noise and flame and smoke and dust and wood splinters from the stairs and shards of plastic from where the muzzle blast blew the protruding flashlight apart. Then the muzzle flash died and the house went pitch dark again and Reacher vaulted out of his clamped position, his right foot landing on the top stair, his left foot on the second, balanced, ready, using the bright fragment of visual memory his eyes had retained, leaning down to where he knew the shotgun must be, grabbing it two-handed, tearing it away from the guy holding it, backhanding it hard into where he knew the guy’s face must be, achieving two results in one, making the guy disappear backward and recycling the shotgun’s pump action both at once, loudly,
CRUNCH-crunch
, and then shouldering the swinging door away and feeling it crash against the second guy, and bursting out of the stairwell and firing into the floor, not really seeking to hit anyone but needing the brief light from the muzzle flash, seeing one guy down on his left and the other still up on his right, launching himself at that new target, clubbing the gun at the guy, cycling the action again against his face,
CRUNCH-crunch
, bringing him down, kicking hard against his fallen form, head, ribs, arms, legs, whatever he could find, then dancing back and kicking and stamping on the first guy in the dark, head, stomach, hands, then back to the second guy, then the first again, all unaimed and wild, overwhelming force indiscriminately applied, not giving up on it until well after he was sure no more was required.

Then he finally stopped and stepped back and stood still and listened. Most of what he heard was panicked breathing from the room on his left. The dining room. He called, ‘Doctor? This is Reacher. I’m OK. No one got shot. Everything is under control now. But I need the power back on.’

No response.

Pitch dark.

‘Doctor? The sooner the better, OK?’

He heard movement in the dining room. A chair scraping back, a hand touching a wall, a stray foot kicking a table leg. Then the door opened and the doctor came out, more sensed than seen, a presence in the dark. Reacher asked him, ‘Do you have another flashlight?’

The doctor said, ‘No.’

‘OK, go switch on the circuit breakers for me. Take care on the stairs. They might be a little busted up.’

The doctor said, ‘Now?’

‘In a minute,’ Reacher said. Then he called out, ‘You two on the floor? Can you hear me? You listening?’

No response. Pitch dark. Reacher moved forward, carefully, sliding his feet flat on the floor, feeling his way with the toes of his boots. He came up against the first guy’s head, and worked out where his gut must be, and jammed the shotgun muzzle down into it, hard. Then he pivoted onward, like pole vaulting, and found the second guy a yard away. They were on their backs, roughly in a straight line, lying symmetrically, feet to feet. Reacher stood between them and kicked the side of his left boot against one guy’s sole and his right boot against the other’s. He got set and aimed the shotgun at the floor in front of him and rehearsed a short arc, left and then right and back again, like a batter in the box loosening up his swing ahead of a pitch. He said, ‘If you guys move at all, I’m going to shoot you both in the nuts, one after the other.’

No response.

Nothing at all.

Reacher said, ‘OK, doctor, go ahead. Take care now.’ He heard the doctor feel his way along the wall, heard his feet on the stairs, slow cautious steps, fingertips trailing, the creak and crack of splintered boards underfoot, and then the confident click of a heel on the solid concrete below.

Ten seconds later the lights came back on, and the television picture jumped back to life, and the excited announcers started up again, and the heating system clicked and caught and hummed and whirred. Reacher screwed his eyes shut against the sudden dazzle and then forced them open to narrow slits and looked down. The two guys on the floor were battered and bleeding. One was out cold, and the other was dazed. Reacher fixed that with another kick to the head, and then he looked around and saw the roll of duct tape on the sofa. Five minutes later both guys were trussed up like chickens and bound together back to back by their necks and their waists and their ankles. Together they were far too heavy to move, so Reacher left them right where they were, on the hallway floor, hiding the ruined patch of parquet where he had fired into the ground.

Job done
, he thought.

Job done
, Jacob Duncan thought. Seth’s Cadillac had been retrieved from the road, and both dead Iranians had been stripped to the skin and their clothes had been dumped in the kitchen woodstove. Their bodies had been hauled to the door and left in the yard for later disposal. Then the kitchen wall and the floor had been wiped clean, and the broken glass had been swept up, and the busted window had been patched with tape and wax paper, and Seth’s hand had been taken care of, and then Jasper had dragged extra chairs in from another room, and now all six men were sitting close together around the table, the four Duncans plus Cassano and Mancini, all of them tight and collegial and elbow to elbow. The Knob Creek had been brought out, and toasts had been drunk, to each other, and to success, and to future partnership.

