Worth Dying For

it.
    Seth Duncan lowered the gun to his hip again. He walked forward with it and then handed it off to the fourth guy. He walked on without it and stopped face to face with Reacher, a yard away. His eyes were bloodshot and his breathing was low and shallow. He was quivering a little. Some kind of fury or excitement. He said, ‘I have a message for you, pal.’
    Reacher said, ‘Who from? The National Association of Assholes?’
    ‘No, from me personally.’
    ‘What, you let your membership lapse?’
    ‘Ten seconds from now we’ll know who’s a member of that club, and who isn’t.’
    ‘So what’s the message?’
    ‘It’s more of a question.’
    ‘OK, so what’s the question?’
    ‘The question is, how do
you
like it?’
    Reacher had been fighting since he was five years old, and he had never had his nose broken. Not even once. Partly good luck, and partly good management. Plenty of people had tried, over the years, either deliberately or in a flurry of savage unaimed blows, but none had ever succeeded. Not one. Not ever. Not even close. It was a fact Reacher was proud of, in a peculiar way. It was a symbol. A talisman. A badge of honour. He had all kinds of nicks and cuts and scars on his face and his arms and his body, but he felt that the distinctive but intact bone in his nose made up for them.
    It said:
I’m still standing
.
    The blow came in exactly as he expected it to, a clenched fist, a straight right, hard and heavy, riding up a little, aiming high, as if Duncan subconsciously expected Reacher to flinch up and back, like his wife Eleanor probably did every single time. But Reacher didn’t flinch up and back. He
started
with his head up and back, his eyes open, watching down his nose, timing it, then jerking forward from the neck, smashing a perfect improvised head-butt straight into Duncan’s knuckles, an instant high-speed high-impact collision between the thick ridge in Reacher’s brow and the delicate bones in Duncan’s hand. No contest. No contest at all. Reacher had a skull like concrete, and an arch was the strongest structure known to man, and hands were the most fragile parts of the body. Duncan screamed and snatched his hand away and cradled it limp against his chest and hopped a whole yowling circle, looking up, looking down, stunned and whimpering. He had three or four busted phalanges, Reacher figured, certainly a couple of proximals, and maybe a couple of cracked distals too, from the fingers folding much tighterthan nature intended, under the force of the sudden massive compression.
    ‘Asshole,’ Reacher said.
    Duncan clamped his right wrist under his left armpit and huffed and blew and stomped around. He came to rest a whole minute later, a little cramped and crouched and bent, and he glowered up and out from either side of his splint, hurting and angry and humiliated, looking first at Reacher, and then at his fourth guy, who was standing there stock-still, holding the shotgun. Duncan jerked his head, from the guy to Reacher, a gesture full of silent fury and impatience.
    Get him
.
    The fourth guy stepped up. Reacher was pretty sure he wasn’t going to shoot. No one fires a shotgun at a group of four people, three of which are his friends.
    Reacher was pretty sure it was going to be worse than shooting.
    The guy reversed the gun. Right hand on the barrel, left hand on the stock.
    The guy behind Reacher moved. He wrapped his left forearm tight around Reacher’s throat, and he clamped his right palm tight on Reacher’s forehead.
    Immobile.
    The fourth guy raised the gun horizontal, butt first, two-handed, and cocked it back over his right shoulder, ready to go, lining it up like a spear, and then he rocked forward and took a step and aimed carefully and jabbed the butt straight at the centre of Reacher’s face and
    CRACK
    BLACK

FORTY-TWO
    J ACOB D UNCAN CONVENED AN UNSCHEDULED MIDDLE-OF-THE-NIGHT meeting with his brothers, in his own kitchen, not Jonas’s or Jasper’s, with Wild Turkey, not Knob Creek, and plenty of it, because his mood was celebratory.
    ‘I just got off the phone,’ he said. ‘You’ll be pleased to hear my boy has redeemed himself.’
    Jasper asked, ‘How?’
    ‘He captured Jack Reacher.’
    Jonas asked, ‘How?’
    Jacob Duncan leaned back in his chair and shot his feet straight out in front of him, relaxed, expansive, a man at ease, a man with a story to tell. He said, ‘ I drove Seth home, as you know, but I let him out at the end of his