Jack Reacher 15 - Worth Dying For

by Lee Child

  Reacher turned and jogged back to the road, to the black pick-up, and he got in and drove it forward beyond the mouth of the driveway, and then he backed it up and in and parallel parked it across the width of the space, between the fences, sawing it back and forth until he had it at a perfect ninety degrees, with just a couple of feet of open space at either end. The white Tahoe was rolling steadily, already halfway to its target, jerking left and right in the ruts, trailing a bright plume of flame. Reacher pulled the black pick-up’s keys and jogged back to the road. He leaned on the blind side of the gold Yukon’s hood and watched.

  The white Tahoe was well ablaze. It rolled on through its final twenty yards, dumbly, unflinchingly, and it hit the front of the center house and stopped dead. Two tons, some momentum, but no kind of a major crash. The wood on the house split and splintered, and the front wall bowed inward a little, and glass fell out of a ground floor window, and that was all.

  But that was enough.

  The flames at the rear of the truck swayed forward and came back and settled in to burn. They roiled the air around them and licked out horizontally under the sills and climbed up the doors. They spilled out of the rear wheel wells and fat coils of black smoke came off the tires. The smoke boiled upward and caught the breeze and drifted away south and west.

  Reacher leaned into the Yukon and took the rifle off the seat.

  The flames crept onward toward the front of the Tahoe, slow but urgent, busy, seeking release, curling out and up. The rear tires started to burn and the front tires started to smoke. Then the fuel line must have ruptured because suddenly there was a wide fan of flame, a new color, a fierce lateral spray that beat against the front of the house and rose up all around the Tahoe’s hood, surging left and right, licking the house, lighting it, bubbling the paint in a fast black semicircle. Then finally flames started chasing the bubbling paint, small at first, then larger, like a map of an army swarming through broken defenses, fanning out, seeking new ground. Air sucked in and out of the broken window and the flames started licking at its frame.

  Reacher dialed his borrowed cell.

  He said, “The center house is alight.”

  Dorothy Coe answered, from her position half a mile west, out in the fields.

  She said, “That’s Jonas’s house. We can see the smoke.”

  “Anyone moving?”

  “Not yet.” Then she said, “Wait. Jonas is coming out his back door. Turning left. He’s going to head around to the front.”

  “Positive ID?”

  “A hundred percent. We’re using the telescope.”

  “OK,” Reacher said. “Stay on the line.”

  He laid the open cell phone on the Yukon’s hood and picked up the rifle. It had a rear iron sight just ahead of the scope mount, and a front iron sight at the muzzle. Reacher raised it to his eye and leaned forward and rested his elbows on the sheet metal and aimed at the gap between the center house and the southernmost house. Distance, maybe a hundred and forty yards.

  He waited.

  He saw a stocky figure enter the gap from the rear. A man, short and wide, maybe sixty years old or more. Round red face, thinning gray hair. Reacher’s first live sighting of a Duncan elder. The guy hustled stiffly between the blank ends of the two homes and came out in the light and stopped dead. He stared at the burning Tahoe and started toward it and stopped again and then turned and faced front and stared at the pick-up truck parked across the far end of the driveway.

  Reacher laid the front sight on the guy’s center mass and pulled the trigger.

  Chapter 58

  The .338 hit high, a foot above Jonas Duncan’s center mass, halfway between his lower lip and the point of his chin. The bullet drove through the roots of his front incisors, through the soft tissue of his mouth and his throat, through his third vertebra, through his spinal cord, through the fat on the back of his neck, and onward into the corner of Jacob Duncan’s house. Jonas went down vertically, claimed by gravity, his stiff fireplug body suddenly loose and malleable, and he ended up sprawled in a grotesque tangle of limbs, face-up, eyes open, the last of his brain’s oxygenated blood leaking from his wound, and then he died.

  Reacher shot the rifle’s bolt and the spent shell case clanged against the Yukon’s hood and rolled down its contour and fell to the ground. Reacher picked up the cell phone and said, “Jonas is down.”

