Worth Dying For_ A Reacher Novel - Lee Child [34]
Dorothy stood in the yard with one hand on the side of her truck, steadying herself. Reacher watched her. He guessed she was about thirty seconds away from gathering her wits and taking a breath and shouting that the guys were gone and he could come out now. Then he saw twenty-five years of habitual caution get the better of her. She pushed off the truck and walked the same path the two guys had taken. She was gone a whole minute. Then she came back, around the other side of the house. A full circle. Flat land all around. Wintertime. No place to hide.
She called, “They’re gone.”
He picked up the stack of plates and shouldered his way out between the barn’s warped doors. He blinked in the light and shivered in the cold. He walked on and met her near the pick-up truck. She took the plates from him. He said, “You OK?”
She said, “I was a little worried there for a minute.”
“The safety catch was on. The guy never moved his thumb. I was watching. It was a bluff.”
“Suppose it hadn’t been a bluff? Would you have come out?”
“Probably,” Reacher said.
“You did good with these plates. I suddenly remembered them, and thought I was a goner for sure. Those guys looked like they wouldn’t miss much.”
“What else did they look like?”
“Rough,” she said. “Menacing. They said they were here representing the Duncans. Representing them, not working for them. That’s something new. The Duncans never used outsiders before.”
“Where will they go next?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think they know, either. Nowhere to hide is pretty much the same as nowhere to look, isn’t it?”
“The doctor’s, maybe?”
“They might. The Duncans know you had contact.”
“Maybe I should head over there.”
“And maybe I should get back to the motel. I think they hurt Mr. Vincent. He didn’t sound too good on the phone.”
“There’s an old barn and an old shed south of the motel. Off the road, to the west. Made of wood. All alone in a field. Whose are they?”
“They’re nobody’s. They were on one of the farms that got sold for the development that never happened. Fifty years ago.”
“I have a truck in there. I took it from the football players last night. Give me a ride?”
“No,” she said. “I’m not driving you past the Duncan place again.”
“They don’t have X-ray vision.”
“They do. They have a hundred pairs of eyes.”
“So you want me to walk past their place?”
“You don’t have to. Head west across the fields until you see a cell tower. One of my neighbors leases half an acre to the phone company. That’s how he pays his haulage. Turn north there and skirt the Duncan place on the blind side and then you’ll see the barns.”
“How far is it?”
“It’s a morning’s walk.”
“I’ll burn up all that breakfast.”
“That’s what breakfast is for. Make sure you turn north, OK? South takes you near Seth Duncan’s house, and you really don’t want to go there. You know the difference between north and south?”
“I walk south, I get warmer. North, I get colder. I should be able to figure it out.”
“I’m serious.”
“What was your daughter’s name?”
“Margaret,” the woman said. “Her name was Margaret.”
So Reacher walked around the back of the barns and the sheds and the coops and the sties and struck out across the fields. The sun was nothing more than a bright patch of luminescence in the high gray sky, but it was enough to navigate by. After ten o’clock in the morning in Nebraska in the wintertime, and it was solidly east of south, behind his left shoulder. He kept it there for forty minutes, and then he saw a cell phone tower looming insubstantial in the mist. It was tall and skeletal, with a microwave receptor the shape of a bass drum, and cell antennas the shape of fungo bats. It had a tangle of dead brown weeds at its base, and it was surrounded by a token barbed-wire fence. In the far distance beyond it was a farmhouse similar to Dorothy’s. The neighbor’s, presumably. The ground underfoot was hard and lumpy, all softball-sized clods and clarts of frozen earth, the wreckage from