Worth Dying For

out with a bunch of keys. He held them up briefly, to prove what they were, and then he tossed them underhand to Reacher, who made no attempt to catch them. They bounced off his coat and landed on the gravel. Reacher wanted his left hand free and his attention all in one place. He looked at the guy again and asked, ‘So how does your nose feel right now?’
    The guy said, ‘It feels OK.’
    ‘It looks like it has been busted before.’
    The guy said, ‘Two times.’
    Reacher said, ‘Well, they say three is a lucky number. They say the third time’s the charm.’
    Nobody spoke.
    Reacher said, ‘John, lie face down on the ground.’
    John didn’t move.
    Reacher fired into the ground at John’s feet. The gun boomed and kicked and the sound rolled away across the land, loud and dull, like a quarry explosion. John howled and danced. Not hit,but stung in the shins by fragments of gravel kicked up by the blast. Reacher waited for quiet and pumped the gun, a solid
crunch-crunch
, probably the most intimidating sound in the world. The husk of the spent cartridge ejected and flew through the air and landed near the car keys and skittered away.
    John got down on the ground. First he got on his knees, awkwardly, like he was in church, and then he spread his hands and lowered himself face down, reluctantly, like a bad-tempered coach had demanded a hundred push-ups. Reacher called over his shoulder, ‘Doctor? Bring me the duct tape, would you?’
    No response from inside the house.
    Reacher called, ‘Don’t worry, doctor. There won’t be any comebacks. Never again. This is the last day. Tomorrow you’ll be living like normal people. These guys will be unemployed, heading back where they came from, looking for new jobs.’
    There was a long, tense pause. Then a minute later the doctor came out with the tape. He didn’t look at the two guys. He kept his face averted and his eyes down. Old habits. He gave the roll to Reacher and ducked back inside. Reacher tossed the tape to the guy who had hit him and said, ‘Make it so your buddy can’t move his arms or legs. Or I will, by some other method, probably including spinal injury.’
    The guy caught the roll of tape and got to work. He wrapped John’s wrists with a tight three-layer figure of eight, and then he wrapped the waist of the eight in the other direction, around and around. Plastic handcuffs. Reacher had no idea of the tensile strength of duct tape in terms of engineering numbers, but he knew no human could pull it apart lengthways. The guy did the same to John’s ankles, and Reacher said, ‘Now hog-tie him. Join it all up.’
    The guy folded John’s feet up towards his butt and wrapped tape between the wrist restraints and the ankle restraints, four turns, each about a foot long. He squeezed it all tight and stood back. Reacher took out his wrench and held it up. There was a little blood and hair on it, from the previous two guys. He dropped it on the ground behind him. He took out his switchblade. He dropped it on the ground behind him. He took out his Glockpistol. He dropped it on the ground behind him. Then he turned and laid the sawn-off next to it. He shrugged out of his coat and let it fall. It covered all four weapons. He looked at the guy who had hit him and said, ‘Fair fight. You against me. Second-string Nebraska football against the U.S. Army. Bare knuckles. No rules. If you can get past me, you’re welcome to use anything you can find under my coat.’
    The guy looked blank for a second, and then he smiled a little, as if the sun had come out, as if an unbelievable circumstance had unveiled itself right in front of him, as if a hole had opened up in a tight defence, as if suddenly he had a straight shot to the end zone. He came up on his toes, and angled his body, and bunched his right fist up under his chin, and got ready to lead with his left.
    Reacher smiled too, just a little. The guy was dancing around like the Marquess of Queensberry. He had no idea. No idea at all. Maybe the last fight he had seen was in a Rocky movie. He was six-seven and three hundred pounds, but he was nothing more than a prize ox, big and dumb and shiny, going up against a gutter rat.
    A 250-pound gutter rat.
    The guy stepped in and bobbed and weaved for a minute, up on his toes, jiggling around, ducking and diving, wasting time and energy. Reacher stood perfectly still and gazed at him, wide-eyed with peripheral vision, focusing nowhere and everywhere at once,