Worth Dying For

were drinking coffee last night.’
    Reacher smiled. The guy was trying to prove he could remember something. Trying to prove he hadn’t been really drunk, trying to prove he wasn’t really hung over.
    ‘A cup of coffee is always welcome,’ Reacher said.
    The doctor stepped away to the sink and got a drip machine going. Then he came back and took Reacher’s arm, like doctors do, his fingertips in Reacher’s palm, lifting, turning, manipulating. The doctor was small and Reacher’s arm was big. The guy was struggling like a butcher with a side of beef. He dug the fingers of his other hand deep into Reacher’s shoulder joint, poking, feeling, probing.
    ‘I could give you cortisone,’ he said.
    ‘Do I need it?’
    ‘It would help.’
    ‘How much?’
    ‘A little. Maybe more than a little. You should think about it. It would ease the discomfort. Right now it’s nagging at you. Probably making you tired.’
    ‘OK,’ Reacher said. ‘Go for it.’
    ‘I will,’ the doctor said. ‘In exchange for some information.’
    ‘Like what?’
    ‘How did you hurt yourself?’
    ‘Why do you want to know?’
    ‘Call it professional interest.’
    The doctor’s wife finished her work. She tossed the last cotton ball on the table and handed Reacher his shirt. He shrugged it on and started buttoning it. He said, ‘It was like you figured. I was caught in a hurricane.’
    The doctor said, ‘I don’t believe you.’
    ‘Not a natural weather event. I was in an underground chamber. It caught on fire. There was a stair shaft and two ventilation shafts. I was lucky. The flames went up the ventilation shafts. I was on the stairs. So I wasn’t burned. But air to feed the fire was coming down the stair shaft just as hard as the flames were going back up the ventilation shafts. So it was like climbing through ahurricane. It blew me back down twice. I couldn’t keep my feet. In the end I had to haul myself up by the arms.’
    ‘How far?’
    ‘Two hundred and eighty steps.’
    ‘Wow. That would do it. Where was this?’
    ‘That’s outside of your professional interest.’
    ‘Then what happened?’
    ‘That’s outside of your professional interest, too.’
    ‘Recent event, yes?’
    ‘Feels like yesterday,’ Reacher said. ‘Now go get the needle.’
    It was a long needle. The doctor went away and came back with a stainless steel syringe that looked big enough for a horse. He made Reacher take his shirt off again and sit forward with his elbow on the table. He eased the sharp point deep into the joint, from the back. Reacher felt it pushing and popping through all kinds of tendons and muscles. The doctor pressed the plunger, slow and steady. Reacher felt the fluid flood the joint. Felt the joint loosen and relax, in real time, immediately, like healing insanely accelerated. Then the doctor did the other shoulder. Same procedure. Same result.
    ‘Wonderful,’ Reacher said.
    The doctor asked, ‘What did you want to talk about?’
    ‘A time long ago,’ Reacher said. ‘When your wife was a kid.’

TWENTY-FOUR
    R EACHER DRESSED AGAIN AND ALL THREE OF THEM TOOK MUGS OF fresh coffee to the living room, which was a narrow rectangular space with furniture arranged in an L-shape along two walls, and a huge flat screen television on a third wall. Under the screen was a rack loaded with audio-visual components all interconnected with thick wires. Flanking the screen were two serious loudspeakers. Set into the fourth wall was an undraped picture window that gave a great view of a thousand acres of absolutely nothing at all. Dormant lawn, the post-and-rail fence, then dirt all the way to the horizon. No hills, no dales, no trees, no streams. But no trucks or patrols, either. No activity of any kind. Reacher took an armchair where he could see the door and the view both at the same time. The doctor sat on a sofa. His wife sat next to him. She didn’t look enthusiastic about talking.
    Reacher asked her, ‘How old were you when Dorothy’s kid went missing?’
    She said, ‘I was fourteen.’
    ‘Six years older than Seth Duncan.’
    ‘About.’
    ‘Not quite in his generation.’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Do you remember when he first showed up?’
    ‘Not really. I was ten or eleven. There was some talk. I’m probably remembering the talk, rather than the event.’
    ‘What did people say?’
    ‘What could they say? No one knew anything. There was no information. People assumed he was a relative. Maybe orphaned. Maybe there had