Jacob Duncan had leaned back and drunk with considerable private satisfaction and personal triumph, because he felt fully vindicated. He had glimpsed Cassano at the window, had seen the aimed .45, and had talked a little longer and louder than was strictly necessary, proclaiming his undying loyalty to Rossi, cementing the relationship beyond a reasonable doubt, all the while keeping his nerve and waiting for Cassano to shoot, which he had eventually. Quick thinking, courage under pressure, and a perfect result. Doubled profits stretched ahead in perpetuity. Reacher was locked safely underground, with two good men on guard. And the shipment was on its way, which was the most wonderful thing of all, because as always a small portion of it would be retained for the family’s personal use. A kind of benign shrinkage. It made the whole crazy operation worthwhile.

Jacob raised his glass and said, ‘Here’s to us,’ because life was good.

Reacher found a paring knife in a kitchen drawer and cut the decapitated remains of the flashlight off the shotgun barrel. Laymen misunderstood gunpowder. A charge powerful enough to propel a heavy projectile through the air at hundreds of miles an hour did so by creating a shaped bubble of exploding gas energetic enough to destroy anything it met on its way out of the barrel. Which was why military flashlights were made of metal and mounted with the lens behind the muzzle, not in front of it. He tossed the shattered plastic in the trash, and then he looked around the kitchen and asked, ‘Where’s my coat?’

The doctor’s wife said, ‘In the closet. When we came back in I took all the coats and hung them up. I kind of scooped yours up along the way. I thought I should hide it. I thought you might have useful stuff in it.’

Reacher glanced into the hallway. ‘Those guys didn’t search my pockets?’

‘No.’

‘I should kick them in the head again. It might raise their IQ.’

The doctor’s wife told him to sit down in a chair. He did, and she examined him carefully, and said, ‘Your nose looks really terrible.’

‘I know,’ Reacher said. He could see it between his eyes, purple and swollen, out of focus, an unexpected presence. He had never seen his own nose before, except in a mirror.

‘My husband should take a look at it.’

‘Nothing he can do.’

‘It needs to be set.’

‘I already did that.’

‘No, seriously.’

‘Believe me, it’s as set as it’s ever going to get. But you could clean the cuts, if you like. With that stuff you used before.’

Dorothy Coe helped her. They started with warm water, to sponge the crusted blood off his face. Then they got to work with the cotton balls and the thin astringent liquid. The skin had split in big U-shaped gashes. The open edges stung like crazy. The doctor’s wife was thorough. It was not a fun five minutes. But finally the job was done, and Dorothy Coe rinsed his face with more water, and then patted it dry with a paper towel.

The doctor’s wife asked, ‘Do you have a headache?’

‘A little bit,’ Reacher said.

‘Do you know what day it is?’

‘Yes.’

‘Who’s the president?’

‘Of what?’

‘The Nebraska Corn Growers.’

‘I have no idea.’

‘I should bandage your face.’

‘No need,’ Reacher said. ‘Just lend me a pair of scissors.’

‘What for?’

‘You’ll see.’

She found scissors and he found the roll of duct tape. He cut a neat eight-inch length and laid it glue-side up on the table. Then he cut a two-inch length and trimmed it to the shape of a triangle. He stuck the triangle glue-side to glue-side in the centre of the eight-inch length, and then he picked the whole thing up and smoothed it into place across his face, hard and tight, a broad silver slash that ran from one cheekbone to the other, right under his eyes. He said, ‘This is the finest field dressing in the world. The Marines once flew me from the Lebanon to Germany with nothing but duct tape keeping my lower intestine in.’

‘It’s not sterile.’

‘It’s close enough.’

‘It can’t be very comfortable.’

‘But I can see past it. That’s the main thing.’

Dorothy Coe said, ‘It looks like war paint.’

‘That’s another point in its favour.’

The doctor came in and stared for a second. But he didn’t comment. Instead he asked, ‘What happens next?’