Worth Dying For (4 page)

SIX

T
HE PARTY WAS STILL IN FULL SWING IN THE BACK ROOM
. N
O
more elbows on tables. Now all seven men were leaning back expansively, enjoying themselves, spreading out, owning the space. They were all a little red in the face from the warmth and the beer, six of them half listening to the seventh boasting about something and getting ready to one-up him with the next anecdote. Reacher strolled in and stepped behind Duncan’s chair and took his hands out of his pockets. He put them on Duncan’s shoulders. The room went absolutely silent. Reacher leaned on his hands and pulled them back a little until Duncan’s chair was balanced uneasily, up on two legs. Then he let go and the chair thumped forward again and Duncan scrambled up out of it and stood straight and turned around, equal parts fear and anger in his face, plus an attempt to play it cool for his pals. Then he looked around and couldn’t find his guy, which took out some of the cool and some of the anger and left all of the fear.

Reacher asked, ‘Seth Duncan?’

The bony man didn’t answer.

Reacher said, ‘I have a message for you, pal.’

Duncan said, ‘Who from?’

‘The National Association of Marriage Counselors.’

‘Is there such a thing?’

‘Probably.’

‘What’s the message?’

‘It’s more of a question.’

‘OK, what’s the question?’

‘The question is, how do
you
like it?’ Reacher hit him, a straight right to the nose, a big vicious blow, his knuckles driving through cartilage and bone and crushing it all flat. Duncan went over backward and landed on the table. He bounced once and plates broke and glasses tipped over and knives skittered away and fell to the floor.

Duncan made no attempt to get up.

Reacher walked away, down the corridor, past the lectern, back to the lot.

The key the red-headed guy had given him was marked with a big figure six, so Reacher parked next to the sixth cabin and went inside and found a miniature version of the lounge, a purely circular space except for a straight section boxed off for a bathroom and a closet. The ceiling was domed and washed with light. The bed was against the wall, on a platform that had been custom built to fit the curve. There was a tub-shaped armchair and a small round table next to it, with an old-fashioned glass television on a larger table nearby. There was an old-fashioned telephone next to the bed. It had a rotary dial. The bathroom was small but adequate, with a shower head over a tub, and the closet was about the same size as the bathroom.

Everything he needed, and nothing he didn’t.

He undressed and left his clothes on the bed and took a shower. He ran the water as hot as he could stand and let it play over his neck, his shoulders, his arms, his ribs. He raised one arm, then the other, then both of them together. They moved, but they moved like a newly constructed machine in need of some further development. The good news was that his knuckles didn’t hurt at all.

Seth Duncan’s doctor was more than two hundred miles away in Denver, Colorado. A first-class medical man, no question, but obviously impractical for emergency services. And the nearest ER was an hour away. And no one in his right mind would go near the local quack. So Duncan had a friend drive him to his uncle Jasper Duncan’s place. Because his uncle Jasper Duncan was the kind of guy who could handle odd things at odd hours. He lived five miles south of the motel crossroads, in the northernmost of the three old houses that stood all alone at the end of their long shared driveway. The house was a warren, filled with all kinds of things saved against the day they might be useful. Uncle Jasper himself was more than sixty years old, built like the bole of an oak, a man of various arcane skills, a reservoir of folk wisdom and backwoods knowledge.

Jasper sat Seth Duncan in a kitchen chair and took a look at the injury. Then he went away and rooted around and came back with a syringe and some local anaesthetic. It was a veterinary product, designed for hogs, but mammals were mammals, and it worked. When the site was properly numb, Jasper used a strong thumb and a strong forefinger to set the bone and then went away again and rooted around and came back with an old aluminium facial splint. It was the kind of thing he could be counted on to have at hand. He worked at it and reshaped it to fit and taped it over his nephew’s nose. He stopped up the nostrils with wads of gauze and used warm water to sponge away the blood.

Then he got on the phone and called his neighbours.

Next to him lived his brother Jonas Duncan, and next to Jonas lived their brother Jacob Duncan, who was Seth Duncan’s father. Five minutes later all four men were sitting around Jasper’s kitchen table, and a council of war had started.

Jacob Duncan said, ‘First things first, son. Who was the guy?’

Seth Duncan said, ‘I never saw him before.’

Jonas said, ‘No, first things first, where the hell was your boy Brett?’

‘The guy jumped him in the parking lot. Brett was escorting him out. The guy kicked him in the balls and then kicked him in the head. Just left him lying there.’

‘Is he OK?’

‘He’s got a concussion. Doesn’t know what day it is. Useless piece of shit. I want him replaced.’

‘Plenty more where he came from,’ Jonas said.

