Worth Dying For_ A Reacher Novel - Lee Child [54]
“Showtime,” Reacher said, and headed for the door. The doctor trailed him by a yard or two. Reacher knocked and waited and a long minute later he heard feet on the boards inside. A light tread, slow and a little hesitant. Eleanor.
She opened up and stood there, with her left hand cupping the edge of the door and her right-hand fingers spidered against the opposite wall, as if she needed help with stability, or as if she thought her horizontal arm was protecting the inside of the house from the outside. She was wearing a black skirt and a black sweater. No necklace. Her lips had scabbed over, dark and thick, and her nose was swollen, the white skin tight over yellow contusions that were not quite hidden by her makeup.
“You,” she said.
“I brought the doctor,” Reacher said. “To check on how you’re doing.”
Eleanor Duncan glanced at the doctor’s face and said, “He looks as bad as I do. Was it Seth? Or one of the Cornhuskers? Either way, I apologize.”
“None of the above,” Reacher said. “It seems we have a couple of tough guys in town.”
Eleanor Duncan didn’t answer that. She just took her right hand off the wall and trailed it through a courtly gesture and invited them in. Reacher asked, “Is Seth home?”
“No, thank goodness,” Eleanor said.
“His car is here,” the doctor said.
“His father picked him up.”
Reacher asked, “How long will he be gone?”
“I don’t know,” Eleanor said. “But it seems they have much to discuss.” She led the way to the kitchen, where she had been treated the night before, and maybe on many previous occasions. She sat down in a chair and tilted her face to the light. The doctor stepped up and took a look. He touched the wounds very lightly and asked questions about pain and headaches and teeth. She gave the kind of answers Reacher had heard from many people in her situation. She was brave and somewhat self-deprecating. She said yes, her nose and mouth still hurt a little, and yes, she had a slight headache, and no, her teeth didn’t feel entirely OK. But her diction was reasonably clear and she had no loss of memory and her pupils were reacting properly to light, so the doctor was satisfied. He said she would be OK.
“And how is Seth?” Reacher asked.
“Very angry at you,” Eleanor said.
“What goes around comes around.”
“You’re much bigger than him.”
“He’s much bigger than you.”
She didn’t answer. She just looked at Reacher for another long second, and then she looked away, seemingly very unsure of herself, an expression of complete uncertainty on her face, its extent limited only by the immobility caused by the stiff scabs on her lips and the frozen ache in her nose. She was hurting bad, Reacher thought. She had taken two blows, he figured, probably the first to her nose and the second aimed lower at her mouth. The first had been hard enough to do damage without breaking the bone, and the second had been hard enough to draw blood without smashing her teeth.
Two blows, carefully aimed, carefully calculated, carefully delivered.
Expert blows.
Reacher said, “It wasn’t Seth, was it?”
She said, “No, it wasn’t.”
“So who was it?”
“I’ll quote your earlier conclusion. It seems we have a couple of tough guys in town.”
“They were here?”
“Twice.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“Who are they?”
“I don’t know.”
“They’ve been saying they represent the Duncans.”
“Well, they don’t. The Duncans don’t need to hire people to beat me. They’re perfectly capable of doing that themselves.”
“How many times has Seth hit you?”
“A thousand, maybe.”
“That’s good. Not from your point of view, of course.”
“But good from the point of view of your own clear conscience?”
“Something like that.”
She said, “Have at Seth all you like. All day, every day. Beat him to a pulp. Break every bone in his body. Be my guest. I mean it.”
“Why do you stay?”
“I don’t know,