Jacob put down his knife and his fork. He dabbed his lips with his cuff. He folded his hands in front of him. He said, ‘We have to ask ourselves something.’
Jonas was hosting, so he was entitled to the first response.
‘What something?’ he asked.
‘We have to consider whether it might be worth trading a little dignity and self-respect for a useful outcome.’
‘In what way?’
‘We have a provocation and a threat. The provocation comes from the stranger in the motel throwing his weight around in matters that don’t concern him. The threat comes from our friend to the south getting impatient. The first thing must be punished, and the second thing shouldn’t have happened at all. No date should have been guaranteed. But it was, so we have to deal with it, and without judgement either. No doubt Seth was doing what he thought was best for all of us.’
Jonas asked, ‘How do we deal with it?’
‘Let’s think about the other thing first. The stranger from the motel.’
Seth said, ‘I want him hurt bad.’
‘We all do, son. And we tried, didn’t we? Didn’t work out so well.’
‘What, now we’re afraid of him?’
‘We are, a little bit, son. We lost three guys. We’d be stupid not to be at least a little concerned. And we’re not stupid, are we? That’s one thing a Duncan will never be accused of. Hence my question about self-respect.’
‘You want to let him walk?’
‘No, I want to tell our friend to the south that the stranger is the problem. That he’s somehow the reason for the delay. Then we point out to our friend that he’s already got two of his boys up here, and if he wants a bit of giddy-up in the shipment process, then maybe those two boys could be turned against the stranger. That’s a win all around, isn’t it? Three separate ways. First, those two boys are off Seth’s back, as of right now, and second, the stranger gets hurt or killed, and third, some of the sting goes out of our friend’s recent attitude, because he comes to see that the delay isn’t really our fault at all. He comes to see that we’re beleaguered, by outside forces, in ways that he’ll readily understand, because no doubt he’s beleaguered too, from time to time, in similar ways. In other words, we make common cause.’
Silence for a moment.
Then Jasper Duncan said, ‘I like it.’
Jacob said, ‘I like it too. Otherwise I wouldn’t be proposing it. The only downside is a slight blow to our self-respect and dignity, in that it won’t be our own hands on the man who transgressed against us, and we’ll be admitting to our friend to the south that there are problems in this world that we can’t solve all by ourselves.’
‘No shame in that,’ Jonas said. ‘This is a very complicated business.’
Seth asked, ‘You figure his boys are better than our boys?’
‘Of course they are, son,’ Jacob said. ‘As good as our boys are, his are in a different league. There’s no comparison. Which we need to bear in mind. Our friend to the south needs to remain our friend, because he would make a very unpleasant enemy.’
‘But suppose the delay doesn’t go away?’ Jasper asked. ‘Suppose nothing changes? Suppose the stranger gets nailed today and we still can’t deliver for a week? Then our friend to the south knows we were lying to him.’
‘I don’t think the stranger will get nailed in one day,’ Jacob said.
‘Why not?’
‘Because he seems to be a very capable person. All the evidence so far points in that direction. It could take a few days, by which time our truck could well be on its way. And even if it isn’t, we could say that we thought it prudent to keep the merchandise out of the country until the matter was finally resolved. Our friend might believe that. Or, of course, he might not.’
‘It’s a gamble, then.’
‘Indeed it is. But it’s probably the best we can do. Are we in or out?’
‘We should offer assistance,’ Jasper said. ‘And information. We should require compliance from the population.’
Jacob said, ‘Naturally. Our friend would expect nothing less. Instructions will be issued, and sanctions will be advertised.’
‘And our boys should be out there too. Ears and eyes open. We need to feel we made some contribution, at least.’
‘Naturally,’ Jacob said again. ‘So are we in or out?’
No one spoke for a long moment. Then Jasper said, ‘I’m in.’
‘Me too,’ Jonas said.
Jacob Duncan nodded and unfolded his hands.
