Worth Dying For_ A Reacher Novel - Lee Child [133]
Six blows, three seconds.
No rules.
Second-string Nebraska football against the U.S. Army.
But the guy was tough. Or afraid. Or both. Either way, he didn’t quit. He started scrabbling around on his back, like a turtle, trying to get up again, making botched snow angels in the gravel, his head snapping left and right. Maybe the decent thing would have been to let him take an eight count, but having your opponent on the floor is gutter rat heaven, the absolute object of the exercise, a precious gift never to be spurned, so Reacher stilled him by kicking him hard in the ear, and then he stamped down hard with his heel in the guy’s face, like an appalled homeowner stomping a cockroach, and the crunch of the guy’s shattering nose was clearly audible over all the generalized panting and grunting and groaning and moaning.
Game over. Eight blows in six seconds, which was grievously slow and laborious by Reacher’s standards, but then, the guy was huge, and he had an athlete’s tone and stamina, and he was accustomed to a certain amount of physical punishment. He had been competitive, just barely. In the ballpark, almost. Not the worst Reacher had ever seen. Four years of college ball was probably equivalent to four days of Ranger training, and plenty of people Reacher had known hadn’t even made day three.
He taped the guy up where he lay, with plastic handcuffs linked to four turns around the guy’s own neck and ankle restraints linked to four turns around John’s neck. Then he stepped back into the hallway and did a better job on the two who had come in first. He slid them around on the shiny parquet and taped them together, back-to-back, like the two from the middle of the night. He stood up and caught his breath.
Then a phone rang, muted and distant.
The phone turned out to be Dorothy Coe’s cell. Its ring was muted and distant because it was with her, behind a closed door, in her room. She came out with it in her hand, and looked between it and the four taped guys on the hallway floor, and then she smiled, as if at a hidden irony, as if normality was intruding on a thoroughly abnormal day. She said, “That was Mr. Vincent at the motel. He wants me to work this morning. He has guests.”
Reacher asked, “Who are they?”
“He didn’t say.”
Reacher thought for a moment, and said, “OK.” He told the doctor to keep a medical eye on all six of the captured football players, and then he went back out to the gravel path and put his coat back on. He reloaded the pockets with his improvised arsenal, and he found the car keys where they lay on the stones, and then he headed down the driveway to the white SUV parked beyond the fence.
Eldridge Tyler moved, just a little, but enough to keep himself comfortable. He was into his second hour of daylight. He was a patient man. His eye was still on the scope. The scope was still trained on the barn door, six inches left of the judas hole, six inches down. The rifle’s forestock was still bedded securely on the bags of rice. The air was wet and thick, but the sun was bright and the view was good.
But the big man in the brown coat hadn’t come.
Not yet.
And perhaps he never would, if the Duncans had been successful during the night. But Tyler was still fully on the ball, because he was cautious by nature, and he always took his tasks seriously, and maybe the Duncans hadn’t been successful during the night. In which case the big man would show up very soon. Why would he wait? Daylight was all he needed.
Tyler took his finger off the trigger, and he flexed his hand, once, twice, and then he put his finger back.
Chapter 53
The white SUV turned out to be a Chevy Tahoe, which seemed to Reacher’s untutored eye the exact same thing as a GMC Yukon. The cabin was the same. All the controls were the same. All the dials were the same. It drove just the same, big and sloppy and inexact, all the way back to the two-lane, where Reacher turned right and headed south. There was mist, but the sun was well up in the east. The day was close to two hours old.
He slowed and coasted and then