The Essential Jack Reacher 12-Book Bundle

by Lee Child

  Nobody moved. Reacher watched and thought. Behind him he heard the doctor stir and heard him ask, “Can we talk?”

  Duncan said, “Sit down.”

  The doctor said, “We should discuss this. Like reasonable people.”

  “Sit down.”

  “No, tell us what you want.”

  A brave try, but in Reacher’s estimation the wrong tactic. The doctor thought there was something to be gained by spinning things out, by using up the clock. Reacher thought the exact opposite was true. He thought there was no time to waste. None at all. He said, “It’s cold.”

  Duncan said, “So?”

  “Too cold to sit down outside. Too cold to stand up outside. Let’s go inside.”

  “I want you outside.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I do.”

  “Then let them go get their coats.”

  “Why should I?”

  “Self-respect,” Reacher said. “You’re wearing a coat. If it’s warm enough not to need one, then you’re a pussy. If it’s cold enough to bundle up, then you’re making innocent people suffer unnecessarily. If you think you’ve got a beef with me, OK, but these folks have never hurt you.”

  Seth Duncan thought about it for a second, the gun still up at his shoulder, his head still bent down to it, an eye still closed. He said, “OK, one at a time. The others stay here, like hostages. Mrs. Coe goes first. Get your coat. Nothing else. Don’t touch the phone.”

  Nobody moved for a beat, and then Dorothy Coe peeled out of the cluster and walked to the door and stepped inside. She was gone a minute, and then she came back wearing her coat, this time buttoned over her dress. She resumed her position.

  Duncan said, “Sit down, Mrs. Coe.”

  Dorothy tugged her coat down and sat, not cross-legged, but with her knees drawn up to one side.

  Reacher said, “Now the doctor’s wife.”

  Duncan said, “Don’t tell me what to do.”

  “I’m just saying. Ladies first, right?”

  “OK, the doctor’s wife. Go. Same rules. Just the coat. Don’t touch the phone. Don’t forget I have hostages here. Including your beloved husband.”

  The doctor’s wife peeled out of the cluster. A minute later she was back, wearing her wool coat, and a hat, and gloves, and a muffler.

  “Sit down,” Duncan said.

  She sat down, right next to Dorothy Coe, cross-legged, her back straight, her hands on her knees, her gaze level and aimed at a faraway spot in the fields. Nothing there, but Reacher guessed it was better than looking at her tormentor.

  Reacher said, “Now the doctor.”

  “OK, go,” Duncan said.

  The doctor peeled out and was gone a minute. He came back in a blue parka, all kinds of nylon and Gore-Tex and zippered compartments. He sat down without waiting to be told.

  Reacher said, “Now me.”

  Duncan said, “No, not you. Not now, not ever. You stay right there. I don’t trust you.”

  “That’s not very nice.”

  “Sit down.”

  “Make me.”

  Duncan leaned into the gun, the final percent, like he was ready to fire.

  He said, “Sit down.”

  Reacher didn’t move. Then he glanced to his right and saw lights in the mist, and he knew that his chance had gone.

  The Cornhuskers came on fast, five of them in five separate vehicles, a tight little high-speed convoy, three pick-up trucks and two SUVs. They all jammed to a stop on the road in line with the fence, five vehicles all nose to tail, and five doors were flung open, and five guys spilled out, all of them in red jackets, all of them moving fast, the smallest of them the size of a house. They swarmed straight in, climbing the fence in unison, moving across the dormant lawn on a broad front, coming in wide of the Remington’s potential trajectory. The Remington stayed rock steady in Seth Duncan’s hands. Reacher was watching its muzzle. It wasn’t moving at all, its blued steel dark in the moonlight, trained dead on his chest from thirty feet, the smooth bore at its center looking big enough to stick a thumb in.

  Duncan said, “Take the three others inside, and keep them there.”

  Rough hands grabbed at the doctor, and his wife, and Dorothy Coe, hauling them back to their feet, by their arms and shoulders, pulling them away, hustling them across the last of the gravel, pushing them in through the door. Eight people went in, and a minute later four came out, all of them football players, all of them crunching back to where Reacher was standing.

