Worth Dying For by Lee Child Page B

Vincent. He didn’t sound too good on the phone.’
    ‘There’s an old barn and an old shed south of the motel. Off the road, to the west. Made of wood. All alone in a field. Whose are they?’
    ‘They’re nobody’s. They were on one of the farms that got sold for the development that never happened. Fifty years ago.’
    ‘I have a truck in there. I took it from the football players last night. Give me a ride?’
    ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m not driving you past the Duncan place again.’
    ‘They don’t have X-ray vision.’
    ‘They do. They have a hundred pairs of eyes.’
    ‘So you want me to walk past their place?’
    ‘You don’t have to. Head west across the fields until you see a cell tower. One of my neighbours leases half an acre to the phone company. That’s how he pays his haulage. Turn north there and skirt the Duncan place on the blind side and then you’ll see the barns.’
    ‘How far is it?’
    ‘It’s a morning’s walk.’
    ‘I’ll burn up all that breakfast.’
    ‘That’s what breakfast is for. Make sure you turn north, OK? South takes you near Seth Duncan’s house, and you really don’t want to go there. You know the difference between north and south?’
    ‘I walk south, I get warmer. North, I get colder. I should be able to figure it out.’
    ‘I’m serious.’
    ‘What was your daughter’s name?’
    ‘Margaret,’ the woman said. ‘Her name was Margaret.’
    So Reacher walked around the back of the barns and the sheds and the coops and the sties and struck out across the fields. The sun was nothing more than a bright patch of luminescence in the high grey sky, but it was enough to navigate by. After ten o’clock in the morning in Nebraska in the wintertime, and it was solidly east of south, behind his left shoulder. He kept it there for forty minutes, and then he saw a cell phone tower looming insubstantial in the mist. It was tall and skeletal, with a microwave receptor the shape of a bass drum, and cell antennas the shape of fungo bats. It had a tangle of dead brown weeds at its base, and it was surrounded by a token barbed wire fence. In the far distance beyond it was a farmhouse similar to Dorothy’s. The neighbour’s, presumably. The ground underfoot was hard and lumpy, all softball-sized clods and clarts of frozen earth, the wreckage from the last year’s harvest. They rolled away either left or right or crushed under his heels as he walked.
    He turned north at the tower. The sun had moved on. Now it was high and almost behind him, an hour before the season’s drab version of noon. There was no warmth in it. Just light, a little brighter than the rest of the day. Far ahead, to the right, he could see a smudge on the horizon. The three Duncan houses, he guessed, grouped together at the end of their long shared driveway. He couldn’t make out any detail. Certainly nothing man-sized. Which meant no one there could make out any man-sized detail either, in reverse. Same number of miles east to west as west to east, same grey gloom, same mist. But even so, he tracked left a little, following a curve, maintaining his distance, making sure.
    Dorothy the housekeeper sat Mr Vincent down in a red velvet chair and sponged the blood off his face. He had a split lip and a cut brow and a lump the size of an egg under his eye. He had apologized for being so slow with his warning call. He had passed out, he said, and had scrambled for the phone as soon as he came around.
    Dorothy told him to hush up.
    On the other side of the circular room one of the bar stools was lying on its side and a mirrored panel on the bar back had been shattered. Shards of silvered glass had fallen among the bottles like daggers. One of the NASA mugs was broken. Its handle had come right off.
    *     *     * 
    Angelo Mancini had the doctor’s shirt collar bunched in his left hand and he had his right hand bunched into a fist. The doctor’s wife was sitting in Roberto Cassano’s lap. She had been