Lee Child: Worth Dying For

Reacher laid the front sight on the guy’s centre mass and pulled the trigger.

THE.338 HIT HIGH, A FOOT ABOVE JONAS DUNCAN’S CENTRE mass, halfway between his lower lip and the point of his chin. The bullet drove through the roots of his front incisors, through the soft tissue of his mouth and his throat, through his third vertebra, through his spinal cord, through the fat on the back of his neck, and onward into the corner of Jacob Duncan’s house. Jonas went down vertically, claimed by gravity, his stiff fireplug body suddenly loose and malleable, and he ended up sprawled in a grotesque tangle of limbs, face up, eyes open, the last of his brain’s oxygenated blood leaking from his wound, and then he died.

Reacher shot the rifle’s bolt and the spent shell case clanged against the Yukon’s hood and rolled down its contour and fell to the ground. Reacher picked up the cell phone and said, ‘Jonas is down.’

Dorothy Coe said, ‘We heard the shot.’

‘Any activity?’

‘Not yet.’

Reacher kept the phone against his ear. Jonas’s house was burning nicely. The whole front wall was on fire, and there were flames inside, throwing orange light and shadows all around, curling flat and angry against the ceilings, gleaming wetly behind intact panes of glass, spilling out through the broken windows and leaping up and merging into the general conflagration. Smoke was still blowing south, and heat too, towards the southernmost building.

Dorothy Coe’s voice came back: ‘Jasper is out. He has a weapon. A long gun. He sees us. He’s looking right at us.’

Reacher asked, ‘How far back are you?’

‘About six hundred yards.’

‘Stand your ground. If he fires, he’ll miss.’

‘We think it’s a shotgun.’

‘Even better. The round won’t even reach you.’

‘He’s running. He’s past Jonas’s house. He’s heading for Jacob’s.’

Reacher saw him, flitting right to left across the narrow gap between Jonas’s house and Jacob’s, a short wide man very similar to his brother. On the phone Dorothy Coe said, ‘He’s gone inside. We see him in Jacob’s kitchen. Through the window. Jacob and Seth are in there too.’

Reacher waited. The fire in Jonas’s house was burning out of control. In front of it the white Tahoe was a blackened wreck inside a ball of flame. Glass was punching out of the house’s windows ahead of flames that followed horizontally like arms and fists before boiling upward. The roof was alight. Then there was a loud sound and the air inside the house seemed to shudder and cough and a hot blue shimmer gasped out through the ground floor, like an expelled breath, clearly visible, like a force, and it rose slowly upward, one second, two, three, and then the flames came back even stronger behind it.

Dorothy Coe said, ‘Something just blew up in Jonas’s kitchen. The propane tank, maybe. The back wall is burning hard.’

Reacher waited.

Then the ground floor itself burned through and there was another cough and shudder as the flaming timbers tumbled through to the basement. The left-hand gable tilted inward and the right-hand gable fell outward, across the gap to Jasper’s house. Sparks showered all around and thermals caught them and sent them shooting a hundred feet in the air. Jonas’s right-hand wall collapsed into the gap and piled high against Jasper’s left-hand wall, and gales of new air hit fresh unburned surfaces and vivid new flames leapt up.

Reacher said, ‘This is going very well.’

Then Jonas’s second floor fell in with an explosion of sparks and his left-hand wall came unmoored and folded slowly and neatly in half, the top part falling inward into the fire and the bottom part angling outward and propping itself against Jacob’s house. Burning timbers and bright red embers spilled and settled and sucked oxygen towards them and huge new flames started licking upward and outward and sideways. Even the weeds in the gravel were on fire.

Reacher said, ‘I think we’re three for three. I think we got them all.’

Dorothy Coe said, ‘Jasper is out again. He’s heading for his truck.’

Reacher watched over the front sight of his rifle. He saw Jasper run for the line of cars. Saw him slide into a white pickup. Saw him start it up and back it out. It stopped and turned and aimed straight for the driveway. It blew through a shower of sparks, right past Jonas’s body, and headed straight towards the two-lane. Straight towards Reacher. Straight towards the parked black truck. It braked hard and stopped short just behind it, and Jasper scrambled out. He opened the black truck’s passenger door and ducked inside.

Then a second later he ducked out again.

No key.

The key was in Reacher’s pocket.

Reacher put the phone on the Yukon’s hood.

Jasper Duncan stood still, momentarily unsure. Distance, maybe forty yards. Which was really no distance at all.

Reacher shot him through the head and he went straight down the same way his brother had before him, leaving a small pink cloud in the air above him, made of pulverized blood and bone, which drifted an inch and then disappeared in the breeze.

Reacher picked up the phone and said, ‘Jasper is down.’

Then he dropped the empty gun on the road behind him and climbed inside the Yukon. Lack of replacement ammunition meant that phase one was over, and that phase two was about to begin.

REACHER DROVE THE YUKONA HUNDRED YARDS BEYOND THE mouth of the driveway, and then he turned right, on to the open dirt. Lumps and stones squirmed and pattered under his tyres. He drove a wide circle until he was level with the compound itself and then he stopped, facing the houses, the engine idling, his foot on the brake. From his new angle he saw that Jacob’s south wall was so far untouched by the fire, but judging by the backdrop of smoke and flame the north end of the house was burning. Ahead and far to the left he could see Dorothy Coe’s truck, waiting six hundred yards west in the fields, similarly nose-in and pent-up and expectant, like a gundog panting and crouching.

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.