TEN

THE FORD PICK-UP TRUCK WAS STILL IDLING PATIENTLY. ITS headlights were still on. The two guys lay slack and heaped in the gloom beyond the bright beams, steaming slightly, four cubic yards of bone and muscle, six hundred pounds of beef, now horizontal, not vertical. They were going to be very hard to move. The doctor's wife said, 'Now what the hell are we going to do?'

Reacher said, 'About what?'

'I wish you hadn't done that.'

'Why?'

'Because nothing good can possibly come of it.'

'Why not? What the hell is going on here? Who are these people?'

'I told you. Football players.'

'Not them,' Reacher said. 'The Duncans. The people who sent them.'

'Did they see me?'

'These two? I doubt it.'

'That's good. I really can't get involved in this.'

'Why not? What's going on here?'

'This isn't your business.'

'Tell that to them.'

'You seemed so angry.'

'Me?' Reacher said. 'I wasn't angry. I was barely interested. If I had been angry, we'd be cleaning up with a fire hose. As it is we're going to need a forklift truck.'

'What are you going to do with them?'

'Tell me about the Duncans.'

'They're a family. That's all. Seth, and his father, and two uncles. They used to farm. Now they run a trucking business.'

'Which one of them hires the football players?'

'I don't know who makes the decisions. Maybe it's a majority thing. Or maybe they all have to agree.'

'Where do they live?'

'You know where Seth lives.'

'What about the other three? The old guys?'

'Just south of here. Three houses all alone. One each.'

'I saw them. Your husband was staring at them.'

'Did you see his hands?'

'Why?'

'He was probably crossing his fingers for luck. Whistling past the graveyard.'

'Why? Who the hell are they?'

'They're a hornets' nest, that's what. And you just poked it with a stick and now you're going to leave.'

'What was I supposed to do? Let them hit me with shop tools?'

'That's what we do. We take our punishments and we keep smiles on our faces and our heads down. We go along to get along.'

'What the hell are you talking about?'

She paused. Shook her head.

'It's not a big deal,' she said. 'Not really. So we tell ourselves. If you throw a frog in hot water, he'll jump right out again. Put him in cold water and heat it up slowly, he'll let himself get boiled to death without ever noticing.'

'And that's you?'

'Yes,' she said. 'That's us.'

'Give me the details.'

She paused again. She shook her head again.

'No,' she said. 'No, no, no. You won't hear anything bad about the Duncans from me. I want that on the record. I'm a local girl, and I've known them all my life. They're a fine family. There's nothing wrong with them. Nothing at all.'

The doctor's wife took a long hard look at the wrecked Subaru and then she set off walking home. Reacher offered her a ride in the pick-up truck, but she wouldn't hear of it. He watched her out of the motel lot until she was swallowed by the dark and lost to sight. Then he turned back to the two guys on the gravel outside his door. No way could he lift an unconscious human weighing three hundred pounds. Three hundred pounds of free weights on a bar, maybe. But not three hundred pounds of inert flesh and blood the size of a refrigerator.

He opened the pick-up's door and climbed into the cab. It smelled of pine disinfectant and hot oil. He found the gearshift and took off forward on a curve and then stopped and backed up until the tailgate was in line with where the two guys lay. He got out again and stepped around the hood and looked at the winch that was bolted to the frame at the front. It was electric. It had a motor connected to a drum wrapped with thin steel cable. The cable had a snap hook on the end. There was a release ratchet and a winding button.

He hit the ratchet and unwound the cable, ten feet, twenty, thirty. He flipped it up over the hood, over the roof of the cab, between two lights on the light bar, over the load bed, and down to where the guys were lying behind the truck. He dropped the tailgate flat and bent and fastened the hook on to the front of the first guy's belt. He walked back to the front of the truck and found the winding button and pressed.

The motor started and the drum turned and the slack pulled out of the cable. Then the cable went tight and quivered like a bowstring and burred a groove into the front edge of the hood and pulled a crease into the light bar on the roof. The drum slowed, and then it dug in and kept on turning. The truck squatted low on its springs. Reacher walked back and saw the first guy getting dragged by his belt towards the load bed, scuffling along the ground, waist first, arms and legs trailing. The guy dragged all the way to the edge of the tailgate. Then the cable came up vertically and shrieked against the sheet metal and the guy's belt stretched oval and he started up into the air, spinning a little, his back arched, his head and legs and arms hanging down. Reacher waited and timed it and pulled and pushed and shoved and got him up over the angle and watched as he dragged onward into the load bed. Reacher stepped back to the front and waited a beat and then stopped the winch. He came back and leaned into the load bed and released the hook, and then he did the same things all over again for the second guy, like a veterinarian called out to a couple of dead heifers.

