Worth Dying For

confirmed, and then there were more pats on the back and slaps on the shoulder, all shuffling mobile
catch you later
kind of stuff, and then the two big dark-skinned men climbed back into their red Ford. They closed their doors and got set to go and then the Italian who had done all the talking suddenly remembered something and turned back and tapped on the driver’s glass.
    The window came down.
    The Italian had a gun in his hand.
    The Italian leaned in and there were two bright flashes, one hard after the other, like orange camera strobes right there insidethe car, behind the glass, all six windows lighting up, and two loud explosions, then a pause, then two more, two more bright flashes, two more loud explosions, evenly spaced, carefully placed.
    Then the Italian stepped away and Vincent saw the two dark-skinned men all slumped down in their seats, somehow suddenly much smaller, deflated, diminished, smeared with dark matter, their heads lolling down on their chests, their heads altered and misshapen, parts of their heads actually
missing
.
    Vincent fell to the floor under the inside sill of his window and vomited in his throat. Then he ran for the phone.
    Angelo Mancini opened the red Ford’s trunk and found two nylon roll-aboard suitcases, which more or less confirmed a personal theory of his. Real men carried their bags. They didn’t wheel them around like women. He unzipped one of the bags and rooted around and came up with a bunch of shirts on wire hangers, all folded together concertina-style. He took one and tore it off the hanger and crushed the hanger flat and opened the Ford’s filler neck and used the hanger to poke the shirt down into the tube, one sleeve in, the body all bunched up, the other sleeve trailing out. He lit the trailing cuff with a paper match from a book he had taken from the diner near the Marriott. Then he walked away and got in the blue Chevrolet’s passenger seat and Roberto Cassano drove him away.
    The road beyond the post-and-rail fence outside the dining room window stayed dark. The doctor got up and left the room and came back with four mugs of fresh coffee on a plastic tray. His wife sat quiet. Next to her Dorothy Coe sat quiet. The sisterhood, enduring, waiting it out. Just one long night out of more than nine thousand in the last twenty-five years, most of them tranquil, presumably, but some of them not. Nine thousand separate sunsets, each one of them heralding who knew what.
    Reacher was waiting it out, too. He knew that Dorothy wanted to ask what he had found in the county archive. But she was taking her time getting around to it, and that was OK with him.He wasn’t about to bring it up unannounced. He had dealt with his fair share of other people’s tragedy, all of it bad, none of it easy, but he figured there was nothing worse than the Coe family story. Nothing at all. So he waited, ten silent minutes, then fifteen, and finally she asked, ‘Did they still have the files?’
    He answered, ‘Yes, they did.’
    ‘Did you see them?’
    ‘Yes, I did.’
    ‘Did you see her photograph?’
    ‘She was very beautiful.’
    ‘Wasn’t she?’ Dorothy said, smiling, not with pride, because the kid’s beauty was not her achievement, but with simple wonderment. She said, ‘I still miss her. Which I think is strange, really, because the things I miss are the things I actually had, and they would be gone now anyway. The things I didn’t get to see would have happened afterwards. She would be thirty-three now. All grown up. And I don’t miss those things, because I don’t have a clear picture of what they might have been. I don’t know what she might have become. I don’t know if she would have been a mother herself, and stayed around here, or if she would have been a career girl, maybe a lawyer or a scientist, living far away in a big city.’
    ‘Did she do well in school?’
    ‘Very well.’
    ‘Any favourite subjects?’
    ‘All of them.’
    ‘Where was she going that day?’
    ‘She loved flowers. I like to think she was going searching for some.’
    ‘Did she roam around often?’
    ‘Most days, when she wasn’t in school. Sundays especially. She loved her bike. She was always going somewhere. Those were innocent times. She did the same things I did, when I was eight.’
    Reacher paused a beat and said, ‘I was a cop of sorts for a long time. So may I ask you a serious question?’
    She said, ‘Yes.’
    ‘Do you really want to know what happened to