Worth Dying For

TWENTY-ONE

REACHER RAN THIRTY YARDS ACROSS THE WINTER DIRT AND stopped. Inside the truck the driver was twisted around in his seat, staring back at him, pawing and fumbling blindly at the wheel and the gearshift. The truck backed up, straining, still locked in low-range, the engine revving fast and the ground speed grinding slow. Reacher had no idea how long it would take for a hard-worked engine with no oil in it to seize up and die.

Not long, he hoped.

He danced sideways, left, and left, and left, and the truck tracked him all the way, coming on slow, the crushed bumper plastered across the front like an ugly afterthought, the axles locked up for maximum traction, the tyres squirming and hopping and grinding out new ruts all their own. The driver hit the gas and jerked the wheel to his left, aiming to decode Reacher’s decoy dance and hit him after the inevitable sudden change of direction at its end, but Reacher double-bluffed him and jumped to his own left, and the truck missed him by ten whole feet.

The truck stopped dead and Reacher saw the guy tugging on levers and heard the transmission change back to normal-speed road duty. The truck made a big forty-foot loop out on the dirt and headed back in. Reacher stood still and watched it and sidestepped right, and right, and right, and then he triple-bluffed and jumped right again while the truck slammed left and missed him again. The truck ended up with its battered nose deep in the thicket. All kinds of unpleasant noises were coming out of it. Deep banging sounds, like tuneless church bells. Bearings, Reacher thought. The big ends. He knew some terminology. He had heard car guys talking, on military bases. He saw the driver glance down in alarm, as if red warning lights were blazing on the dash. There was steam in the air. And blue smoke.

The truck backed up, one more time.

Then it died.

It swung through a short backward arc and stopped, ready for a change of gear, which happened, but it didn’t move on again. It just bounced forward a foot against the slack in its suspension and seized up solid. The engine noise shut off and Reacher heard wheezing and hissing and ticking and saw steam jetting out and a final fine black spray from underneath, like a cough, like a death rattle.

The driver stayed where he was, in his seat, behind locked doors.

Reacher looked again for a rock, and couldn’t find one.

Impasse.

But not for long.

Reacher saw them first. He had a better vantage point. Flames, coming out of the seams between the hood and the fenders, low down at the front of the vehicle. The flames were small and colourless at first, boiling the air above them, spreading fast, blistering the paint around them. Then they got bigger and turned blue and yellow and started spilling black smoke from their edges. The hood was a big square pressing and within a minute all four seams surrounding it were alive with flame and the paint all over it was cooking and bubbling and splitting from the heat underneath.

The driver just sat there.

Reacher ran over and tried his door. Still locked. He banged on the window glass, dull padded thumps from his fist, and he pointed urgently at the hood. But it was impossible that the guy didn’t already know he was on fire. His wiper blades were alight. Black smoke was rolling off them and swirling up the windshield in coils. The guy was looking right at them, then looking at Reacher, back and forth, panic in his eyes.

He was as worried about Reacher as he was about the fire.

So Reacher backed off ten feet and the door opened up and the guy jumped out, a big slabby white boy, very young, maybe six-six, close to three hundred pounds. He ran five feet and stopped dead. His hands bunched into fists. Behind him the flames started shooting out of the wheel wells at the front of the truck, starting downward, curling back up around the sheet metal, burning hard. The front tyres were smoking. The guy just stood there, rooted. So Reacher ran in again, and the guy swung at him, and missed. Reacher ducked under the blow and popped the guy in the gut and then grabbed him by the collar. The guy went straight down in a crouch and cradled his head, defensively. Reacher pulled him back to his feet and hauled him away across the field, fast, thirty feet, forty, then fifty. He stopped and the guy swung again and missed again. Reacher feinted with a left jab and threw in a huge right hook that caught the guy on the ear. The guy wobbled for a second and then went down on his butt. Just sat there, blinking, in the middle of a field in the middle of nowhere. Twenty yards away the truck was burning fiercely, all the way back to the windshield pillars. The front tyres were alight and the hood was buckled.

Reacher asked, ‘How much gas is in the tank?’

The guy said, ‘Don’t hit me again.’

‘Answer my question.’

‘I filled it this morning.’

So Reacher grabbed him again and pulled him up and hauled him further away, another thirty feet, then ten more. The guy stumbled all the way and eventually resisted and said, ‘Please don’t hit me again.’

