Worth Dying For (27 page)

FORTY-NINE

T
HEY WENT BACK TO THE DINING ROOM AND SAT IN THE DARK, SO
they could watch the road. There were three more Cornhuskers out there somewhere, and it was possible they would come in and out on rotation, swapping duties, spelling each other. Like shift work. Reacher hoped they all showed up sooner or later. He kept the duct tape and the Remington close by.

The doctor said, ‘We haven’t heard any news.’

Reacher nodded. ‘Because you weren’t allowed to use the phone. But it rang, and so you think something new has happened.’

‘We think three new things have happened. Because it rang three times.’

‘Best guess?’

‘The gang war. Three men left, three phone calls. Maybe they’re all dead now.’

‘They can’t all be dead. The winner must still be alive, at least. Murder-suicide isn’t normally a feature of gang fights.’

‘OK, then maybe it’s two dead. Maybe the man in the Cadillac got the Italians.’

Reacher shook his head. ‘More likely the other way around. The man in the Cadillac will get picked off very easily. Because he’s alone, and because he’s new up here. This terrain is very weird. It takes some getting used to. The Italians have been here longer than him. In fact they’ve been here longer than me, and I feel like I’ve been here for ever.’

The doctor’s wife said, ‘I don’t see how this is a gang war at all. Why would a criminal in Las Vegas or wherever just step aside because two of his men got hurt in Nebraska?’

Reacher said, ‘The two at the motel got more than hurt.’

‘You know what I mean.’

‘Think about it,’ Reacher said. ‘Suppose the big guy is at home in Vegas, taking it easy by the pool, smoking a cigar, and his supplier calls him up and says he’s cutting him out of the chain. What does the big guy do? He sends his boys over, that’s what. But his boys just got beat. So he’s bankrupt now. He’s fresh out of threats. He’s powerless. It’s over for him.’

‘He must have more boys.’

‘They all have more boys. They can choose to fight two on two, or ten on ten, or twenty on twenty, and there’s always a winner and there’s always a loser. They accept the referee’s decision and they move on. They’re like rutting stags. It’s in their DNA.’

‘So what kind of gangs are they?’

‘The usual kind. The kind that makes big money out of something illegal.’

‘What kind of something?’

‘I don’t know. But it’s not gambling debts. It’s not something theoretical on paper. It’s something real. Something physical. With weight, and dimensions. It has to be. That’s what the Duncans do. They run a transportation company. So they’re trucking something in, and it’s getting passed along from A to B to C to D.’

‘Drugs?’

‘I don’t think so. You don’t need to truck drugs south to Vegas. You can get them direct from Mexico or South America. Or California.’

‘Drug money, then. To be laundered in the casinos. From the big cities in the East, maybe coming through Chicago.’

‘Possible,’ Reacher said. ‘Certainly it’s something very valuable, which is why they’re all in such an uproar. It has to be the kind of thing where you smile and rub your hands when you see it rolling in through the gate. And it’s late now, possibly, which is why there are so many boots on the ground up here. They’re all anxious. They all want to see it arrive, because it’s physical, and valuable. They all want to put their hands on it and babysit their share. But first of all, they want to help bust up the logjam.’

‘Which is what?’

‘Me, I think. Either the Duncans are late for some other reason and they’re using me as an excuse, or this is something a stranger absolutely can’t be allowed to see. Maybe the area has to be sanitized before it can come in. Have you ever been told to stay away from anywhere for periods of time?’

‘Not really.’

‘Have you ever seen any weird stuff arrive? Any big unexplained vehicles?’

‘We see Duncan trucks all the time. Not so much in the winter.’

‘I heard the harvest trucks are all in Ohio.’

‘They are. Nothing more than vans here now.’

Reacher nodded. ‘One of which was missing from the depot. Three spaces, two vans. So what kind of a thing is valuable and fits in a van?’

Jacob Duncan saw that Roberto Cassano’s mind had been changed once and for all by the dead man in the Cadillac’s trunk. Mancini’s, too. Now they both accepted that Reacher was a genuine threat. How else could they react? The dead man had no marks on him. None at all. So what had Reacher done to him? Frightened him to death? Jacob could see both Cassano and Mancini thinking about it. So he waited patiently and eventually Cassano looked across the table at him and said, ‘I apologize, most sincerely.’

Jacob looked back and said, ‘For what, sir?’

‘For before. For not taking you seriously about Reacher.’

‘Your apology is accepted.’

‘Thank you.’

‘But the situation remains the same,’ Jacob said. ‘Reacher is still a problem. He’s still on the loose. And nothing can happen until he’s accounted for. We have three men looking for him. They’ll work all night and all day if necessary. Just as long as it takes. Because we don’t want Mr Rossi to feel we’re in any way the junior partner in this new relationship. That’s very important to us.’

