Worth Dying For

vehicles, no obvious activity. By that point Reacher assumed the second Brett had delivered his messages. He assumed they had been heard and then immediately dismissed as bravado. Although the burned-out truck should have counted for something. The Duncans were losing, steadily and badly, and they had to know it.
    Reacher made the left where he had the night before in the Subaru wagon, and then he threaded through the turns until Seth Duncan’s house appeared ahead on his right. It looked much the same lit by daylight as it had by electricity. The white mailbox with
Duncan
on it, the hibernating lawn, the antique horse buggy. The long straight driveway, the outbuilding, the three sets of doors. This time two of them were standing open. The back ends of two cars were visible in the gloom inside. One was a small red sports car, maybe a Mazda, very feminine, and the other was a big black Cadillac sedan, very masculine.
    The doctor said, ‘That’s Seth’s car.’
    Reacher smiled. ‘Which one?’
    ‘The Cadillac.’
    ‘Nice car,’ Reacher said. ‘Maybe I should go smash it up. I’ve got a wrench of my own now. Want me to do that?’
    ‘No,’ the doctor said. ‘For God’s sake.’
    Reacher smiled again and parked where he had the night before and they climbed out together and stood for a moment in the chill. The cloud was still low and flat, and mist was peeling off the underside of it and drifting back down to earth, ready for afternoon, ready for evening. The mist made the air itself look visible, grey and pearlescent, shimmering like a fluid.
    ‘Show time,’ Reacher said, and headed for the door. The doctor trailed him by a yard or two. Reacher knocked and waited and a long minute later he heard feet on the boards inside. A light tread, slow and a little hesitant. Eleanor.
    She opened up and stood there, with her left hand cuppingthe edge of the door and her right-hand fingers spidered against the opposite wall, as if she needed help with stability, or as if she thought her horizontal arm was protecting the inside of the house from the outside. She was wearing a black skirt and a black sweater. No necklace. Her lips had scabbed over, dark and thick, and her nose was swollen, the white skin tight over yellow contusions that were not quite hidden by her make-up.
    ‘You,’ she said.
    ‘I brought the doctor,’ Reacher said. ‘To check on how you’re doing.’
    Eleanor Duncan glanced at the doctor’s face and said, ‘He looks as bad as I do. Was that Seth? Or one of the Cornhuskers? Either way, I apologize.’
    ‘None of the above,’ Reacher said. ‘It seems we have a couple of tough guys in town.’
    Eleanor Duncan didn’t answer that. She just took her right hand off the wall and trailed it through a courtly gesture and invited them in. Reacher asked, ‘Is Seth home?’
    ‘No, thank goodness,’ Eleanor said.
    ‘His car is here,’ the doctor said.
    ‘His father picked him up.’
    Reacher asked, ‘How long will he be gone?’
    ‘I don’t know,’ Eleanor said. ‘But it seems they have much to discuss.’ She led the way to the kitchen, where she had been treated the night before, and maybe on many previous occasions. She sat down in a chair and tilted her face to the light. The doctor stepped up and took a look. He touched the wounds very lightly and asked questions about pain and headaches and teeth. She gave the kinds of answers Reacher had heard from many people in her situation. She was brave and somewhat self-deprecating. She said yes, her nose and mouth still hurt a little, and yes, she had a slight headache, and no, her teeth didn’t feel entirely OK. But her diction was reasonably clear and she had no loss of memory and her pupils were reacting properly to light, so the doctor was satisfied. He said she would be OK.
    ‘And how is Seth?’ Reacher asked.
    ‘Very angry at you,’ Eleanor said.
    ‘What goes around comes around.’
    ‘You’re much bigger than him.’
    ‘He’s much bigger than you.’
    She didn’t answer. She just looked at Reacher for another long second, and then she looked away, seemingly very unsure of herself, an expression of complete uncertainty on her face, its extent limited only by the immobility caused by the stiff scabs on her lips and the frozen ache in her nose. She was hurting bad, Reacher thought. She had taken two blows, he figured, probably the first to her nose and the second aimed lower, at her mouth. The first had been hard enough to do