by Lee Child
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 forward, 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.
The guy who had held the wrench was down, rolling around, in Reacher’s judgment stunned not so much by the pain, most of which would be still to come, but by the awful dawning knowledge that life as he knew it was over, the momentary fears he might have experienced as an athlete after a bad on-field collision finally come true, his future now holding nothing but canes and braces and limps and pain and frustration and unemployment. The guy who had held the hammer was still on his feet, back on his heels, blinking, his nose pouring blood, one arm limp and numb, his eyes unfocused, not a whole lot going on in his head.
Enough, a person might say, if that person lived in the civilized world, the world of movies and television and fair play and decent restraint. But Reacher didn’t live there. He lived in a world where you don’t start fights but you sure as hell finish them, and you don’t lose them either, and he was the inheritor of generations of hard-won wisdom that said the best way to lose them was to assume they were over when they weren’t yet. So he stepped back to the guy who had held the hammer and risked his hands and his arms and crashed a low right hook into the skinny triangle below the guy’s pectorals and above his six-pack abdominals, a huge blow, timed and jerked and delivered to perfection, straight into the solar plexus, hitting it like a switch, and the guy went into all kinds of temporary distress and sagged forward and down. Reacher waited until he was bent low enough for the finishing kick to the face, delivered hard but with a degree of mercy, in that smashed teeth and a busted jaw were better than out-and-out brain damage.
Then he turned to the guy who had held the wrench and waited until he rolled the right way and put him to sleep with a kick to the forehead. He picked up the wrench and broke the guy’s wrist with it, one, and then the other wrist, two, and turned back and did the same to the guy who had held the hammer, three, four. The two men were somebody’s weapons, consciously deployed, and no soldier left an enemy’s abandoned ordnance on the field in working order.
The doctor’s wife was watching from the cabin door, all kinds of terror in her face.
“What?” Reacher asked her.
Chapter 10
The Ford pick-up truck was still idling patiently. Its headlights were still on. The two guys lay slack and heaped in the gloom beyond the bright beams, steaming slightly, four cubic yards of bone and muscle, six hundred pounds of beef, now horizontal, not vertical. They were going to be very hard to move. The doctor’s wife said, “Now what the hell are we going to do?”
Reacher said, “About what?”
“I wish you hadn’t done that.”
“Why?”
“Because nothing good can possibly come of it.”
“Why not? What the hell is going on here? Who are these people?”
“I told you. Football players.”
“Not them,” Reacher said. “The Duncans. The people who sent them.”
“Did they see me?”
“These two? I doubt it.”
“That’s good. I really can’t get involved in this.”
“Why not? What’s going on here?”
“This isn’t your business.
”
“Tell that to them.”
“You seemed so angry.”
“Me?” Reacher said. “I wasn’t angry. I was barely interested. If I had been angry, we’d be cleaning up with a fire hose. As it is we’re going to need a forklift truck.”
“What are you going to do with them?”
“Tell me about the Duncans.”
“They’re a family. That’s all. Seth, and his father, and two uncles. They used to farm. Now they run a trucking business.”
“Which one of them hires the football players?”
“I don’t know who makes the decisions. Maybe it’s a majority thing. Or maybe they all have to agree.”
“Where do they live?”
“You know where Seth lives.”
“What about the other three? The old guys?”
“Just south of here. Three houses all alone. One each.”
“I saw them. Your husband was staring at them.”
“Did you see his hands?”
“Why?”
“He was probably crossing his fingers for luck. Whistling past the graveyard.”
“Why? Who the hell are they?”
“They’re a hornet’s nest, that’s what. And you just poked it with a stick and now you’re going to leave.”
“What was I supposed to do? Let them hit me with shop tools?”
“That’s what we do. We take our punishments and we keep smiles on our faces and our heads down. We go along to get along.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
She paused. Shook her head.
“It’s not a big deal,” she said. “Not really. So we tell ourselves. If you throw a frog in hot water, he’ll jump right out again. Put him in cold water and heat it up slowly, he’ll let himself get boiled to death without ever noticing.”
“And that’s you?”
“Yes,” she said. “That’s us.”
“Give me the details.”
She paused again. She shook her head again.
“No,” she said. “No, no, no. You won’t hear anything bad about the Duncans from me. I want that on the record. I’m a local girl, and I’ve known them all my life. They’re a fine family. There’s nothing wrong with them. Nothing at all.”
The doctor’s wife took a long hard look at the wrecked Subaru and then she set off walking home. Reacher offered her a ride in the pickup truck, but she wouldn’t hear of it. He watched her walk out of the motel lot until she was swallowed by the dark and lost to sight. Then he turned back to the two guys on the gravel outside his door. No way could he lift an unconscious human weighing three hundred pounds. Three hundred pounds of free weights on a bar, maybe. But not three hundred pounds of inert flesh and blood the size of a refrigerator.
He opened the pick-up’s door and climbed into the cab. It smelled of pine disinfectant and hot oil. He found the gearshift and took off forward on a curve and then stopped and backed up until the tailgate was in line with where the two guys lay. He got out again and stepped around the hood and looked at the winch that was bolted to the frame at the front. It was electric. It had a motor connected to a drum wrapped with thin steel cable. The cable had a snap hook on the end. There was a release ratchet and a winding button.
