Jack Reacher 15 - Worth Dying For

by Lee Child

  He walked to the steakhouse door. Inside it was a small square lobby with another door. Inside that was an unattended maitre d’ lectern with a reading light and a reservations book. To the right was a small dining room with two couples finishing up their meals. To the left, the exact same thing. Ahead, a short corridor with a larger room at the end of it. Low ceilings, unfinished wood on the walls, brass accents. A warm, intimate place.

  Reacher stepped past the lectern and checked the larger room. Directly inside the arch was a table for two. It had one guy at it, eating, wearing a red Cornhuskers football jacket. The University of Nebraska. In the main body of the room was a table for eight. It was occupied by seven men, coats and ties, three facing three plus the guy from the wedding photograph at the head. He was a little older than the picture, a little bonier, even more smug, but it was the same guy. No question. He was unmistakable. The table held the wreckage of a big meal. Plates, glasses, serrated knives with worn wooden handles.

  Reacher stepped into the room. As he moved the guy alone at the table for two stood up smoothly and sidestepped into Reacher’s path. He raised his hand like a traffic cop. Then he placed that hand on Reacher’s chest. He was a big man. Nearly as tall as Reacher himself, a whole lot younger, maybe a little heavier, in good shape, with some level of mute intelligence in his eyes. Strength and brains. A dangerous mixture. Reacher preferred the old days, when muscle was dumb. He blamed education. The end of social promotion. There was a genetic price to be paid for making athletes attend class.

  Nobody looked over from the big table.

  Reacher said, “What’s your name, fat boy?”

  The guy said, “My name?”

  “It’s not a difficult question.”

  “Brett.”

  Reacher said, “So here’s the thing, Brett. Either you take your hand off my chest, or I’ll take it off your wrist.”

  The guy dropped his hand. But he didn’t move out of the way.

  “What?” Reacher asked.

  The guy asked, “Are you here to see Mr. Duncan?”

  “What do you care?”

  “I work for Mr. Duncan.”

  “Really?” Reacher said. “What do you do for him?”

  “I schedule his appointments.”

  “And?”

  “You don’t have one.”

  “When can I get one?”

  “How does never work for you?”

  “Not real well, Brett.”

  “Sir, you need to leave.”

  “What are you, security? A bodyguard? What the hell is he?”

  “He’s a private citizen. I’m one of his assistants, that’s all. And now we need to get you back to your car.”

  “You want to walk me out to the lot?”

  “Sir, I’m just doing my job.”

  The seven men at the big table were all hunched forward on their elbows, conspiratorial, six of them listening to a story Duncan was telling, laughing on cue, having a hell of a time. Elsewhere in the building there were kitchen noises and the sharp sounds of silverware on plates and the thump of glasses going down on wooden tabletops.

  Reacher said, “Are you sure about this?”

  The young man said, “I’d appreciate it.”

  Reacher shrugged.

  “OK,” he said. “Let’s go.” He turned and threaded his way back around the lectern and through the first door and through the second and out to the cold night air. The big guy followed him all the way. Reacher squeezed between two trucks and headed across open ground toward the Subaru. The big guy followed him all the way. Reacher stopped ten feet short of the car and turned around. The big guy stopped too, face-to-face. He waited, standing easy, relaxed, patient, competent.

  Reacher said, “Can I give you some advice?”

  “About what?”

  “You’re smart, but you’re not a genius. You just swapped a good tactical situation for a much worse one. Inside, there were crowded quarters and witnesses and telephones and possible interventions, but out here there’s nothing at all. You just gave away a big advantage. Out here I could take my sweet time kicking your ass and there’s no one to help you.”

  “Nobody’s ass needs to get kicked tonight.”

  “I agree. But whatever, I still need to give Mr. Duncan a message.”

  “What message?”

  “He hits his wife. I need to explain to him why that’s a bad idea.”

  “I’m sure you’re mistaken.”

  “I’ve seen the evidence. Now I need to see Duncan.”

  “Sir, get real. You won’t be seeing anything. Only one of us is going back in there tonight, and it won’t be you.”

  “You enjoy working for a guy like that?”

  “I have no complaints.”

  “You might, later. Someone told me the nearest ambulance is sixty miles away. You could be lying out here for an hour.”

  “Sir, you need to get in your car and move right along.”

  Reacher put his hands in his coat pockets, to immobilize his arms, to protect them from further damage. He said, “Last chance, Brett. You can still walk away. You don’t need to get hurt for scum like that.”

  “I have a job to do.”

  Reacher nodded, and said “Listen, kid,” very quietly, and the big guy leaned in fractionally to hear the next part of the sentence, and Reacher kicked him hard in the groin, right footed, a heavy boot on the end of a driving leg, and then he stepped back while the guy jackknifed ninety degrees and puked and retched and gasped and spluttered. Then Reacher kicked him again, a solid blow to the side of the head, like a soccer player pivoting to drive a volleyed crossfield pass into the goal. The guy pinwheeled on the balls of his feet and went down like he was trying to screw himself into the ground.

  Reacher kept his hands in his pockets and headed for the steakhouse door again.

  Chapter 6

  The party was still in full swing in the back room. No 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. T
he 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 showerhead 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 anesthetic. 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 aluminum 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 neighbors.

  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 counseling.”

  Jonas Duncan nodded and said, “There you go. That’s how it played out. We’ve got a passerby 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.”

  Chapter 7

  Reacher 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 bodyguarding 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 neighborhood, 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 tires 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 sur
veilled 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 gray 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 onto 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.