Worth Dying For_ A Reacher Novel - Lee Child [103]
“Asshole,” Reacher said.
Duncan clamped his right wrist under his left armpit and huffed and blew and stomped around. He came to rest a whole minute later, a little cramped and crouched and bent, and he glowered up and out from either side of his splint, hurt and angry and humiliated, looking first at Reacher, and then at his fourth guy, who was standing there stock-still, holding the shotgun. Duncan jerked his head, from the guy, to Reacher, a gesture full of silent fury and impatience.
Get him.
The fourth guy stepped up. Reacher was pretty sure he wasn’t going to shoot. No one fires a shotgun at a group of four people, three of which are his friends.
Reacher was pretty sure it was going to be worse than shooting.
The guy reversed the gun. Right hand on the barrel, left hand on the stock.
The guy behind Reacher moved. He wrapped his left forearm tight around Reacher’s throat, and he clamped his right palm tight on Reacher’s forehead.
Immobile.
The fourth guy raised the gun horizontal, butt first, two-handed, and cocked it back over his right shoulder, ready to go, lining it up like a spear, and then he rocked forward and took a step and aimed carefully and jabbed the butt straight at the center of Reacher’s face and
CRACK
BLACK
Chapter 42
Jacob Duncan convened an unscheduled middle-of-the-night meeting with his brothers, in his own kitchen, not Jonas’s or Jasper’s, with Wild Turkey, not Knob Creek, and plenty of it, because his mood was celebratory.
“I just got off the phone,” he said. “You’ll be pleased to hear my boy has redeemed himself.”
Jasper asked, “How?”
“He captured Jack Reacher.”
Jonas asked, “How?”
Jacob Duncan leaned back in his chair and shot his feet straight out in front of him, relaxed, expansive, a man at ease, a man with a story to tell. He said, “I drove Seth home, as you know, but I let him out at the end of his road, because he was a little down, and he wanted to walk a spell in the night air. He got within a hundred yards of his house, and he was nearly run over by a car. His car, as it happens. His own Cadillac, going like a bat out of hell. Naturally he hurried home. His wife was induced to reveal all the details. It turns out Reacher stole the Cadillac earlier in the afternoon. It turns out the doctor was with him. Misguided, of course, but it seems the poor fellow has formed an alliance of sorts with our Mr. Reacher. So Seth took his old Remington pump and set off in Eleanor’s car and, sure enough, Reacher was indeed at the doctor’s house, large as life and twice as natural.”
“Where is he now?”
“In a safe place. It seems like the capture was mostly uneventful.”
“Is he alive?”
“So far,” Jacob Duncan said. “But how long he stays alive is what we need to discuss.”
The room went quiet. The others sat and waited, as they had so many times before, for their brother Jacob, the eldest, a contemplative man, always ready with a pronouncement, or a decision, or a nugget of wisdom, or an analysis, or a proposal.
Jacob said, “Seth wants to finesse the whole thing, right down to the wire, and frankly I’m tempted to let him try. He wants to rebuild his credibility with us, which of course I told him isn’t necessary, but it remains true that all of us need to pay some attention to our own credibility, in a collective sense, with Mr. Rossi, our good friend to the south.”
Jasper asked, “What does Seth want to do?”
“He wants to stage things so that our prior hedging is shown to have been entirely justified. He wants to wait until our shipment is about an hour away, whereupon he wants to unveil Reacher to Mr. Rossi’s boys, whereupon he wants to fake a phone call and have the truck arrive within the next sixty minutes, as if what we’ve been saying all along about the delay was indeed true and legitimate.”
“Too risky,” Jonas said. “Reacher is a dangerous