The Essential Jack Reacher 12-Book Bundle

by Lee Child

  “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 surveilled 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.

  The truck backed up and turned and stopped astride the sandy track, facing south, in position, ready. It shut down and settled and its lights went off.

  It waited.

  Reacher waited in the dark in his tub armchair, forty minutes, an hour, tracing the next day’s intended route in his head. South to the Interstate, and then east. The Interstate would be easy. He had hitchhiked most of the network before. There were on-ramps and rest areas and a vast traveling population, some of it commercial, some of it private, a fair proportion of it lonely and ready for company. The problem would come before the Interstate, on the middle-of-nowhere trek down to it. Since climbing out of the car that had dumped him at the crossroads he had heard no traffic at all. Nighttime was always worse than daytime, but even so it was rare in America to be close to a road and hear nothing go by. In fact he had heard nothing at all, no wind, no night sounds, and he had been listening hard, for tires on gravel. It was like he had gone deaf. He raised his hand awkwardly and clicked his fingers near his ear, just to be sure. He wasn’t deaf. It was just the middle of the night, in the countryside. That was all. He got up and used the bathroom and sat back down.

  Then he heard something.

  Not a passing vehicle, not wind, not night sounds.

  Not tires on gravel.

  Footsteps on gravel.

  Chapter 8

  Footsteps on gravel. One pair. A light, hesitant tread, approaching. Reacher watched the window and saw a shape flit across it. Small, slight, head ducked down into the collar of a coat.

  A woman.

  There was a knock at the door, soft and tentative and padded. A small nervous hand, wearing a glove. A decoy, possibly. Not beyond the wit of man to send someone on ahead, all innocent and unthreatening, to get the door open and lull the target into a sense of false security. Not unlikely that such a person would be nervous and hesitant about her role.

  Reacher crossed the floor silently and headed back to the bathroom. He eased the window up and clipped out the screen and rested it in the bathtub. Then he ducked his head and climbed out, scissoring his legs over the sill, stepping down to the gravel. He walked one of the silver timbers that boxed the path, like a tightrope, silently. He went counterclockwise around the circular cabin and came up on the woman from behind.

  She was alone.

  No cars on the road, nobody in the lot, nobody flattened on either side of his door, nobody crouched under his window. Just the woman, standing there on her own. She looked cold. She was wearing a wool coat and a scarf. No hat. She was maybe forty, small, dark, and worried. She raised her hand and knocked again.

  Reacher said, “I’m here.”

  She gasped and spun around and put her hand on her chest. Her mouth stayed open and made
a tiny O. He said, “I’m sorry if I startled you, but I wasn’t expecting visitors.”

  She said, “Perhaps you should have been.”

  “Well, in fact, perhaps I was. But not you.”

  “Can we go inside?”

  “Who are you?”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m the doctor’s wife.”

  “I’m pleased to meet you,” Reacher said.

  “Can we go inside?”

  Reacher found the key in his pocket and unlocked the door from the outside. The doctor’s wife stepped in and he followed her and locked the door again behind them. He crossed the room and closed the bathroom door against the night air coming in through the open window. He turned back to find her standing in the middle of the space. He indicated the armchair and said, “Please.”

  She sat down. Didn’t unbutton her coat. She was still nervous. If she had been carrying a purse, she would have had it clamped hard on her knees, defensively. She said, “I walked all the way over here.”

  “To pick up the car? You should have let your husband do that, in the morning. That’s what I arranged with him.”

  “He’s too drunk to drive.”

  “He’ll be OK by morning, surely.”

  “Morning’s too late. You have to get going. Right now. You’re not safe here.”

  “You think?”

  “My husband said you’re heading south to the Interstate. I’ll drive you there.”

  “Now? It’s got to be a hundred miles.”

  “A hundred and twenty.”

  “It’s the middle of the night.”

  “You’re not safe here. My husband told me what happened. You interfered with the Duncans. You saw. They’ll punish him for sure, and we think they’ll come after you, too.”

  “ ‘They’?”

  “The Duncans. There are four of them.”

  “Punish him how?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Last time they wouldn’t let him come here for a month.”

  “Here? To the lounge?”

  “It’s his favorite place.”

  “How could they stop him coming here?”

  “They told Mr. Vincent not to serve him. The owner.”

  “Why would the owner of this place do what the Duncans tell him?”

  “The Duncans run a trucking business. All of Mr. Vincent’s supplies come through them. He signed a contract. He kind of had to. That’s how the Duncans work. So if Mr. Vincent doesn’t play ball, a couple of deliveries will be late, a couple lost, a couple damaged. He knows that. He’ll go out of business.”

  Reacher asked, “What will they figure to do to me?”

  The woman said, “They hire football players right out of college. Cornhuskers. The ones who were good enough to get scholarships, but not good enough to go to the NFL. Guards and tackles. Big guys.”

  Brett, Reacher thought.

  The woman said, “They’ll connect the dots and figure out where you are. I mean, where else could you be? They’ll pay you a visit. Maybe they’re already on their way.”

  “From where?”

  “The Duncan depot is twenty miles from here. Most of their people live close to it.”

  “How many football players have they got?”

  “Ten.”

  Reacher said nothing.

  The woman said, “My husband heard you say you’re headed for Virginia.”

  “That’s the plan.”

  “Is that where you live?”

  “As much as anywhere else.”

  “We should get going. You’re in big trouble.”

  “Not unless they send all nine at once,” Reacher said.

  “All nine what?”

  “Football players.”

  “I said there were ten.”

  “I already met one of them. He’s currently indisposed. They’re one short, as of tonight.”

