by Lee Child
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 fir
ed.”
“I’m good,” Reacher said. “Are you OK? He’s as likely to hit you as me. Wherever you are.”
“We’re good.”
“Where’s Jacob?”
“Still heading south and west. He’s slowing down.”
“Stay on him,” Reacher said. He put the phone back on the seat. He kept his Glock in his pocket. The problem with being a right-handed man in a left-hand-drive truck was that he would have to bust out the windshield to fire, which used to be easy enough back in the days of pebbly safety glass, but modern automotive windshields were tough, because they were laminated with strong plastic layers, and anyway his heavy wrench was in the burned-out Tahoe, probably all melted back to ore.
Seth rested, bending forward from the waist, his head coming down almost to his shins, and he forced air into his lungs, and he panted once, then twice, and he straightened up and held his breath and aimed the gun again, this time with much more concentration and much better control. Now the muzzle was moving through a circle the size of a baseball. Reacher turned the wheel and stamped on the gas and took off to his right, in a fast tight circle, and then he feinted to come back on his original line but wrenched the wheel the other way and rocked the truck through a figure eight. Seth fired once into empty space and then aimed again and fired again. A round smacked into the top of the Yukon’s windshield surround, on the passenger side, six feet from Reacher’s head.
One round left, Reacher thought.
But there were no rounds left. Reacher saw Seth thrashing at the trigger and he saw the gun’s wheel turning and turning to no effect at all. Either the gun was a six-shooter that hadn’t been fully loaded, or it was a five-shooter. Maybe a Smith 60, Reacher thought. Eventually Seth gave up on it and looked around desperately and then just hurled the empty gun at the Yukon. Finally, a decent aim. The guy would have been better off throwing rocks. The gun hit the windshield dead in front of Reacher’s face. Reacher flinched and ducked involuntarily. The gun bounced off the glass and fell away. Then Seth turned and ran again, and the rest of it was easy.
Reacher stamped on the gas and accelerated and lined up carefully and hit Seth from behind doing close to forty miles an hour. A car might have scooped him up and tossed him in the air and sent him cartwheeling backward over the hood and the roof, but the Yukon wasn’t a car. It was a big truck with a high blunt nose. It was about as subtle as a sledgehammer. It caught Seth flat on his back, everywhere from his knees to his shoulders, like a two-ton bludgeon, and Reacher felt the impact and Seth’s head whipped away out of view, instantaneously, like it had been sucked down by amazing gravity, and the truck bucked once, like there was something passing under the rear left wheel, and then the going got as smooth as the dirt would let it.
Reacher slowed and steered a wide circle and came back to check if any further attention was required. But it wasn’t. No question about it. Reacher had seen plenty of dead people, and Seth Duncan was more dead than most of them.
Reacher took the phone off the passenger seat and said, “Seth is down,” and then he lined up again and drove away fast, south and west across the field.
Chapter 61
Jacob Duncan had gotten about two hundred yards from his house. That was all. Reacher saw him up ahead, all alone in the vastness, with nothing but open space all around. He saw Dorothy Coe’s truck a hundred yards farther on, well beyond the running man to the north and the west. It was holding a wide slow curve, like a vigilant sheepdog, like a destroyer guaranteeing a shipping lane.
On the phone Dorothy said, “I’m worried about the gun.”
Reacher said, “Seth was a lousy shot.”
“Doesn’t mean Jacob is.”
“OK,” Reacher said. “Pull over and wait for me. We’ll do this together.”
He clicked off the call and changed course and crossed Jacob’s path a hundred yards back and headed straight for Dorothy Coe. When he arrived she got out of her truck and headed for his passenger door. He dropped the window with the switch on his side and said, “No, you drive. I’ll ride shotgun.”
He got out and stepped around and they met where the front of the Yukon’s hood was dented. No words were exchanged. Dorothy’s face was set with determination. She was halfway between calm and nervous. She got in the driver’s seat and motored it forward and checked the mirror, like it was a normal morning and she was heading out to the store for milk. Reacher climbed in beside her and freed the Glock from his pocket.
She said, “Tell me about the photographs. In their silver frames.”
“I don’t want to,” Reacher said.
“No, I mean, I need to know there’s no doubt they implicate the Duncans. Jacob in particular. Like evidence. I need you to tell me. Before we do this.”
“There’s no doubt,” Reacher said. “No doubt at all.”
