by Lee Child
Then the Italian stepped away and Vincent saw the two dark-skinned men all slumped down in their seats, somehow suddenly much smaller, deflated, diminished, smeared with dark matter, their heads lolling down on their chests, their heads altered and misshapen, parts of their heads actually missing.
Vincent fell to the floor under the inside sill of his window and vomited in his throat. Then he ran for the phone.
Angelo Mancini opened the red Ford’s trunk and found two nylon roll-aboard suitcases, which more or less confirmed a personal theory of his. Real men carried their bags. They didn’t wheel them around like women. He unzipped one of the bags and rooted around and came up with a bunch of shirts on wire hangers, all folded together concertina-style. He took one and tore it off the hanger and crushed the hanger flat and opened the Ford’s filler neck and used the hanger to poke the shirt down into the tube, one sleeve in, the body all bunched up, the other sleeve trailing out. He lit the trailing cuff with a paper match from a book he had taken from the diner near the Marriott. Then he walked away and got in the blue Chevrolet’s passenger seat and Roberto Cassano drove him away.
The road beyond the post-and-rail fence outside the dining room window stayed dark. The doctor got up and left the room and came back with four mugs of fresh coffee on a plastic tray. His wife sat quiet. Next to her Dorothy Coe sat quiet. The sisterhood, enduring, waiting it out. Just one long night out of more than nine thousand in the last twenty-five years, most of them tranquil, presumably, but some of them not. Nine thousand separate sunsets, each one of them heralding who knew what.
Reacher was waiting it out, too. He knew that Dorothy wanted to ask what he had found in the county archive. But she was taking her time getting around to it, and that was OK with him. He wasn’t about to bring it up unannounced. He had dealt with his fair share of other people’s tragedy, all of it bad, none of it easy, but he figured there was nothing worse than the Coe family story. Nothing at all. So he waited, ten silent minutes, then fifteen, and finally she asked, “Did they still have the files?”
He answered, “Yes, they did.”
“Did you see them?”
“Yes, I did.”
“Did you see her photograph?”
“She was very beautiful.”
“Wasn’t she?” Dorothy said, smiling, not with pride, because the kid’s beauty was not her achievement, but with simple wonderment. She said, “I still miss her. Which I think is strange, really, because the things I miss are the things I actually had, and they would be gone now anyway. The things I didn’t get to see would have happened afterward. She would be thirty-three now. All grown up. And I don’t miss those things, because I don’t have a clear picture of what they might have been. I don’t know what she might have become. I don’t know if she would have been a mother herself, and stayed around here, or if she would have been a career girl, maybe a lawyer or a scientist, living far away in a big city.”
“Did she do well in school?”
“Very well.”
“Any favorite subjects?”
“All of them.”
“Where was she going that day?”
“She loved flowers. I like to think she was going searching for some.”
“Did she roam around often?”
“Most days, when she wasn’t in school. Sundays especially. She loved her bike. She was always going somewhere. Those were innocent times. We thought it was safe here. She did the same things I did, when I was eight.”
Reacher paused a beat and said, “I was a cop of sorts for a long time. So may I ask you a serious question?”
She said, “Yes.”
“Do you really want to know what happened to her?”
“Can’t be worse than what I imagine.”
Reacher said, “I’m afraid it can. And it sometimes is. That’s why I asked. Sometimes it’s better not to know.”
She didn’t speak for a long moment.
Then she said, “My neighbor’s son hears her ghost screaming.”
“I met him,” Reacher said. “He smokes a lot of weed.”
“I hear it too, sometimes. Or I think I do. It makes me wonder.”
“I don’t believe in ghosts.”
“Neither do I, really. I mean, look at me.”
Reacher did. A solid, capable woman, about sixty years old, blunt and square, worn down by work, worn down by hardship, fading slowly to gray.
She said, “Yes, I really want to know what happened to her.”
Reacher said, “OK.”
Two minutes later the phone rang. An old-fashioned instrument. The slow peal of a mechanical bell, a low sonorous sound, doleful and not at all urgent. The doctor’s wife jumped up and ran out to the hallway to answer. She said hello, but nothing more. She just listened. The phone tree again. The others heard the thin distorted crackle of a loud panicked voice from the earpiece, and they sensed a gasping shuffle out there in the hallway. Some kind of surprising news. Dorothy Coe fidgeted in her chair. The doctor got to his feet. Reacher watched the window. The road stayed dark.
The doctor’s wife came back in, more puzzled than worried, more amazed than frightened. She said, “Mr. Vincent just saw the Italians shoot the men from the red car. With a gun. They’re dead. Both of them. Then they set the car on fire. Right outside his window. In the motel lot.”
Nobody spoke, until Reacher said, “Well, that changes things a little.”
“How?”
