Worth Dying For

her position half a mile west, out in the fields.
    She said, ‘That’s Jonas’s house. We can see the smoke.’
    ‘Anyone moving?’
    ‘Not yet.’ Then she said, ‘Wait. Jonas is coming out his back door. Turning left. He’s going to head around to the front.’
    ‘Positive ID?’
    ‘A hundred per cent. We’re using the telescope.’
    ‘OK,’ Reacher said. ‘Stay on the line.’
    He laid the open cell phone on the Yukon’s hood and picked up the rifle. It had a rear iron sight just ahead of the scope mount, and a front iron sight at the muzzle. Reacher raised it to his eyeand leaned forward and rested his elbows on the sheet metal and aimed at the gap between the centre house and the southernmost house. Distance, maybe a hundred and forty yards.
    He waited.
    He saw a stocky figure enter the gap from the rear. A man, short and wide, maybe sixty years old or more. Round red face, thinning grey hair. Reacher’s first live sighting of a Duncan elder. The guy hustled stiffly between the blank ends of the two homes and came out in the light and stopped dead. He stared at the burning Tahoe and started towards it and stopped again and then turned and faced front and stared at the pick-up truck parked across the far end of the driveway.
    Reacher laid the front sight on the guy’s centre mass and pulled the trigger.

FIFTY-EIGHT
    T HE .338 HIT HIGH , A FOOT ABOVE J ONAS D UNCAN ’ S CENTRE mass, halfway between his lower lip and the point of his chin. The bullet drove through the roots of his front incisors, through the soft tissue of his mouth and his throat, through his third vertebra, through his spinal cord, through the fat on the back of his neck, and onward into the corner of Jacob Duncan’s house. Jonas went down vertically, claimed by gravity, his stiff fireplug body suddenly loose and malleable, and he ended up sprawled in a grotesque tangle of limbs, face up, eyes open, the last of his brain’s oxygenated blood leaking from his wound, and then he died.
    Reacher shot the rifle’s bolt and the spent shell case clanged against the Yukon’s hood and rolled down its contour and fell to the ground. Reacher picked up the cell phone and said, ‘Jonas is down.’
    Dorothy Coe said, ‘We heard the shot.’
    ‘Any activity?’
    ‘Not yet.’
    Reacher kept the phone against his ear. Jonas’s house was burning nicely. The whole front wall was on fire, and there were flames inside, throwing orange light and shadows all around, curling flat and angry against the ceilings, gleaming wetly behind intact panes of glass, spilling out through the broken windows and leaping up and merging into the general conflagration. Smoke was still blowing south, and heat too, towards the southernmost building.
    Dorothy Coe’s voice came back: ‘Jasper is out. He has a weapon. A long gun. He sees us. He’s looking right at us.’
    Reacher asked, ‘How far back are you?’
    ‘About six hundred yards.’
    ‘Stand your ground. If he fires, he’ll miss.’
    ‘We think it’s a shotgun.’
    ‘Even better. The round won’t even reach you.’
    ‘He’s running. He’s past Jonas’s house. He’s heading for Jacob’s.’
    Reacher saw him, flitting right to left across the narrow gap between Jonas’s house and Jacob’s, a short wide man very similar to his brother. On the phone Dorothy Coe said, ‘He’s gone inside. We see him in Jacob’s kitchen. Through the window. Jacob and Seth are in there too.’
    Reacher waited. The fire in Jonas’s house was burning out of control. In front of it the white Tahoe was a blackened wreck inside a ball of flame. Glass was punching out of the house’s windows ahead of flames that followed horizontally like arms and fists before boiling upward. The roof was alight. Then there was a loud sound and the air inside the house seemed to shudder and cough and a hot blue shimmer gasped out through the ground floor, like an expelled breath, clearly visible, like a force, and it rose slowly upward, one second, two, three, and then the flames came back even stronger behind it.
    Dorothy Coe said, ‘Something just blew up in Jonas’s kitchen. The propane tank, maybe. The back wall is burning hard.’
    Reacher waited.
    Then the ground floor itself burned through and there was another cough and shudder as the flaming timbers tumbledthrough to the basement. The left-hand gable tilted inward and the right-hand gable fell outward, across the gap to Jasper’s house. Sparks showered all around