Reacher drove five miles south and slowed and stopped just before the shared driveway that ran west towards the three houses huddled together. They had been painted white a generation ago and still managed a grey gleam in the moonlight. They were substantial buildings, arranged along a short arc without much space between them. There was no landscaping. Just threadbare gravel and weeds and three parked cars, and then a heavy post-and-rail fence, and then flat empty fields running away into the darkness.

There was a light behind a ground floor window in the house on the right. No other signs of activity.

Reacher pulled thirty feet ahead and then backed up and turned and reversed into the driveway. Gravel crunched and scrabbled under his tyres. A noisy approach. He risked fifty yards, which was about halfway. Then he stopped and slid out and unlatched the tailgate. He climbed up into the load bed and grabbed the first guy by the belt and the collar and heaved and hauled and half dragged and half rolled him to the edge and then put the sole of his boot against the guy's hip and shoved him over. The guy fell three feet and thumped down on his side and settled on his back.

Return to sender.

Reacher went back for the second guy and pushed and pulled and hauled and rolled him out of the truck right on top of his buddy. Then he latched the tailgate again and vaulted over the side to the ground and got behind the wheel and took off fast.

The four Duncans were still around the table in Jasper's kitchen. Not a planned meeting, but they had a permanently long agenda and they were taking advantage of circumstances. Foremost in their minds was an emerging delay on the Canadian border. Jacob said, 'We're getting pressure from our friend to the south.'

Jonas said, 'We can't control what we can't control.'

'Try telling that to him.'

'He'll get his shipment.'

'When?'

'Whenever.'

'He paid upfront.'

'He always does.'

'A lot of money.'

'It always is.'

'But this time he's agitated. He wants action. And here's the thing. It was very strange. He called me, and it was like jumping into the conversation halfway through.'

'What?'

'He was frustrated, obviously. But also a little surly, like we weren't taking him seriously. Like he had made prior communications that had gone unheeded. Like we had ignored warnings. I felt like he was on page three and I was on page one.'

'He's losing his mind.'

'Unless.'

'Unless what?'

'Unless one of us took a couple of his calls already.'

Jonas Duncan said, 'Well, I didn't.'

'Me either,' Jasper Duncan said.

'You sure?'

'Of course.'

'Because there's really no other explanation here. And remember, this is a guy we can't afford to mess with. This is a deeply unpleasant person.'

Jacob's brothers both shrugged. Two men in their sixties, gnarled, battered, built like fireplugs. Jonas said, 'Don't look at me.'

'Me either,' Jasper said again.

Only Seth Duncan hadn't spoken. Not a word. Jacob's son.

His father asked, 'What aren't you telling us, boy?'

Seth looked down at the table. Then he looked up, awkwardly, the aluminium plate huge on his face. His father and his two uncles stared right back at him. He said, 'It wasn't me who broke Eleanor's nose tonight.'

ELEVEN

JASPER DUNCAN TOOK A PART-USED BOTTLE OF KNOB CREEK whiskey from his kitchen cabinet and stuck three gnarled fingers and a blunt thumb in four chipped glasses. He put them on the table and pulled the cork from the bottle and poured four generous measures. He slid the glasses across the scarred wood, a little ceremony, focused and precise. He sat down again and each man took an initial sip, and then the four glasses went back to the table, a ragged little volley of four separate thumps in the quiet of the night.

Jacob Duncan said, 'From the beginning, son.'

Seth Duncan said, 'I'm dealing with it.'

'But not very well, by the sound of it.'

'He's my customer.'

Jacob shook his head. 'He was your contact, back in the day, but we're a family. We do everything together, and nothing apart. There's no such thing as a side deal.'

'We were leaving money on the table.'

'You don't need to go over ancient history. You found a guy willing to pay more for the same merchandise, and we surely appreciate that. But rewards bring risks. There's no such thing as something for nothing. No free lunch. So what happened?'