  Dorothy Coe said, “We heard the shot.”

  “Any activity?”

  “Not yet.”

  Reacher kept the phone against his ear. Jonas’s house was burning nicely. The whole front wall was on fire, and there were flames inside, throwing orange light and shadows all around, curling flat and angry against the ceilings, gleaming wetly behind intact panes of glass, spilling out through the broken windows and leaping up and merging into the general conflagration. Smoke was still blowing south, and heat too, toward the southernmost building.

  Dorothy Coe’s voice came back: “Jasper is out. He has a weapon. A long gun. He sees us. He’s looking right at us.”

  Reacher asked, “How far back are you?”

  “About six hundred yards.”

  “Stand your ground. If he fires, he’ll miss.”

  “We think it’s a shotgun.”

  “Even better. The round won’t even reach you.”

  “He’s running. He’s past Jonas’s house. He’s heading for Jacob’s.”

  Reacher saw him, flitting right to left across the narrow gap between Jonas’s house and Jacob’s, a short wide man very similar to his brother. On the phone Dorothy Coe said, “He’s gone inside. We see him in Jacob’s kitchen. Through the window. Jacob and Seth are in there too.”

  Reacher waited. The fire in Jonas’s house was burning out of control. In front of it the white Tahoe was a blackened wreck inside a ball of flame. Glass was punching out of the house’s windows ahead of flames that followed horizontally like arms and fists before boiling upward. The roof was alight. Then there was a loud sound and the air inside the house seemed to shudder and cough and a hot blue shimmer gasped out through the ground floor, like an expelled breath, clearly visible, like a force, and it rose slowly upward, one second, two, three, and then the flames came back even stronger behind it.

  Dorothy Coe said, “Something just blew up in Jonas’s kitchen. The propane tank, maybe. The back wall is burning hard.”

  Reacher waited.

  Then the ground floor itself burned through and there was another cough and shudder as the flaming timbers tumbled through to the basement. The left-hand gable tilted inward and the right-hand gable fell outward, across the gap to Jasper’s house. Sparks showered all around and thermals caught them and sent them shooting a hundred feet in the air. Jonas’s right-hand wall collapsed into the gap and piled high against Jasper’s left-hand wall, and gales of new air hit fresh unburned surfaces and vivid new flames leapt up.

  Reacher said, “This is going very well.”

  Then Jonas’s second floor fell in with an explosion of sparks and his left-hand wall came unmoored and folded slowly and neatly in half, the top part falling inward into the fire and the bottom part angling outward and propping itself against Jacob’s house. Burning timbers and bright red embers spilled and settled and sucked oxygen toward them and huge new flames started licking upward and outward and sideways. Even the weeds in the gravel were on fire.

  Reacher said, “I think we’re three for three. I think we got them all.”

  Dorothy Coe said, “Jasper is out again. He’s heading for his truck.”

  Reacher watched over the front sight of his rifle. He saw Jasper run for the line of cars. Saw him slide into a white pick-up. Saw him start it up and back it out. It stopped and turned and aimed straight for the driveway. It blew through a shower of sparks, right past Jonas’s body, and it headed straight toward the two-lane. Straight toward Reacher. Straight toward the parked black truck. It braked hard and stopped short just behind it, and Jasper scrambled out. He opened the black truck
’s passenger door and ducked inside.

  Then a second later he ducked out again.

  No key.

  The key was in Reacher’s pocket.

  Reacher put the phone on the Yukon’s hood.

  Jasper Duncan stood still, momentarily unsure. Distance, maybe forty yards. Which was really no distance at all.

  Reacher shot him through the head and he went straight down the same way his brother had before him, leaving a small pink cloud in the air above him, made of pulverized blood and bone, which drifted an inch and then disappeared in the breeze.

  Reacher picked up the phone and said, “Jasper is down.”

  Then he dropped the empty gun on the road behind him and climbed inside the Yukon. Lack of replacement ammunition meant that phase one was over, and that phase two was about to begin.

