Lee Child - Worth Dying For

Assholes.

Yokels.

Retards.

All of them.

Cassano jerked upright and spilled the doctor’s wife off his lap. She sprawled on the floor. Mancini punched the doctor one more time, and then they left, back to the rented Impala parked outside.

Reacher kept the three smudged shapes far to his right and tracked onward. He was used to walking. All soldiers were. Sometimes there was no alternative to a long fast advance on foot, so soldiers trained for it. It had been that way since the Romans, and it was still that way, and it would stay that way for ever. So he kept on going, satisfied with his progress, enjoying the small compensations that fresh air and country smells brought with them.

Then he smelled something else.

Up ahead was a tangle of low bushes, like a miniature grove. Wild raspberries or wild roses, maybe, a remnant, somehow spared by the ploughs, now bare and dormant but still thick and dense with thorns. There was a thin plume of smoke coming from them, from right in the middle, horizontal and almost invisible on the wind. It smelled distinctive. Not a wood fire. Not a cigarette.

Marijuana.

Reacher was familiar with the smell. All cops are, even military cops. Grunts get high like anyone else, off duty. Sometimes even on duty. Reacher guessed what he was smelling was a fine sativa, probably not imported junk from Mexico, probably a good home-grown strain. And why not, in Nebraska? Corn country was ideal for a little clandestine farming. Corn grew as high as an elephant’s eye, and dense, and a twenty-foot clearing carved out a hundred yards from the edge of a field was as secret a garden as could be planted anywhere. More profitable than corn, too, even with all the federal subsidies. And these people had their haulage fees to meet. Maybe someone was sampling his recent harvest, judging its quality, setting its price in his mind.

It was a kid. A boy. Maybe fifteen years old, maybe sixteen. Reacher walked on and looked down into the chest-high thicket and found him there. He was quite tall, quite thin, with the kind of long centre-parted hair Reacher hadn’t seen on a boy for a long time. He was wearing thick pants and a surplus parka from the old West German army. He was sitting on a spread-out plastic grocery bag, his knees drawn up, his back against a large granite rock that jutted up from the ground. The rock was wedge-shaped, as if it had been broken out of a bigger boulder and rolled into a different position far from its source. And the rock was why the ploughs had spared the thicket. Big tractors with vague steering had given it a wide berth, and nature had taken advantage. Now the boy was taking advantage in turn, hiding from the world, getting through his day. Maybe not a semi-commercial grower after all. Maybe just an amateur enthusiast, with mail-order seeds from Boulder or San Francisco.

‘Hello,’ Reacher said.

‘Dude,’ the boy said. He sounded mellow. Not high as a kite. Just cruising gently a couple of feet off the ground. An experienced user, probably, who knew how much was too much and how little was too little. His thought processes were slow, and right there in his face. First: Am I busted? Then: No way.

‘Dude,’ he said again. ‘You’re the man. You’re the guy the Duncans are looking for.’

Reacher said, ‘Am I?’

The kid nodded. ‘You’re Jack Reacher. Six-five, two-fifty, brown coat. They want you, man. They want you real bad.’

‘Do they?’

‘We had Cornhuskers at the house this morning. We’re supposed to keep our eyes peeled. And here you are, man. You snuck right up on me. I guess your eyes were peeled, not mine. Am I right?’ Then he lapsed into a fit of helpless giggles. He was maybe a little higher than Reacher had thought.

Reacher said, ‘You got a cell phone?’

‘Hell yes. I’m going to text my buddies. I’m going to tell them I’ve seen the man, large as life, twice as natural. Hey, maybe I could put you on the line with them. That would be a kick, wouldn’t it? Would you do that? Would you talk to my buds? So they know I’m not shitting them?’

‘No,’ Reacher said.

The kid went instantly serious. ‘Hey, I’m with you, man. You got to lie low. I can dig that. But dude, don’t worry. We’re not going to rat you out. Me and my buds, I mean. We’re on your side. You’re putting it to the Duncans, we’re with you all the way.’

Reacher said nothing. The kid concentrated hard and lifted his arm high out of the brambles and held out his joint.

‘Share?’ he said. ‘That would be a kick too. Smoking with the man.’

The joint was fat and well rolled, in yellow paper. It was about half gone.

‘No, thanks,’ Reacher said.

‘Everyone hates them,’ the kid said. ‘The Duncans, I mean. They’ve got this whole county by the balls.’

‘Show me a county where someone doesn’t.’

‘Dude, I hear you. The system stinks. No argument from me on that score. But the Duncans are worse than usual. They killed a kid. Did you know that? A little girl. Eight years old. They took her and messed her up real bad and killed her.’

‘Did they?’

‘Hell yes. Definitely.’

‘You sure?’

‘No question, my friend.’

‘It was twenty-five years ago. You’re what, fifteen?’

‘It happened.’

‘The FBI said different.’

‘You believe them?’

‘As opposed to who? A stoner who wasn’t even born yet?’

‘The FBI didn’t hear what I hear, man.’

‘What do you hear?’

‘Her ghost, man. Still here, after twenty-five years. Sometimes I sit out here at night and I hear that poor ghost screaming, man, screaming and wailing and moaning and crying, right here in the dark.’

OUR SHIP HAS COME IN. AN OLD, OLD PHRASE, FROM OLD SEA-faring days, full of hope and wonder. An investor could spend all he had, building a ship, fitting it out, hiring a crew, or more than all he had, if he was borrowing. Then the ship would sail into a years-long void, unimaginable distances, unfathomable depths, incalculable dangers. There was no communication with it. No radio, no phone, no telegraph, no mail. No news at all. Then, maybe, just maybe, one chance day the ship would come back, weather-beaten, its sails heaving into view, its hull riding low in the channel waters, loaded with spices from India, or silks from China, or tea, or coffee, or rum, or sugar. Enough profit to repay the costs and the loans in one fell swoop, with enough left over to live generously for a decade. Subsequent voyages were all profit, enough to make a man rich beyond his dreams. Our ship has come in.

Jacob Duncan used that phrase, at eleven-thirty that morning. He was with his brothers, in a small dark room at the back of his house. His son Seth had gone home. Just the three elders were there, stoic, patient, and reflective.

‘I got the call from Vancouver,’ Jacob said. ‘Our man in the port. Our ship has come in. The delay was about weather in the Luzon Strait.’

‘Where’s that?’ Jasper asked.

‘Where the South China Sea meets the Pacific Ocean. But now our goods have arrived. They’re here. Our truck could be rolling tonight. Tomorrow morning, at the very latest.’

‘That’s good,’ Jasper said.

‘Is it?’

‘Why wouldn’t it be?’

‘You were worried before, in case the stranger got nailed before the delay went away. You said that would prove us liars.’

‘True. But now that problem is gone.’

‘Is it? Seems to me that problem has merely turned itself inside out. Suppose the truck gets here before the stranger gets nailed? That would prove us liars, too.’

‘We could hold the truck up there.’

‘We couldn’t. We’re a transportation company, not a storage company. We have no facilities.’