  Duncan said, “Hold him.”

  Reacher was spending no time on regret or recrimination. No time at all. The time for ruing mistakes and learning from them came later. As always he was focused in the present and the immediate future. People who wasted time and energy cursing recent errors were certain losers. Not that Reacher saw an easy path to certain victory. Not right then. Not in the short term. Right then he saw nothing ahead but a world of hurt.

  The four big guys stepped up close. No opportunity. The Remington stayed trained on its target and two guys came in from wide positions, never getting between Reacher and the gun. They stepped alongside him and grabbed an arm each, big strong hands on his elbows from behind, on his wrists from in front, pushing one, pulling the other, straightening his arms, bending his elbows back, kicking his feet apart, hooking their ankles in front of his ankles, holding him immobile. A third guy came up behind him and stood between his spread feet and wrapped massive arms around his chest. The fourth backed off and stood ten feet from Duncan.

  Reacher didn’t struggle. No point. Absolutely no point at all. Each of the three men holding him was taller than him by inches and outweighed him by fifty pounds. No doubt they were all slow and stupid and untutored, but right then sheer dumb bulk was doing the job just fine. He could move his feet a little, and he could move his head a little, but that was all, and all he could do with his feet was move them backward, which would pitch him forward on his face, except that the guy who had him in the bear hug from behind would hold him upright. And all he could do with his head was duck his chin to his chest, or jerk it back a couple of inches. Not enough to hurt the guy behind him.

  He was stuck, and he knew it.

  Seth Duncan lowered the gun to his hip again. He walked forward with it and then handed it off to the fourth guy. He walked on without it and stopped face-to-face with Reacher, a yard away. His eyes were bloodshot and his breathing was low and shallow. He was quivering a little. Some kind of fury or excitement. He said, “I have a message for you, pal.”

  Reacher said, “Who from? The National Association of Assholes?”

  “No, from me personally.”

  “What, you let your membership lapse?”

  “Ten seconds from now we’ll know who’s a member of that club, and who isn’t.”

  “So what’s the message?”

  “It’s more of a question.”

  “OK, so what’s the question?”

  “The question is, how do you like it?”

  Reacher had been fighting since he was five years old, and he had never had his nose broken. Not even once. Partly good luck, and partly good management. Plenty of people had tried, over the years, either deliberately or in a flurry of savage unaimed blows, but none had ever succeeded. Not one. Not ever. Not even close. It was a fact Reacher was proud of, in a peculiar way. It was a symbol. A talisman. A badge of honor. He had all kinds of nicks and cuts and scars on his face and his arms and his body, but he felt that the distinctive but intact bone in his nose made up for them.

  It said: I’m still standing.

  The blow came in exactly as he expected it to, a clenched fist, a straight right, hard and heavy, riding up a little, aiming high, as if Duncan subconsciously expected Reacher to flinch up and back, like his wife Eleanor probably did every single time. But Reacher didn’t flinch up and back. He started with his head up and back, his eyes open, watching down his nose, timing it, then jerking forward from the neck, smashing a perfect impro
vised head butt straight into Duncan’s knuckles, an instant high-speed high-impact collision between the thick ridge in Reacher’s brow and the delicate bones in Duncan’s hand. No contest. No contest at all. Reacher had a skull like concrete, and an arch was the strongest structure known to man, and hands were the most fragile parts of the body. Duncan screamed and snatched his hand away and cradled it limp against his chest and hopped a whole yowling circle, looking up, looking down, stunned and whimpering. He had three or four busted phalanges, Reacher figured, certainly a couple of proximals, and maybe a couple of cracked distals too, from the fingers folding much tighter than nature intended, under the force of the sudden massive compression.

  “Asshole,” Reacher said.

  Duncan clamped his right wrist under his left armpit and huffed and blew and stomped around. He came to rest a whole minute later, a little cramped and crouched and bent, and he glowered up and out from either side of his splint, hurt and angry and humiliated, looking first at Reacher, and then at his fourth guy, who was standing there stock-still, holding the shotgun. Duncan jerked his head, from the guy, to Reacher, a gesture full of silent fury and impatience.

