Worth Dying For_ A Reacher Novel - Lee Child [100]
“More likely vibrate, not ring,” the doctor said. “Check the settings and the call register and the address book. You should be able to find an access number.”
“You check,” Reacher said. “I’m not familiar with cell phones.” He tracked around the back of the truck and handed the phone to the doctor. Then he looked to his left and saw light in the mist to the east. A high hemispherical glow, trembling, bouncing, weakening and strengthening and weakening, very white, almost blue.
A car, coming west toward them, pretty fast.
It was about half a mile away. Just like before, the misty glow resolved itself to a fierce source low down above the surface of the road, then to twin fierce sources, spaced just feet apart, oval in shape, low to the ground, blue-white and intense. And just like before, the ovals kept on coming, getting closer, flickering and jittering because of firm suspension and fast steering. They looked small at first, because of the distance, and they stayed small because they were small, because the car was a Mazda Miata, low and tiny and red. Reacher recognized it about two hundred feet out.
Eleanor Duncan.
The sisterhood, clustering together.
A hundred feet out the Mazda slowed a little. Its top was up this time, like a tight little hat. Cold weather, no further need for instant identification. No more sentries to distract.
Fifty feet out, it braked hard, ready for the turn in, and red light flared in the mist behind it.
Twenty feet out, it swung wide and started to turn.
Ten feet out, Reacher remembered three things.
First, Eleanor Duncan was not on the phone tree.
Second, his gun was in his coat.
Third, his coat was in the kitchen.
The Mazda swung in fast and crunched over the gravel and jammed to a stop right behind Dorothy Coe’s pick-up. The door opened wide and Seth Duncan unfolded his lanky frame and stepped out.
He was holding a shotgun.
Chapter 41
Seth Duncan had a huge aluminum splint on his face, like a dull metal patch taped to a large piece of rotten fruit. All kinds of sick moonlit colors were spreading out from under it. Yellows, and browns, and purples. He was wearing dark pants and a dark sweater with a new parka over it. The shotgun in his hands was an old Remington 870 pump. Probably a 12-gauge, probably a twenty-inch barrel. A walnut stock, a seven-round tubular magazine, altogether a fine all-purpose weapon, well proven, more than four million built and sold, used by the navy for shipboard security, used by the Marines for close-quarters combat, used by the army for heavy short-range firepower, used by civilians for hunting, used by cops as a riot gun, used by cranky homeowners as a get-off-my-lawn deterrent.
Nobody moved.
Reacher watched carefully and saw that Seth Duncan was holding the Remington pretty steady. His finger was on the trigger. He was aiming it from the hip, straight back at Reacher, which meant he was aiming it at Dorothy Coe and the doctor and his wife too, because buckshot spreads a little, and all four of them were clustered tight together, on the driveway, ten feet from the doctor’s front door. All kinds of collateral damage, just waiting to happen.
Nobody spoke.
The Mazda idled. Its door was still open. Seth Duncan started to move up the driveway. He raised the Remington’s stock to his shoulder and closed one eye and squinted along the barrel and walked forward, slow and steady. A useless maneuver on rough terrain. But feasible on smooth gravel. The Remington stayed dead on target.
He stopped thirty feet away. He said, “All of you sit down. Right where you are. Cross-legged on the ground.”
Nobody moved.
Reacher asked, “Is that thing loaded?”
Duncan said, “You bet your ass it is.”
“Take care it doesn’t go off by accident.”
“It won’t,” Duncan said, all nasal and inarticulate, because of his injury, and because his cheek was pressed hard against the Remington’s walnut stock.
Nobody moved. Reacher watched and thought. Behind him he heard the doctor stir and heard