He hit the ratchet and unwound the cable, ten feet, twenty, thirty. He flipped it up over the hood, over the roof of the cab, between two lights on the light bar, over the load bed, and down to where the guys were lying behind the truck. He dropped the tailgate flat and bent and fastened the hook to the front of the first guy’s belt. He walked back to the front of the truck and found the winding button and pressed.
The motor started and the drum turned and the slack pulled out of the cable. Then the cable went tight and quivered like a bowstring and burred a groove into the front edge of the hood and pulled a crease into the light bar on the roof. The drum slowed, and then it dug in and kept on turning. The truck squatted low on its springs. Reacher walked back and saw the first guy getting dragged by his belt toward the load bed, scuffling along the ground, waist first, arms and legs trailing. The guy dragged all the way to the edge of the tailgate. Then the cable came up vertically and shrieked against the sheet metal and the guy’s belt stretched oval and he started up into the air, spinning a little, his back arched, his head and legs and arms hanging down. Reacher waited and timed it and pulled and pushed and shoved and got him up over the angle and watched as he dragged onward into the load bed. Reacher stepped back to the front and waited a beat and then stopped the winch. He came back and leaned into the load bed and released the hook, and then he did the same things all over again for the second guy, like a veterinarian called out to a couple of dead heifers.
Reacher drove five miles south and slowed and stopped just before the shared driveway that ran west toward the three houses huddled together. They had been painted white a generation ago and still managed a gray gleam in the moonlight. They were substantial buildings, arranged along a short arc without much space between them. There was no landscaping. Just threadbare gravel and weeds and three parked cars, and then a heavy post-and-rail fence, and then flat empty fields running away into the darkness.
There was a light behind a ground floor window in the house on the right. No other signs of activity.
Reacher pulled thirty feet ahead and then backed up and turned and reversed into the driveway. Gravel crunched and scrabbled under his tires. A noisy approach. He risked fifty yards, which was about halfway. Then he stopped and slid out and unlatched the tailgate. He climbed up into the load bed and grabbed the first guy by the belt and the collar and heaved and hauled and half-dragged and half-rolled him to the edge and then put the sole of his boot against the guy’s hip and shoved him over. The guy fell three feet and thumped down on his side and settled on his back.
Return to sender.
Reacher went back for the second guy and pushed and pulled and hauled and rolled him out of the truck right on top of his buddy. Then he latched the tailgate again and vaulted over the side to the ground and got behind the wheel and took off fast.
The four Duncans were still around the table in Jasper’s kitchen. Not a planned meeting, but they had a permanently long agenda and they were taking advantage of circumstances. Foremost in their minds was an emerging delay on the Canadian border. Jacob said, “We’re getting pressure from our friend to the south.”
Jonas said, “We can’t control what we can’t control.”
“Try telling that to him.”
“He’ll get his shipment.”
“When?”
“Whenever.”
“He paid up front.”
“He always does.”
“A lot of money.”
“It always is.”
“But this time he’s agitated. He wants action. And here’s the thing. It was very strange. He called me, and it was like jumping into the conversation halfway through.”
“What?”
“He was frustrated, obviously. But also a little surly, like we weren’t taking him seriously. Like he had made prior communications that had gone unheeded. Like we had ignored warnings. I felt like he was on page three and I was on page one.”
“He’s losing his mind.”
“Unless.”
“Unless what?”
“Unless one of us took a couple of his calls already.”
Jonas Duncan said, “Well, I didn’t.”
“Me either,” Jasper Duncan said.
“You sure?”
“Of course.”
“Because there’s really no other explanation here. And remember, this is a guy we can’t afford to mess with. This is a deeply unpleasant person.”
Jacob’s brothers both shrugged. Two men in their sixties, gnarled, battered, built like fireplugs. Jonas said, “Don’t look at me.”
“Me either,” Jasper said again.
Only Seth Duncan hadn’t spoken. Not a word. Jacob’s son.
His father asked, “What aren’t you
telling us, boy?”
Seth looked down at the table. Then he looked up, awkwardly, the aluminum plate huge on his face. His father and his two uncles stared right back at him. He said, “It wasn’t me who broke Eleanor’s nose tonight.”
Chapter 11
Jasper Duncan took a part-used bottle of Knob Creek whiskey from his kitchen cabinet and stuck three gnarled fingers and a blunt thumb in four chipped glasses. He put them on the table and pulled the cork from the bottle and poured four generous measures. He slid the glasses across the scarred wood, a little ceremony, focused and precise. He sat down again and each man took an initial sip, and then the four glasses went back to the table, a ragged little volley of four separate thumps in the quiet of the night.
Jacob Duncan said, “From the beginning, son.”
Seth Duncan said, “I’m dealing with it.”
“But not very well, by the sound of it.”
“He’s my customer.”
Jacob shook his head. “He was your contact, back in the day, but we’re a family. We do everything together, and nothing apart. There’s no such thing as a side deal.”
“We were leaving money on the table.”
“You don’t need to go over ancient history. You found a guy willing to pay more for the same merchandise, and we surely appreciate that. But rewards bring risks. There’s no such thing as something for nothing. No free lunch. So what happened?”
“We’re a week late.”
“We aren’t. We don’t specify dates.”
Seth Duncan said nothing.
Jacob said, “What? You guaranteed a date?”
Seth Duncan nodded.
Jacob said, “That was dumb, son. We never specify dates. You know we can’t afford to. There are a hundred factors outside of our control. The weather, for one.”
“I used a worst-case analysis.”
“You think too much. There’s always something worse than the worst. Count on it. So what happened?”