'We're a week late.'

'We aren't. We don't specify dates.'

Seth Duncan said nothing.

Jacob said, 'What? You guaranteed a date?'

Seth Duncan nodded.

Jacob said, 'That was dumb, son. We never specify dates. You know we can't afford to. There are a hundred factors outside of our control. The weather, for one.'

'I used a worst-case analysis.'

'You think too much. There's always something worse than the worst. Count on it. So what happened?'

'Two guys showed up. At my house. Two days ago. His people. Tough guys.'

'Where was Brett?'

'I had to tell him I was expecting them.'

'Were you?'

'More or less.'

'Why didn't you tell us?'

'Because I'm dealing with it.'

'Not very well, son. Apparently. What did they do?'

'They said they were there to deliver a message from their boss. An expression of displeasure. I said I understood. I explained. I apologized. They said that wasn't good enough. They said they had been told to leave marks. I said they couldn't. I said I have to be out and about. I have a business to run. So they hit Eleanor instead. To make their point.'

'Just like that?'

'They asked first. They made me agree. They made her agree, too. They made me hold her. They took turns. I told her sorry afterwards. She said, what's the difference? Them then or you later? Because she knew I was agitated.'

'And then what?'

'I asked for another week. They gave me forty-eight hours.'

'So they came back again? Tonight?'

'Yes. They did it all over again.'

'So who was the guy in the restaurant? One of them?'

'No, he wasn't one of them. I told you, I never saw him before.'

Jonas Duncan said, 'He was a passer-by. Like we figured. From what he said at the time, to the boy. A passer-by full of the wrong end of the stick on this occasion.'

Jacob said, 'Well, at least he's out of our hair.'

Then they heard faint sounds outside. Tyres on gravel. A vehicle, on their driveway. It came slow, whining in a low gear. It seemed to stop halfway. The engine kept on running. There was a pause, and then a ragged thump, dull, percussive, somehow mixed with the sound of breath expelled, and then another pause, and another sound. Then the vehicle drove away, faster this time, with acceleration and gear changes, and the world went quiet again.

Jonas Duncan was first out the door. From fifty yards he could see strange humped shapes in the moonlight. From twenty he saw what they were. From five he saw what condition they were in. He said, 'Not out of our hair. Not exactly. Not yet.'

Jacob Duncan said, 'Who the hell is this guy?'

Seth Duncan and his uncle Jasper didn't speak.

Reacher parked the pick-up truck next to the wrecked Subaru and found the motel owner waiting at his door. Mr Vincent. His hair looked black in the light.

'Changing the locks?' Reacher asked him.

The guy said, 'I hope I won't have to.'

'But?'

'I can't let you stay here.'

Reacher said, 'I paid thirty dollars.'

'I'll refund it, of course.'

'That's not the point. A deal is a deal. I didn't damage anything.'

Vincent said nothing.

Reacher said, 'They already know I'm here. Where else could I be?'

'It was OK before.'

'Before what?'

'Before they told me not to let you stay here. Ignorance of the law is no offence. But I can't defy them now. Not after they informed me.'

'When did they inform you?'

'Two minutes ago. By phone.'

'You always do what they tell you?'

Vincent didn't answer.

'Dumb question, I suppose,' Reacher said.

'I'd lose everything I've worked for. And my family before me. All those years.'

'Since 1969?' Reacher asked.

'How did you know that?'

'Just a lucky guess. The moon landing and all. The Apollo programme.'

'Do you remember 1969?'

'Vaguely.'

'I loved it. So many things were going on. I don't know what happened afterwards. It really seemed like the start of a new era.'

'It was,' Reacher said. 'Just not the era you expected.'

'I'm sorry about this.'

'You going to offer to drive me down to the Interstate now?'

'I can't do that either. We're not supposed to help you in any way at all.'

'We?'

'Any of us. They're putting the word out.'

'Well, I seem to have inherited a truck,' Reacher said. 'I can drive myself.'

'Don't,' Vincent said. 'They'll report it stolen. The county police will stop you. You won't get halfway there.'

'The Duncans control the cops too?'

'No, not really. But a stolen truck is a stolen truck, isn't it?'

'They want me to stay here?'

'They do now. You started a war. They want to finish it.'