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 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 same organization, 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 sisterhood, clustering together.
A hundred feet out the Mazda slowed a little. Its top was up this time, like a tight little hat. Cold weather, no further need for instant identification. No more sentries to distract.
Fifty feet out, it braked hard, ready for the turn in, and red light flared in the mist behind it.
Twenty feet out, it swung wide and started to turn.
Ten feet out, Reacher remembered three things.
First, Eleanor Duncan was not on the phone tree.
Second, his gun was in his coat.
Third, his coat was in the kitchen.
The Mazda swung in fast and crunched over the gravel and jammed to a stop right behind Dorothy Coe's pick-up. The door opened wide and Seth Duncan unfolded his lanky frame and stepped out.
He was holding a shotgun.
FORTY-ONE
SETH DUNCAN HAD A HUGE ALUMINIUM SPLINT ON HIS FACE, LIKE a dull metal patch taped to a large piece of rotten fruit. All kinds of sick moonlit colours were spreading out from under it. Yellows, and browns, and purples. He was wearing dark pants and a dark sweater with a new parka over it. The shotgun in his hands was an old Remington 870 pump. Probably a twelve-gauge, probably a twenty-inch barrel. A walnut stock, a seven-round tubular magazine, altogether a fine all-purpose weapon, well proven, more than four million built and sold, used by the Navy for shipboard security, used by the Marines for close-quarters combat, used by the army for heavy short-range firepower, used by civilians for hunting, used by cops as a riot gun, used by cranky homeowners as a get-off-my-lawn deterrent.