Cassano said, ‘We should go out too.’

‘All of us?’

‘I meant me and Mancini.’

‘Indeed,’ Jacob Duncan said. ‘Perhaps you should. Perhaps we should turn the whole thing into a competition. Perhaps the prize should be to speak first when we sit down to renegotiate the profit share.’

‘There are more of you than us.’

‘But you are professionals.’

‘You know the neighbourhood.’

‘You want a fairer fight? Very well. We’ll send our three boys home to bed, and I’ll send my son out in their place. Alone. That’s one against two. As long as it takes. May the best man win. To the victor, the spoils, and so on, and so forth. Shall I do that?’

‘I don’t care,’ Cassano said. ‘Do whatever you want. We’ll beat all of you, however many you put out there.’ He drained his glass and set it back on the table and stood up with Mancini. They walked out together, through the back door, to their car, which was still parked in the field, on the other side of the fence. Jacob Duncan watched them go, and then he sat back in his chair and relaxed. They would waste some long and fruitless hours, and then all in good time Reacher would be revealed, and Rossi would take the small subliminal hit, and the playing field would tilt, just a little, but enough. Jacob smiled. Success, triumph, and vindication. Subtlety, and finesse.

*     *     *

The road outside the dining room window stayed dark. Nothing moved on it. The two Cornhusker vehicles were still parked on the shoulder beyond the fence. One was an SUV and one was a pick-up truck. Both looked cold and inert. Overhead the moon came and went, first shining faintly through thin cloud, and then disappearing completely behind thicker layers.

The doctor said, ‘I don’t like just sitting here.’

‘So don’t,’ Reacher said. ‘Go to bed. Take a nap.’

‘What are you going to do?’

‘Nothing. I’m waiting for daylight.’

‘Why?’

‘Because you don’t have street lights here.’

‘You’re going out?’

‘Eventually.’

‘Why?’

‘Places to go, things to see.’

‘One of us should stay awake. To keep an eye on things.’

‘I’ll do that,’ Reacher said.

‘You must be tired.’

‘I’ll be OK. You guys go get some rest.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Positive.’

They didn’t need much more persuading. The doctor looked at his wife and they headed off together, and then Dorothy Coe followed them, presumably to a spare room somewhere. Doors opened and closed and water ran and toilets flushed, and then the house went quiet. The heating system whirred and the taped-up football players muttered and grunted and snored on the hallway floor, but apart from that Reacher heard nothing at all. He sat upright on the hard chair and kept his eyes open and stared out into the dark. The duct tape bandage itched his face. He did OK for ten or twenty minutes, and then he slipped a little, like he knew he would, like he often had before, into a kind of trance, like suspended animation, half awake and half asleep, half effective and half useless. He was a less than perfect sentry, and he knew it. But then, practically all sentries were less than perfect. It was any army’s most persistent problem.

Half awake and half asleep. Half effective and half useless. He heard the car and he saw its lights, but it was a whole stubborn second before he understood he wasn’t dreaming.

FIFTY

T
HE CAR CAME IN FROM THE RIGHT, FROM THE EAST, PRECEDED BY
headlight beams and road noise. It slowed to a walk and passed behind the parked Cornhusker pick-up, and then it rolled on and passed behind the parked SUV. Then it turned and nosed into the driveway, with a crunch and a squelch from its wheels on the gravel, and then it stopped.

And then Reacher saw it.

There was enough light scatter and enough reflection to identify it. It was the dark blue Chevrolet. The Italians. Reacher picked up the Remington. The car stayed where it was. No one got out. It was sixty yards away, half in and half out of the driveway mouth. Just sitting there, lights on, idling. A tactical problem. Reacher had three innocent non-combatants in a wood-frame house. There were two parked cars on the driveway and two on the road, for cover. There were two opponents and the house had windows and a door both front and back.

Not ideal conditions for a gun battle.

Best hope would be for the Italians to approach the front door on foot. Game over, right there. Reacher could swing the door open and fire point blank. But the Italians weren’t approaching on foot. They were just sitting in the car. Doing nothing. Talking, maybe. And scouting around. Reacher could see dim flashes of white as necks craned and heads turned. They were discussing something.

Angelo Mancini was saying, ‘This is a waste of time. He ain’t in there. He can’t be. Not unless he’s hanging out with three of their football players.’

Roberto Cassano nodded. He glanced over his shoulder at the pick-up truck and the SUV on the shoulder, and then he glanced ahead at the gold GMC Yukon on the driveway. It was parked in front of an older truck. He said, ‘That’s the old woman’s ride, from the farm.’