  “What?”

  “He got between me and Seth Duncan.”

  “What did you do to Seth Duncan?”

  “I broke his nose.”

  “Oh, sweet Jesus. Why?”

  “Why not?”

  “Oh, sweet, sweet Jesus. Where are the car keys?”

  “What will happen to Mrs. Duncan?”

  “We need to get going. Right this minute.”

  “First answer the question.”

  “Mrs. Duncan will be punished too. For calling my husband. She’s been told not to do that. Just like he’s been told not to go treat her.”

  “He’s a doctor. He doesn’t get a choice. They take an oath, don’t they?”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Jack Reacher.”

  “We have to go, Mr. Reacher. Right now.”

  “What will they do to Mrs. Duncan?”

  “This isn’t your business,” the woman said. Which, strictly speaking, was fairly close to Reacher’s own opinion at that point. His business was to get himself to Virginia, and he was being offered a ride through the hardest part of the journey, fast and free. I-80 awaited, two hours away. An on-ramp, the last of the night drivers, the first stirrings of morning traffic. Maybe breakfast. Maybe there was a rest area or a truck stop with a greasy spoon café. Bacon, eggs, coffee.

  “What will they do to her?” he asked again.

  The woman said, “Probably nothing much.”

  “What kind of nothing much?”

  “Well, they might put her on a coagulant. One of the uncles seems to have medical supplies. Or maybe they’ll just stop her taking so much aspirin. So she doesn’t bleed so bad next time. And they’ll probably ground her for a month. That’s all. Nothing too serious. Nothing for you to worry about. They’ve been married ten years, after all. She’s not a prisoner. She could leave if she wanted to.”

  “Except this time she inadvertently got her husband’s nose broken. He might take that out on her, if he can’t take it out on me.”

  The doctor’s wife said nothing. But it sounded like she was agreeing. The strange round room went quiet. Then Reacher heard tires on gravel.

  Chapter 9

  Reacher checked the window. There were four tires in total, big knobbly off-road things, all of them on a Ford pick-up truck. The truck had a jacked suspension and lights on a roof bar and a snorkel air intake and a winch on the front. There were two large shapes in the gloom inside. The shapes had thick necks and huge shoulders. The truck nosed slowly down the row of cabins and stopped twenty feet behind the parked Subaru. The headlights stayed on. The engine idled. The doors opened. Two guys climbed out.

  They both looked like Brett, only bigger. Late twenties, easily six-six or six-seven, probably close to three hundred pounds each, big waists made tiny by huge chests and arms and shoulders. They had cropped hair and small eyes and fleshy faces. They were the kind of guys who ate two dinners and were still hungry afterward. They were wearing red Cornhuskers football jackets made gray by the blue light from the cabin’s eaves.

  The doctor’s wife joined Reacher at the window.

  “Sweet Jesus,” she said.

  Reacher said nothing.

  The two guys closed the truck’s doors and stepped back in unison to the load bed and unlatched a tool locker bolted across its width behind the cab. They lifted the lid and one took out an engineer’s ball-peen hammer and the other took out a two-headed wrench at least a foot and a half long. They left the lid open and walked forward into the truck’s headlight wash and their shadows jumped ahead of them. They were light on their feet and nimble for their size, like football players usually were. They paused for a moment and looked at the cabin’s door, and then they turned away.

  Toward the Subaru.

  They attacked it in a violent frenzy, an absolute blitzkrieg, two or three minutes of uncontrolled smashing and pounding. The noise was deafening. They smashed every shard of glass out of the windshield, they smashed the side windows, the back window, the headlights, the taillights. They hammered jagged dents into the hood, into the doors, into the roof, into the fenders,
into the tailgate. They put their arms through the absent glass and smashed up the dials and the switches and the radio.

  Shit, Reacher thought. There goes my ride.

  “My husband’s punishment,” the doctor’s wife whispered. “Worse this time.”

  The two guys stopped as suddenly as they had started. They stood there, one on each side of the wrecked wagon, and they breathed hard and rolled their shoulders and let their weapons hang down by their sides. Pebbles of broken automotive glass glittered in the neon and the boom and clang of battered sheet metal echoed away to absolute silence.

  Reacher took off his coat and dumped it on the bed.

  The two guys formed up shoulder to shoulder and headed for the cabin’s door. Reacher opened it up and stepped out to meet them head-on. Win or lose, fighting inside would bust up the room, and Vincent the motel owner had enough problems already.

  The two guys stopped ten feet away and stood there, side by side, symmetrical, their weapons in their outside hands, four cubic yards of bone and muscle, six hundred pounds of beef, all flushed and sweating in the chill.

  Reacher said, “Pop quiz, guys. You spent four years in college learning how to play a game. I spent thirteen years in the army learning how to kill people. So how scared am I?”

  No answer.

  “And you were so bad at it you couldn’t even get drafted afterward. I was so good at it I got all kinds of medals and promotions. So how scared are you?”

  “Not very,” said the guy with the wrench.

  Wrong answer. But understandable. Being a good enough guard or tackle in high school to get a full-boat free ride to the big school in Lincoln was no mean achievement. Playing even a cameo role on the field in Memorial Stadium made a guy close to the best of the best. And failing to make the National Football League was no kind of real disgrace. The dividing line between success and failure in the world of sports was often very narrow, and the reasons for falling on one side or the other were often very arbitrary. These guys had been the elite for most of twenty years, the greatest thing their neighborhood had ever seen, then their town, then their county, maybe their state. They had been popular, they had been feted, they had gotten the girls. And they probably hadn’t lost a fight since they were eight years old.