Worth Dying For_ A Reacher Novel - Lee Child [36]
Then he smelled something else.
Up ahead was a tangle of low bushes, like a miniature grove. Wild raspberries or wild roses, maybe, a remnant, somehow spared by the plows, now bare and dormant but still thick and dense with thorns. There was a thin plume of smoke coming from them, from right in the middle, horizontal and almost invisible on the wind. It smelled distinctive. Not a wood fire. Not a cigarette.
Marijuana.
Reacher was familiar with the smell. All cops are, even military cops. Grunts get high like anyone else, off duty. Sometimes even on duty. Reacher guessed what he was smelling was a fine sativa, probably not imported junk from Mexico, probably a fine homegrown strain. And why not, in Nebraska? Corn country was ideal for a little clandestine farming. Corn grew as high as an elephant’s eye, and dense, and a twenty-foot clearing carved out a hundred yards from the edge of a field was as secret a garden as could be planted anywhere. More profitable than corn too, even with all the federal subsidies. And these people had their haulage fees to meet. Maybe someone was sampling his recent harvest, judging its quality, setting its price in his mind.
It was a kid. A boy. Maybe fifteen years old, maybe sixteen. Reacher walked on and looked down into the chest-high thicket and found him there. He was quite tall, quite thin, with the kind of long center-parted hair Reacher hadn’t seen on a boy for a long time. He was wearing thick pants and a surplus parka from the old West German army. He was sitting on a spread-out plastic grocery bag, his knees drawn up, his back against a large granite rock that jutted up from the ground. The rock was wedge-shaped, as if it had been broken out of a bigger boulder and rolled into a different position far from its source. And the rock was why the plows had spared the thicket. Big tractors with vague steering had given it a wide berth, and nature had taken advantage. Now the boy was taking advantage in turn, hiding from the world, getting through his day. Maybe not a semicommercial grower after all. Maybe just an amateur enthusiast, with mail-order seeds from Boulder or San Francisco.
“Hello,” Reacher said.
“Dude,” the boy said. He sounded mellow. Not high as a kite. Just cruising gently a couple of feet off the ground. An experienced user, probably, who knew how much was too much and how little was too little. His thought processes were slow, and right there in his face. First: Am I busted? Then: No way.
“Dude,” he said again. “You’re the man. You’re the guy the Duncans are looking for.”
Reacher said, “Am I?”
The kid nodded. “You’re Jack Reacher. Six-five, two-fifty, brown coat. They want you, man. They want you real bad.”
“Do they?”
“We had Cornhuskers at the house this morning. We’re supposed to keep our eyes peeled. And here you are, man. You snuck right up on me. I guess your eyes were peeled, not mine. Am I right?” Then he lapsed into a fit of helpless giggles. He was maybe a little higher than Reacher had thought.
Reacher said, “You got a cell phone?”
“Hell yes. I’m going to text my buddies. I’m going to tell them I’ve seen the man, large as life, twice as natural. Hey, maybe I could put you on the line with them. That would be a kick, wouldn’t it? Would you do that? Would you talk to my buds? So they know I’m not shitting them?”
“No,” Reacher said.
The kid went instantly serious. “Hey, I’m with you, man. You got to lie low. I can dig that. But, dude, don’t worry. We’re not going to rat you out. Me and my buds, I mean. We’re on your side. You’re putting it to the Duncans. We’re with you all the way.”
Reacher said nothing. The kid concentrated hard and lifted his arm high out of the brambles and held out his joint.
“Share?” he said. “That would be a kick too. Smoking with the man.”
The joint was fat and well rolled, in yellow paper. It was about half gone.
“No, thanks,” Reacher said.
“Everyone hates them,” the kid said. “The Duncans, I mean. They’ve got this whole county by