Worth Dying For_ A Reacher Novel - Lee Child [44]
Not long, he hoped.
He danced sideways, left, and left, and left, and the truck tracked him all the way, coming on slow, the crushed bumper plastered across the front like an ugly afterthought, the axles locked up for maximum traction, the tires squirming and hopping and grinding out new ruts all their own. The driver hit the gas and jerked the wheel to his left, aiming to decode Reacher’s decoy dance and hit him after the inevitable sudden change of direction at its end, but Reacher double-bluffed him and jumped to his own left, and the truck missed him by ten whole feet.
The truck stopped dead and Reacher saw the guy tugging on levers and heard the transmission change back to normal-speed road duty. The truck made a big forty-foot loop out on the dirt and headed back in. Reacher stood still and watched it and sidestepped right, and right, and right, and then he triple-bluffed and jumped right again while the truck slammed left and missed him again. The truck ended up with its battered nose deep in the thicket. All kinds of unpleasant noises were coming out of it. Deep banging sounds, like tuneless church bells. Bearings, Reacher thought. The big ends. He knew some terminology. He had heard car guys talking, on military bases. He saw the driver glance down in alarm, as if red warning lights were blazing on the dash. There was steam in the air. And blue smoke.
The truck backed up, one more time.
Then it died.
It swung through a short backward arc and stopped, ready for a change of gear, which happened, but it didn’t move on again. It just bounced forward a foot against the slack in its suspension and seized up solid. The engine noise shut off and Reacher heard wheezing and hissing and ticking and saw steam jetting out and a final fine black spray from underneath, like a cough, like a death rattle.
The driver stayed where he was, in his seat, behind locked doors.
Reacher looked again for a rock, and couldn’t find one.
Impasse.
But not for long.
Reacher saw them first. He had a better vantage point. Flames, coming out of the seams between the hood and the fenders, low down at the front of the vehicle. The flames were small and colorless at first, boiling the air above them, spreading fast, blistering the paint around them. Then they got bigger and turned blue and yellow and started spilling black smoke from their edges. The hood was a big square pressing and within a minute all four seams surrounding it were alive with flame and the paint all over it was cooking and bubbling and splitting from the heat underneath.
The driver just sat there.
Reacher ran over and tried his door. Still locked. He banged on the window glass, dull padded thumps from his fist, and he pointed urgently at the hood. But it was impossible that the guy didn’t already know he was on fire. His wiper blades were alight. Black smoke was rolling off them and swirling up the windshield in coils. The guy was looking right at them, then looking at Reacher, back and forth, panic in his eyes.
He was as worried about Reacher as he was about the fire.
So Reacher backed off ten feet and the door opened up and the guy jumped out, a big slabby white boy, very young, maybe six-six, close to three hundred pounds. He ran five feet and stopped dead. His hands bunched into fists. Behind him the flames started shooting out of the wheel wells at the front of the truck, starting downward, curling back up around the sheet metal, burning hard. The front tires were smoking. The guy just stood there, rooted. So Reacher ran in again, and the guy swung at him, and missed. Reacher ducked under the blow and popped the guy in the gut and then grabbed him by the collar. The guy went straight down