Worth Dying For_ A Reacher Novel - Lee Child [151]
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.
One round left, Reacher thought.
But there were no rounds left. Reacher saw Seth thrashing at the trigger and he saw the gun’s wheel turning and turning to no effect at all. Either the gun was a six-shooter that hadn’t been fully loaded, or it was a five-shooter. Maybe a Smith 60, Reacher thought. Eventually Seth gave up on it and looked around desperately and then just hurled the empty gun at the Yukon. Finally, a decent aim. The guy would have been better off throwing rocks. The gun hit the windshield dead in front of Reacher’s face. Reacher flinched and ducked involuntarily. The gun bounced off the glass and fell away. Then Seth turned and ran again, and the rest of it was easy.
Reacher stamped on the gas and accelerated and lined up carefully and hit Seth from behind doing close to forty miles an hour. A car might have scooped him up and tossed him in the air and sent him cartwheeling backward over the hood and the roof, but the Yukon wasn’t a car. It was a big truck with a high blunt nose. It was about as subtle as a sledgehammer. It caught Seth flat on his back, everywhere from his knees to his shoulders, like a two-ton bludgeon, and Reacher felt the impact and Seth’s head whipped away out of view, instantaneously, like it had been sucked down by amazing gravity, and the truck bucked once, like there was something passing under the