Jasper asked, ‘So who was this guy?’

‘He was a big man in a brown coat. With a watch cap on his head. That’s all I saw. That’s all I remember. He just came in and hit me.’

‘Why would he?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Didn’t he say anything?’

‘Just some bullshit. But Brett said he was driving the doctor’s car.’

‘He doesn’t know what day it is but he remembers what car the guy was in?’

‘I guess concussions are unpredictable.’

‘And you’re sure it wasn’t the doctor who hit you?’

‘I told you, I never saw the guy before. I know the doctor. And the damn doctor wouldn’t hit me, anyway. He wouldn’t dare.’

Jacob Duncan said, ‘What aren’t you telling us, son?’

‘I have a bad headache.’

‘I’m sure you do. But you know that’s not what I mean.’

‘I don’t want to talk.’

‘But you know you have to. We can’t let a thing like this go by.’

Seth Duncan looked left, looked right. He said, ‘OK, I had a dispute with Eleanor tonight. Before I went out. No big deal. But I had to slap her.’

‘How hard?’

‘I might have made her nose bleed.’

‘How bad?’

‘You know she’s delicate.’

The kitchen went quiet for a moment. Jonas Duncan said, ‘So let’s try to piece it together. Your wife called the doctor.’

‘She’s been told not to do that.’

‘But maybe she did anyway. Because she’s delicate. And maybe the doctor wasn’t home. Maybe he was in the motel lounge, like he usually is, halfway through a bottle of Jim Beam, like he usually is. Maybe Eleanor reached him there.’

‘He’s been told to stay away from her.’

‘But maybe he didn’t obey. Sometimes doctors have strange notions. And perhaps he was too drunk to drive. He usually is. Because of the bourbon. So perhaps he asked someone else to drive him. Because of his level of concern.’

‘Who else?’

‘Another guy in the lounge.’

‘Nobody would dare do that.’

‘Nobody who lives here, I agree. Nobody who knows not to. But a stranger might do it. And it’s a motel, after all. That’s what motels are for. Strangers, passing through.’

‘OK, so then what?’

‘Maybe the stranger didn’t like what he saw at your house, and he came to find you.’

‘Eleanor gave me up?’

‘She must have. How else would the guy have known where to look? He can’t know his way around, if he’s a stranger.’

Jacob Duncan asked, ‘What exactly did he say to you?’

‘Some bullshit about marriage counselling.’

Jonas Duncan nodded and said, ‘There you go. That’s how it played out. We’ve got a passer-by full of moral outrage. A guest in the motel.’

Seth Duncan said, ‘I want him hurt bad.’

His father said, ‘He will be, son. He’ll be hurt bad and sent on his way. Who have we got?’

Jasper said, ‘Not Brett, I guess.’

Jonas said, ‘Plenty more where he came from.’

Jacob Duncan said, ‘Send two of them. Have them call me for orders before they deploy.’

SEVEN

R
EACHER DRESSED AGAIN AFTER HIS SHOWER, COAT AND ALL
because the room was cold, and then he turned the lights off and sat in the tub armchair and waited. He didn’t expect Seth Duncan to call the cops. Apparently the cops were a county department, sixty miles away. No local ties. No local loyalties. And calling the cops would require a story, and a story would unravel straight to a confession about beating his wife. No smug guy would head down that route.

But a smug guy who had just lost a bodyguard might have access to a replacement, or two or three. And whereas body-guarding was generally a reactive profession, those two or three substitutes might be persuaded to go proactive for one night only, especially if they were Brett’s friends. And Reacher knew it wouldn’t be hard to track him down. The Apollo Inn was probably the only public accommodation in two hundred square miles. And if the doctor’s drinking habits were well known in the neighbourhood, it wouldn’t be difficult to puzzle out the chain of causation. The phone call, the treatment, the intervention.

So Reacher dressed again and laced his boots and sat in the dark and kept his ears open for tyres on gravel.

More than four hundred and fifty miles due north of where Reacher was sitting, the United States finished and Canada began. The world’s longest land border followed the 49th Parallel, over mountains and roads and rivers and streams, and through towns and fields and woods, its western portion running perfectly straight for nearly nineteen hundred miles, all the way from Washington State to Minnesota, every inch of it undefended in the military sense, most of it unfenced and unmarked, but much of it surveilled more closely than people knew. Between Washington State and Minnesota there were fifty-four official crossings, seventeen manned around the clock, thirty-six manned through daylight hours only, and one entirely unstaffed but equipped with telephones connected to remote customs offices. Elsewhere the line was randomly patrolled by a classified number of agents, and more isolated spots had cameras, and great lengths of it had motion sensors buried in the earth. The governments on both sides of the line had a pretty good idea of what was happening along its length.

