Worth Dying For

forty miles an hour. A car might have scooped him up and tossed him in the air and sent him cartwheeling backward over the hood and the roof, but the Yukon wasn’t a car. It was a big truck with a high blunt nose. It was about as subtle as a sledgehammer. It caught Seth flat on his back, everywhere from his knees to his shoulders, like a two-ton bludgeon, and Reacher felt the impact and Seth’s head whipped away out of view, instantaneously, like it had been sucked down by amazing gravity, and the truck bucked once,like there was something passing under the rear left wheel, and then the going got as smooth as the dirt would let it.
    Reacher slowed and steered a wide circle and came back to check if any further attention was required. But it wasn’t. No question about it. Reacher had seen plenty of dead people, and Seth Duncan was more dead than most of them.
    Reacher took the phone off the passenger seat and said, ‘Seth is down,’ and then he lined up again and drove away fast, south and west across the field.

SIXTY-ONE
    J ACOB D UNCAN HAD GOTTEN ABOUT TWO HUNDRED YARDS FROM HIS house. That was all. Reacher saw him up ahead, all alone in the vastness, with nothing but open space all around. He saw Dorothy Coe’s truck a hundred yards farther on, well beyond the running man to the north and the west. It was holding a wide slow curve, like a vigilant sheepdog, like a destroyer guaranteeing a shipping lane.
    On the phone Dorothy said, ‘I’m worried about the gun.’
    Reacher said, ‘Seth was a lousy shot.’
    ‘Doesn’t mean Jacob is.’
    ‘OK,’ Reacher said. ‘Pull over and wait for me. We’ll do this together.’
    He clicked off the call and changed course and crossed Jacob’s path a hundred yards back and headed straight for Dorothy Coe. When he arrived she got out of her truck and headed for his passenger door. He dropped the window with the switch on his side and said, ‘No, you drive. I’ll ride shotgun.’
    He got out and stepped around and they met where the front of the Yukon’s hood was dented. No words were exchanged.Dorothy’s face was set with determination. She was halfway between calm and nervous. She got in the driver’s seat and motored it forward and checked the mirror, like it was a normal morning and she was heading out to the store for milk. Reacher climbed in beside her and freed the Glock from his pocket.
    She said, ‘Tell me about the photographs. In their silver frames.’
    ‘I don’t want to,’ Reacher said.
    ‘No, I mean, I need to know there’s no doubt they implicate the Duncans. Jacob in particular. Like evidence. I need you to tell me. Before we do this.’
    ‘There’s no doubt,’ Reacher said. ‘No doubt at all.’
    Dorothy Coe nodded and said nothing. She fiddled the selector into gear and the truck took off, rolling slow, jiggling and pattering across the ground. She said, ‘We were talking about what comes next.’
    Reacher said, ‘Call a trucker from the next county. Or do business with Eleanor.’
    ‘No, about the barn. The doctor thinks we should burn it down. But I’m not sure I want to do that.’
    ‘Your call, I think.’
    ‘What would you do?’
    ‘Not my decision.’
    ‘Tell me.’
    Reacher said, ‘I would nail the judas hole shut, and I would leave it alone and never go there again. I would let the flowers grow right over it.’
    There was no more conversation. They got within fifty yards of Jacob Duncan and switched to operational shorthand. Jacob was still running, but not fast. He was just about spent. He was stumbling and staggering, a short wide man limited by bad lungs and stiff legs and the aches and pains that come with age. He had a revolver in his hand, the same dull stainless and the same stubby barrel as Seth’s. Probably another Smith 60, and likely to be just as ineffective if used by a weak man all wheezing and gasping and trembling from exertion.
    Dorothy Coe asked, ‘How do I do this?’
    Reacher said, ‘Pass him on the left. Let’s see if he stands and fights.’
    He didn’t. Reacher buzzed his window down and hung the Glock out in the breeze and Dorothy swooped fast and close to Jacob’s left and he didn’t turn and fire. He just flinched away and stumbled onward, a degree or two right of where he had been heading before.
    Reacher said, ‘Now come around in a big wide circle and aim right for him from behind.’
    ‘OK,’ Dorothy said. ‘For Margaret.’
    She continued the long leftward curve, winding it