Worth Dying For

her?’
    ‘Can’t be worse than what I imagine.’
    Reacher said, ‘I’m afraid it can. And it sometimes is. That’s why I asked. Sometimes it’s better not to know.’
    She didn’t speak for a long moment.
    Then she said, ‘My neighbour’s son hears her ghost screaming.’
    ‘I met him,’ Reacher said. ‘He smokes a lot of weed.’
    ‘I hear it too, sometimes. Or I think I do. It makes me wonder.’
    ‘I don’t believe in ghosts.’
    ‘Neither do I, really. I mean, look at me.’
    Reacher did. A solid, capable woman, about sixty years old, blunt and square, worn down by work, worn down by hardship, fading slowly to grey.
    She said, ‘Yes, I really want to know what happened to her.’
    Reacher said, ‘OK.’
    Two minutes later the phone rang. An old-fashioned instrument. The slow peal of a mechanical bell, a low sonorous sound, doleful and not at all urgent. The doctor’s wife jumped up and ran out to the hallway to answer. She said hello, but nothing more. She just listened. The phone tree again. The others heard the thin distorted crackle of a loud panicked voice from the earpiece, and they sensed a gasping shuffle out there in the hallway. Some kind of surprising news. Dorothy Coe fidgeted in her chair. The doctor got to his feet. Reacher watched the window. The road stayed dark.
    The doctor’s wife came back in, more puzzled than worried, more amazed than frightened. She said, ‘Mr Vincent just saw the Italians shoot the men from the red car. With a gun. They’re dead. Then they set the car on fire. Right outside his window. In the motel lot.’
    Nobody spoke, until Reacher said, ‘Well, that changes things a little.’
    ‘How?’
    ‘I thought maybe we had six guys working for the sameorganization, with some kind of a two-way relationship, them and the Duncans. But we don’t. They’re three pairs. Three separate organizations, plus the Duncans make four. Which makes it a food chain. The Duncans owe somebody something, and that somebody owes somebody else, and so on, all the way up the line. They’re all invested, and they’re all here to safeguard their investment. And as long as they’re all here, they’re all trying to cut each other out. They’re all trying to shorten the chain.’
    ‘So we’re caught in the middle of a gang war?’
    ‘Look on the bright side. Six guys showed up this afternoon, and now there are only three of them left. Fifty per cent attrition. That works for me.’
    The doctor said, ‘We should call the police.’
    His wife said, ‘No, the police are sixty miles away. And the Cornhuskers are right here, right now. That’s what we need to worry about tonight. We need to know what they’re doing.’
    Reacher asked, ‘How do they normally communicate?’
    ‘Cell phone.’
    ‘I’ve got one,’ Reacher said. ‘In the truck I took. Maybe we could listen in. Then we’d know for sure what they’re doing.’
    The doctor undid the locks and unlatched the chain and they all crowded out to the driveway. Reacher opened the Yukon’s passenger door and rooted around in the foot well and came out with the cell phone, slim and black, like a candy bar. He stood in the angle of the door and flipped it open and said, ‘They’ll use conference calls, right? This thing will ring and all five of them will be on?’
    ‘More likely vibrate, not ring,’ the doctor said. ‘Check the settings and the call register and the address book. You should be able to find an access number.’
    ‘You check,’ Reacher said. ‘I’m not familiar with cell phones.’ He tracked around the back of the truck and handed the phone to the doctor. Then he looked to his left and saw light in the mist to the east. A high hemispherical glow, trembling, bouncing, weakening and strengthening and weakening, very white, almost blue.
    A car, coming west towards them, pretty fast.
    It was about half a mile away. Just like before, the misty glow resolved itself to a fierce source low down above the surface of the road, then to twin fierce sources, spaced just feet apart, oval in shape, low to the ground, blue-white and intense. And just like before, the ovals kept on coming, getting closer, flickering and jittering because of firm suspension and fast steering. They looked small at first, because of the distance, and they stayed small because they were small, because the car was a Mazda Miata, low and tiny and red. Reacher recognized it about two hundred feet out.
    Eleanor Duncan.
    The