Jack Reacher 15 - Worth Dying For Page 4

  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 traveling 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. Nighttime 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 tires 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 tires on gravel.

  Footsteps on gravel.

  Chapter 8

  Footsteps on gravel. One 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 on 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 favorite 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 t
hey 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 tires on gravel.

  Chapter 9

  Reacher checked the window. There were four tires in total, big knobbly off-road things, all of them on a Ford pick-up truck. The truck had a jacked suspension and lights on a roof bar and a snorkel air intake and a winch on the front. There were two large shapes in the gloom inside. The shapes had thick necks and huge shoulders. The truck nosed slowly down the row of cabins and stopped twenty feet behind the parked Subaru. The headlights stayed on. The engine idled. The doors opened. Two guys climbed out.

  They both looked like Brett, only bigger. Late twenties, easily six-six or six-seven, probably close to three hundred pounds each, big waists made tiny by huge chests and arms and shoulders. They had cropped hair and small eyes and fleshy faces. They were the kind of guys who ate two dinners and were still hungry afterward. They were wearing red Cornhuskers football jackets made gray by the blue light from the cabin’s eaves.

  The doctor’s wife joined Reacher at the window.

  “Sweet Jesus,” she said.

  Reacher said nothing.

  The two guys closed the truck’s doors and stepped back in unison to the load bed and unlatched a tool locker bolted across its width behind the cab. They lifted the lid and one took out an engineer’s ball-peen hammer and the other took out a two-headed wrench at least a foot and a half long. They left the lid open and walked forward into the truck’s headlight wash and their shadows jumped ahead of them. They were light on their feet and nimble for their size, like football players usually were. They paused for a moment and looked at the cabin’s door, and then they turned away.

  Toward the Subaru.

  They attacked it in a violent frenzy, an absolute blitzkrieg, two or three minutes of uncontrolled smashing and pounding. The noise was deafening. They smashed every shard of glass out of the windshield, they smashed the side windows, the back window, the headlights, the taillights. They hammered jagged dents into the hood, into the doors, into the roof, into the fenders, into the tailgate. They put their arms through the absent glass and smashed up the dials and the switches and the radio.

  Shit, Reacher thought. There goes my ride.

  “My husband’s punishment,” the doctor’s wife whispered. “Worse this time.”

  The two guys stopped as suddenly as they had started. They stood there, one on each side of the wrecked wagon, and they breathed hard and rolled their shoulders and let their weapons hang down by their sides. Pebbles of broken automotive glass glittered in the neon and the boom and clang of battered sheet metal echoed away to absolute silence.

  Reacher took off his coat and dumped it on the bed.

  The two guys formed up shoulder to shoulder and headed for the cabin’s door. Reacher opened it up and stepped out to meet them head-on. Win or lose, fighting inside would bust up the room, and Vincent the motel owner had enough problems already.

  The two guys stopped ten feet away and stood there, side by side, symmetrical, their weapons in their outside hands, four cubic yards of bone and muscle, six hundred pounds of beef, all flushed and sweating in the chill.

  Reacher said, “Pop quiz, guys. You spent four years in college learning how to play a game. I spent thirteen years in the army learning how to kill people. So how scared am I?”

  No answer.

  “And you were so bad at it you couldn’t even get drafted afterward. I was so good at it I got all kinds of medals and promotions. So how scared are you?”

  “Not very,” said the guy with the wrench.

  Wrong answer. But understandable. Being a good enough guard or tackle in high school to get a full-boat free ride to the big school in Lincoln was no mean achievement. Playing even a cameo role on the field in Memorial Stadium made a guy close to the best of the best. And failing to make the National Football League was no kind of real disgrace. The dividing line between success and failure in the world of sports was often very narrow, and the reasons for falling on one side or the other were often very arbitrary. These guys had been the elite for most of twenty years, the greatest thing their neighborhood had ever seen, then their town, then their county, maybe their state. They had been popular, they had been feted, they had gotten the girls. And they probably hadn’t lost a fight since they were eight years old.