Mancini said, ‘Sleepover time.’

‘I guess Mahmeini’s boy was right about something. They know the doctor is the weak link. They’ve got him staked out.’

‘Not much of a trap, all things considered. Not with their cars parked out front. No one is going to walk into that.’

‘Which is good for us, in a way. They’re wasting their resources. Which gives us a better chance somewhere else.’

‘Do you want to check here? Just in case?’

‘What’s the point? If he’s in there, he’s already their prisoner.’

‘That’s what I was thinking. But then I thought, not necessarily. They could be his prisoner.’

‘One against three?’

‘You saw what he did to the guy in the Cadillac’s trunk.’

‘I don’t know. I kind of want to check, I guess. And maybe we should. But you heard the man. This is a competition now. We can’t waste time.’

‘Wouldn’t take much time.’

‘I know. But we’ll look like idiots if he’s not in there. The football players will be straight on the phone to the Duncans, all yukking it up about how we came looking in a place he couldn’t possibly be.’

‘No one said there are style points involved.’

‘But there are. There are always style points involved. This is a long game. There’s a lot of money involved. If we lose face we’ll never get it back.’

‘So where?’

Cassano looked again at the old woman’s truck. ‘If she’s here, then her house is empty tonight. And people looking for places to hide love empty houses.’

Reacher saw them back out and drive away again. At first he didn’t understand why. Then he concluded they were looking for Seth Duncan. They had pulled up, they had eyeballed the parked cars, they had seen that the Mazda wasn’t among them, and they had gone away again. Logical. He put the Remington back on the floor, and planted his feet, and straightened his back, and stared out into the darkness.

Nothing else happened for ninety long minutes. No one came, no one stirred. Then pale streaks of dawn started showing in the sky to Reacher’s right. They came in low and silver and purple, and the land slowly lightened from black to grey, and the world once again took solid shape, all the way to the far horizon. Rags of tattered cloud lit up bright overhead, and a knee-high mist rose up off the dirt. A new day. But not a good one, Reacher thought. It was going to be a day full of pain, both for those who deserved it, and for those who didn’t.

He waited.

He couldn’t get his Yukon out, because he had no key for Dorothy Coe’s pick-up truck. It was possibly in her coat, but he wasn’t inclined to go look for it. He was in no hurry. It was wintertime. Full daylight was still an hour away.

Five hundred miles due north, up in Canada, just above the 49th Parallel, because of the latitude, dawn came a little later. The first of the morning light filtered down through the needles of the towering pine and touched the white van in its summer picnic spot at the end of the rough grassy track. The driver woke in his seat, and blinked, and stretched. He had heard nothing all night long. He had seen nothing. No bears, no coyotes, no red foxes, no moose, no elk, no wolves. No people. He had been warm, because he had a sleeping bag filled with down, but he had been very uncomfortable, because panel vans had small cabs, and he had spent the night folded into a seat that didn’t recline very far. It was always on his mind that the cargo in the back was treated better than he was. It rode more comfortably. But then, it was expensive and hard to get, and he wasn’t. He was a realistic man. He knew how things worked.

He climbed out and took a leak against the pine’s ancient trunk. Then he ate and drank from his meagre supplies, and he pushed his palms against his aching back, and he stretched again to work out the kinks. The sky was brightening. It was his favourite time for a run to the border. Light enough to see, too early for company. Ideal. He had just twenty miles to go, most of them on an unmapped forest track, to a point a little less than four thousand yards north of the line. The transfer zone, he called it. The end of the road for him, but not for his cargo.

He climbed back in the cab and started the engine. He let it warm and settle for a minute while he checked the dials and the gauges. Then he selected first gear, and released the parking brake, and turned the wheel, and moved away slowly, at walking speed, lurching and bouncing down the rough grassy track.

Reacher heard sounds at the end of the hallway. A toilet flushing, a faucet running, a door opening, a door closing. Then the doctor came limping past the dining room, stiff with sleep, mute with morning. He nodded as he passed, and he skirted the football players, and he headed for the kitchen. A minute later Reacher heard the gulp and hiss of the coffee machine. The sun was up enough to show a reflection in the window of the SUV parked beyond the fence. Webs of frost were glinting and glittering in the fields.

The doctor came in with two mugs of coffee. He was dressed in a sweater over pyjamas. His hair was uncombed. The damage on his face was lost in general redness. He put one mug in front of Reacher and threaded his way around and sat in a chair on the opposite side of the table.

He said, ‘Good morning.’

Reacher said nothing.

The doctor asked, ‘How’s your nose?’

