Worth Dying For_ A Reacher Novel - Lee Child [17]
The guy who had held the wrench was down, rolling around, in Reacher’s judgment stunned not so much by the pain, most of which would be still to come, but by the awful dawning knowledge that life as he knew it was over, the momentary fears he might have experienced as an athlete after a bad on-field collision finally come true, his future now holding nothing but canes and braces and limps and pain and frustration and unemployment. The guy who had held the hammer was still on his feet, back on his heels, blinking, his nose pouring blood, one arm limp and numb, his eyes unfocused, not a whole lot going on in his head.
Enough, a person might say, if that person lived in the civilized world, the world of movies and television and fair play and decent restraint. But Reacher didn’t live there. He lived in a world where you don’t start fights but you sure as hell finish them, and you don’t lose them either, and he was the inheritor of generations of hard-won wisdom that said the best way to lose them was to assume they were over when they weren’t yet. So he stepped back to the guy who had held the hammer and risked his hands and his arms and crashed a low right hook into the skinny triangle below the guy’s pectorals and above his six-pack abdominals, a huge blow, timed and jerked and delivered to perfection, straight into the solar plexus, hitting it like a switch, and the guy went into all kinds of temporary distress and sagged forward and down. Reacher waited until he was bent low enough for the finishing kick to the face, delivered hard but with a degree of mercy, in that smashed teeth and a busted jaw were better than out-and-out brain damage.
Then he turned to the guy who had held the wrench and waited until he rolled the right way and put him to sleep with a kick to the forehead. He picked up the wrench and broke the guy’s wrist with it, one, and then the other wrist, two, and turned back and did the same to the guy who had held the hammer, three, four. The two men were somebody’s weapons, consciously deployed, and no soldier left an enemy’s abandoned ordnance on the field in working order.
The doctor’s wife was watching from the cabin door, all kinds of terror in her face.
“What?” Reacher asked her.
Chapter 10
The Ford pick-up truck was still idling patiently. Its headlights were still on. The two guys lay slack and heaped in the gloom beyond the bright beams, steaming slightly, four cubic yards of bone and muscle, six hundred pounds of beef, now horizontal, not vertical. They were going to be very hard to move. The doctor’s wife said, “Now what the hell are we going to do?”
Reacher said, “About what?”
“I wish you hadn’t done that.”
“Why?”
“Because nothing good can possibly come of it.”
“Why not? What the hell is going on here? Who are these people?”
“I told you. Football players.”
“Not them,” Reacher said. “The Duncans. The people who sent them.”
“Did they see me?”
“These two? I doubt it.”
“That’s good. I really can’t get involved in this.”
“Why not? What’s going on here?”
“This isn’t your business.”
“Tell that to them.”
“You seemed so angry.”
“Me?” Reacher said. “I wasn’t angry. I was barely interested. If I had been angry, we’d be cleaning up with a fire hose. As it is we’re going to need a forklift truck.”
“What are you going to do with them?”
“Tell me about the Duncans.”
“They’re a family. That’s all. Seth, and his father, and two uncles. They used to farm. Now they run a trucking business.”
“Which one of them hires the football players?”
“I don’t know who makes the decisions. Maybe it’s a majority thing. Or maybe they all have to agree.”
“Where do they live?”
“You know where Seth lives.”
“What about the other three? The old guys?”
“Just south of here. Three houses all alone. One each.”
“I saw them. Your husband was staring at them.”
“Did you see his hands?”
“Why?”
“He was probably crossing his fingers for luck. Whistling past the graveyard.”
“Why? Who the hell are