A pretty good idea, but not perfect knowledge. In the state of Montana, east of the Rockies, below the tree line, the land spent a hundred miles flattening from jagged peaks to gentle plains, most of it thickly forested with conifers, the woods interrupted only by sparkling streams and freshwater lakes and occasional sandy needle-strewn paths. One of those paths connected through labyrinthine miles of twists and turns to a dirt fire road, which ran south and in turn connected to a wandering gravel road, which many miles later ended as an inconspicuous left-hand turn off a minor county two-lane far to the north of a small no-account town called Hogg Parish.

A grey panel truck made that left-hand turn. It rolled slowly along the gravel, crunching quietly, getting bounced left and right by the ruts and the bad camber, its springs creaking, its headlights off and its parking lights on. It burrowed ever deeper into the bitter cold and the darkness, endlessly. Then eventually it turned on to the fire road, beaten dirt now under its wheels, bare frozen trunks to the left and right, a narrow slice of night sky visible overhead, plenty of stars, no moon, the GPS satellites thousands of miles up connecting perfectly, guiding it, showing it the limits of safety.

It crawled onward, many miles, and then the fire road petered out and the sandy track began. The truck slowed to a walk and locked into the ruts it had made on its many previous trips. It followed them left and right through arbitrary turns and curves, between scarred trees where the clearance was tight, with stubs of low branches scraping the sides. It drove for more than an hour and then came to a stop in a location chosen long before, exactly two miles south of the border. No one was certain where the motion sensors had been buried, but most assumed that a belt a mile either side of the line was the practical limit. Like a minefield. Another mile had been added as a safety margin, and a small area of underbrush had been hacked out to allow the truck to turn.

The truck backed up and turned and stopped astride the sandy track, facing south, in position, ready. It shut down and settled and its lights went off.

It waited.

Reacher waited in the dark in his tub armchair, forty minutes, an hour, tracing the next day’s intended route in his head. South to the Interstate, and then east. The Interstate would be easy. He had hitchhiked most of the network before. There were on-ramps and rest areas and a vast travelling population, some of it commercial, some of it private, a fair proportion of it lonely and ready for company. The problem would come before the Interstate, on the middle-of-nowhere trek down to it. Since climbing out of the car that had dumped him at the crossroads he had heard no traffic at all. Night-time was always worse than daytime, but even so it was rare in America to be close to a road and hear nothing go by. In fact he had heard nothing at all, no wind, no night sounds, and he had been listening hard, for tyres on gravel. It was like he had gone deaf. He raised his hand awkwardly and clicked his fingers near his ear, just to be sure. He wasn’t deaf. It was just the middle of the night, in the countryside. That was all. He got up and used the bathroom and sat back down.

Then he heard something.

Not a passing vehicle, not wind, not night sounds.

Not tyres on gravel.

Footsteps on gravel.

EIGHT

F
OOTSTEPS ON GRAVEL
. O
NE PAIR
. A
LIGHT
,
HESITANT TREAD
, approaching. Reacher watched the window and saw a shape flit across it. Small, slight, head ducked down into the collar of a coat.

A woman.

There was a knock at the door, soft and tentative and padded. A small nervous hand, wearing a glove. A decoy, possibly. Not beyond the wit of man to send someone on ahead, all innocent and unthreatening, to get the door open and lull the target into a sense of false security. Not unlikely that such a person would be nervous and hesitant about her role.

Reacher crossed the floor silently and headed back to the bathroom. He eased the window up and clipped out the screen and rested it in the bathtub. Then he ducked his head and climbed out, scissoring his legs over the sill, stepping down to the gravel. He walked one of the silver timbers that boxed the path, like a tightrope, silently. He went counterclockwise around the circular cabin and came up on the woman from behind.

She was alone.

No cars on the road, nobody in the lot, nobody flattened either side of his door, nobody crouched under his window. Just the woman, standing there on her own. She looked cold. She was wearing a wool coat and a scarf. No hat. She was maybe forty, small, dark, and worried. She raised her hand and knocked again.

Reacher said, ‘I’m here.’

She gasped and spun around and put her hand on her chest. Her mouth stayed open and made a tiny O. He said, ‘I’m sorry if I startled you, but I wasn’t expecting visitors.’

She said, ‘Perhaps you should have been.’

‘Well, in fact, perhaps I was. But not you.’

‘Can we go inside?’

‘Who are you?’

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m the doctor’s wife.’

‘I’m pleased to meet you,’ Reacher said.

‘Can we go inside?’

