Worth Dying For

FIFTY-TWO

AWHITE SUV PARKED ON THE ROAD BEYOND THE FENCE, AND THE guy who had broken Reacher’s nose climbed out of the driver’s seat. Then the passenger door opened and the kid called John got out. The kid Reacher had left at the depot. Go to bed, Reacher had said. But the kid hadn’t gone to bed. He had hung out until he heard that things were safe, and then he had come out to claim his share of the fun.

Dumb, dumb, dumb.

The hallway was almost too crowded to move. It was full of football players, four of them lying around like carcasses, like beached whales, limbs taped, heads flopping. Reacher picked his way around them and watched out a window. The two late arrivals were making their way past Dorothy Coe’s pick-up, past John’s own Yukon, hustling through the damp and the cold, heading for the door, full of high spirits.

Reacher opened the door and stepped out to meet them head on. He drew his sawn-off across his body, a long high exaggerated movement like a pirate drawing an ancient flintlock pistol, and he held it right-handed, elbow bent and comfortable, and he aimed it at the guy who had hit him. But he looked at John.

‘You let me down,’ he said.

Both guys came to a dead stop and stared at him a little more urgently than he thought was warranted, until he remembered the duct tape on his face. Like war paint. He smiled and felt it pucker. He looked back at the guy who had hit him and said, ‘It was nothing that couldn’t be fixed. But I’m not certain you’ll be able to say the same.’

Neither guy spoke. Reacher kept his eyes on the guy who had hit him and said, ‘Take out your car keys and toss them to me.’

The guy said, ‘What?’

‘I’m bored with John’s Yukon. I’m going to use your truck the rest of the day.’

‘You think?’

‘I’m pretty sure.’

No response.

Reacher said, ‘It’s make-your-mind-up time, boys. Either do what I tell you, or get shot.’

The guy dipped into his pocket and came out with a bunch of keys. He held them up briefly, to prove what they were, and then he tossed them underhand to Reacher, who made no attempt to catch them. They bounced off his coat and landed on the gravel. Reacher wanted his left hand free and his attention all in one place. He looked at the guy again and asked, ‘So how does your nose feel right now?’

The guy said, ‘It feels OK.’

‘It looks like it has been busted before.’

The guy said, ‘Two times.’

Reacher said, ‘Well, they say three is a lucky number. They say the third time’s the charm.’

Nobody spoke.

Reacher said, ‘John, lie face down on the ground.’

John didn’t move.

Reacher fired into the ground at John’s feet. The gun boomed and kicked and the sound rolled away across the land, loud and dull, like a quarry explosion. John howled and danced. Not hit, but stung in the shins by fragments of gravel kicked up by the blast. Reacher waited for quiet and pumped the gun, a solid crunch-crunch, probably the most intimidating sound in the world. The husk of the spent cartridge ejected and flew through the air and landed near the car keys and skittered away.

John got down on the ground. First he got on his knees, awkwardly, like he was in church, and then he spread his hands and lowered himself face down, reluctantly, like a bad-tempered coach had demanded a hundred push-ups. Reacher called over his shoulder, ‘Doctor? Bring me the duct tape, would you?’

No response from inside the house.

Reacher called, ‘Don’t worry, doctor. There won’t be any comebacks. Never again. This is the last day. Tomorrow you’ll be living like normal people. These guys will be unemployed, heading back where they came from, looking for new jobs.’

There was a long, tense pause. Then a minute later the doctor came out with the tape. He didn’t look at the two guys. He kept his face averted and his eyes down. Old habits. He gave the roll to Reacher and ducked back inside. Reacher tossed the tape to the guy who had hit him and said, ‘Make it so your buddy can’t move his arms or legs. Or I will, by some other method, probably including spinal injury.’

The guy caught the roll of tape and got to work. He wrapped John’s wrists with a tight three-layer figure of eight, and then he wrapped the waist of the eight in the other direction, around and around. Plastic handcuffs. Reacher had no idea of the tensile strength of duct tape in terms of engineering numbers, but he knew no human could pull it apart lengthways. The guy did the same to John’s ankles, and Reacher said, ‘Now hog-tie him. Join it all up.’

The guy folded John’s feet up towards his butt and wrapped tape between the wrist restraints and the ankle restraints, four turns, each about a foot long. He squeezed it all tight and stood back. Reacher took out his wrench and held it up. There was a little blood and hair on it, from the previous two guys. He dropped it on the ground behind him. He took out his switchblade. He dropped it on the ground behind him. He took out his Glock pistol. He dropped it on the ground behind him. Then he turned and laid the sawn-off next to it. He shrugged out of his coat and let it fall. It covered all four weapons. He looked at the guy who had hit him and said, ‘Fair fight. You against me. Second-string Nebraska football against the U.S. Army. Bare knuckles. No rules. If you can get past me, you’re welcome to use anything you can find under my coat.’

The guy looked blank for a second, and then he smiled a little, as if the sun had come out, as if an unbelievable circumstance had unveiled itself right in front of him, as if a hole had opened up in a tight defence, as if suddenly he had a straight shot to the end zone. He came up on his toes, and angled his body, and bunched his right fist up under his chin, and got ready to lead with his left.

