Worth Dying For_ A Reacher Novel - Lee Child [147]
The white Tahoe was well ablaze. It rolled on through its final twenty yards, dumbly, unflinchingly, and it hit the front of the center house and stopped dead. Two tons, some momentum, but no kind of a major crash. The wood on the house split and splintered, and the front wall bowed inward a little, and glass fell out of a ground floor window, and that was all.
But that was enough.
The flames at the rear of the truck swayed forward and came back and settled in to burn. They roiled the air around them and licked out horizontally under the sills and climbed up the doors. They spilled out of the rear wheel wells and fat coils of black smoke came off the tires. The smoke boiled upward and caught the breeze and drifted away south and west.
Reacher leaned into the Yukon and took the rifle off the seat.
The flames crept onward toward the front of the Tahoe, slow but urgent, busy, seeking release, curling out and up. The rear tires started to burn and the front tires started to smoke. Then the fuel line must have ruptured because suddenly there was a wide fan of flame, a new color, a fierce lateral spray that beat against the front of the house and rose up all around the Tahoe’s hood, surging left and right, licking the house, lighting it, bubbling the paint in a fast black semicircle. Then finally flames started chasing the bubbling paint, small at first, then larger, like a map of an army swarming through broken defenses, fanning out, seeking new ground. Air sucked in and out of the broken window and the flames started licking at its frame.
Reacher dialed his borrowed cell.
He said, “The center house is alight.”
Dorothy Coe answered, from her position half a mile west, out in the fields.
She said, “That’s Jonas’s house. We can see the smoke.”
“Anyone moving?”
“Not yet.” Then she said, “Wait. Jonas is coming out his back door. Turning left. He’s going to head around to the front.”
“Positive ID?”
“A hundred percent. We’re using the telescope.”
“OK,” Reacher said. “Stay on the line.”
He laid the open cell phone on the Yukon’s hood and picked up the rifle. It had a rear iron sight just ahead of the scope mount, and a front iron sight at the muzzle. Reacher raised it to his eye and leaned forward and rested his elbows on the sheet metal and aimed at the gap between the center house and the southernmost house. Distance, maybe a hundred and forty yards.
He waited.
He saw a stocky figure enter the gap from the rear. A man, short and wide, maybe sixty years old or more. Round red face, thinning gray hair. Reacher’s first live sighting of a Duncan elder. The guy hustled stiffly between the blank ends of the two homes and came out in the light and stopped dead. He stared at the burning Tahoe and started toward it and stopped again and then turned and faced front and stared at the pick-up truck parked across the far end of the driveway.
Reacher laid the front sight on the guy’s center mass and pulled the trigger.
Chapter 58
The .338 hit high, a foot above Jonas Duncan’s center 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