  Get him.

  The fourth guy stepped up. Reacher was pretty sure he wasn’t going to shoot. No one fires a shotgun at a group of four people, three of which are his friends.

  Reacher was pretty sure it was going to be worse than shooting.

  The guy reversed the gun. Right hand on the barrel, left hand on the stock.

  The guy behind Reacher moved. He wrapped his left forearm tight around Reacher’s throat, and he clamped his right palm tight on Reacher’s forehead.

  Immobile.

  The fourth guy raised the gun horizontal, butt first, two-handed, and cocked it back over his right shoulder, ready to go, lining it up like a spear, and then he rocked forward and took a step and aimed carefully and jabbed the butt straight at the center of Reacher’s face and

  CRACK

  BLACK

  Chapter 42

  Jacob Duncan convened an unscheduled middle-of-the-night meeting with his brothers, in his own kitchen, not Jonas’s or Jasper’s, with Wild Turkey, not Knob Creek, and plenty of it, because his mood was celebratory.

  “I just got off the phone,” he said. “You’ll be pleased to hear my boy has redeemed himself.”

  Jasper asked, “How?”

  “He captured Jack Reacher.”

  Jonas asked, “How?”

  Jacob Duncan leaned back in his chair and shot his feet straight out in front of him, relaxed, expansive, a man at ease, a man with a story to tell. He said, “I drove Seth home, as you know, but I let him out at the end of his road, because he was a little down, and he wanted to walk a spell in the night air. He got within a hundred yards of his house, and he was nearly run over by a car. His car, as it happens. His own Cadillac, going like a bat out of hell. Naturally he hurried home. His wife was induced to reveal all the details. It turns out Reacher stole the Cadillac earlier in the afternoon. It turns out the doctor was with him. Misguided, of course, but it seems the poor fellow has formed an alliance of sorts with our Mr. Reacher. So Seth took his old Remington pump and set off in Eleanor’s car and, sure enough, Reacher was indeed at the doctor’s house, large as life and twice as natural.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “In a safe place. It seems like the capture was mostly uneventful.”

  “Is he alive?”

  “So far,” Jacob Duncan said. “But how long he stays alive is what we need to discuss.”

  The room went quiet. The others sat and waited, as they had so many times before, for their brother Jacob, the eldest, a contemplative man, always ready with a pronouncement, or a decision, or a nugget of wisdom, or an analysis, or a proposal.

  Jacob said, “Seth wants to finesse the whole thing, right down to the wire, and frankly I’m tempted to let him try. He wants to rebuild his credibility with us, which of course I told him isn’t necessary, but it remains true that all of us need to pay some attention to our own credibility, in a collective sense, with Mr. Rossi, our good friend to the south.”

  Jasper asked, “What does Seth want to do?”

  “He wants to stage things so that our prior hedging is shown to have been entirely justified. He wants to wait until our shipment is about an hour away, whereupon he wants to unveil Reacher to Mr. Rossi’s boys, whereupon he wants to fake a phone call and have the truck arrive within the next sixty minutes, as if what we’ve been saying all along about the delay was indeed true and legitimate.”

  “Too risky,” Jonas said. “Reacher is a dangerous man. We shouldn’t keep him around a minute longer than we have to. That’s just asking for trouble.”

  “As I said, Reacher’s in a safe place. Plus, in the end, if we do it Seth’s way, we’ll have been seen to have solved our own problems with our own hands, without any outside assistance at all, and therefore whatever small shred of vulnerability we displayed will evaporate completely.”

  “Even so. It’s still risky.”

  “There are other factors,” Jacob said.

  The room went quiet again.

  Jacob said, “We’ve never really known or cared what happens to our shipments once they’re in Mr. Rossi’s hands, except that I imagine we always vaguely supposed they pass down a lengthy chain of commerce, sale and resale, to an ultimate destination. And now that chain, or at least a large part of it, has become visible. As of tonight, it seems that three separate participants have representation here. Probably they’re all desperate. It’s clear to me they have agreed to work together to break up the logjam. And once that is done, it’s equally clear to me they will be under instructions to eliminate one another, so that the last man standing triples his profit.”