Reacher smiled too, just a little. The guy was dancing around like the Marquess of Queensberry. He had no idea. No idea at all. Maybe the last fight he had seen was in a Rocky movie. He was six-seven and three hundred pounds, but he was nothing more than a prize ox, big and dumb and shiny, going up against a gutter rat.

A 250-pound gutter rat.

The guy stepped in and bobbed and weaved for a minute, up on his toes, jiggling around, ducking and diving, wasting time and energy. Reacher stood perfectly still and gazed at him, wide-eyed with peripheral vision, focusing nowhere and everywhere at once, hyper-alert, watching the guy’s eyes and his hands and his feet. And soon enough the left jab came in. The obvious first move, for a right-handed man who thought he was in a boxing ring. Any guy’s left jab followed the same basic trajectory as his straight left, but much less forcefully, because it was powered by the arm only, snapping out from the elbow, with no real contribution from the legs or the upper body or the shoulders. No real power. Reacher watched the big pink knuckles getting closer, and then he moved his own left hand, fast, a blur, whipping it in and up and out like a man flailing backhanded at a wasp, and he slapped at the inside of the guy’s wrist, hard enough to alter the line of the incoming jab, hard enough to deflect it away from his face and send it buzzing harmlessly over his moving shoulder.

His shoulder was moving because he was already driving hard off his back foot, jerking forward, twisting at the waist, building torque, hurling his right elbow into the gap created by turning the guy counterclockwise an inch, aiming to hit him with the elbow right on the outer edge of his left eye socket, hoping to crack his skull along the line of his temple. No rules. The blow landed with all 250 pounds of moving mass behind it, a solid, jarring impact Reacher felt all the way down to his toes. The guy staggered back. He stayed on his feet. Evidently his skull hadn’t cracked, but he was feeling it. He was feeling it bad, and his mouth was opening ready to howl, so Reacher shut it again for him with a vicious uppercut under the chin, convulsive, far from elegant, but effective. The guy’s head snapped back in a mist of blood and bounced forward again off his massive deltoids and Reacher tried for his other eye socket with his left elbow, a ferocious in-and-out snap from the waist, and then he put a forearm smash from the right into the guy’s throat, a real home run swing, and then he kneed him in the groin, and danced behind him and kicked him hard in the back of the knees, a sweeping, scything action, so that the guy’s legs folded up under him and he went down heavily on his back on the path.

Six blows, three seconds.

No rules.

Second-string Nebraska football against the U.S. Army.

But the guy was tough. Or afraid. Or both. Either way, he didn’t quit. He started scrabbling around on his back, like a turtle, trying to get up again, making botched snow angels in the gravel, his head snapping left and right. Maybe the decent thing would have been to let him take an eight-count, but having your opponent on the floor is gutter rat heaven, the absolute object of the exercise, a precious gift never to be spurned, so Reacher stilled him by kicking him hard in the ear, and then he stamped down hard with his heel in the guy’s face, like an appalled homeowner stomping a cockroach, and the crunch of the guy’s shattering nose was clearly audible over all the generalized panting and grunting and groaning and moaning.

Game over. Eight blows in six seconds, which was grievously slow and laborious by Reacher’s standards, but then, the guy was huge, and he had an athlete’s tone and stamina, and he was accustomed to a certain amount of physical punishment. He had been competitive, just barely. In the ballpark, almost. Not the worst Reacher had ever seen. Four years of college ball was probably equivalent to four days of Ranger training, and plenty of people Reacher had known hadn’t even made day three.

He taped the guy up where he lay, with plastic handcuffs linked to four turns around the guy’s own neck and ankle restraints linked to four turns around John’s neck. Then he stepped back into the hallway and did a better job on the two who had come in first. He slid them around on the shiny parquet and taped them together, back to back, like the two from the middle of the night. He stood up and caught his breath.

Then a phone rang, muted and distant.

The phone turned out to be Dorothy Coe’s cell. Its ring was muted and distant because it was with her, behind a closed door, in her room. She came out with it in her hand, and looked between it and the four taped guys on the hallway floor, and then she smiled, as if at a hidden irony, as if normality was intruding on a thoroughly abnormal day. She said, ‘That was Mr Vincent at the motel. He wants me to work this morning. He has guests.’

Reacher asked, ‘Who are they?’

‘He didn’t say.’

Reacher thought for a moment, and said, ‘OK.’ He told the doctor to keep a medical eye on all six of the captured football players, and then he went back out to the gravel path and put his coat back on. He reloaded the pockets with his improvised arsenal, and he found the car keys where they lay on the stones, and then he headed down the driveway to the white SUV parked beyond the fence.

Eldridge Tyler moved, just a little, but enough to keep himself comfortable. He was into his second hour of daylight. He was a patient man. His eye was still on the scope. The scope was still trained on the barn door, six inches left of the judas hole, six inches down. The rifle’s forestock was still bedded securely on the bags of rice. The air was wet and thick, but the sun was bright and the view was good.

But the big man in the brown coat hadn’t come.

Not yet.

And perhaps he never would, if the Duncans had been successful during the night. But Tyler was still fully on the ball, because he was cautious by nature, and he always took his tasks seriously, and maybe the Duncans hadn’t been successful during the night. In which case the big man would show up very soon. Why would he wait? Daylight was all he needed.

Tyler took his finger off the trigger, and he flexed his hand, once, twice, and then he put his finger back.