‘That’s a majority, then,’ he said. ‘Which I’m mighty relieved to have, because I took the liberty of calling our friend to the south two hours ago. Our boys and his are already on the hunt.’
‘I want to be there,’ Seth said. ‘When the stranger gets it.’
FIFTEEN
REACHER WAS HALF EXPECTING SOMETHING NAILED TOGETHER from sod and rotten boards, like a Dust Bowl photograph, but the woman drove him down a long gravel farm track to a neat two-storey dwelling standing alone in the corner of a spread that might have covered a thousand acres. The woman parked behind the house, next to a line of old tumbledown barns and sheds. Reacher could hear chickens in a coop, and he could smell pigs in a sty. And earth, and air, and weather. The countryside, in all its winter glory. The woman said, ‘I don’t mean to be rude, but how much are you planning to pay me?’
Reacher smiled. ‘Deciding how much food to give me?’
‘Something like that.’
‘My breakfast average west of the Mississippi is about fifteen bucks with tip.’
The woman looked surprised. And satisfied.
‘That’s a lot of money,’ she said. ‘That’s two hours’ wages. That’s like having a nine-day work week.’
‘Not all profit,’ Reacher said. ‘I’m hungry, don’t forget.’
She led him inside through a door to a back hallway. The house was what Seth Duncan’s place might have been before the expensive renovations. Low ceilings overhead, small panes of wavy glass in the windows, uneven floors underfoot, the whole place old and antique and outdated in every possible way, but cleaned and tidied and well maintained for a hundred consecutive years. The kitchen was immaculate. The stove was cold.
‘You didn’t eat yet?’ Reacher asked.
‘I don’t eat,’ the woman said. ‘Not breakfast, at least.’
‘Dieting?’
The woman didn’t answer, and Reacher immediately felt stupid.
‘I’m buying,’ he said. ‘Thirty bucks. Let’s both have some fun.’
‘I don’t want charity.’
‘It isn’t charity. I’m returning a favour, that’s all. You stuck your neck out bringing me here.’
‘I was just trying to be a decent person.’
‘Me too,’ Reacher said. ‘Take it or leave it.’
She said, ‘I’ll take it.’
He said, ‘What’s your name? Most times when I have breakfast with a lady, I know her name at least.’
‘My name is Dorothy.’
‘I’m pleased to meet you, Dorothy. You married?’
‘I was. Now I’m not.’
‘You know my name?’
‘Your name is Jack Reacher. We’ve all been informed. The word is out.’
‘I told the doctor’s wife.’
‘And she told the Duncans. Don’t blame her for it. It’s automatic. She’s trying to pay down her debt, like all of us.’
‘What does she owe them?’
‘She sided with me, twenty-five years ago.’
Roberto Cassano and Angelo Mancini were driving north in a rented Impala. They were based in a Courtyard Marriott, which was the only hotel in the county seat, which was nothing more than a token grid of streets set in the middle of what felt like a billion square miles of absolutely nothing at all. They had learned to watch their fuel gauge. Nebraska was that kind of place. It paid to fill up at every gas station you saw. The next one could be a million miles away.
The
y were from Vegas, which as always meant they were really from somewhere else. New York, in Cassano’s case, and Philadelphia, in Mancini’s. They had paid their dues in their home towns, and then they had gotten hired together in Miami, like playing triple-A ball, and then they had moved up to the big show out in the Nevada desert. Tourists were told that what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, but that wasn’t true as far as Cassano and Mancini were concerned. They were travelling men, always on the move, tasked to roam around and deal with the first faint pre-echoes of trouble long before it rolled in and hit their boss where he lived.