‘Why shouldn’t I? You just tried to kill me with a truck.’

‘I’m sorry about that.’

‘You’re sorry about that?’

‘I had to do it.’

‘Just following orders?’

‘I’m surrendering, OK? I’m out of the fight now. Like a POW.’

‘You’re bigger than me. And younger.’

‘But you’re a crazy man.’

‘Says who?’

‘We were told. About last night. You put three of us in the hospital.’

Reacher asked, ‘What’s your name?’

The guy said, ‘Brett.’

‘What is this, the Twilight Zone? You’ve all got the same name?’

‘Only three of us.’

‘Out of ten, right?’

‘Yes.’

‘Thirty per cent. What are the odds?’

The guy didn’t answer.

Reacher asked, ‘Who’s in charge here?’

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘Who told you to come out this morning and kill me with a truck?’

‘Jacob Duncan.’

‘Seth Duncan’s father?’

‘Yes.’

‘You know where he lives?’

The guy nodded and pointed into the distance, south and east, beyond the burning vehicle. The flames had moved inside it. The glass had shattered and the seats were on fire. There was a column of black smoke in the air, thick and dirty. It was going straight up and then hitting a low atmospheric layer and spreading sideways. Like a miniature mushroom cloud.

Then the gas tank exploded.

An orange fireball kicked the rear of the truck clear off the ground and a split second later a dull boom rolled across the dirt on a pressure wave hard enough to make Reacher stagger a step and hot enough to make him flinch away. Flames leapt fifty feet in the air and died instantly and the truck crashed back to earth, now all black and skeletal inside a hot new fire that roiled the air a hundred feet above it.

Reacher watched for a second. Then he said, ‘OK, Brett, this is what you’re going to do. You’re going to jog over to Jacob Duncan’s place, and you’re going to tell him three things. You listening to me?’

The big guy looked away from the fire and said, ‘Yes.’

‘OK, first, if Duncan wants to, he can send his six remaining boys after me, and each one will delay me a couple of minutes, but then I’ll come right over and kick his ass. Got that?’

‘Yes.’

‘Second, if he prefers, he can skip getting the six boys hurt, and he can come out and meet with me face to face, right away. Got that?’

‘Yes.’

‘And third, if I see those two out-of-towners again, they’ll be going home in a bucket. Is that clear? Got all that?’

‘Yes.’

‘You got a cell phone?’

‘Yes,’ the guy said.

‘Give it to me.’

The guy dug in a pocket and came back with a phone, black and tiny in his giant red paw. He handed it over and Reacher pulled it apart. He had seen cell phones dropped on sidewalks, and he knew what was in there. A battery, and a SIM card. He pulled off the cover and clipped out the battery and tossed it twenty feet in one direction, and he took out the SIM card and threw the rest of the phone twenty feet in the other direction. He balanced the SIM card on his palm and held it out, a tiny silicon wafer with gold tracks on it.

‘Eat it,’ he said.

The guy said, ‘What?’

‘Eat it. That’s your forfeit. For being a useless tub of lard.’

The guy paused a second and then he took it, delicately, finger and thumb, and he opened his mouth and placed it on his tongue. He closed his mouth and worked up some saliva and swallowed.

‘Show me,’ Reacher said.

The guy opened his mouth again and stuck out his tongue. Like a kid at the clinic. The card was gone.

‘Now sit down,’ Reacher said.

‘What?’

‘Like you were before.’

‘I thought you wanted me to head for the Duncans’ place.’

‘I do,’ Reacher said. ‘But not yet. Not while I’m still in the neighbourhood.’

The guy sat down, a little worried, facing south, his legs straight out and his hands on his knees and his upper body curled forward a little.

‘Arms behind you,’ Reacher said. ‘Lean back on your hands.’

‘Why?’

Enemy ordnance.

‘Just do it,’ Reacher said.

The guy got his arms behind him and put his weight on his hands. Reacher stepped behind him and crashed the sole of his boot through the guy’s right elbow. The guy went down flat and shrieked and rolled and whimpered. Then he sat up again and cradled his broken arm and stared at Reacher accusingly. Reacher stepped around behind him again and kicked him hard in the back of the head. The guy toppled slowly, forward at first, and then he twisted sideways as his gut got in the way of further progress. He sprawled out and landed softly on one shoulder and lay still, like a large letter L on a dirty brown page. Reacher turned away and slogged on north, towards the two wooden buildings on the horizon.