Reacher said, ‘Terrific.’

The doctor said, ‘There’s something you never told me.’

Reacher said, ‘There are many things I never told you.’

‘You said twenty-five years ago the detective neglected to search somewhere. You said because of ignorance or confusion.’

Reacher nodded, and took a sip of his coffee.

The doctor asked, ‘Is that where you’re going this morning?’

‘Yes, it is.’

‘Will you find anything there after twenty-five years?’

‘Probably not.’

‘Then why are you going?’

‘Because I don’t believe in ghosts.’

‘I don’t follow.’

‘I hope you never have to. I hope I’m wrong.’

‘Where is this place we’re talking about?’

‘Mrs Coe told me that fifty years ago two farms were sold for a development that never happened. The outbuildings from one of them are still there. Way out in a field. A barn, and a smaller shed.’

The doctor nodded. ‘I know where they are.’

‘People plough right up to them.’

‘I know,’ the doctor said. ‘I guess they shouldn’t, but why let good land go to waste? The subdivisions were never built, and they’re never going to be. So it’s something for nothing, and God knows these people need it. It’s yield that doesn’t show up on their mortgages.’

‘So when Detective Carson came up here twenty-five years ago, what did he see? In the early summer? He saw about a million acres of waist-high corn, and he saw some houses dotted around here and there, and he saw some outbuildings dotted around here and there. He stopped in at every house, and every occupant said they’d searched their outbuildings. So Carson went away again, and that old barn and that old shed fell right between the cracks. Because Carson’s question was, did you search
your
outbuildings? Everyone said yes, probably quite truthfully. And Carson saw the old barn and the old shed and quite naturally assumed they must belong to someone, and that therefore they had indeed been looked at, as promised. But they didn’t belong to anyone, and they hadn’t been looked at.’

‘You think that was the scene of the crime?’

‘I think Carson should have asked that question twenty-five years ago.’

‘There won’t be anything there. There can’t be. Those buildings are ruins now, and they must have been ruins then. They’ve been sitting there empty for fifty years, in the middle of nowhere, just mouldering away.’

‘Have they?’

‘Of course. You said it yourself, they don’t belong to anyone.’

‘Then why have they got wheel ruts all the way to the door?’

‘Have they?’

Reacher nodded. ‘I hid a truck in the smaller shed my first night. No problem getting there. I’ve seen worse roads in New York City.’

‘Old ruts? Or new ruts?’

‘Hard to tell. Both, probably. Many years’ worth, I would say. Quite deep, quite well established. No weeds. Not much traffic, probably, but some. Some kind of regularity. Enough to keep the ruts in shape, anyway.’

‘I don’t understand. Who would use those places now? And for what?’

Reacher said nothing. He was looking out the window. The light was getting stronger. The fields were turning from grey to brown. The parked pick-up beyond the fence was all lit up by a low ray.

The doctor asked, ‘So you think someone scooped the kid up and drove her to that barn?’

‘I’m not sure any more,’ Reacher said. ‘They were harvesting alfalfa at the time, and there will have been plenty of trucks on the road. And I’m guessing this whole place felt a bit happier back then. More energetic. People doing this and that, going here and there. The roads were probably a little busier than they are now. Probably a lot busier. Maybe even too busy to risk scooping a kid up against her will in broad daylight.’

‘So what do you think happened to her?’

Reacher didn’t answer. He was still looking out the window. He could see the knots in the fence timbers. He could see clumps of frozen weeds at the base of the posts. The front lawn was dry and brittle with cold.

Reacher said, ‘You’re not much of a gardener.’

‘No talent,’ the doctor said. ‘No time.’

‘Does anyone garden?’

‘Not really. People are too tired. And working farmers hardly ever garden. They grow stuff to sell, not to look at.’

‘OK.’

‘Why do you want to know?’

‘I’m asking myself, if I was a little girl with a bicycle, and I loved flowers, where would I go to see some? No point coming to a house like this, for instance. Or any house, probably. Or anywhere at all, really, because every last inch of ground is ploughed for cash crops. I can think of just three possibilities. I saw two big rocks in the fields, with brambles around them. Nice wild flowers in the early summer, probably. There may be more just like them, but it doesn’t matter anyway, because in the early summer they would be completely inaccessible, because you’d have to wade a mile through growing corn just to get to them. But there was one other place I saw the same kind of brambles.’

‘Where was that?’

‘Around the base of that old barn. Windblown seeds, I guess. People plough close, but they leave some space.’

‘You think she rode there on her own?’

‘I think it’s possible. Maybe she knew the one place she was sure to see flowers. And maybe someone knew she knew.’