Hence the trip to the vast agricultural wastelands, nearly eight hundred miles north and east of the glitter and the glamour. There was a snafu in the supply chain, and it was a day or two away from getting extremely embarrassing. Their boss had promised certain specific things to certain specific people, and it would do him no good at all if he couldn’t deliver. So Cassano and Mancini had so far been on the scene for seventy-two hours straight, and they had smacked some beanpole yokel’s wife around, just to make their point. Then some other related yokel had called with a claim that the snafu was being caused by a stranger poking his nose in where it didn’t belong. Bullshit, possibly. Quite probably entirely unconnected. Just an excuse. But Cassano and Mancini were only sixty miles away, so their boss was sending them north to help, because if the yokel’s statement was indeed a lie, then it indicated vulnerability, and therefore minor assistance rendered now would leverage a better deal later. An obvious move. This was American business, after all. Forcing down the wholesale price was the name of the game.
They came up the crappy two-lane and rolled through the crappy crossroads and pulled in at the motel. They had seen it before. It looked OK at night. Not so good in the daylight. In the daylight it looked sad and botched and half-hearted. They saw a damaged Subaru standing near one of the cabins. It was all smashed up. There was nothing else to see. They parked in the lot outside the lounge and got out of the rental car and stood and stretched. Two city boys, yawning, scoured by the endless wind. Cassano was medium height, dark, muscled, blank-eyed. Mancini was pretty much the same. They both wore good shoes and dark suits and coloured shirts and no ties and wool overcoats. They were often mistaken for each other.
They went inside, to find the motel owner. Which they did, immediately. They found him behind the bar, using a rag, wiping a bunch of sticky overlapping rings off the wood. Some kind of a sadsack loser, with dyed red hair.
Cassano said, ‘We represent the Duncan family,’ which he had been promised would produce results. And it did. The guy with the hair dropped the rag and stepped back and almost came to attention and saluted, like he was in the army, like a superior officer had just yelled at him.
Cassano said, ‘You sheltered a guy here last night.’
The guy with the hair said, ‘No, sir, I did not. I tossed him out.’
Mancini said, ‘It’s cold.’
The guy behind the bar said nothing, not following.
Cassano said, ‘If he didn’t sleep here, where the hell did he sleep? You got no local competition. And he didn’t sleep out under a hedge. For one thing, there don’t seem to be any hedges in Nebraska. For another, he’d have frozen his ass off.’
‘I don’t know where he went.’
‘You sure?’
‘He wouldn’t tell me.’
‘Any kindly souls here, who would take a stranger in?’
‘Not if the Duncans told them not to.’
‘Then he must have stayed here.’
‘Sir, I told you, he didn’t.’
‘You checked his room?’
‘He returned the key before he left.’
‘More than one way into a room, asshole. Did you check it?’
‘The housekeeper already made it up.’
‘She say anything?’
‘No.’
‘Where is she?’
‘She finished. She left. She went home.’
‘What’s her name?’
‘Dorothy.’
Mancini said, ‘Tell us where Dorothy lives.’
SIXTEEN
DOROTHY’S IDEA OF A FIFTEEN-DOLLAR BREAKFAST TURNED OUT to be a regular feast. Coffee first, while the rest of it was cooking, which was oatmeal, and bacon, and eggs, and toast, big heaping portions, lots of everything, all the food groups, all piping hot, served on thick china plates that must have been fifty years old, and eaten with ancient silverware that had heavy square Georgian handles.
‘Fabulous,’ Reacher said. ‘Thank you very much.’
‘You’re welcome. Thank you for mine.’
‘It isn’t right, you know. People not eating because of the Duncans.’
‘People do all kinds of things because of the Duncans.’
‘I know what I’d do.’
She smiled. ‘We all talked like that, once upon a time, long ago. But they kept us poor and tired, and then we got old.’
‘What do the young people do here?’
‘They leave, just as soon as they can. The adventurous ones go all over the place. It’s a big country. The others stay closer to home, in Lincoln or Omaha.’
‘Doing what?’
‘There are jobs there. Some boys join the State Police. That’s always popular.’
‘Someone should call those boys.’
She didn’t answer.