  Chapter 59

  Reacher drove the Yukon a hundred yards beyond the mouth of the driveway, and then he turned right, onto the open dirt. Lumps and stones squirmed and pattered under his tires. He drove a wide circle until he was level with the compound itself and then he stopped, facing the houses, the engine idling, his foot on the brake. From his new angle he saw that Jacob’s south wall was so far untouched by the fire, but judging by the backdrop of smoke and flame the north end of the house was burning. Ahead and far to the left he could see Dorothy Coe’s truck, waiting six hundred yards west in the fields, similarly nose-in and pent-up and expectant, like a gundog panting and crouching.

  He raised the phone to his ear and said, “I’m end-on now. What do you see?”

  Dorothy Coe said, “Jonas’s house is about gone. All that’s left is the chimney, really. The bricks are glowing red. And Jasper’s house is on its way. His propane just blew up.”

  “How about Jacob’s?”

  “It’s burning north to south. Pretty fierce. Has to be getting hot in there.”

  “Stand by, then. It won’t be long now.”

  It was less than a minute. Dorothy Coe said, “They’re out,” and a second later Reacher saw Jacob and Seth Duncan spill around the back corner of the house. They ran ducked down and bent over, zigzagging, afraid of the rifle they thought was still out there. They made it to one of the remaining pick-up trucks and Reacher saw them open the doors from a crouch and then climb in and hunker down low. Behind them the north end of Jacob’s house swelled and bellied and came down, quite slowly and gracefully, with sparks shooting up and out like fireworks, with burning timbers tumbling and spreading like lava from a volcano, reaching almost to the boundary fence, a vertical mass made horizontal, and then the south end of the house fell slowly backward and collapsed into the fire, leaving only the chimney upright.

  Reacher asked, “How does it look?”

  Dorothy Coe answered, “Just like you said it would.”

  Reacher saw Jacob Duncan at the wheel of the pick-up, shorter and broader than Seth in the passenger seat. Seth still had his splint taped to his face. The truck backed up ten yards, almost into the fire behind it, and then it drove forward and hit the fence, butting against it, trying to break through. The pick-up’s front bumper bent out of shape and the hood crumpled a little, and the fence shuddered and rattled, but it held. Deep holes for the posts, sturdy timbers, strong rails. A big production. The law of unintended consequences.

  Jacob Duncan tried again. He backed up, much less than ten yards this time because the fire was spreading behind him, and then he shot forward once more. The truck hit the fence and he and Seth bounced around in the cab like rag dolls, but the fence held. Reacher saw Jacob glance backward again. There was no space for a longer run-up. The fire and the mean allocation of land did not permit it.

  Jacob changed his tactics. He maneuvered until the nose of the truck was exactly halfway between two posts, and then he came in slow, in a low gear, pushing the grille into the rails, firming up the contact, then easing down on the gas, pushing harder and harder, hoping that sustained pressure would achieve what a sharp blow had not.

  It didn’t. The rails bent, and they bowed, and they trembled, but they held. Then the pick-up’s rear tires lost traction and spun and howled in the dirt and the fence pushed back and the truck eased off six inches.

  The doors opened up again and Jacob and Seth spilled out and hustled over and tried the Cadillac instead. A heavier car, better torque, better power. But worse tires, built for quiet and comfort out on the open road, not for traction over loose surfaces. Seth drove, hardly backing up at all for fear of putting his gas tank right in the flames behind him. Then he rolled four feet forward and the chrome grille hit the rails and the tires spun almost immediately.

  Game over.

  “Here they come,” Reacher said.

  Behind them the last vestigial support under the blazing structure gave way and the burning pile settled slowly and gently into a lower and wider shape, blowing gales of sparks and gases outward. Big curled flames danced free, burning the air itself, twisting and splitting and then vanishing. Heat distorted the air and gouts of fire hurled themselves a hundred feet up. Jacob and Seth shrank back and shielded their faces with their arms and ducked away.

