Worth Dying For (34 page)
Authors: Lee Child
Tags: #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #Police Procedural, #Thrillers, #Crime, #Fiction - Espionage, #Thriller, #American Mystery & Suspense Fiction
‘Prejudice and local knowledge,’ Reacher said. ‘I bet you mentioned Seth beat you.’
‘Well, yes, I did. Because he did.’
‘Therefore they ignored everything else you said. They put it down to a wronged wife making stuff up to get her husband in trouble. Cops can be like that sometimes. It ain’t right, but that’s how it is. And they certainly weren’t going to tackle the domestic issue itself. Not against the Duncans. Because of local knowledge. Dorothy Coe told me some neighbourhood kids join the State Police. So either they were asked, or else the story had already gotten around some other way, but in either case the message was the same, which was, in that corner of that county, you can’t mess with the Duncans.’
‘I don’t believe it.’
‘You tried,’ Reacher said. ‘Along with everything else, you have to remember that. You tried to do the right thing.’
They drove on and blew through what counted as the downtown area, past the Chamber of Commerce billboard, past the aluminium coach diner, past the gas station with its Texaco sign and its three service bays, past the hardware store, and the liquor store, and the bank, and the tyre shop and the John Deere dealership and the grocery and the pharmacy, past the water tower, past McNally Street, past the signpost to the hospital, and onward into territory Reacher hadn’t seen before. The van’s engine muttered low, and the tyres hummed, and from time to time Reacher thought he heard sounds from the load space behind him, people moving around, talking occasionally, even laughing. Beside him Eleanor Duncan concentrated on the dark road ahead, and he watched her in the corner of his eye.
Then an hour and sixty miles later they saw bright vapour lights at the highway cloverleaf, and big green signs pointing west and east. Eleanor slowed and stopped and Reacher got out and waved her away. She used the first ramp, west towards Denver and Salt Lake City, and he walked under the bridge and set up on the eastbound ramp, one foot on the shoulder and one in the traffic lane, and he stuck out his thumb and smiled and tried to look friendly.
Lee Child
is one of the world’s leading thriller writers. His novels consistently achieve the number one slot in hardback and paperback on bestsellers lists on both sides of the Atlantic, and are translated into over forty languages. His début novel,
Killing Floor
, was written after he was made redundant from his television job in Manchester, and introduced his much-admired maverick hero, the former military cop Jack Reacher. Born in Coventry, he now lives in New York. Visit
www.jackreacher.co.uk
Table of Contents
Table of Contents