  Jonas said, “That’s not relevant to us.”

  “Except that Mr. Rossi’s boys seem to be jumping the gun. It was inevitable that one of them would seize the initiative. Our stooges on the phone tree tell me that two men are already dead. Mr. Rossi’s boys killed them outside Mr. Vincent’s motel. So my idea is to give Mr. Rossi’s boys enough time to shorten the chain a little more, so that by the end of tomorrow Mr. Rossi himself will be the last man standing, whereupon he and we can have a little talk about splitting the extra profit equally. The way it works mathematically is that we’ll all double our shares. Mr. Rossi will be happy to live with that, I imagine, and so will we, I’m sure.”

  “Still risky.”

  “You don’t like money, brother?”

  “I don’t like risk.”

  “Everything’s a risk. We know that, don’t we? We’ve lived with risk for a long time. It’s part of the thrill.”

  A long silence.

  Jonas said, “The doctor lied to us. He told us Reacher hitched a ride in a white sedan.”

  Jacob nodded. “The doctor has apologized for that, most sincerely. I’m told he’s being a model of cooperation now. His wife is with him, of course. I’m sure that’s a factor. He also claims Reacher left Seth’s Cadillac sixty miles south of here, and that it was restolen quite independently by an operative from further up the chain. A small Middle Eastern person, according to reports on the phone tree. It appears he was the one who nearly ran Seth over.”

  “Anything else?”

  “The doctor says Reacher saw the police files.”

  Silence in the room.

  Then Jonas said, “And?”

  “Inconclusive, the doctor says.”

  “Conclusive enough to come back.”

  “The doctor says he came back because of the men in the cars.”

  Nobody spoke.

  Jacob said, “But in the interests of full disclosure, the doctor also claims Reacher asked Mrs. Coe if she really wants to be told what happened to her daughter.”

  “Reacher can’t possibly know. Not yet.”

  “I agree. But he might be beginning to pull on threads.”

  “Then we have to kill him now. We have to.”

&nbs
p; “It’s just one more day. He’s locked up. Escape is impossible.”

  More silence.

  Nobody spoke.

  Then Jonas asked, “Anything else?”

  “Eleanor helped Reacher get past the sentry,” Jacob said. “She defied her husband and left his house, quite brazenly. She and Reacher conspired together to decoy the boy away from his post. He didn’t perform well. We’ll have to fire him, of course. We’ll leave Seth to decide what happens to his wife. And it seems that Seth has broken his hand. He’ll need some attention. It appears Reacher has a very hard head. And that’s all the news I have.”

  Nobody spoke.

  Jacob said, “We need to make a decision about the immediate matter at hand. Life and death. Always the ultimate choice.”

  No reply.

  Jacob asked, “Who wants to go first?”

  Nobody spoke.

  Jacob said, “Then I’ll go first. I vote to let my boy do it his way. I vote to keep Reacher concealed until our truck is close by. It’s a minor increase in risk. One more day, that’s all. Overall, it’s insignificant. And I like finesse. I like a measure of elegance in a solution.”

  A long pause.

  Then Jasper said, “I’m in.”

  And Jonas said, “OK,” a little reluctantly.

  Reacher woke up in a concrete room full of bright light. He was on his back on the floor, at the foot of a flight of steep stairs. He had been carried down, he figured, not thrown or fallen. Because the back of his skull was OK. He had no sprains or bruises. His limbs were intact, all four of them. He could see and hear and move. His face hurt like hell, but that was to be expected.

  The lights were regular incandescent household bulbs, six or eight of them, randomly placed, maybe a hundred watts each. No shades. The concrete was smooth and pale gray. Very fine. Not dusty. It was like an engineering product. High-strength. It had been poured with great precision. There were no seams. The angles where the walls met each other and the floor were chamfered and radiused, just slightly. Like a swimming pool, ready for tiling. Reacher had dug swimming pools once. Temporary employment, many years ago. He had seen them in all their different stages of completion.