Lee Child - Worth Dying For

‘Not well, probably. He’s one guy, on his own. And there’s no guarantee he’ll even stick around.’

‘You know where he is right now?’

‘Yes. More or less.’

‘Don’t tell me.’

‘I won’t.’

Dorothy said, ‘You should go check on Mr Vincent. He was hurt pretty bad.’

‘That’s where I’m headed next,’ the doctor said.

Safir clicked off the call with Rossi and thought hard for ten long minutes, and then he dialled his customer Mahmeini, eight blocks across town. He took a breath and held it and asked, ‘Have you ever seen better merchandise?’

Mahmeini said, ‘Get to the damn point.’

‘There’s a kink in the chain.’

‘Chains don’t have kinks. Hoses have kinks. Chains have weak links. Are you confessing? You’re the weak link?’

‘I’m just saying. There’s a speed bump. A Catch-22. It’s crazy, but it’s there.’

‘And?’

‘We all have a common goal. We all want that shipment. And we’re not going to get it until the speed bump disappears. That’s a fact, unfortunately. There’s nothing any of us can do about it. We’re all victims here. So I’m asking you to put our differences aside and make common cause, just for a day or two.’

‘How?’

‘I want you to take your guys out of my office and send them up to Nebraska. I’m sending my guys. We could all work together and solve this problem.’

Mahmeini went quiet. Truth was, he was nothing more than a link in a chain, too, the same as Safir, the same as Rossi, who he knew all about, the same as the Duncans, who he knew all about too, and Vancouver. He knew the lie of the land. He had exercised due diligence. He had done the research. They were all links in a chain, except that he was the penultimate link, the second to last, and therefore he was under the greatest strain. Because right next to him at the top were Saudis, unbelievably rich and beyond vicious. A bad combination.

Mahmeini said, ‘Ten per cent discount.’

Safir said, ‘Of course.’

Mahmeini said, ‘Call me back with the arrangements.’

The doctor parked to the rear of the motel lounge, between its curved wall and a circular stockade that hid the trash cans and the propane tanks, nose to tail with Vincent’s own car, which was an old Pontiac sedan. Not a perfect spot. The truck would be clearly visible from certain angles, both north and south. But it was the best he could do. He got out and paused in the chill and checked the road. Nothing coming.

He found Vincent in the lounge, just sitting there in one of his red velvet armchairs, doing absolutely nothing at all. He had a black eye and a split lip and a swelling the size of a hen’s egg on his cheek. Exactly like the doctor himself, in fact. They were a matched pair. Like looking in a mirror.

The doctor asked, ‘You need anything?’

Vincent said, ‘I have a terrible headache.’

‘Want painkillers?’

‘Painkillers won’t help. I want this to be over. That’s what I want. I want that guy to finish what he started.’

‘He’s on his way to Virginia.’

‘Great.’

‘He said he’s going to check in with the county cops along the way. He said he’s going to come back if there’s something wrong with the case file from twenty-five years ago.’

‘Ancient history. They’ll have junked the file.’

‘He says not.’

‘Then they won’t let him see it.’

‘He says they will.’

‘But what can he find now, that they didn’t find then? Saying all that just means he’s never coming back. He’s softening the blow, that’s all he’s doing. He’s slipping away, with an excuse. He’s leaving us in the lurch.’

The strange round room went quiet.

‘You need anything?’ the doctor asked again.

‘Do you?’ Vincent asked back. ‘You want a drink?’

‘Are you allowed to serve me?’

‘It’s a little late to worry about that kind of thing, don’t you think? You want one?’

‘No,’ the doctor said. ‘I better not.’ Then he paused and said, ‘Well, maybe just one, for the road.’

Safir called Rossi back and said, ‘I want a twenty per cent discount.’

Rossi said, ‘In exchange for what?’

‘Helping you. Sending my boys up there.’

‘Fifteen per cent. Because you’ll be helping yourself too.’

‘Twenty,’ Safir said. ‘Because I’m talking about sending more boys than just mine.’

‘How so?’

‘I’ve got guys babysitting me too. Two of them. Right here, right now. I told you that, didn’t I? So you think I’m taking my guys out of your office while I’ve still got guys in my own office? Well, dream on. That’s not going to happen any time soon, believe me. So I got my customer to agree to send his guys, too. Like a shared sacrifice. And anyway, a thing like this, we’ll all want our fingers in the pie.’

Rossi paused.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘That’s good. That’s real good. Between us we’ll have six men up there. We can take care of this thing real fast. We’ll be out of the woods in no time at all.’

‘Arrangements?’

Rossi said, ‘The nearest civilization is sixty miles south. Where the county offices are. The only accommodation is a Courtyard Marriott. My guys are based there. I’ll tell them to pull back there right now and I’ll book a couple more rooms. Then everyone can meet up as soon as possible, and then they can all get going.’

The two-lane road stayed arrow-straight the whole way. Reacher kept the Cadillac rolling along at a steady sixty per, covering a mile a minute, no stress at all. Fifty minutes from where he started he passed a lonely bar on the right shoulder. It was a small hunched building made of wood, with dirty windows with beer signs in them, and three cars in its lot, and a name board that said Cell Block. Which was marginally appropriate. Reacher figured that if he squinted the place might look like a jail from an old Western movie. He blew past it and a mile later the far horizon changed. A water tower and a Texaco sign loomed up out of the afternoon gloom. Civilization. But not much of it. The place looked small. It was just a chequerboard of a dozen low-rise blocks dumped down on the dirt in the middle of nowhere.

Eight hundred yards out there was a Chamber of Commerce billboard that listed five different ways a traveller could spend his money. If he wanted to eat, there were two restaurants. One was a diner, and one wasn’t. Reacher recognized neither name. Not chains. If a traveller needed to fix his car, there was a service station and a tyre shop. If he wanted to sleep, the only choice was a Courtyard Marriott.

REACHER BLEW STRAIGHT PAST THE BILLBOARD AND THEN SLOWED and checked ahead. In his experience most places reserved the main drag for profit-and-loss businesses. Municipal enterprises like cops and county offices would be a block or two over. Maybe more. Something to do with tax revenues. A town couldn’t charge as much for a lot on a back street.

He slowed a little more and passed the first building. It was on the left. It was an aluminium coach diner, as advertised on the billboard, as mentioned by Dorothy the housekeeper. It was the place where the county cops got their morning coffee and doughnuts. And their afternoon snacks, apparently. There was a black-and-white Dodge police cruiser parked outside. Plus two working pick-up trucks, both of them farm vehicles, both of them dented and dirty. Next up in terms of infrastructure was a gas station across the street, Texaco, with three service bays attached. Then came a long sequence of miscellaneous enterprises, on the left and the right, a hardware store, a liquor store, a bank, tyre bays, a John Deere dealership, a grocery, a pharmacy. The street was broad and muddy and had diagonal parking on both sides.