Reacher found the key in his pocket and unlocked the door from the outside. The doctor’s wife stepped in and he followed her and locked the door again behind them. He crossed the room and closed the bathroom door against the night air coming in through the open window. He turned back to find her standing in the middle of the space. He indicated the armchair and said, ‘Please.’

She sat down. Didn’t unbutton her coat. She was still nervous. If she had been carrying a purse, she would have had it clamped hard on her knees, defensively. She said, ‘I walked all the way over here.’

‘To pick up the car? You should have let your husband do that, in the morning. That’s what I arranged with him.’

‘He’s too drunk to drive.’

‘He’ll be OK by morning, surely.’

‘Morning’s too late. You have to get going. Right now. You’re not safe here.’

‘You think?’

‘My husband said you’re heading south to the Interstate. I’ll drive you there.’

‘Now? It’s got to be a hundred miles.’

‘A hundred and twenty.’

‘It’s the middle of the night.’

‘You’re not safe here. My husband told me what happened. You interfered with the Duncans. You
saw
. They’ll punish him for sure, and we think they’ll come after you too.’

‘They?’

‘The Duncans. There are four of them.’

‘Punish him how?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. Last time they wouldn’t let him come here for a month.’

‘Here? To the lounge?’

‘It’s his favourite place.’

‘How could they stop him coming here?’

‘They told Mr Vincent not to serve him. The owner.’

‘Why would the owner of this place do what the Duncans tell him?’

‘The Duncans run a trucking business. All of Mr Vincent’s supplies come through them. He signed a contract. He kind of had to. That’s how the Duncans work. So if Mr Vincent doesn’t play ball, a couple of deliveries will be late, a couple lost, a couple damaged. He knows that. He’ll go out of business.’

Reacher asked, ‘What will they figure to do to me?’

The woman said, ‘They hire football players right out of college. Cornhuskers. The ones who were good enough to get scholarships, but not good enough to go to the NFL. Guards and tackles. Big guys.’

Brett
, Reacher thought.

The woman said, ‘They’ll connect the dots and figure out where you are. I mean, where else could you be? They’ll pay you a visit. Maybe they’re already on their way.’

‘From where?’

‘The Duncan depot is twenty miles from here. Most of their people live close to it.’

‘How many football players have they got?’

‘Ten.’

Reacher said nothing.

The woman said, ‘My husband heard you say you’re headed for Virginia.’

‘That’s the plan.’

‘Is that where you live?’

‘As much as anywhere else.’

‘We should get going. You’re in big trouble.’

‘Not unless they send all nine at once,’ Reacher said.

‘All nine what?’

‘Football players.’

‘I said there were ten.’

‘I already met one of them. He’s currently indisposed. They’re one short, as of tonight.’

‘What?’

‘He got between me and Seth Duncan.’

‘What did you do to Seth Duncan?’

‘I broke his nose.’

‘Oh, sweet Jesus. Why?’

‘Why not?’

‘Oh sweet, sweet Jesus. Where are the car keys?’

‘What will happen to Mrs Duncan?’

‘We need to get going. Right this minute.’

‘First answer the question.’

‘Mrs Duncan will be punished too. For calling my husband. She’s been told not to do that. Just like he’s been told not to go treat her.’

‘He’s a doctor. He doesn’t get a choice. They take an oath, don’t they?’

‘What’s your name?’

‘Jack Reacher.’

‘We have to go, Mr Reacher. Right now.’

‘What will they do to Mrs Duncan?’

‘This isn’t your business,’ the woman said. Which, strictly speaking, was fairly close to Reacher’s own opinion at that point. His business was to get himself to Virginia, and he was being offered a ride through the hardest part of the journey, fast and free. I-80 awaited, two hours away. An on-ramp, the last of the night drivers, the first stirrings of morning traffic. Maybe breakfast. Maybe there was a rest area or a truck stop with a greasy spoon café. Bacon, eggs, coffee.

‘What will they do to her?’ he asked again.

The woman said, ‘Probably nothing much.’

‘What kind of nothing much?’

‘Well, they might put her on a coagulant. One of the uncles seems to have medical supplies. Or maybe they’ll just stop her taking so much aspirin. So she doesn’t bleed so bad next time. And they’ll probably ground her for a month. That’s all. Nothing too serious. Nothing for you to worry about. They’ve been married ten years, after all. She’s not a prisoner. She could leave if she wanted to.’

‘Except this time she inadvertently got her husband’s nose broken. He might take that out on her, if he can’t take it out on me.’

The doctor’s wife said nothing. But it sounded like she was agreeing. The strange round room went quiet. Then Reacher heard tyres on gravel.