Worth Dying For

cautious distance, as if she already knew.
    A long minute later the truck doors opened and the doctor climbed out. His wife slid across the vinyl and joined him. Then Dorothy Coe got out on her side. She stood still, shielded by the open door, one hand on its frame. Reacher blinked one last time and ran his free hand over his taped face and walked down to meet her. She was quiet for a moment, and then she started the same question twice, and stopped twice, before getting it all the way out on the third attempt.
    She asked, ‘Is she in there?’
    Reacher said, ‘Yes.’
    ‘Are you sure?’
    ‘Her bike is in there.’
    ‘Still? After all these years? Are you sure it’s hers?’
    ‘It’s as described in the police report.’
    ‘It must be all rusted.’
    ‘A little. It’s dry in there.’
    Dorothy Coe went quiet. She was staring at the western horizon, a degree or two south of the barn, as if she couldn’t look directly at it. She was completely still, but her hand was clenched hard on the truck’s door frame. Her knuckles were white.
    She asked, ‘Can you tell what happened to her?’
    Reacher said, ‘No,’ which was technically true. He was no pathologist. But he had been a cop for a long time, and he knew a thing or two, and he could guess.
    She said, ‘I should go look.’
    He said, ‘Don’t.’
    ‘I have to.’
    ‘Not really.’
    ‘I want to.’
    ‘Better if you don’t.’
    ‘You can’t stop me.’
    ‘I know.’
    ‘You have no right to stop me.’
    ‘I’m asking you, that’s all. Please don’t look.’
    ‘I have to.’
    ‘Better not.’
    ‘I don’t have to listen to you.’
    ‘Then listen to her instead. Listen to Margaret. Pretend she grew up. Imagine what she would have become. She wouldn’t have been a lawyer or a scientist. She loved flowers. She loved colours and forms. She would have been a painter or a poet. An artist. A smart, creative person. In love with life, and full of common sense, and full of concern for you, and full of wisdom. She’d look at you and she’d shake her head and smile and she’d say, come on, mom, do what the man says.’
    ‘You think?’
    ‘She’d say, mom, trust me on this.’
    ‘But I have to see. After all these years of not knowing.’
    ‘Better if you don’t.’
    ‘It’s just her bones.’
    ‘It’s not just her bones.’
    ‘What else can be left?’
    ‘No,’ Reacher said. ‘I mean, it’s not just
her
bones.’
    Up on the 49th Parallel, the transfer was going exactly to plan. The white van had driven slowly south, through the last of Canada, and it had parked for the final time in a rough forest clearing a little more than two miles north of the border. The driver had gotten out and stretched and then taken a long coil of rope from the passenger foot well and walked around to the rear doors. He had opened them up and gestured urgently and the women and the girls had come on out immediately, with no reluctance, with no hesitation at all, because passage to America was what they wanted, what they had dreamed about, and what they had paid for.
    There were sixteen of them, all from rural Thailand, six women and ten female children, average weight close to eighty pounds each, for a total payload of 1,260 pounds. The women were slim and attractive, and the girls were all eight years old or younger. They all stood and blinked in the morning light and looked up and around at the tall trees, and shuffled their feet a little, stiff and weary but excited and full of wonderment.
    The driver herded them into a rough semicircle. He couldn’t speak Thai and they couldn’t understand English, so he started the same dumb show he had performed many times before. It was probably faster than talking anyway. First he patted the air to calm them down and get their attention. Then he raised a finger to his lips and twisted left, twisted right, tracking the whole length of the semicircle, a big exaggerated pantomime, so that they all saw, so that they all understood they had to be silent. He pointed at a spot on the ground and then cupped a hand behind his ear.
There are sensors. The earth listens
. The women nodded, deferential, keen to let him know they understood. He pointed to himself, and then to all of them, and then pointedsouth, and wiggled his fingers.
Now we all have to walk
. The women nodded again. They knew. They had been told at the outset. He used both hands, one and then the other, palms down, stepping on the air gently and