Worth Dying For

charity.’
    ‘It isn’t charity. I’m returning a favour, that’s all. You stuck your neck out bringing me here.’
    ‘I was just trying to be a decent person.’
    ‘Me too,’ Reacher said. ‘Take it or leave it.’
    She said, ‘I’ll take it.’
    He said, ‘What’s your name? Most times when I have breakfast with a lady, I know her name at least.’
    ‘My name is Dorothy.’
    ‘I’m pleased to meet you, Dorothy. You married?’
    ‘I was. Now I’m not.’
    ‘You know my name?’
    ‘Your name is Jack Reacher. We’ve all been informed. The word is out.’
    ‘I told the doctor’s wife.’
    ‘And she told the Duncans. Don’t blame her for it. It’s automatic. She’s trying to pay down her debt, like all of us.’
    ‘What does she owe them?’
    ‘She sided with me, twenty-five years ago.’
    Roberto Cassano and Angelo Mancini were driving north in a rented Impala. They were based in a Courtyard Marriott, which was the only hotel in the county seat, which was nothing more than a token grid of streets set in the middle of what felt likea billion square miles of absolutely nothing at all. They had learned to watch their fuel gauge. Nebraska was that kind of place. It paid to fill up at every gas station you saw. The next one could be a million miles away.
    They were from Vegas, which as always meant they were really from somewhere else. New York, in Cassano’s case, and Philadelphia, in Mancini’s. They had paid their dues in their home towns, and then they had gotten hired together in Miami, like playing triple-A ball, and then they had moved up to the big show out in the Nevada desert. Tourists were told that what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, but that wasn’t true as far as Cassano and Mancini were concerned. They were travelling men, always on the move, tasked to roam around and deal with the first faint pre-echoes of trouble long before it rolled in and hit their boss where he lived.
    Hence the trip to the vast agricultural wastelands, nearly eight hundred miles north and east of the glitter and the glamour. There was a snafu in the supply chain, and it was a day or two away from getting extremely embarrassing. Their boss had promised certain specific things to certain specific people, and it would do him no good at all if he couldn’t deliver. So Cassano and Mancini had so far been on the scene for seventy-two hours straight, and they had smacked some beanpole yokel’s wife around, just to make their point. Then some other related yokel had called with a claim that the snafu was being caused by a stranger poking his nose in where it didn’t belong. Bullshit, possibly. Quite probably entirely unconnected. Just an excuse. But Cassano and Mancini were only sixty miles away, so their boss was sending them north to help, because if the yokel’s statement was indeed a lie, then it indicated vulnerability, and therefore minor assistance rendered now would leverage a better deal later. An obvious move. This was American business, after all. Forcing down the wholesale price was the name of the game.
    They came up the crappy two-lane and rolled through the crappy crossroads and pulled in at the motel. They had seen it before. It looked OK at night. Not so good in the daylight. In the daylight it looked sad and botched and half-hearted. Theysaw a damaged Subaru standing near one of the cabins. It was all smashed up. There was nothing else to see. They parked in the lot outside the lounge and got out of the rental car and stood and stretched. Two city boys, yawning, scoured by the endless wind. Cassano was medium height, dark, muscled, blank-eyed. Mancini was pretty much the same. They both wore good shoes and dark suits and coloured shirts and no ties and wool overcoats. They were often mistaken for each other.
    They went inside, to find the motel owner. Which they did, immediately. They found him behind the bar, using a rag, wiping a bunch of sticky overlapping rings off the wood. Some kind of a sadsack loser, with dyed red hair.
    Cassano said, ‘We represent the Duncan family,’ which he had been promised would produce results. And it did. The guy with the hair dropped the rag and stepped back and almost came to attention and saluted, like he was in the army, like a superior officer had just yelled at him.
    Cassano said, ‘You sheltered a guy here last night.’
    The guy with the hair said, ‘No, sir, I did not. I tossed him out.’
    Mancini said, ‘It’s cold.’
    The guy behind the