Worth Dying For_ A Reacher Novel - Lee Child [35]
He turned north at the tower. The sun had moved on. Now it was high and almost behind him, an hour before the season’s drab version of noon. There was no warmth in it. Just light, a little brighter than the rest of the day. Far ahead, to the right, he could see a smudge on the horizon. The three Duncan houses, he guessed, grouped together at the end of their long shared driveway. He couldn’t make out any detail. Certainly nothing man-sized. Which meant no one there could make out any man-sized detail either, in reverse. Same number of miles east to west as west to east, same gray gloom, same mist. But even so, he tracked left a little, following a curve, maintaining his distance, making sure.
Dorothy the housekeeper sat Mr. Vincent down in a red velvet chair and sponged the blood off his face. He had a split lip and a cut brow and a lump the size of an egg under his eye. He had apologized for being so slow with his warning call. He had passed out, he said, and had scrambled for the phone as soon as he came around.
Dorothy told him to hush up.
On the other side of the circular room one of the bar stools was lying on its side and a mirrored panel on the bar back had been shattered. Shards of slivered glass had fallen among the bottles like daggers. One of the NASA mugs was broken. Its handle had come right off.
Angelo Mancini had the doctor’s shirt collar bunched in his left hand and he had his right hand bunched into a fist. The doctor’s wife was sitting in Roberto Cassano’s lap. She had been ordered to, and she had refused. So Mancini had hit her husband, hard, in the face. She had refused again. Mancini had hit her husband again, harder. She had complied. Cassano had his hand on her thigh, his thumb an inch under the hem of her skirt. She was rigid with fear and shuddering with revulsion.
“Talk to me, baby,” Cassano whispered, in her ear. “Tell me where you told Jack Reacher to hide.”
“I didn’t tell him anything.”
“You were with him twenty minutes. Last night. The weirdo at the motel told us so.”
“I didn’t tell him anything.”
“So what were you doing there for twenty minutes? Did you have sex with him?”
“No.”
“You want to have sex with me?”
She didn’t answer.
“Shy?” Cassano asked. “Bashful? Cat got your tongue?”
He moved his hand another inch, upward. He licked the woman’s ear. She ducked away. Just twisted at the waist and leaned right over, away from him.
He said, “Come back, baby.”
She didn’t move.
He said, “Come back,” a little louder.
She straightened up. He got the impression she was about to puke. He didn’t want that. Not all over his good clothes. But he licked her ear one more time anyway, just to show her who was boss. Mancini hit the doctor one more time, just for fun. Traveling men, roaming around, getting the job done. But wasting their time in Nebraska, that was for sure. No one knew a damn thing. The whole place was as barren as the surface of the moon, with much less to do. Who would stay? This guy Reacher was long gone, obviously, totally in the wind, probably halfway to Omaha by the time the sun came up, rumbling along in the stolen truck, completely unnoticed by the county cops, who clearly sat around all night with their thumbs up their butts, because hadn’t they missed every single one of the deliveries roaring through from Canada to Vegas? For months? Hadn’t they? Every single one?
Assholes.
Yokels.
Retards.
All of them.
Cassano jerked upright and spilled the doctor’s wife off his lap. She sprawled on the floor. Mancini punched the doctor one more time, and then they left, back to the rented Impala parked outside.
Reacher kept the three smudged shapes far to his right and tracked onward. He was used to walking. All soldiers were. Sometimes there was no alternative to a long fast advance on foot, so soldiers trained for it. It had been that way since the Romans, and it was still that way, and it would stay that way forever. So he kept on going, satisfied with his progress,