  Except they had never had a fight. Not in the sense meant by people paid to fight or die. Pushing and shoving at the schoolyard gate or on the sidewalk outside the soda shop or late at night after a start-of-summer keg party was as far from fighting as two fat guys tossing lame spirals in the park were from the Super Bowl. These guys were amateurs, and worse, they were complacent amateurs, accustomed to getting by on bulk and reputation alone. In the real world, they would be dead before they even landed a blow.

  Case in point: bad choice of weapons. Best are shooting weapons, second best are stabbing weapons, third best are slashing weapons. Blunt instruments are way down the list. They slow hand speed. Their uncontrolled momentum is disadvantageous after a miss. And: If you have to use them, the backhand is the only way to go, so that you accelerate and strike in the same sudden fluid motion. But these guys were shoulder to shoulder with their weapons in their outer hands, which promised forehand swings, which meant that the hammer or the wrench would have to be swung backward first, then stopped, then brought forward again. The first part of the move would be a clear telegraph. All the warning in the world. No surprise. They might as well put a notice in the newspaper, or send a cable by Western Union.

  Reacher smiled. He had been raised on military bases all around the world, battling hardcore Marine progeny, honing his skills against gangs of resentful native youths in dusty Pacific streets and damp European alleys. Whatever hardscrabble town in Texas or Arkansas or Nebraska these guys had come up in had been a feather bed by comparison. And while they had been studying the playbook and learning to run and jump and catch, he had been broken down and built back up by the kind of experts who could snap your neck so fast you never knew it had happened until you went to nod your head and it rolled away down the street without you.

  The guy with the wrench said, “We’ve got a message for you, pal.”

  Reacher said, “Really?”

  “Actually it’s more of a question.”

  “Any difficult words? You need more time?” Reacher stepped forward and a little to his right. He put himself directly in front of the two guys, equidistant, seven feet away, so that if he was six on a clock face, they were eleven and one. The guy with the wrench was on his left, and the guy with the hammer was on his right.

  The guy with the wrench moved first. He dumped his weight on his right foot and started a short, compact backswing with the heavy metal tool, a backswing that looked designed to bounce off tensed muscles after perhaps forty degrees or a couple of feet, and then snap forward again through a low horizontal arc, aiming to break Reacher’s left arm between the shoulder and the elbow. The guy wasn’t a total idiot. It was a decent first try.

  But it was uncompleted.

  Reacher had his weight on his left foot, and he had his right foot moving a split second after the wrench, driving the same way at the same speed, maybe even a little faster, and before the wrench stopped moving backward and started moving for
ward, the heel of Reacher’s boot met the big guy’s knee and drove right through it, smashing the kneecap deep into the joint, bursting it, rupturing ligaments, tearing tendons, dislocating the joint, turning it inside out, making it fold forward the way no knee is designed to go. The guy started to drop and before he was past the first vertical inch and before the first howl was starting in his throat Reacher was stepping past him, on the outside, shouldering him aside, deleting him from memory, forgetting all about him. He was now essentially an unarmed one-legged man, and one-legged men had never featured near the top of Reacher’s concerns.

  The guy with the hammer had a split-second choice to make. He could spin on the forehand, but that would give him almost a full circle to move through, because Reacher was now almost behind him, and anyway his crippled buddy was in the way of the spin, just waiting helplessly for a face-to-face collision. Or the guy could flail on the backhand, a Hail Mary blind swing into the void behind him, hoping for surprise, hoping for a lucky contact.

  He chose to flail behind him.

  Which Reacher was half-expecting and wholly rooting for. He watched the lunge, the arm moving, the wrist flicking back, the elbow turning inside out, and he planted his feet and jerked from the waist and drove the heel of his hand into the knob of the guy’s elbow, that huge force jabbing one way, the weight of the swinging hammer pulling the other way, the elbow joint cracking, the wrist overextending, the hammer falling, the guy instantly crumpling and dancing and hopping and trying to force his body to a place where his elbow stayed bent the right way around, which pulled him through a tight counterclockwise circle and left him unsteady and unbalanced and face-to-face with Reacher, who paused less time than it took for the hammer to hit the floor and then head-butted him hard in the face, a savage, snapping movement, solid bone-to-bone contact, and then Reacher danced away toward the wrecked Subaru and turned and planned the next second and a half.