“I thought maybe we had six guys working for the same organization, with some kind of a two-way relationship, them and the Duncans. But we don’t. They’re three pairs. Three separate organizations, plus the Duncans make four. Which makes it a food chain. The Duncans owe somebody something, and that somebody owes somebody else, and so on, all the way up the line. They’re all invested, and they’re all here to safeguard their investment. And as long as they’re all here, they’re all trying to cut each other out. They’re all trying to shorten the chain.”
“So we’re caught in the middle of a gang war?”
“Look on the bright side. Six guys showed up this afternoon, and now there are only three of them left. Fifty percent attrition. That works for me.”
The doctor said, “We should call the police.”
His wife said, “No, the police are sixty miles away. And the Cornhuskers are right here, right now. That’s what we need to worry about tonight. We need to know what they’re doing.”
Reacher asked, “How do they normally communicate?”
“Cell phone.”
“I’ve got one,” Reacher said. “In the truck I took. Maybe we could listen in. Then we’d know for sure what they’re doing.”
The doctor undid the locks and unlatched the chain and they all crowded out to the driveway. Reacher opened the Yukon’s passenger door and rooted around in the footwell and came out with the cell phone, slim and black, like a candy bar. He stood in the angle of the door and flipped it open and said, “They’ll use conference calls, right? This thing will ring and all five of them will be on?”
“More likely vibrate, not ring,” the doctor said. “Check the settings and the call register and the address book. You should be able to find an access number.”
“You check,” Reacher said. “I’m not familiar with cell phones.” He tracked around the back of the truck and handed the phone to the doctor. Then he looked to his left and saw light in the mist to the east. A high hemispherical glow, trembling, bouncing, weakening and strengthening and weakening, very white, almost blue.
A car, coming west toward them, pretty fast.
It was about half a mile away. Just like before, the misty glow resolved itself to a fierce source low down above the surface of the road, then to twin fierce sources, spaced just feet apart, oval in shape, low to the ground, blue-white and intense. And just like before, the ovals kept on coming, getting closer, flickering and jittering because of firm suspension and fast steering. They looked small at first, because of the distance, and they st
ayed small because they were small, because the car was a Mazda Miata, low and tiny and red. Reacher recognized it about two hundred feet out.
Eleanor Duncan.
The sisterhood, clustering together.
A hundred feet out the Mazda slowed a little. Its top was up this time, like a tight little hat. Cold weather, no further need for instant identification. No more sentries to distract.
Fifty feet out, it braked hard, ready for the turn in, and red light flared in the mist behind it.
Twenty feet out, it swung wide and started to turn.
Ten feet out, Reacher remembered three things.
First, Eleanor Duncan was not on the phone tree.
Second, his gun was in his coat.
Third, his coat was in the kitchen.
The Mazda swung in fast and crunched over the gravel and jammed to a stop right behind Dorothy Coe’s pick-up. The door opened wide and Seth Duncan unfolded his lanky frame and stepped out.
He was holding a shotgun.
Chapter 41
Seth Duncan had a huge aluminum splint on his face, like a dull metal patch taped to a large piece of rotten fruit. All kinds of sick moonlit colors were spreading out from under it. Yellows, and browns, and purples. He was wearing dark pants and a dark sweater with a new parka over it. The shotgun in his hands was an old Remington 870 pump. Probably a 12-gauge, probably a twenty-inch barrel. A walnut stock, a seven-round tubular magazine, altogether a fine all-purpose weapon, well proven, more than four million built and sold, used by the navy for shipboard security, used by the Marines for close-quarters combat, used by the army for heavy short-range firepower, used by civilians for hunting, used by cops as a riot gun, used by cranky homeowners as a get-off-my-lawn deterrent.
Nobody moved.
Reacher watched carefully and saw that Seth Duncan was holding the Remington pretty steady. His finger was on the trigger. He was aiming it from the hip, straight back at Reacher, which meant he was aiming it at Dorothy Coe and the doctor and his wife too, because buckshot spreads a little, and all four of them were clustered tight together, on the driveway, ten feet from the doctor’s front door. All kinds of collateral damage, just waiting to happen.
Nobody spoke.
The Mazda idled. Its door was still open. Seth Duncan started to move up the driveway. He raised the Remington’s stock to his shoulder and closed one eye and squinted along the barrel and walked forward, slow and steady. A useless maneuver on rough terrain. But feasible on smooth gravel. The Remington stayed dead on target.
He stopped thirty feet away. He said, “All of you sit down. Right where you are. Cross-legged on the ground.”
Nobody moved.
Reacher asked, “Is that thing loaded?”
Duncan said, “You bet your ass it is.”
“Take care it doesn’t go off by accident.”
“It won’t,” Duncan said, all nasal and inarticulate, because of his injury, and because his cheek was pressed hard against the Remington’s walnut stock.
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 cl
ose. 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?”