Worth Dying For

step. Then he stopped dead, because Reacher had stopped dead. Reacher was staring ahead at the empty rectangle in front of the building. The cracked stones. The managerial parking lot. Nothing in it.
    Reacher asked, ‘Where do you normally park your truck, John?’
    ‘Right out front there, by the doors.’
    ‘Where do your buddies park?’
    ‘Same place.’
    ‘So where are they?’
    The night-time silence clamped down and the young man’s mouth came open a little, and he whirled around as if he was expecting his friends to be hiding somewhere behind him. Like a practical joke. But they weren’t. He turned back and said, ‘I guess they’re out. They must have gotten a call.’
    ‘From you?’ Reacher asked. ‘When you saw Mrs Duncan?’
    ‘No, I swear. I didn’t call. You can check my phone.’
    ‘So who called them?’
    ‘Mr Duncan, I guess. Mr Jacob, I mean.’
    ‘Why would he?’
    ‘I don’t know. Nothing was supposed to happen tonight.’
    ‘He called them but he didn’t call you?’
    ‘No, he didn’t call me. I swear. Check my phone. He wouldn’t call me anyway. I’m on sentry duty. I was supposed to stay put.’
    ‘So what’s going on, John?’
    ‘I don’t know.’
    ‘Best guess?’
    ‘The doctor. Or his wife. Or both of them together. They’re always seen as the weakest link. Because of the drinking. Maybe the Duncans think they have information.’
    ‘About what?’
    ‘You, of course. About where you are and what you’re doing and whether you’re coming back. That’s what’s on their minds.’
    ‘It takes five guys to ask those questions?’
    ‘Show of force,’ the kid said. ‘That’s what we’re here for. A surprise raid in the middle of the night can shake people up.’
    ‘OK, John,’ Reacher said. ‘You stay here.’
    ‘Here?’
    ‘Go to bed.’
    ‘You’re not going to hurt me?’
    ‘You already hurt yourself. You showed no fight at all against a smaller, older man. You’re a coward. You know that now. That’s as good to me as a dislocated elbow.’
    ‘Easy for you to say. You’ve got a gun.’
    Reacher put the Glock back in his pocket. He folded the flap down and stood with his arms out, hands empty, palms forward, fingers spread.
    He said, ‘Now I don’t. So bring it on, fat boy.’
    The guy didn’t move.
    ‘Go for it,’ Reacher said. ‘Show me what you’ve got.’
    The guy didn’t move.
    ‘You’re a coward,’ Reacher said again. ‘You’re pathetic. You’re a waste of good food. You’re a useless three-hundred-pound sack of shit. And you’re ugly, too.’
    The guy said nothing.
    ‘Last chance,’ Reacher said. ‘Step up and be a hero.’
    The guy walked away, head down, shoulders slumped, towards the dark building. He stopped twenty feet later and looked back. Reacher looped around the rear of the Yukon, to the driver’s door. He got in. The seat was too far back. The kid was huge. But Reacher wasn’t about to adjust it in front of the guy. Some stupid male inhibition, way in the back of his brain. He just started up and turned and drove away, and fixed it on the fly.
    The Yukon drove OK, but the brakes were a little spongy. The result of the panic stop, probably, back at the old roadhouse. Five years’ wear and tear, all in one split second. But Reacher didn’t care. He wasn’t braking much. He was hustling hard,concentrating on speeding up, not slowing down. Twenty miles was a long distance, through the empty rural darkness.
    He saw nothing the whole way. No lights, no other vehicles. No activity of any kind. He got back to the main two-lane north of the motel and five minutes later he passed the place. It was all closed up and dark. No blue neon. No activity. No cars, except the wrecked Subaru. It was still there, beaded over with dew, low down on slowly softening tyres, sad and inert, like road kill. Reacher charged onward past it, and then he made the right and the left and the right, along the boundaries of the dark empty fields, like twice before, to the plain ranch house with the post-and-rail fence and the flat, featureless yard.
    There were lights on in the house. Plenty of them. Like a cruise ship at night on the open ocean. But there was no sign of uproar. There were no cars on the driveway. No pick-up trucks, no SUVs. No large figures in the shadows. No sound, no movement. Nothing. The front door was closed. The windows were intact.
    Reacher turned in and parked on the driveway and walked to the door. He stood