  They climbed the fence.

  They dropped into the field.

  They ran.

  Chapter 60

  Jacob and Seth Duncan ran thirty yards, a straight line away from the fire, pure animal instinct, and then they stopped and glanced back and spun in place, alone and insignificant in the empty acres. They saw the parked Yukon as if for the first time, and they stared at it in confusion, because it was one of theirs, driven by one of their own damn boys, and the guy wasn’t coming to help them. Then they saw Dorothy Coe’s truck far off in another direction and they glanced back at the Yukon and they understood. They looked at each other one last time, and they ran again, in different directions, Jacob one way, and Seth another.

  Reacher raised his phone.

  He said, “If I’m nine o’clock on a dial and you’re twelve, then Jacob is heading for ten and Seth is heading for seven. Seth is mine. Jacob is yours.”

  Dorothy Coe said, “Understood.”

  Reacher took his foot off the brake and steered one-handed, following a lazy clockwise curve, heading first north and then east, bumping across the washboard surface, feeling the heat of the fires on the glass next to his face. Ahead of him Seth was stumbling through the dirt, heading for the road, still seventy yards short of getting there. Reacher saw something in his right hand, and then he heard Dorothy Coe’s voice on the phone: “Jacob has a gun.”

  Reacher asked, “What kind?”

  “A handgun. A revolver, I think. We can’t see. We’re bouncing around too much.”

  “Slow down and take a good look.”

  Ten long seconds later: “We think it’s a regular six-shooter.”

  “Has he fired it yet?”

  “No.”

  “OK, back off, but keep him in sight. He’s got nowhere to go. Let him get tired.”

  “Understood.”

  Reacher laid the phone on the seat next to him and followed Seth south, staying thirty yards back. The guy was really hustling. His arms were pumping. Reacher had no scope, but he was prepared to bet the thing in Seth’s right hand was a revolver too, probably half of a matched pair his father had shared.

  Reacher steered and accelerated and pushed on to within twenty yards. Seth was racing hard, knees pumping, arms pumping, his head thrown back. The thing in his hand was definitely a gun. The barrel was short, no longer than a finger. The two-lane road was forty yards away. Reacher had no idea why Seth wanted to get there. No point in it. The road was just a blacktop ribbon with no traffic on it and nothing but more dirt beyond. Maybe it was a generational thing. Maybe the youngest Duncan thought municipal infrastructure was going to save him. Or maybe he was heading home. Maybe he had more weapons in the house. He was going in roughly the right direction. In which case he was either terminally desperate or the world’s biggest optimist. He had more than two miles to go, and he was
being chased by a motor vehicle.

  Reacher stayed twenty yards back and watched. Way behind his left shoulder a last propane tank cooked off with a dull thump. The Yukon’s mirror filled with sparks. Up ahead, Seth kept on running.

  Then he stopped running and whirled around and planted his feet and aimed his revolver two-handed, eye-high, with his aluminum mask right behind it. His chest was heaving and all four of his limbs were trembling and despite the two-handed grip the muzzle was jerking through a circle roughly the size of a basketball. Reacher slowed and changed gear and backed up and stood thirty yards off. He felt safe enough. He had a big V-8 engine block between himself and the gun, and anyway the chances of a panting untrained man even hitting the truck itself with a short-barreled handgun at ninety feet were slight. The chances of a successful head shot through a windshield were less than zero. The chances of putting the round in the right zip code were debatable.

  Seth fired, three times, well spaced, with a jerky trigger action and plenty of muzzle climb and no lateral control at all. Reacher didn’t even blink. He just watched the three muzzle flashes with professional interest and tried to identify the gun, but he couldn’t at thirty yards. Too far away. He knew there were seven- and eight-shot revolvers in the world, but they weren’t common, so he assumed it was a six-shooter and that therefore there were now three rounds left in it. Beside him the phone squawked with concern and he picked it up and Dorothy Coe asked, “Are you OK? We heard shots fired.”