Lee Child: Worth Dying For

Jacob Duncan tried again. He backed up, much less than ten yards this time because the fire was spreading behind him, and then he shot forward once more. The truck hit the fence and he and Seth bounced around in the cab like rag dolls, but the fence held. Reacher saw Jacob glance backward again. There was no space for a longer run-up. The fire and the mean allocation of land did not permit it.

Jacob changed his tactics. He manoeuvred until the nose of the truck was exactly halfway between two posts, and then he came in slow, in a low gear, pushing the grille into the rails, firming up the contact, then easing down on the gas, pushing harder and harder, hoping that sustained pressure would achieve what a sharp blow had not.

It didn’t. The rails bent, and they bowed, and they trembled, but they held. Then the pick-up’s rear tyres lost traction and spun and howled in the dirt and the fence pushed back and the truck eased off six inches.

The doors opened up again and Jacob and Seth spilled out and hustled over and tried the Cadillac instead. A heavier car, better torque, better power. But worse tyres, built for quiet and comfort out on the open road, not for traction over loose surfaces. Seth drove, hardly backing up at all for fear of putting his gas tank right in the flames behind him. Then he rolled four feet forward and the chrome grille hit the rails and the tyres spun almost immediately.

Game over.

‘Here they come,’ Reacher said.

Behind them the last vestigial support under the blazing structure gave way and the burning pile settled slowly and gently into a lower and wider shape, blowing gales of sparks and gases outward. Big curled flames danced free, burning the air itself, twisting and splitting and then vanishing. Heat distorted the air and gouts of fire hurled themselves a hundred feet up. Jacob and Seth shrank back and shielded their faces with their arms and ducked away.

They climbed the fence.

They dropped into the field.

They ran.

JACOB AND SETH DUNCAN RAN THIRTY YARDS, A STRAIGHT LINE AWAY from the fire, pure animal instinct, and then they stopped and glanced back and spun in place, alone and insignificant in the empty acres. They saw the parked Yukon as if for the first time, and they stared at it in confusion, because it was one of theirs, driven by one of their own damn boys, and the guy wasn’t coming to help them. Then they saw Dorothy Coe’s truck far off in another direction and they glanced back at the Yukon and they understood. They looked at each other one last time, and they ran again, in different directions, Jacob one way, and Seth another.

Reacher raised his phone.

He said, ‘If I’m nine o’clock on a dial and you’re twelve, then Jacob is heading for ten and Seth is heading for seven. Seth is mine. Jacob is yours.’

Dorothy Coe said, ‘Understood.’

Reacher took his foot off the brake and steered one-handed, following a lazy clockwise curve, heading first north and then east, bumping across the washboard surface, feeling the heat of the fires on the glass next to his face. Ahead of him Seth was stumbling through the dirt, heading for the road, still seventy yards short of getting there. Reacher saw something in his right hand, and then he heard Dorothy Coe’s voice on the phone: ‘Jacob has a gun.’

Reacher asked, ‘What kind?’

‘A handgun. A revolver, I think. We can’t see. We’re bouncing around too much.’

‘Slow down and take a good look.’

Ten long seconds later: ‘We think it’s a regular six-shooter.’

‘Has he fired it yet?’

‘No.’

‘OK, back off, but keep him in sight. He’s got nowhere to go. Let him get tired.’

‘Understood.’

Reacher laid the phone on the seat next to him and followed Seth south, staying thirty yards back. The guy was really hustling. His arms were pumping. Reacher had no scope, but he was prepared to bet the thing in Seth’s right hand was a revolver too, probably half of a matched pair his father had shared.

Reacher steered and accelerated and pushed on to within twenty yards. Seth was racing hard, knees pumping, arms pumping, his head thrown back. The thing in his hand was definitely a gun. The barrel was short, no longer than a finger. The two-lane road was forty yards away. Reacher had no idea why Seth wanted to get there. No point in it. The road was just a blacktop ribbon with no traffic on it and nothing but more dirt beyond. Maybe it was a generational thing. Maybe the youngest Duncan thought municipal infrastructure was going to save him. Or maybe he was heading home. Maybe he had more weapons in the house. He was going in roughly the right direction. In which case he was either terminally desperate or the world’s biggest optimist. He had more than two miles to go, and he was being chased by a motor vehicle.

Reacher stayed twenty yards back and watched. Way behind his left shoulder a last propane tank cooked off with a dull thump. The Yukon’s mirror filled with sparks. Up ahead, Seth kept on running.

Then he stopped running and whirled around and planted his feet and aimed his revolver two-handed, eye-high, with his aluminium mask right behind it. His chest was heaving and all four of his limbs were trembling and despite the two-handed grip the muzzle was jerking through a circle roughly the size of a basketball. Reacher slowed and changed gear and backed up and stood thirty yards off. He felt safe enough. He had a big V-8 engine block between himself and the gun, and anyway the chances of a panting untrained man even hitting the truck itself with a short-barrelled handgun at ninety feet were slight. The chances of a successful head shot through a windshield were less than zero. The chances of putting the round in the right zip code were debatable.

Seth fired, three times, well spaced, with a jerky trigger action and plenty of muzzle climb and no lateral control at all. Reacher didn’t even blink. He just watched the three muzzle flashes with professional interest and tried to identify the gun, but he couldn’t at thirty yards. Too far away. He knew there were seven- and eight-shot revolvers in the world, but they weren’t common, so he assumed it was a six-shooter and that therefore there were now three rounds left in it. Beside him the phone squawked with concern and he picked it up and Dorothy Coe asked, ‘Are you OK? We heard shots fired.’

‘I’m good,’ Reacher said. ‘Are you OK? He’s as likely to hit you as me. Wherever you are.’

‘We’re good.’

‘Where’s Jacob?’

‘Still heading south and west. He’s slowing down.’

‘Stay on him,’ Reacher said. He put the phone back on the seat. He kept his Glock in his pocket. The problem with being a right-handed man in a left-hand-drive truck was that he would have to bust out the windshield to fire, which used to be easy enough back in the days of pebbly safety glass, but modern automotive windshields were tough, because they were laminated with strong plastic layers, and anyway his heavy wrench was in the burned-out Tahoe, probably all melted back to ore.

Seth rested, bending forward from the waist, his head coming down almost to his shins, and he forced air into his lungs, and he panted once, then twice, and he straightened up and held his breath and aimed the gun again, this time with much more concentration and much better control. Now the muzzle was moving through a circle the size of a baseball. Reacher turned the wheel and stamped on the gas and took off to his right, in a fast tight circle, and then he feinted to come back on his original line but wrenched the wheel the other way and rocked the truck through a figure eight. Seth fired once into empty space and then aimed again and fired again. A round smacked into the top of the Yukon’s windshield surround, on the passenger side, six feet from Reacher’s head.