Dorothy Coe nodded and said nothing. She fiddled the selector into gear and the truck took off, rolling slow, jiggling and pattering across the ground. She said, “We were talking about what comes next.”
Reacher said, “Call a trucker from the next county. Or do business with Eleanor.”
“No, about the barn. The doctor thinks we should burn it down. But I’m not sure I want to do that.”
“Your call, I think.”
“What would you do?”
“Not my decision.”
“Tell me.”
Reacher said, “I would nail the judas hole shut, and I would leave it alone and never go there again. I would let the flowers grow right over it.”
There was no more conversation. They got within fifty yards of Jacob Duncan and switched to operational shorthand. Jacob was still running, but not fast. He was just about spent. He was stumbling and staggering, a short wide man limited by bad lungs and stiff legs and the aches and pains that come with age. He had a revolver in his hand, the same dull stainless and the same stubby barrel as Seth’s. Probably another Smith 60, and likely to be just as ineffective if used by a weak man all wheezing and gasping and trembling from exertion.
Dorothy Coe asked, “How do I do this?”
Reacher said, “Pass him on the left. Let’s see if he stands and fights.”
He didn’t. Reacher buzzed his window down and hung the Glock out in the breeze and Dorothy swooped fast and close to Jacob’s left and he didn’t turn and fire. He just flinched away and stumbled onward, a degree or two right of where he had been heading before.
Reacher said, “Now come around in a big wide circle and aim right for him from behind.”
“OK,” Dorothy said. “For Margaret.”
She continued the long leftward curve, winding it tighter and tighter until she came back to her original line. She coasted for a second and straightened up and then she hit the gas and the truck leapt forward, ten yards, twenty, thirty, and Jacob Duncan glanced back in horror and darted left, and Dorothy Coe flinched right, involuntarily, a civilian with forty years of safe driving behind her, and she hit Jacob a heavy glancing blow with the left headlight, hard in his back and his right shoulder, sending the gun flying, sending him tumbling, spinning him around, hurling him to the ground.
“Get back quick,” Reacher said.
But Jacob Duncan wasn’t getting up. He was on his back, one leg pounding away like a dog dreaming, one arm scrabbling uselessly in the dirt, his head jerking, his eyes open and staring, up and down, left and right. His gun was ten feet away.
Dorothy Coe drove back and stopped and stood off ten yards away. She asked, “What now?”
Reacher said, “I would leave him there. I think you broke his back. He’ll die slowly.”
“How long?”
“An hour, maybe two.”
“I don’t know.”
Reacher gave her the Glock. “Or go shoot him in the head. It would be a mercy, not that he deserves it.”
“Will you do it?”
“Gladly. But you should. You’ve wanted to for twenty-five years.”
She nodded slowly. She stared dow
n at the Glock, laid flat like an open book on both her hands, like she had never seen such a thing before. She asked, “Is there a safety catch?”
Reacher shook his head.
“No safety on a Glock,” he said.
She opened the door. She climbed down, to the sill step, to the ground. She looked back at Reacher.
“For Margaret,” she said again.
“And the others,” Reacher said.
“And for Artie,” she said. “My husband.”
She stepped sideways around her open door, touching it with one hand as she went, slowly, with reluctance, and then she crossed the open ground, small neat strides on the dirt, ten of them, twelve, turning a short distance into a long journey. Jacob Duncan went still and watched her approach. She stepped up close and pointed the gun straight down and to one side, holding it a little away from herself, making it not part of herself, separating herself from it, and then she said some words Reacher didn’t hear, and then she pulled the trigger, once, twice, three four five six times, and then she stepped away.
Chapter 62
The doctor and his wife were waiting in Dorothy Coe’s truck, back on the two-lane road. Reacher and Dorothy parked ahead of them and they all got out and stood together. The Duncan compound was reduced to three vertical chimneys and a wide horizontal spread of ashy gray timbers that were still burning steadily, but no longer fiercely. Smoke was coming up and gathering into a wide column that seemed to rise forever. It was the only thing moving. The sun was as high as it was going to get, and the rest of the sky was blue.
Reacher said, “You’ve got a lot of work to do. Get everyone on it. Get backhoes and bucket loaders and dig some big holes. Really big holes. Then gather the trash and bury it deep. But save some space for later. Their van will arrive at some point, and the driver is just as guilty as the rest of them.”