He asked, ‘What happened twenty-five years ago?’
‘I can’t talk about it.’
‘You can, to me. No one will know. If I ever meet the Duncans, we’ll be discussing the present day, not ancient history.’
‘I was wrong anyway.’
‘About what?’
She wouldn’t answer.
He asked, ‘Were you the neighbour with the dispute?’
She wouldn’t answer.
He asked, ‘You want help cleaning up?’
She shook her head. ‘You don’t wash the dishes in a restaurant, do you?’
‘Not so far.’
‘Where were you, twenty-five years ago?’
‘I don’t remember,’ he said. ‘Somewhere in the world.’
‘Were you in the army then?’
‘Probably.’
‘People say you beat up three Cornhuskers yesterday.’
‘Not all at once,’ he said.
‘You want more coffee?’
‘Sure,’ he said, and she recharged the percolator and set it going again. He asked, ‘How many farms contracted with the Duncans?’
‘All of us,’ she said. ‘This whole corner of the county. Forty farms.’
‘That’s a lot of corn.’
‘And soybeans and alfalfa. We rotate the crops.’
‘Did you buy part of the old Duncan place?’
‘A hundred acres. A nice little parcel. It squared off a corner. It made sense.’
‘How long ago was that?’
‘It must be thirty years.’
‘So things were good for the first five years?’
‘I’m not going to tell you what happened.’
‘I think you should,’ he said. ‘I think you want to.’
‘Why do you want to know?’
‘Like you said, I had three football players sent after me. I’d like to understand why, at least.’
‘It was because you busted Seth Duncan’s nose.’
‘I’ve busted lots of noses. Nobody ever retaliated with retired athletes before.’
She poured the coffee. She placed his mug in front of him. The kitchen was warm from the stove. It felt like it would stay warm all day long. She said, ‘Twenty-five years ago Seth Duncan was eight years old.’
‘And?’
‘This corner of the county was like a little community. We were all spread out and isolated, of course, but the school bus kind of defined it. Everybody knew everybody else. Children would play together, big groups of them, at one house, then another.’
‘And?’
‘No one liked going to Seth Du
ncan’s place. Girls especially. And Seth played with girls a lot. More so than with boys.’
‘Why didn’t they like it?’
‘No one spelled it out. A place like this, a time like that, such things were not discussed. But something unpleasant was going on. Or nearly going on. Or in the air. My daughter was eight years old at the time. Same age as Seth. Almost the same birthday, as a matter of fact. She didn’t want to play there. She made that clear.’
‘What was going on?’
‘I told you, no one said.’
‘But you knew,’ Reacher said. ‘Didn’t you? You had a daughter. Maybe you couldn’t prove anything, but you knew.’
‘Have you got kids?’
‘None that I know about. But I was a cop of sorts for thirteen years. And I’ve been human all my life. Sometimes people just know things.’
The woman nodded. Sixty years old, blunt and square, her face flushed from the heat and the food. She said, ‘I suppose today they would call it inappropriate touching.’
‘On Seth’s part?’
She nodded again. ‘And his father’s, and both his uncles’.’
‘That’s awful.’
‘Yes, it was.’
‘What did you do?’
‘My daughter never went there again.’
‘Did you talk to people?’
‘Not at first,’ she said. ‘Then it all came out in a rush. Everyone was talking to everyone else. Nobody’s girl wanted to go there.’
‘Did anyone talk to Seth’s mother?’
‘Seth didn’t have a mother.’
Reacher said, ‘Why not? Had she left?’
‘No.’
‘Had she died?’
‘She never existed.’
‘She must have.’
‘Biologically, I suppose. But Jacob Duncan was never married. He was never seen with a woman. No woman was ever seen with any of them. Their own mother had passed on years before. It was just old man Duncan and the three of them. Then the three of them on their own. Then all of a sudden Jacob was bringing a little boy to kindergarten.’
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